In 2009, LinkedIn new technical chief, David Henke, gathered his entire team of programmers and managers for the first time and fired off tough questions. “What the hell is going on with all of you?” was the pure core of it. The fast-growing professional social network had about 50 million users, but went completely offline every Thursday afternoon as engineers launched new features and fixed bugs. Job seekers were unable to browse job openings. Recruiters who paid to scour the website for candidates were forced to twiddle their thumbs. Clicking on a profile will bring up the “wizard of [in]a cheerful, staff-wielding mascot that resembles Twitter’s famous ‘failed whale’.
Henke was not amused. The weekly downtime, including an office happy hour to smooth out a long night’s work, stemmed from LinkedIn’s shoddily built technology. That was common among startups, but the network was now large and important enough that unreliability threatened to hinder its growth and scare away customers, Henke thought. That could stifle a healthy company that was looking for profit early on to win over venture capitalists who still feared dotcom busts.
Over the next few weeks of coding around the clock, the engineering team rebuilt LinkedIn’s technology from the ground up, significantly reducing downtime. Company veterans remember the project as one of the most pivotal in the company’s 20-year history. Without the focus on “site up,” LinkedIn may have struggled to become the giant it is today, says Deep Nishar, product manager from 2009 to 2014. ” he says.
Launched on May 5, 2003, LinkedIn will be the first of a series of social media giants born from the spoils of the early 2000s tech crash transitioning out of its teens, while Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter follow suit. of the time also turn 20. next three years. While those incumbents are proven survivors, problems at Twitter under Elon Musk and the rise of challengers like TikTok and Bluesky make social media feel more competitive than it has in years.
Looking back at LinkedIn’s coming of age, several current and former executives recalled some of WIRED’s defining moments. They also talked about LinkedIn’s preparations to survive another 20 years by integrating AI “copilots,” as Microsoft likes to describe virtual assistants, and making hiring fairer.
LinkedIn grew out of a small group of Silicon Valley product managers and engineers, including Founder CEO Reid Hoffman, who wanted a way to track their connections in the startup community to find the hot spots to work and bring friends. Hoffman, who later became chairman, stepped away to focus on investing after Microsoft bought the service for $26 billion in 2016.
Today, LinkedIn has more than 930 million users. Revenue rose 34 percent to nearly $14 billion in the year ended June 30 — a much smaller company than Meta, whose annual revenue was nearly $117 billion last year, but a company that has a near-monopoly on its business-minded user base .
Scrappy no more
In 2009, Henke joined LinkedIn as Yahoo’s chief technical officer. LinkedIn’s then CFO, Steve Sordello, pitched Henke for four hours about the potential revenue growth of effectively digitizing resumes and friendships in the workplace, and the lack of real competition. “He opened the books,” says Henke.
LinkedIn had started selling premium services like more powerful user profile searches to recruiters, researchers, and companies much earlier than other social networks like Facebook that rolled out ads or subscriptions. It had worked, but Henke discovered that bad engineering practices festered over time and once modern technology had become obsolete.
