Moving Trucks and Birthday Cakes

Chris Saccheri May 04, 2007

This weekend, LinkedIn celebrates two milestones: first, after outgrowing our current Palo Alto digs, we're moving to our fifth office (not counting Reid's living room). We'll be back in Mountain View, just down the road from the office where we originally launched LinkedIn -- an office that we once shared with Friendster.

The other milestone is the fourth anniversary of LinkedIn’s launch on May 5, 2003. I remember "Cinco de LinkedIn" fondly: it started with the founding team signing up, connecting to each other and then inviting the first wave of users to LinkedIn. My wife (then girlfriend) was our first non-employee user so, for about ten minutes, I actually had more connections than Reid! (That didn't last.)

Growth was slow and steady in the early days: we had 2,500 users after the first week, 6,000 after the first month, and 37,000 after the first six months. By comparison, last week alone we added more than 130,000 new users.

To mark the anniversary, we thought it would be fun to share some screenshots of how LinkedIn looked when it launched. Reid once said, "if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late." I don't remember being embarrassed at the time, but four years later, I'll admit that these screens make me wince. It's like flipping through my high school yearbook -- did we really look like that?

 
•         LinkedIn Home (before sign in), May 2003  
 
•         LinkedIn Home (after sign in), May 2003  

Posted at 08:34 AM in Events | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

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