Many companies in the Bay Area have holiday parties at the end of the year, but we decided to wait and celebrate with a donation at a most unusual time of year – St. Patrick’s Day. Re-sale shops and donations in general have been at an all time low this year, and we decided to give to The Shop in Menlo Park, Ecumenical Hunger Program, and Second Harvest.

Party organizers, Brooke and Florina, with the donations mountain

The setup was quite unique – casino day mixed with green beer and lots of corned beef. The donations came in massive waves as everyone at LinkedIn opened their hearts and their wallets. Each donated item was given a raffle ticket in exchange, and there was over 20 prizes to be won. In the end, more than 3000 (!) raffle tickets were distributed with donations from over 120 of our colleagues at LinkedIn.

Now let’s get to the party details. The wonderful people at Class Casino set up Blackjack, Roulette, Craps, and Pai Gow poker tables. The talented chef at Mountain Terrace and Alice’s Restaurant prepared a bevvy of traditional Irish food, as well as wonderful fruit and cheese platters. The green beer was flowing, the music was blasting, and let’s not forget all those people who took advantage of the audience to improve their Rock Band skills.

LinkedIn celebrates St.Patrick's Day

Check out the rest of the pictures!

Many of us try to keep our work and personal lives separate, but sometimes having compassionate professionals around you when you’re confronted with something a traumatic as cancer can make a world of a difference.

Last month, Hala Moddelmog, the President and Chief Executive Officer at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, was kind enough to post a featured question here on LinkedIn to help raise awareness. The question she asked our 30 million plus users was:

“What’s the most effective method you’ve seen a non-profit use to raise awareness for their cause?“

Hala received nearly 400 passionate responses to her question during the week it was posted on our site. We’re hopeful that those of you who saw the question and/or responded to it were able to help get the word out about breast cancer awareness.

This month, in an effort to show that cancer awareness ought to be something we ought to think about 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, Robin Roberts who is the Co-Anchor of ABC News’ “Good Morning America” and a breast cancer survivor herself posted her own featured question on LinkedIn:

“When it comes to cancer what have you done to help a co-worker cope?”

The question was posted this morning and in less than an hour Robin has already received responses from a number of you that were willing to share your stories and support for LinkedIn members that are fighting the “C” word.

In addition to Robin’s question this week, LinkedIn is also running a poll on the site asking:

“If a co-worker got cancer, what would your first reaction be?”

When this post went to print more than 500 of you had already cast your vote and let us know your thoughts.

On a personal note, in October my dad’s girlfriend (Cynthia) got diagnosed with breast cancer. For Cynthia, and for our family, cancer does not fit squarely into October or one month of awareness. It’s spilling into November both literally and figuratively with her pending mastectomy taking place this week. This will undoubtedly be a battle we’ll fight together for many weeks and months to come, but in my heart I know it will draw us closer and hopefully make our extended family unit even stronger. I’ll be sending the link to this post to Cynthia. Hopefully it will put a smile on her face before her surgery on the 7th.

Part of what’s helped me this past month is an awesome group of supportive co-workers. Many of them have had their own lives touched by cancer. Sometimes it’s those little kind words we say to a co-worker in passing that help them get through a rough patch. On October 24th a large number of LinkedIn employees purchased Pink LinkedIn shirts and proudly wore them to work in a show of our support. The proceeds from the sales of the shirts went toward breast cancer awareness. We should be posting a group photo of all of us in our passionate pink splendor soon, so stay tuned to the blog for that update!

When Steve Ganz left to compete in the PDGA World Championships little did he know that he’d return to find a fast talking, “fashionably low-rate” robot built in his likeness; he may never take a vacation again!  The “Ganzbot”, as we named it, was a collaborative effort from our Web Development team with participation from Jamie Still, Dennis Hengeveld, Scott Olson and me.

The robot reads quotes from the Ganzbot Twitter feed and an internal message queue that anyone in the office can submit text to. When he talks his face becomes expressive with moving eyebrows, lips synchronized to the audio and eyes that change color.

The idea behind Ganzbot actually goes back several months when Bryan Haggerty and Steve were joking that he needed a robot to do his work so he would have time for meetings. But frankly, we just wanted to put it together to see Steve’s reaction when he returned and I think that alone was worth the effort!

That soon caught on and Ganzbot became an office joke until being realized as a real robot while Steve was away. But who’d have thought that Engadget, Gizmodo and Make would notice too.

