LinkedIn: A talk with CEO Dan Nye

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 17

After all my recent bellyaching about “embargoed” news, I sit down with LinkedIn’s CEO Dan Nye this morning, and he gives me news that’s… embargoed. Well, here’s the un-embargoed stuff:

LinkedIn has 23 million users, with 1.2 million new ones signing up every month. Nye expects eventually to reach a population of 100 million professionals. He won’t say how many of the accounts are active, but says they get 7 million to 9 million member visits per month.

The average LinkedIn user is 41 years old, makes $109k per year, and 76% of them graduated from college. That’s pretty close to the BusinessWeek demo, I’ll bet, which helps to explain the BW-LinkedIn’s partnership with BW. (He went through other things that are in this blog post by Rob Hof.)

I asked on Twitter for questions. I’ll put the answers below:

@jayrosen_nyu asks what technologies LinkedIn has "undone."
The resume, says Nye. He adds that company's traditionally paid big bucks for "resume books" from places like Harvard Biz School. No need for them anymore.
@adamclyde asks what LinkedIn has done to make the site more interesting. Nye says he's thrilled with a redesign done last year, and says users can drill down on all sorts of connections. He's opening the site to Google's Open Social APIs, but will not have any games on the site. Says it has to retain its business focus.
@bikespeak is looking for success stories. Here's one: Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital got a meeting the next day with Ross Levinsohn through a high profile recommendation from none other than Marc Andreesen. (Lesson: If you can get chummy with tech legends, all kinds of connections can follow...)
@sdavis asks if they've partnered with other job boards. Yes, says Nye: SimplyHired.
@LMFeliciano asks about plans for non-English offerings. Yes, says Nye. Later this year, but he won't say which languages.
@PRPresident and @metainfluence ask about the value of LinkedIn for people not looking for jobs. Nye stresses the value for headhunters in locating "passive" jobseekers. Better to find the ideal candidate and pry him or her away, than to settle for the unsettled...
That's about it. There were other questions, but they have to do with the ... embargoed news. The announcement comes tomorrow.

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