LinkedIn helps professionals network

Web venture the latest success for entrepreneur

LinkedIn
Chairman and founder Reid Hoffman at his company headquarters in
Mountain View, Calif. LinkedIn is an online business-networking service
that helps professionals like him realize the value of their contacts
from the past and present. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar / September 28, 2007)

By Michael Liedtke |The Associated Press

January 20, 2008

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Few Internet entrepreneurs practice what they preach as devoutly as LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman, whose business revolves around his belief that good fortune flows from good relationships.

Hoffman, 40, has put that principle to work by mining his own vast
network of Silicon Valley connections to rake in one Internet jackpot
after another.

A college friendship led Hoffman to PayPal and his first windfall when eBay Inc. bought
the online payment service for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, he has
become even wealthier by investing in other Internet start-ups he
discovered through friends and former colleagues.

Along the way, Hoffman also used some of his PayPal proceeds to help
start LinkedIn, an online business-networking service that helps
professionals like him realize the value of their contacts from the
past and present.

With more than 1 million people joining each month and projected
2008 revenue of $75 million to $100 million, LinkedIn Corp. seems
likely to deliver another big payoff for Hoffman.

“LinkedIn is a great expression of who Reid is,” said John Lilly, chief executive of the Firefox Web browser maker, Mozilla Corp., where Hoffman sits on the board of directors. “It’s really his brain on the Web.”

LinkedIn tries to help people who know each other elsewhere more
easily meet others who might help their careers. For example, if Mary
and Bob are both part of Fred’s online network, Mary could ask Fred for
a referral to Bob, who could then decide whether he wanted to embrace a
new relationship with Mary.

LinkedIn’s focus on professional networking distinguishes it from social playgrounds like Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace, where users are encouraged to share their personal lives by posting party photos and adding favorite bands.

Although it may not sound as much fun, LinkedIn appears to be
thriving. About 18 million people now have profiles on the site,
roughly twice as many as a year ago.

Hoffman, who remains LinkedIn’s chairman and largest shareholder
five years after starting the company, said the Mountain View-based
company will probably file for an initial public offering of stock
before 2010 if he isn’t first tempted to sell to one of the suitors
that have inquired about buying LinkedIn. Hoffman wouldn’t identify the
suitors.

“I know we are going to be much more valuable in a year or two,”
Hoffman said. “We have had [buyout] conversations with all the usual
suspects, but I think an IPO is by far and away the most likely
outcome.”

Nonetheless, LinkedIn has its share of detractors, who see it as
little more than a tool for job hunters and employment recruiters, a
slightly different twist on online help-wanted services like Monster.com or Yahoo Inc.’s HotJobs. Besides selling ads, the site lets employment recruiters and others pay for expanded access to LinkedIn members.

Although former LinkedIn executive Keith Rabois isn’t as harsh, he
thinks Hoffman needs to pursue an IPO as soon as possible to create a
bigger buzz about the service.

“Right now, LinkedIn just doesn’t seem to be at the center of the
Internet universe and an IPO would be an amazing marketing
opportunity,” said Rabois, who left LinkedIn last year to join another
rapidly growing startup, Slide Inc.

LinkedIn so far hasn’t generated the same kind buzz as Facebook
Inc., which has been attracting many of the same users as LinkedIn.
With 60 million users, privately held Facebook already boasts a $15
billion market value and has indicated it will pursue its own IPO in
2009 or 2010.

Hoffman happens to have a stake in Facebook, underscoring his
knack for identifying promising Internet opportunities in their early
stages.

“It’s like he is able to look at the Internet and figure out where
all the pieces fit together,” said Mark Kvamme, a partner at Sequoia
Capital and a member of LinkedIn’s board of directors.

While Facebook could produce Hoffman’s biggest investment return,
it threatens to become a thorn in his side if it diminishes the amount
of time people spend at LinkedIn.

As a countermeasure, LinkedIn in recent months has been adopting
more Facebook-like features. The changes have allowed LinkedIn users to
display pictures next to their personal profiles and opened up the site
for outsiders to post mini-applications, known as widgets, designed to
help people with common connections to share information.

