LinkedIn’s Co-Founder On Why It Took Off – with Konstantin Guericke
You’ll hear us mention in this program a lot of social networks that flopped. So why did LinkedIn take off when others couldn’t?
It all started with a series of walks that Konstantin Guericke took with his future LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman. In those walks, they took turns suggesting and knocking down business ideas. What they finally came up with was a series of ingredients that they used to create LinkedIn. You’ll hear all about them here, including why they intentionally targeted an audience that had money so they could generate revenue. How they insisted the site be useful more than fun, so it would become a necessity. And how they planned to make it to be social so users would promote it.
Konstantin Guericke is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a social network for business whose mission is “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” He was also the CEO of Jaxtr, which provides cheap international calling from mobile phones and a network that enables mobile-to-mobile calling and where members socialize around the question “What do you want to talk about?”
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