Where LinkedIn is headed next
CEO Jeff Weiner discussed the volatility of the stock's first year, as well as the company's plans for future growth. … ADAM LASHINSKY: Okay, so extremely exciting time here a year after your IPO. IPOs are all the rage again with Facebook's IPO.
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn's first year as a public company closes with a Fortune sit-down between Adam Lashinsky and CEO Jeff Weiner, who took the top job in 2009 and steered the company to its NYSE listing in May 2011. The interview lands amid renewed IPO appetite that Facebook's offering has put back in the headlines, making Weiner's read on stock volatility a proxy for how the market is pricing social-era companies.
First-order effects
- Weiner must defend LinkedIn's valuation narrative directly to investors: after a debut-year price swing, the growth plan he lays out becomes the reference point for whether the stock holds its premium over fundamentals like the $121M quarter, up 120 percent year over year.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's just-completed IPO sets the comparison every LinkedIn conversation now runs through — if the larger social network stumbles post-listing, LinkedIn's steadier revenue model becomes the argument for professional-networking economics over consumer scale.
Third-order effects
- If LinkedIn sustains public-market credibility where Facebook wobbles, it cements the template for subscription-and-data business models going public ahead of ad-dependent peers, shaping which internet companies the next IPO window opens for.
The trend: Professional internet companies are re-entering public markets after a decade-long drought, with LinkedIn's 2011 listing and Facebook's 2012 debut testing whether investors will fund them at scale.