LinkedIn

LinkedIn operates the professional social network used by individuals to publish career profiles and by employers and recruiters to hire, sell and advertise. It was founded on December 10, 2002 in Mountain View, California by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly, among others, and is now headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Its 2011 IPO prospectus described it as the largest professional network on the internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories, and Wikipedia reports 1.3 billion registered members as of March 2026.

Sequoia Capital led LinkedIn's Series A in late 2003. In June 2008, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and other venture firms bought about 5% of the company for $53 million, a price that valued LinkedIn at roughly $1 billion; the prospectus records that the company sold 6,599,987 Series D preferred shares at $11.47 each in 2008. Tiger Global Management invested $20 million in 2010 at a valuation of about $2 billion. At the IPO, the 5% holders listed in the prospectus were Reid Hoffman, entities affiliated with Sequoia Capital (18.7%), Greylock Partners (15.6%) and Bessemer Venture Partners (5.1%), and Bain Capital Ventures, Goldman Sachs and McGraw-Hill appeared among selling stockholders.

LinkedIn priced its IPO on May 18, 2011 at $45 per share, selling 7,840,000 Class A shares for $352.8 million in gross proceeds under the ticker LNKD on the New York Stock Exchange, with Morgan Stanley, BofA Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan leading the underwriting. The stock closed its first day at $94.25, a 109% gain. On June 13, 2016 Microsoft agreed to acquire LinkedIn for $196 per share in an all cash deal valued at $26.2 billion including LinkedIn's net cash, when the network had more than 433 million members. The deal closed on December 8, 2016 and remained Microsoft's largest acquisition until its purchase of Activision Blizzard.

LinkedIn is an early example of a network business where the first institutional check came at a small Series A and the same firms held large stakes through liquidity. Sequoia and Greylock, whose partners Michael Moritz and David Sze sat on the board, each still owned more than 15% at the IPO roughly seven and a half years after the Series A. A second liquidity event followed five years later, when Microsoft paid $196 a share, more than four times the $45 IPO price, giving public market holders a further return on top of the private round investors' gains.