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Source: LinkedIn Today: A Social News Product For Professionals

Accel Partners is announcing today the addition of former eHarmony head CEO Greg Waldorf as CEO-in-residence. Waldof spent eleven years at eHarmony and five as CEO before leaving the company a couple of weeks ago and landing at Accel as of today.

While at eHarmony, Waldorf oversaw an online dating business that raked in more than $1 billion in revenue. Under his helm the company expanded into over 15 countries worldwide. Waldorf has previously worked with Accel on the board of real estate startup Trulia.

Waldorf told us over the phone that he’s most excited about the companies with freemium business models given his background in paid services like dating. He’s also interested in spending some time in Accel’s New York and London offices as so many interesting things are happening internationally with regards to entreprenuership.

As Accel CEO-in-residence, Waldorf will be succeeding LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and former Googler Singh Cassidy who went on to found Polyvore. When asked what his number one piece of advice for budding entrepreneurs is Waldorf said “pick your partners wisely.”

Accel recently launched its New York branch, joining its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Bangalore, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing.

The VC firm has has also had some recent notable exits, including that of Diapers.com to Amazon for $540 Million, Admob to Google for $750 Million and Playfish to Electronic Arts for $300 million.

Image via Wikipedia

Source: Former eHarmony Head Greg Waldorf Joins Accel As CEO-In-Residence

LinkedIn’s S-1 filing was released today, and the filing includes a wealth of information that we’ve never seen before. This includes sales, profit, revenue breakdown and more. One interesting data point shared in the filing is LinkedIn’s largest shareholders and how much each shareholder owns.

Out of the 5 percent stockholders, the company’s largest shareholder is LinkedIn’s founder and chairman Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee, owning 19 million shares or 21.4 percent of the company. He’s followed by Sequoia Capital (16.8 million shares or 18.9 percent), Greylock Partners (14 million shares or 15.8 percent) and Bessemer Venture Partners (4.6 million shares or 5.1 percent).

Seqouia was LinkedIn’s earliest investor in 2003, followed by Greylock in 2004. Bessemer participated in LinkedIn’s three later rounds in 2007 and 2008.

Among the executive officers and directors, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner holds 3.8 million shares, or 4.1 percent of the company, CFO Steven Sordello owns 1 million shares or 1.1 percent of the company, and VP of Product Deep Nishar owns 970,000 shares or 1.1 percent of the company.

Since we don’t know the offering price, it’s difficult to know the dollar value of each party’s shares.

Source: LinkedIn’s Largest Shareholders And How Much They Own

With reports of a 2011 IPO swirling, professional social network LinkedIn has brought on another notable board member—Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz.

It appears that Moritz will be replacing Sequoia Partner Marc Kvamme, who recently left the venture capital firm to run Ohio’s Department of Development. On LinkedIn’s board, Moritz joins Stan Meresman, Netflix CMO Leslie Kilgore, former Ask.com CEO George “Skip†Battle, LinkedIn founder and former CEO Reid Hoffman, current CEO Jeff Weiner, Greylock’s David Sze.

At Sequoia, Michael Moritz focuses on software and services investments. Moritz currently sits on the boards of 24/7 Customer, Aricent, Gamefly, Green Dot, Klarna Kayak.com, Plaxo, Pure Digital, Sugar Inc, WeatherBug, and Zappos.com. Moritz’s previous investments at Sequoia include Google, Yahoo, PayPal and Flextronics (he served on the boards of all of these companies as well). Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 1986, he worked in a variety of positions at Time Warner and was a Founder of Technologic Partners, a technology newsletter and conference company.

Weiner said in a statement: “As one of the founding investors in LinkedIn, Mark’s vision, passion and insight helped fuel the company long before others had recognized the full potential of our platform…Mike brings an impressive range of knowledge and expertise which will be invaluable to the company as we work to continue to grow our business around the world.â€

Source: Prepping For An IPO, LinkedIn Adds Sequoia Partner Michael Moritz To Board Of Directors

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner took the stage to talk with host John Battelle. One question was about why we need LinkedIn in a world increasingly run by Facebook? Weiner had a two-word answer to that: keg stands.

