Jia Jiang Jul 18, 2008
I have been working for LinkedIn for the summer. It has been a fantastic experience throughout, but today, it definitely reached a high point when I saw my sports hero and professional passion come together.
I’ve been a Yao Ming fan for the past ten years. One thing I can say is that while most athletes are self-promoting, Yao is all about others in need. Today, he is going high tech on LinkedIn.
Yao Ming, the NBA superstar who plays for the Houston Rockets, is using LinkedIn for a good cause – rebuilding schools for the children devastated in China’s earthquake. He asks a great question to LinkedIn users on the relationship between playing sports and professional success. He is also hoping to bring more awareness to his newly-founded Yao Ming Foundation and his Olympic raffle.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/non-profit/philantrophy/NNP_PHL/275712-27364774
The raffle’s winner and his/her guest will be Yao’s personal guests in the 2008 Olympics. Five answers posted on LinkedIn Answers prior to 11:59pm EDT on 7/19 (Saturday) will be hand-picked by Yao for an award of 20 raffle tickets each.
Yao, a six year veteran in the NBA, became a superstar the moment he entered the league. He started in all six All Star Games and took the Houston Rockets to the NBA playoffs four times. He will also play for the Chinese National Team in the 2008 Olympics next month in Beijing, China.
As accomplished a basketball player as he is, Yao is also well-known for his philanthropic works. Over the years, he worked on important causes such as the rebuilding efforts in the earthquake affected regions in China, raising awareness about AIDS, and wildlife conservation.
So far, the question has gotten great responses. I encourage you to check them out. I wish Yao Ming the best of luck in the upcoming Olympics and with his foundation.
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Mario Sundar Apr 27, 2008
And, finally a roundup of our most viewed videos, which include demos/ blooper reels/ and feature introduction from our product/design/engineering teams. Going through these videos is literally a trip through memory lane. Here are the Top 10 most popular videos we hosted on YouTube.
Click on any of the images below to take you to the video directly or the title links that will take you to the relevant blog posts.
#10: Feature Enhancements to Network Updates with Ruslan Belkin and Chris Richman
#9: Launch of LinkedIn News with demo by Jen Granito
#8: Launch of LinkedIn Status with demo by Chris Richman
#7: LinkedIn Users with Andy Cohen, CEO of Caring.com
#6: LinkedIn API Announcement with demo by Lucian Beebe
#5: Adam Nash introducing LinkedIn News
#4: Launch of LinkedIn Company Profiles with demo by Maisy Samuelson
#3: LinkedIn's redesigned homepage demo with Elliot Shmukler
#2: LinkedIn Mobile demo on the iPhone with Jerry Luk
#1: LinkedIn Answers Live! Event with Guy Kawasaki and Dan Lyons (a.k.a Fake Steve Jobs)
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While we're on the topic of the blog's one year anniversary (check out our Top 10 posts from the past year here), why not go over the Top 10 photos viewed as well. Also, check out the LinkedIn photo pool we maintain in Flickr with over 555 photos (as of April 2008).
#10: Patrick Crane, Steve Sordello and Mike Lin (from l-r) at the Wednesday lunch
#9: Photo taken at our LinkedIn photo feature launch (read the related blog post here)
#8: Steve Ganz in the Zone
#7: The group behind LinkedIn Groups (read the related blog post here)
#6: Lunches at LinkedIn
#5: Aileen Brown and Brooke Watts (read an earlier blog post by Aileen)
#4: Well, that'd be Kay and me talking about our blog (at a Wed lunch meeting)
#3: Dan Nye, Kay Luo and David Multer who contributed the winning Webby acceptance speech
#2: Ryan Gustafson's contribution to our cube chic contest (read a post from Ryan)
#1: Moving to new digs - Jim Meyer and Jerry Luk at the expanded office space in Mountain View
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I'd like to thank some of the major contributors to the photo pool we currently have (555 photos and counting). A huge thanks to Jerry Luk, Steve Ganz and Brooke Watts for making this an interesting
resources for readers/users to check out what's the latest happening
within LinkedIn.
