LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

February 4, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

Updated

reidhoffman.jpgReid Hoffman, one of the earliest and most prolific players in the early years of the social network revolution, has stepped down as chief executive of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, the online site for professional networkers, last week announced it had raised $12.8 million in fresh venture capital, which may be connected to the executive change.

dannye2.bmpHoffman notified VentureBeat of the change earlier today in an email. He did not state the reasons for the change, but did say he’d appointed Dan Nye (pictured left) to take his place.

Nye was previously an executive at Advent Software, and before that was head of Intuit’s small business division. Hoffman remains Chairman and President.

Hoffman’s move also follows the recent departure of his co-founder, Konstantin Guericke, to launch another company, Jaxtr. Sometimes, venture capitalists agree to invest only on certain terms, and they may have done so last month only on condition of a change in executive — but we aren’t certain of this.

Hoffman was an early player in social networking, active in the area with early player Socialnet even before the phenomenon become popular in 2003 with the emergence of Friendster. Hoffman was an investor in Friendster and another early player Tribe, and has since invested in a multitude of other social networking companies. He is known as one of the most networked people in the valley (see his activities here)

We’ll update if and when we hear back from LinkedIn, Hoffman or Nye.

[Update: Spokeswoman Kay Luo and co-founder Konstantin Guericke have since responded. Both said the change had nothing to do with the financing. Hoffman hired a recruiter almost four months ago, and interviewed 72 candidates. Hoffman wants to build LinkedIn into a multi-billion dollar company, they said, and realized LinkedIn needed to scale, which means giving more attention to management issues, something that isn't his strength. "His passion is in the product," said Guericke, "rather than in sorting out management stuff." Nye is a protege of Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, someone Hoffman respects, Luo said.]

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Wow, this is a total shocker! I'd thought that Mr. Huffman is gonna take LinkedIn public sometimes this year, or get bought up by GE (parent company of CNBC), Fox (who's planning to launch a Biz channel soon), Bloomberg, or even possibly eBay, etc...

    "realized LinkedIn needed to scale, which means giving more attention to management issues, something that isn’t his strength. “His passion is in the product."

    That's a such a classic, selfless act, it's hard to find such personalities in the Valley. Anyway, best luck to him :)
  • Courtney
    Great company with an outstanding future. Congradulations to Nye!
  • Matt
    You've got it backwards. Reid didn't do this on our insistence--our only condition of investment was that Reid stay with the company after hiring the CEO.
  • Matt: your story has a few inaccuracies in it. Most centrally, you imply that we sent you a direct eMail. Actually, we did not. I simply updated my Linkedin profile, since one of the uses of the Linkedin profile is staying in touch with the variety of people that matter in your professional life – e.g. you. Linkedin then sent you an automated eMail letting you know of the change in my status. This is one of the uses of a Linkedin profile; the others include being able to publish it so that search engines can find you directly; and so that former colleagues and classmates can find you as well.

    Frankly everyone who knows me – say has had dinner with me – knows that the CEO job has never been my aspiration. I want to build products and businesses that improve millions of peoples lives; any particular job is just the price I have to pay in order to accomplish those goals. As a company builds, the CEO job becomes more and more about building an organization where most of the substantive problems are solved by people in the organization – the CEO recruits, manages, empowers, and organizes those people. Personally, I prefer working directly on the problems and less on the organization. So, I recruited a world-class guy at building organizations, and gave myself a role working on some of the central problems. End result: Linkedin should get a great organization and a great product by the end of the year. This year our focus is on showing every professional how to use us effectively to become faster and more effective in their work and professional lives.

    This is written from the road, so will try to follow up on this more later.
  • Fair enough, thanks for clarification guys. Reid, your email told me about your update and said "I've hired a new CEO; he starts Tuesday" and then gave me a link to Dan's profile. Automated or not, the email still came across as personal. Guess that's a good thing.