Want to make your own GanzBot? Check out step-by-step instructions here.

During the summer of 2008, LinkedIn participated in the Palo Alto city coed softball league.  We faced some fierce competition, playing against teams representing other companies.

The LinkedIn team was composed of all skill levels, including some first time cricket to softball converts who knew exactly how to crush the ball and some fast-pitch softball players learning how to adjust to hitting a ball coming at your at 10mph instead of 60. Regardless of skill level, everyone was an all-star when it came to finding Oasis Bar and Grill after the games.

Our rookie season proved to be a successful one! We made it to the playoffs and took home the “bronze medal”, ranked #3 in the league. Our final record was 8-4-0 (two of the losses being forfeits and I’m still in denial when it comes to counting them as true losses, therefore this side note is necessary).

Now that we have one season under our belt and have worked out a few kinks, we can’t wait for round 2 where we plan to take home the trophy!

We are always open to other companies challenging us to a little friendly competition, so if you are interested, shoot me a note and we can host a game at the field in our office complex! I can’t, however, promise that you will walk away with your dignity intact :)

Following our Spanish launch video last week, our faithful readers may have come away with the impression that the entire LinkedIn team is fluent in Spanish, and that we mix this popular Romance language casually with colloquial English and the roughneck slang of Silicon Valley. But here’s the startling truth: some of our staff members were coached through these lines.

I know, it seems hard to believe, given the way Español rolls off our gilded tongues. Certainly, our in-house language has a kind of romance to it, but it leans more towards C++ and Ruby on Rails. With this secret out of the bag, here are some outtakes of our best efforts to master the language in a matter of minutes. And on behalf of the LinkedIn team, tienes los ojos más bonitos del mundo.

This is my first post on the LinkedIn Blog that I write less than a month since I started here as Vice President of People Operations. I became a member of LinkedIn the day the site launched on May 5, 2003, and I’m thrilled to be playing a role in helping build a truly great company.

The LinkedIn team has more than tripled in size in the last 12 months; we’ve hired over 200 talented individuals in every possible group within the company ranging from engineering to marketing. We’ve got the core of a world-class team, but we’re just getting started; as we continue to grow and expand, we’re continuing to seek the best and the brightest. And as we bring new people into the organization, we’re committed to give them the best professional experience of their lives.

My joining here has coincided with the launch of LinkedIn’s revamped recruiting site – Work at LinkedIn. We have made the site easier to navigate and filled it with the most current information that any job seeker needs to learn about working at LinkedIn. It’s broken into five simple categories:

1. Culture
2. Benefits
3. Technology
4. Teams
5. Open Jobs

Here’s an interesting tidbit on the recruiting site’s homepage. The different keywords that populate the “knowledge halo” around the featured LinkedIn’ers is an accurate representation of their professional interests!

Expect the new recruiting site to be filled with the latest info both on what’s happening at LinkedIn, the latest job openings and the folks you’ll work with if you join us on this journey. Because we believe the perfect work environment is the one in which you not only enjoy the work but also the company you share. Isn’t that the essence of professional networking!

Well, as we’d promised with the last blog post here’s a quick wrap-up and summary of last week’s LinkedIndia Celebration. Those who read my previous post know that we reached the million member milestone for LinkedIn professionals from India. To celebrate the occasion we threw an India themed party with special servings of South Indian crepes and mango lassis [one of Kay's favorites] while Bollywood movies played in the background. Too bad we couldn’t accommodate Krista’s requests for an elephant.

LinkedIndia 1 Million Celebration!

Check out more pictures from the event. We were lucky to have a large and enthusiastic team to help out with the party: Thanks to Adi for arranging the food and being the overall Master of Ceremonies (and advising our CEO Dan Nye of the celebration protocol), Nishant for buying the sweets, Nayan for the decorations, Manav for the entertainment, Agila, Pallavi, Nalini, Bhupesh, Krista, Florencia, Dhananjay, Maria and many others for the setup, and Kay and Mario for the photographs to record it all. I guess we got most of them in the photograph above.

Thanks as well to all the members who have posted their stories on Answers: It’s great to read the feedback. Stay tuned for our next celebration as we continue to mark new milestones!

As mentioned last week here on the LinkedIn blog, I had the privilege to deliver a keynote at this year’s O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference in Washington, DC.  LinkedIn was one of the featured keynotes, and it was great to have a chance to present our philosophy & vision at the event.  Here is my LinkedIn blog post from last week, where I review the Keynote and the slides presented.