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Yes! It's been 1 year since we started the blog and quite the ride it has been. Starting off with a debate on whether or not we allow comments; our decision to allow comments has resulted in over 1500 comments we've received thus far, since we started blogging on Apr 24, 2007.
Here are some basic stats.
Two of the stats that stood out were, the reader engagement factor and the company participation in the corporate blog. Reader engagement as measured by number of comments currently is at nearly 9 comments a post. What's more interesting is the fact that nearly 18% of our company's workforce has currently blogged (including key members of the management team). And, that's exactly the goal with which we started the blog; making it easier for you, the LinkedIn user, to communicate with the individuals behind these features.
As a treat to the regular readers of the blog, here's a Top 10 list of product feature posts (based on popularity and clicks you've made) of the past year.
#10: Getting Things Done by Chris Richman
#9: Hot Topic: The Importance of a single email address by April Kelly
#8: Videos from the LinkedIn Q&A Event | Guy Kawasaki interviews Fake Steve Jobs
#7: The LinkedIn API Opportunity by Lucian Beebe
#6: Now companies too have profiles on LinkedIn by Maisy Samuelson
#5: What's new in LinkedIn Groups by Benjamin Guthrie
#4: LinkedIn's new redesigned homepage with Status by Elliot Shmukler
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And, we also awarded the contributors of the Top 3 blog posts (see below) with the Linky Awards 2007 (yes, we made one up) to thank our colleagues who not only create the coolest features on LinkedIn, but also engage in the "conversation" with our users. In case you're wondering what those special prizes were, we got them all from our LinkedIn store. Here are the Top 3 LinkedIn Blog posts in 2007!
#3: Guess who's viewed your profile? by Steven Stegman
#2: A photo is worth a thousand words by Adam Nash
#1: Announcing LinkedIn Mobile by Brandon Duncan featuring Jerry Luk
Please leave comments on how further improvements you'd like to see on the blog. Thanks for your support, encouragement and participation!
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Mario Sundar Apr 18, 2008
Friday is a slow news day and the rule applies to the blogosphere as well, I suppose. Either way, thought I'll draw your attention to LinkedIn's own Flickr photo pool that we've maintained for our blog. The photo pool has had numerous contributors over the months and we added a ton of new photographs in the past few weeks.
Here's a sampling of the most recent pictures taken:
Introducing new hires at our Wednesday lunch
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Mario Sundar Feb 15, 2008
Comfortable & customizable workplaces would count as one of the perks of the much analyzed, discussed and debated Silicon Valley culture. Just this past week, I noticed a blog post featuring images from many successful web 2.0 companies (most of them from the Silicon Valley).
However, since the LinkedIn workplace images in the above-mentioned post seemed outdated, here's a quick pictorial overview of the evolution of the LinkedIn workplace.
* Back to the Future | 2008
Adam Nash, Sr. Director of Product, has already blogged about our office expansion, breaking new ground
and the move itself. Almost half of the company (engineering/product/design) now reside in this workspace. Here are images taken during the move.
* Cube Chic | 2007
Many of you've probably read our blog post on the Cube Chic contest we held in August 2007 when we had just moved to our new digs in Mountain View. What you got was a veritable trip down a Silicon Valley Strip with cube designs ranging from "Camp Runamuck" to "Wine Country". The Cube chic designs remain on the second floor of our office in addition to the newer working space on the first floor of the same building (see above).
* Blast from the Past | 2006
One of our earliest office spaces; it was here that I started off as community evangelist. The pictures you see on the Next Web blog are from these office cubes. Good Times!
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Step into the office space of other web 2.0 companies ranging from Twitter to Netvibes (via Next Web blog).
You can also check out our LinkedIn photo stream for more images of our office space.
Have you subscribed to the LinkedIn blog yet?
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Mario Sundar Dec 07, 2007
Recently Fox Sporting Network, filmed two of the LinkedIn teams (Design and IT) involved in a four-square face-off, in a program that chronicles the rise of four square as a game played increasingly at tech companies in the Silicon Valley.
Also, the players in the video were Steve Ganz, Chris Saccheri, and Scott Schlegel from our UI/Web Dev team; Ian McNish, Byron Alvarez, and Jon Merripen from our IT team.