Despite those copycat moves, Hoffman insists he isn’t worried
about Facebook, which he views as being far too casual and goofy for
the ambitious professionals drawn to LinkedIn.

Hoffman credits his own connections for his successful investment streak.

“Any time there were some really good people involved with a
potentially good product, I thought I should probably throw in at least
a little bit of money if I had the option,” he said.

That doesn’t mean he invests in every venture started by people he knows, sometimes to his regret.

For instance, Hoffman hadn’t felt compelled to invest in YouTube when he had the chance, depriving him of a huge payday when Google Inc. bought
the popular video-sharing site for $1.76 billion in 2006. Instead,
LinkedIn provided some initial office space to YouTube founders Chad
Hurley and Steve Chen, who worked with Hoffman at PayPal.

Hoffman hasn’t been wrong too often.

Three of his startup investments have been sold since 2005 for
more than $1.1 billion combined, although Hoffman got only a sliver of
that. They are the photo-sharing site Flickr, bought by Yahoo Inc.;
music network Last.fm, bought by CBS Corp.; and computer security
specialist IronPort Systems Inc., bought by Cisco Systems In

******
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Kolbe Index what does it do for you?

By Martha Beck

 If at first you don’t succeed … ask yourself, Am I an otter? A squirrel? A mouse? The answer could spell the difference between things going swimmingly and squeaking to a halt. Find your own winning style.

It was a problem I’d never anticipated: My brainy daughter was having
trouble in school. Katie began teaching herself to read at 15 months
and tested at a “post-high school” level in almost every subject by
fourth grade. Yet her middle-school grades were dropping like a lead
balloon, and her morale along with them. I cared more about the morale
than the grades.

Does your style resemble an otter, mole, squirrel or a mouse?

I knew Katie was quickly losing something educational psychologists
call her sense of self-efficacy — her belief that she could succeed at
specific tasks and life in general.

People who lack this trait
tend to stop trying because they expect to fail. Then, of course, they
do fail, feel even worse, shut down even more, and carry on to
catastrophe.

It took years of confidence-battering struggle –
for both Katie and me — before I finally got the information I needed.
It came from a no-nonsense bundle of kindly energy named Kathy Kolbe, a
specialist on the instinctive patterns that shape human action.

Kathy’s father pioneered many standardized intelligence tests, but
Kathy was born with severe dyslexia, which meant that this obviously
bright little girl didn’t learn in a typical way. She grew up
determined to understand and defend the different ways in which people
go about solving problems.

The day Katie and I met her, Kathy
was wearing a T-shirt that said “do nothing when nothing works”, a
motto that typifies her approach. On her desk were the results from the
tests (the Kolbe A and Y Indexes) that my daughter and I had just taken
to evaluate our personal “conative styles,” or typical action patterns.

Conative Styles

“Martha, you go about problem-solving in a different way from Katie,”
Kathy said. “There are four basic action modes, and you’re what I call
a Quick Start. When you want to learn, you just jump in and start
messing around.” Bull’s-eye. I cannot count the times I’ve been
defeated, humiliated, or physically injured immediately after saying
the words, “Hey, how hard can it be?” But that never seems to stop me
from saying them again.

“Now,” Kathy went on, “Katie’s not a Quick Start. She’s a Fact Finder.
Before she starts a task, she needs to know all about it. She needs to
go through the instructions and analyze them for flaws, then get more
information to fill in the gaps.”

To my amazement, my daughter
nodded vigorously. I’ve never understood why some people hesitate
before diving into unfamiliar tasks or activities. I couldn’t imagine
wanting more instructions about anything.

“There are two other
typical patterns,” Kathy explained. “The people I call Implementors –
like Thomas Edison, for example — need physical objects to work with.
They figure out things by building models or doing concrete tasks. Then
there are the Follow Thrus. They set up orderly systems, like the Dewey
decimal system or a school curriculum.”

