The members have more than doubled in last five years, growing from 225 million members at its 10th anniversary in 2013
A decade-and-half ago, in 2003, Reid Hoffman along with members from PayPal and Socialnet.com which included Allen Blue, founded LinkedIn in Hoffman's living room in the US. The platform has since become ‘world’s largest professional network’ with 562 million members from over 200 countries and properties.
The members have more than doubled in the last five years growing from 225 million members at its 10th anniversary in 2013.
In its 15 years of journey, the company has travelled a long distance, going public in 2011. It was acquired by software giant Microsoft in June 2016 in a whopping 26.2 billion dollar deal at $196 per share. The splurge by Microsoft valued its stock four times its IPO price of $45 five years ago.
More than one-fourth of the members on the platform are from the United States. India is LinkedIn’s largest market outside the US with more than 47 million members.
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As per stats shared by company’s VP Allen Blue and on its website, professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members per second. Students and recent graduates form the fastest growing demographic on LinkedIn with the number currently pegged at 46 million.
The portal has more than 15 million open jobs. The company itself employs more than 11,800 full-time employees (about half of them in the San Francisco Bay Area) with offices in more than 30 cities around the world including three in India.
In an interesting reading of the data revealed, job titles of the members reflect unique business environments of a country. Two countries among the top in World Bank's 'Ease of Doing Business' ranking - the US and Singapore - have ‘founder’ and ‘co-founder’ as the top three job titles. Contrastingly, ‘software manager’, ‘student’, and ‘consultant’ are the top three job titles from India.
LinkedIn also owns e-learning website Lynda.com. It acquired it in 2015 at a cost of $1.5 billion. The acquisition offered members of LinkedIn access to a comprehensive collection of high-quality courses taught by industry experts, offered in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
In its FY18 Q3 results, Microsoft announced that LinkedIn revenue increased 37% (up 33% in constant currency) with continued acceleration in engagement.