So, if there are any other companies boasting of a four-square team, let us know and we can have another face-off! Many of you are probably aware of us giving away four-square balls as a
giveaway during the Lunch 2.0 that we organized this past summer. Below are similar articles on LinkedIn, Fun, Lunch 2.0 and Four Square.
Related blog posts:
1. LinkedIn Blog on Lunch 2.0 with Four Square | You've been LunchedIn
2. San Francisco Chronicle | Playground mentality comes to the office
3. Wall Street Journal | The Power Lunch, Cafeteria Style
Subscribe to the LinkedIn blog
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Adam Nash Nov 12, 2007
Well, we're not exactly breaking new ground, per se. But we are kicking off the demolition and construction of the new 1st floor of our building. For fun, we let a number of people pitch in and help out with the beginning of demolition. Check out the video below for a sample of some good, old-fashioned sledge hammer swings.
LinkedIn is growing, and we're expanding into a new space dedicated to our rock star product & engineering teams.
We're going to be building out the space to create a environment really optimized for our great engineers, product managers, web developers, designers and quality engineers to all sit and work together. Very high energy, with a lot of thought given to providing the best possible place to design & build the features for the world's largest professional network.
When the space is done in a couple of months, we'll have room for another 120-150 people, and we'll post pictures of the launch. But as a teaser, here is a quick 3D rendering of the type of stations we're planning for the space:
By the way, if you are looking for a great position in architecture, engineering or product, LinkedIn is hiring. One of these new spots could be for you! :)
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Mario Sundar Oct 16, 2007
Last week, you heard me chat with Chris Richman, Product Manager, with recent feature updates to LinkedIn's Communication system. This week, I had a chance to chat with our Director of Engineering for the Content Distribution Network (CDN) group, Ruslan Belkin. Hopefully, the interview will give you a better picture of the internal workings of our engineering teams, one of which Ruslan leads. So, check out the short 3:14 minutes conversation I had with Ruslan, followed by a quick summary.
If you haven't seen the video and don't plan on doing so, I thought I'll summarize some of the key areas Ruslan and I chatted about. Actually, here are the three topics we discussed:
1. What does Ruslan's team work on?
The CDN group is responsible for the following components of LinkedIn's communication system: member affiliation networks (connections and groups), invitations, the network updates and other feeds, the communication platform, contacts management and geography location search.
2. Product/Engineering collaboration:
Within the group we have a number of what we call Product/Engineering tracks: networks track, communication platform track, and the contacts management track. Each track has an engineering lead and a counterpart on the Product side with respective feature and infrastructure projects. Feature releases are typically every two weeks.
3. What's the engineering environment like?
Flexible: You will work in an agile development environment where results of your work will be visible to millions of LinkedIn users (currently there are more than 15 million LinkedIn users) very rapidly and this could be very rewarding for any engineer
Problem Solving: You will be faced with challenges of scale (huge data sets, stringent performance requirements, the need for high quality secure software to protect our customers) and will be exposed to innovative architectural solutions implemented on a large scale: asynchronous communication, caching, data replication.
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Have ideas, feedback, suggestions or questions? As you heard Ruslan say during the interview, the three best ways to reach us:
a. Contact the community guy; that'd be me. Email: msundar@linkedin.com
b. Either pose questions or answer questions on LinkedIn Answers. In particular, the "Using LinkedIn" category
c. Leave a comment at the end of this blog post
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Steve Patrizi Sep 26, 2007
I recently joined the LinkedIn team as Director of Advertising
Sales, a job I gained through using LinkedIn. I’ve used LinkedIn for years as
an invaluable tool to build up and manage my professional network, find and
recruit talented people, and grow my customer base. I’ve also used it to stay
on top of the current voice of the marketing community by taking a daily look at
the types of questions and answers being posted in the Answers section. And now
I can say that I’ve used it to land an exciting new career opportunity even
though I wasn’t actively seeking one out, something that would have been almost
impossible years ago but is now a common occurrence thanks to LinkedIn’s ability
to help you manage your professional brand.