Weiner noted that while Facebook is great for showing how we spend our time and expressing ourselves, most employers probably shouldn’t see all of your extracurricular activities. And you clearly wouldn’t want them to see that. Like keg stands.

But when Battelle asked if that meant LinkedIn was opposed to some sort of social hook-up with Facebook, Weiner said it would depend on the value. Currently, LinkedIn has a feature that ties it in closely to Twitter, but not for Facebook.

Weiner said that while LinkedIn is lumped into being a social network with Facebook, Twitter, and others, there are big differences between them. And plenty of room for all of them.

Weiner also had plenty of interesting stats to share.

[photo: flickr/mcclouds]

Source: LinkedIn CEO On Why We Need More Than Facebook: Keg Stands

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner just dropped some numbers on the LinkedIn social platform’s measurement of engagement, revealing that the social network now boasts 85 million members and is adding a member a second. “That’s the fastest ever,” Weiner said revealing that it took the site 477 days to get the first million and 9 days for last million.

Half of new membership now comes from overseas and the site is about to 60 million uniques according to Comscore.

You can watch more of Weiner’s ongoing talk on the Livestream here.

Source: LinkedIn Is Now At 85 Million Members, Adding A Member A Second

Today is Day 3 of the 2010 Web 2.0 Summit. We will be livestreaming the event all day right here for the folks at home and as yesterday proved, this year’s theme, “Points of Control” gets all sorts of industry people riled up. The event should  start in about five minutes at 10:15 AM PT.  Speakers today include Evan Williams, Jeremy Stoppelman, Matt Galligan, Brian Pokorny and Susan Wojcicki.

Here is the full speaker schedule for today all times are Pacific Time.

Source: Watch The Livestream Of The Web 2.0 Summit Here (Day 3)

We’ve just learned that ChoiceVendor founder and CEO Yan-David Erlich has left LinkedIn, just under two months after his startup was acquired by the professional social network. Erlich was a product manager at Google, Battery Ventures EIR and sold another company to iSkoot before he founded ChoiceVendor, which he then sold to LinkedIn for an undisclosed amount said to be in the $5 million rage.

Sources say that Erlich, who must be walking away from a large amount of equity, is leaving the company for personal reasons. We’ve also heard that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is not particularly thrilled about this latest development — Weiner himself admitted that ChoiceVendor was primarily a talent acquisition on LinkedIn’s part.

ChoiceVendor provided realtime ratings and reviews for B2B service providers before it was folded into LinkedIn on September 23rd. In addition to former Google product manager Erlich, the company hired ChoiceVendor co-founder and former Googler Rama Ranganath, who will be staying on staff. LinkedIn has not yet responded for comment.

Source: ChoiceVendor Founder Yan-David Erlich Leaves LinkedIn After Two Months

If I were a betting man, I’d bet on LinkedIn going public some time in 2011. But I’m not, so I’ll just share with you that the social networking service provider has been significantly beefing up its board of directors this year.

Case in point: this morning, LinkedIn announced the appointment of its seventh board member, Stan Meresman. We’ll forgive you if that name doesn’t ring any bells with you immediately, but suffice to say this is a man with heaps of experience serving on boards of and advising public tech companies under his belt.

In addition to LinkedIn, Meresman is a board member at Riverbed Technology, Meru Networks and HyTrust. Previously, Meresman served on the boards of directors at Polycom, VMware, Starfish Software and Lightsurf, as well as an advisor to Silicon Image, Inktomi and Real Networks.

Meresman also has management experience, having served as SVP and CFO of Silicon Graphics from 1989 to 1997, before shifting his attention to investing.

LinkedIn in a statement says it decided to expand its board for the third time this year as its membership and operations continue to scale globally – it now boasts 80 million members around the world – and as a way to “position itself for long-term growth”.

And readying a public offering in the next 12 months, I’d wager.

Last May, LinkedIn added Netflix CMO Leslie Kilgore to its board, and a month later expanded it again with the appointment of former Ask.com CEO George “Skip” Battle.

Meresman marks the third outsider to join the IPO candidate’s board of directors in a matter of months.

The four others are founder and former CEO Reid Hoffman, current CEO Jeff Weiner, Greylock’s David Sze and Sequoia’s Marc Kvamme.

Source: LinkedIn Beefs Up Its Board Of Directors Some More