“And that, Katie,” she
said, “is why you’re having trouble. The school system was created
mainly by people who are natural Follow Thrus. It works best for
students with the same profile. Your teachers want you to fit into the
system, but you have a hard time seeing how it works. If you question
the instructions — which you absolutely need to do — they think
you’re being sassy.”

Katie nodded so hard I feared for her
cervical vertebrae. I was stunned. I’d spent years trying to understand
my daughter, and a veritable stranger had just nailed the problem in
ways I’d never even conceptualized.

Thanks to Kathy’s work (and
centuries of psychological work on conation), I’ve stopped asking
others to match my instinctive style. I no longer expect squirrels to
swim and otters to climb trees. As a result, I’m better able to support
myself, my children, and everyone else I know. Here’s a quick primer on
how you can do the same:

Your style of action

Accept that you have an inborn, instinctive style of action. Just
learning that there are four distinct patterns of action was a huge
Aha! for me. When Katie and I accepted that we simply had different
ways of doing things, our relationship and her confidence began to
improve immediately.

To identify your own action-mode profile,
you can take a formal online test (the Kolbe Index at kolbe.com; there
is a charge), or just observe your own approach to getting something
done. To give you an example, people with different profiles might
respond to a challenge — let’s say, learning to crochet — in the
following ways:

• Quick Start: If you’re a Quick Start who wants
to crochet, you’ll probably buy some yarn and a hook, get a few tips
from an experienced crochetmeister, and jump right into trial and error.

• Fact Finder: You’ll spend hours reading, watching, asking questions,
and learning about crocheting before actually beginning to use the
tools.

• Implementor: You pay less attention to words than to
concrete objects, so you might draw a pattern of a crochet stitch or
even create a large model using thick rope, before you go near a needle.

• Follow Thru: You’ll likely schedule a lesson with a crochet teacher
or buy a book that proceeds through a yarn curriculum, learning new
stitches in order of difficulty.

None of these approaches is
right or wrong. They can all succeed brilliantly. But someone who’s
programmed to use one style will feel awkward and discouraged trying to
follow another. We can all master each style if we have to, the way a
mole can swim or an otter can climb trees, but it’s not a best-case
scenario.

Once you know your instinctive style, brainstorm ways
to make it work for you, not against you. For starters, choose fields
of endeavor where you feel comfortable and competent. If you love
systematic structure, don’t become a freelancer. If you are crazy about
physical models, don’t force yourself to crunch financial statistics
for a living.

Play to your strengths

To really
boost your sense of self-efficacy, think of ways you could modify your
usual tasks to suit your personal style. For example, Kathy suggested
that Katie might ask for permission to do detailed research reports in
place of other school assignments. I nearly threw up at the very
thought, but to my astonishment Katie agreed enthusiastically.

Of course, you’ll inevitably interact with people whose instinctive
patterns are different from yours. Otter, Mole, Squirrel, and Mouse may
all show up in the same family, workplace, or book club. Occasionally,
it’s fine to conform, using styles of action that don’t come naturally
– but do it consciously and for a limited time, or your sense of
self-efficacy will suffer.

And finally, team up with unlike
others. As long as Otter, Mole, Squirrel, and Mouse are forced to race
in the same terrain, at least three of them will be out of their
element, looking and feeling like failures. But think what they could
do if they pooled their skills. They could access resources from the
water, earth, trees, and fields, combining them in ways none of the
animals could achieve alone. They could rule the world! (Or at least
the backyard.)

This is the very best way to leverage an
understanding of conative style — to create useful, complementary
strategies instead of disheartening, competitive ones. Many of us have
spent a lifetime trying to be what we’re not, feeling lousy about
ourselves when we fail and sometimes even when we succeed. We hide our
differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could
collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive, enjoyable,
and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now. I mean,
hey, how hard can it be?

PS by maja
There are various price options, already the cheap $50 one helps a lot see my results: www.urlfreeze.com/sumo108/KolbeindexMaja/
To get your own go to the blogroll “Kolbe Index”

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