Branding is something that we as professionals need to take
very seriously on an individual level. Ten years ago, Tom Peters penned an
article for Fast Company called “The Brand Called
You”, which stressed that it’s absolutely imperative for all professionals
to develop a unique and personal “professional brand” that communicates the
value they have to offer to prospective employers, employees, clients and
business partners.
That idea was true then and it’s even more true today. The major
search engines and social networks have made all of us far more accessible and
visible than ever before, making it so much more critical that we actively
manage our own professional brands. And that’s where LinkedIn really shines,
allowing you to take control of the major elements of your professional brand: the people you associate with, the questions you ask and the answers you
provide, the recommendations you give and receive, and the way in which you
express your experiences and skills.
If you haven’t done so, I suggest reading over Tom's article,
then looking over your LinkedIn profile and make sure you’re doing all you can
to help your professional brand stand out. To the LinkedIn users reading this, thanks for using our
service. To the marketers reading this, I’m looking forward to helping you
connect your brand with the 14 million professional brands on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to the LinkedIn blog
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Tip #1: If you haven't done so already, claim your own LinkedIn vanity URL, to solidify your own professional brand. Create your LinkedIn vanity URL here. Check out how simple it is:
Create your own LinkedIn vanity URL Tip #2: Another great way to virally propagate your professional brand is to create your own email signature, which you can create by going here. Here's a sample:
Creating your own LinkedIn email signatures
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Veronica Vallez Sep 05, 2007
Veronica is a recruiting coordinator with a penchant for pretentious memoir, writing blurbs about herself and Post-It notes of varying sizes and colors.
The flyer that reached my mailbox claimed that anyone, even non-runners, could train to complete a 26.2 mile marathon by just following the simple training program guidelines. I'll admit, I was skeptical. I have been running for the past couple years but I've never surpassed 8 miles. Was this a message and how did the people at the San Francisco AIDS foundation know I could be convinced easily. Close on the heels of receiving that flyer from the AIDS foundation, I also heard that a close friend of mine tested positive for HIV. News of that magnitude tends to paralyze us; it only proves the reality of our helplessness when faced with issues too large to comprehend. Pessimism sets in.
But one flyer was all it took to shake me out of it and soon I was sitting at an informational meeting watching a DVD of middle-aged marathon finishers, Chariots of Fire playing in my head. I was sold! Flash forward -- every Saturday I wake up at five or six, eat a bowl of oatmeal, fill up my water bottles and make sure I have enough Gu’s to correspond to the amount of hours I will be running. As I drive to the run site I remind myself of the elation that comes after completing a long run and how good it feels to have a training run completed with still an entire Saturday for myself.
As a 25 year old on the cusp of 26, appreciation of life’s basic offerings sounds trite, however I do find myself appreciating life at a much more rudimentary level, not for what I might receive from accomplishment but for what I might receive from the act of working hard. I am close to my goal of 3,000 dollars raised for San Francisco AIDS Foundation and of course I wish I would have begun sooner and told more people but it is 3,000 dollars more than if I would have simply ignored the flyer in my mailbox and threw it out along with the grocery store flyers and credit card offers. Every Saturday I look forward to running with my pace group, we keep each other motivated and although anyone training for a marathon is a slight Type A we keep the competition to ourselves in our online training logs and GPS watches.
As for my friend who was diagnosed with HIV recently; although at first he didn’t want to tell anyone and wondered if he would overcome such a life altering diagnosis it has in fact changed his life for the better. He was seeing the beauty in things easier and a healthy lifestyle had become his main priority.
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Related posts on some of our colleagues:
1. Omar Lee | From American Idol to the New York Times - a Designer Story
2. Ryan Gustafson | Antarctica 2007: Swimming with the Penguins
3. Aileen Brown | AIDS/Lifecyle: Supporting a worthy cause
4. Brittany Schmitt | The journey of a lifetime
5. LinkedIn Cube Chic | LinkedIn's Office Space meets the Strip
Have you subscribed to our blog yet?
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Brendon is our Director of Corporate Sales and has helped build our sales team since early 2006. In his spare time, he can be found either at the driving range in Shoreline (Mountain View) or fly fishing in Northern California.
