LinkedIn’s planetary success story began with – planetary FAILURE
It is almost impossible for you to live, work or do business in the 21st century without having a profile or at least having heard of LinkedIn. This is a social network that can replace your CV and turn many people’s careers around.
We have witnessed this happen several times, but have you ever wondered how and why this network became so important in the world?
As everyone knows, it is a social network, though never as famous and popular as Instagram and Facebook in their time, or TikTok now, but judging by the opinion of many renowned people from the business world, incredibly important.
How has this happened? LinkedIn was created at a time when many other social networks were emerging, which, at the very beginning, did not promise great success. A small company from California had huge competition on the market.
The journey for this company and social network to become what it is today has been going on since 1993, when Reid Hoffman, while studying at Oxford, considered starting a software company. His idea took shape when Hoffman officially launched a website called LinkedIn on May 5, 2003. Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Constantine Garrick, Eric Lee, and Jean-Luc Cayan signed the document as founders.
What is LinkedIn today?
Everyone knows what this network is today: a place that gathers more than 900 million registered members from more than 200 countries of the world, who network with each other in order to achieve certain business goals, to better present themselves to the business community, but also to get informed about other people and their positions in the companies in which they work.
Today, the company is owned by Microsoft, it is worth about US$30 billion, and the story of its creation was not so successful.
Namely, LinkedIn’s “big brother” was called “SocialNet,” and this was a network of similar purposes, but nowhere near such success.
Reid Hoffman says LinkedIn is actually the product of his first unsuccessful attempt – SocialNet.
Even at the very beginning, when it was created in 1997, this network was not promising.
Izvor: BIZLife
Foto: Unsplash