I'm sure you've been reading most of our recent blog posts on LinkedIn's escalating usage numbers - we've moved past 13 million professional users and are now moving quickly towards the 14 million mark. What many of you may not know is that LinkedIn also caters towards corporate solutions for the enterprise. Interestingly, not only do we have executives from every one of the Fortune 500 companies on LinkedIn, but most of those companies also have a corporate account with LinkedIn, including some companies you may have heard of: Microsoft, EMC, Salesforce.com, Kaiser Permanente, Target, etc... Check out a few of our company pages here.
The fundamental value of LinkedIn is allowing aspiring professionals access to unlimited career opportunities across these large growth organizations. Similarly we also help companies, both Fortune 500 companies as well as startups, find the perfect candidate in a passive way. A passive job seeker is usually the person that is reserved at the top of a hiring manager's wish list. They are usually employed, seasoned, accomplished professionally, and typically look for jobs through referrals and recommendations. These are not professionals that you'd typically find on a job board hoping for a new opportunity to pop up. LinkedIn bridges the gap between great companies looking to add top-tier talent, and people only available to the perfect opportunity at their dream company.
As Director of Sales, it's definitely been a fun ride so far, and I'd love to hear from you about the great opportunities you've found through LinkedIn. Just leave me a comment at the end of the post.
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Omar Lee Aug 03, 2007
By day, Omar Lee collaborates with the other members of the Design and Web Development team to make the LinkedIn experience a rewarding one for our users. The rest of the time, he's busy designing for news outlets like the New York Times to American Idol finalists! Here's his story...
Something that few people know about me (well, until now) is that I have a secondary career outside of my primary one as a visual designer for the web -- I'm a freelance illustrator. The sort of work I do runs the gamut from editorial (New York Times, Newsweek, Business Week) to commercial (Sprint, Volkswagen, McDonald's). Aside from the simple thrill that comes with getting paid to draw stuff, I like to think that the rapid concepting and quick execution required in illustration, particularly the editorial variety, keeps my skills sharp and makes me a better visual designer.
This strange part-time job of mine makes for some absurd career moments. The friendly-but-heated debate with an art director over the merits of using dinosaurs as a metaphor for obsolescence. Would it be too obvious? Too jokey? Too scary-looking? Bleary-eyed, late-night Google image searches for reference photos of the second actor who played Darren on Bewitched. The weekend call from an advertising agency asking me if I would be willing to air-draw in a darkened room with an assortment of colored flashlights.
(From Rockstars to American Idol | Source: Omar Lee)
To date, though, my oddest experience as an illustrator was the evening I received no fewer than 36 overly excited e-mails and text messages, littered with exclamation points: "OMG! I just saw Blake wearing your shirt!!!"DOOD! UR SHIRT ON TV! XLNT!" To the chagrin of my American Idol-addicted friends, my initial reaction was: "Um, who's Blake?" But once I realized that they were talking about THAT show -- you know, the one with the mean guy who tells people that they have no business singing -- I got sort of excited. The t-shirt in question was one that I had designed for Poketo, a small Los Angeles-based company, a couple of years ago and it seemed that Blake Lewis, an American Idol hopeful from Seattle, was wearing it. I'd seen a random person or two wearing one on MUNI (San Francisco's version of public transportation) but this was national television! So surreal! So exciting! Chris Saccheri, our Director of Web Development, was thoughtful enough to get some screen captures from the show, which I promptly posted on Flickr.
(American Idol Blake Lewis wearing the Poketo shirt on the show | Source: Omar Lee)
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Ryan Gustafson Jul 27, 2007
From bicycle marathons benefiting AIDS to fire breathing at the Sydney Olympics; from plunging into the cold polar waters to then writing about it! Starting today, you'll hear interesting stories and anecdotes from the LinkedIn team, in a column called "LinkedInside". Here's Ryan Gustafson's account of swimming with the penguins in Antarctica (don't miss the Antarctic Polar Plunge video!):
Antarctica: The end of the world. One of the most remote locations on the planet and virtually untouched by human hands. If you had told me in November of 2006 that I would be swimming in Antarctica less then a month and a half later, I would have laughed at you and called you crazy. Then I got THE EMAIL. It read simply "You know, I've always wanted to go to Antarctica..." and thus it began. A few weeks of frenzied packing, a couple of outrageously expensive REI purchases, a call to Capitol One begging for a credit limit increase and I was ready to depart..
This
past January I spent two weeks on an “eco-adventure” tour in Antarctica. The travel part involved flying from San Francisco to Ushuaia, Argentina, then traveling by
ship the rest of the way to Antarctica. After
30 hours and 5 layovers I arrived in Ushuaia, Tierra Del
Fuego Argentina;
the southern most tip of South America. From
there I boarded a ship bound for Antarctica and spent 2 days crossing the
Drake Passage where 30 to 40 foot waves are
common and 60 foot waves are not unheard of. Fortunately we only experienced the
30 to 40 foot swells but even still, the ship doctor told me about 90% of the
passengers got sea sick. For breakfast the first morning at sea they served us
Monte Cristo sandwiches (ham, turkey and Swiss cheese between two slices of
bread, soaked in egg-based batter and deep-fried). Man, did the crew have a
wicked sense of humor!
Once
we reached the coast of Antarctica the seas
were mostly calm to everyone’s relief. We spent the next few weeks traveling
along the western coast of the Antarctic peninsula, taking Zodiac (those rubber
navy seal boats) trips to various landing spots during the day visiting penguin
colonies, glaciers, a few research stations (the researchers were quite
surprised to see us) and an abandoned whaling site. In the evening the tour
staff (mostly Antarctic researchers / grad students) gave talks about Antarctic
ecology, geology, geography, history etc. so we were able to learn a great deal
about our surrounding environment. During these two weeks we saw an amazing
abundance of wildlife including Penguins (Adele, Gentoo, King, Chinstrap and
Magellanic), seals, whales (sperm, humpback, Minke) and different species of
birds, too numerous to count.
On the last day before heading back
into the Drake Passage we dropped anchor along a small island to allow a few
hearty fools, I mean, souls to take a swim and become members of the Antarctic
Polar Plunge Club. I had already become a member of the Polar Bear Club in
Prudhoe Bay Alaska a few years back and wasn’t about to let this opportunity
slip by. They simply dropped the gang plank, tied a rope around my waist and
pointed towards the water, so I jumped in… and very quickly scrambled back to
the ship to get yanked out. It was just a little cold (34, 35 degrees Fahrenheit
maybe). As I walked up the plank, the ship doctor handed me literally a glass
full of vodka. The ship doctor! Well, cheers!
The trip back to Argentina across the passage was
fairly calm and uneventful aside from an unanticipated stop at a Chilean
“weather station island” which we officially didn’t make (the Chilean Government
would not have been amused). The 30 hour flight/ layover trip back to San Francisco was
also uneventful although I must say, once I was back flying with regular
business travelers I felt just a little out of place having been in such a
different environment if only for a few weeks.
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Related stories from LinkedInside
* Here's an account of the AIDS Lifecyle Marathon that Aileen Brown and Brittany Schmitt participated in and further details of the event itself
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Aileen Brown Jun 19, 2007
Aileen Brown and Brittany Schmitt, scaled the "Quadbuster" as part of the AIDS/Lifecycle - a cycling event and fundraiser aimed at "ending the pandemic and human suffering caused by AIDS". Here are Aileen's impressions:
There stands the final Peets Coffee, before we ride to the finish line in Los Angeles. 545 miles behind us and one more hill left to go. We pulled over, grabbed a cool
beverage and cheered in those riders behind us passing through. Over 2300 cyclists pushed out of San Francisco seven days ago before a crowd of strangers and pulled into LA, as a united community. Over $11 million dollars were raised by the riders to benefit The San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center.
When strangers found community:
It happened somewhere between Rest Stop One and Lunch. We
left King City on a cool foggy morning and the headwinds were well above 10 miles per hour. Just after Rest Stop One we faced the hill of all hills, "Quadbuster"! Everyone was preparing to face the beast and all I could do, with butterflies in my stomach, was to eat a Cliff bar and go!
And
there she was, the mother of all steep climes for beginner bikers straight ahead. In preparation, I shot down to my granny gear and picked a song to sing in my head. "Don't stop believing" by Journey. As the incline grew, my pedal strokes became much slower, my eyes were down on the
road, my lungs were exploding, and the singing got loader in my head. I was climbing Quadbuster! Then in the corner of my left eye I started seeing people flying down the hill, rather then going up. For many of these down hill racers, this was their third or fourth ride that morning. The next thing I saw were their faces next to all of us, upstream hikers that were attacking the hill. Pedaling alongside of us to make sure we all make it to the top. Some were even seen with their hands on the backs of struggling climbers, pushing them to the crest just to turn around and go back down again.
It was at the top of this hill that I realized how much each one of us meant to the group as a whole. And there you have it. The secret to why thousands of people want to train for months, raise millions of dollars, and camp for a week with strangers. It is to be a part of something bigger then yourself and knowing that together you can evoke change.
Using LinkedIn for Good:
At LinkedIn too, we believe in bringing about that change,
and that is best exemplified by LinkedIn for Good, a recent initiative of ours to help philanthropic organizations around the world raise funds and
awareness.
Support LinkedIn for Good by adding a
badge to your LinkedIn profile or donating to a cause
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Adam Nash Jun 18, 2007
I just wanted to write up a quick post here to better introduce myself. My name is Adam Nash, and I just joined the LinkedIn team a few weeks ago as Senior Director of Product. I'm excited to be a part of the team, and will be dedicating myself full-time to help design and build the best possible platform for professional networking.
I've actually been a long-time LinkedIn member myself. In fact, it turns out that my profile was one of the first 10,000 actually created back in 2003.
I think the reason that I was early on LinkedIn is because I've realized that the single most valuable asset in your professional career are the people you trust & respect, and those who trust & respect you. LinkedIn has proven this, and with over 11 million members and counting, more and more people are discovering the value in their own professional networks. Even my Mom is on the site now.
I'm incredibly excited to join the product team here under Reid Hoffman, working on both improving existing features of LinkedIn as well as designing new ones. We want LinkedIn to be an invaluable resource for you in your professional lives, and we have only just begun to realize the number of ways to harness the power of the platform.
I'll be back to post about new features and new ideas on how to use LinkedIn. For now, please feel free to email me at with your best ideas on how we can make LinkedIn invaluable to you. You can also find my LinkedIn profile on the site.
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Aileen Brown Jun 05, 2007
Did you know that in California alone there are 151,000 people living with AIDS/HIV? Nationally, 70 percent of all new infections occurs in communities of color and people under the age of 25 are increasingly affected.
The costs associated, with medical care and treatment for a person with HIV, are about $20,000 per year. Access to life-saving drugs, clinical trials and state-of-the-art treatment helps those with the disease live a longer and better quality of life.
My colleague, Brittany, and I are hoping that to raise awareness both by fund raising and participation
in a week long cycling event - the AIDS/Lifecycle. Over the course of seven days, we will
travel five hundred and fifty six miles from San Francisco to Los
Angeles. We will become part of a traveling community representing
thousands of people who cannot ride with us. Each participant signs up
and commits to a specific minimum donation to
contribute to the federation of foundations sponsoring the rides.
AIDS/LifeCycle helps those living with HIV/AIDS gain greater independence and get the treatment and care they need. Prevention services geared towards high-risk populations, will ensure that future generations need not experience the same level of loss that we have faced in the last two decades.
We have been training for about 6 months and our longest ride in one day has been between 80 and 90 miles with plenty of recovery time. In the next week we will be riding up to 100 miles in a day, resting in the evenings before starting the next day’s long ride with only the prior evening's recovery time.
Every year that this event takes place, we've discovered that there is increased support; not only in the number of participants, but also in the amount of awareness that is generated.
Experience the event through the eyes of participants: a series of photos, podcasts and blogs
Aileen Brown and Brittany Schmitt are a part of our sales team. They are currently participating in the AIDS/LifeCycle event and will be back next week with a recap of their journey. Stay tuned.
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