I wanted to take a moment to follow-up with a second post on the conference, specifically about the NEED for FEEDS panel that I participated in Tuesday afternoon. The other panelists included:

• Sean Ammirati (mSpoke, ReadWriteWeb) – Moderator
• Chris Messina (Vidoop)
• Kevin Chou (WaterCooler)
• David Recordon (Six Apart)
• Dave Morin (Facebook)

It’s normally hard to have a great panel late in the afternoon – people are starting to wear down from waking up early, and sitting a few hundred people in a dark room is not a great way to generate high energy.  This panel, however, was extremely high energy (we even tried to get a Web 2.0 buzzword bingo game going) and ready to engage passionately on the topic.

The balance of the panel was good too – Kevin represented 3rd party application developers well, David & Chris did a great job advocating for open, user-controlled integration, and Dave & I representing the platforms.

I won’t try to cover all the questions or topics from the panel, but there were two points that I made at the panel that I think are worth sharing broadly:

1) Network Feeds are the interesting information problem for this generation of the web.

It’s quickly forgotten, but it wasn’t too long ago that the question of how to present the best 10 search results to a natural search query was a hotly contested product space. When Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft get a query of just a few keywords, they have to decide in an instant which 10 pages out of millions to show you.  Similarly, Amazon has to decide, out of millions of products, which 3 to merchandise to you at any given time.

The question of how to filter and present information and micro-events from your network to you in a digestible form is an extremely difficult and important question, and one of the most exciting things going on right now is the experimentation with different approaches to providing the right events to people at the right time in the right context.

2) How do you define success for Network Feeds?

What makes this challenge particularly difficult is that unlike search or merchandising, it’s unclear in this  context what the right  “success” events are to measure.  With search, it’s clicks.  With e-commerce, it’s purchases.   What should we measure with feeds, where sometimes the value is received just by reading the message?  Is it a click?  A hover?  A rating?  Dave Morin talked about optimizing for user engagement, but I think we’re all still experimenting with the best ways to measure success for feeds.

At LinkedIn, we place an extreme emphasis on business relevance in every application we develop. Nowhere is this more important than in Network Updates, where people count on getting useful updates on activity in their professional network.  As the number of activities and users on LinkedIn grows, we continue to investigate and experiment with ways to optimize the feeds we provide our users.  We have some of our best product, design and engineering talents on this exact problem.

With those two points made, I just want to say thank you to Dave McClure and the rest of the panelists for the great event. I’m looking forward to the next one already.

* By the way, as a lesser known LinkedIn tip, you can click the RSS button next to “Network Updates” on the homepage, and take your Network Events stream with you to any RSS reader.  Chris’ post shows you how.

Yes, we’re getting older but the spirit of fun and craziness with which we started lives on. Last week’s Wednesday lunch session was a trip down memory lane as Jean-Luc Vaillant, Yan Pujante, Chris Saccheri, Candy Mielke, Sarah Imbach and Dan Nye walked us through some of the milestones we’ve covered in five short years!

In case you missed Chris Saccheri’s post last Monday, here’s a brief recap: LinkedIn emerged five years ago on the pre-web 2.0 scene on Cinco de Mayo. Since then we’ve added value to the growing number of professionals turning to our site for social networking, jobs, answers, and the list goes on.

Just last week, we welcomed our 22 millionth professional (and as is tradition) we took a picture of our team right after our Cinco de LinkedIn celebrations. Also, check out a slideshow of the LinkedIn team through the years!

Here are some more pictures from the celebration and a couple of videos as well. Also, check out the entire 5th birthday photo album on Flickr, which has more than 100 pictures and a couple of videos.

LinkedIn turns 5!

And, thanks for the many kind wishes you sent in.

Have a story?

Leave a comment if you have a LinkedIn story to share and we may feature it along with your profile. Check out recent user stories that we have featured on the blog thus far.

Join our team

We’ve grown rapidly since we started five years ago, and our rapid pace of user acquisition has been outdone only by our hiring spree. Check out some of the job openings we have currently. We’d love for you to join the ride!

Cinco de Mayo holds a special place in our hearts here at LinkedIn. In addition to being an excuse to down margaritas and tacos, it marks the fifth anniversary of the day we launched LinkedIn: May 5, 2003. The web was a different place back then; Friendster was the hottest site around, terms like “Web 2.0″ and “AJAX” hadn’t yet been coined, web pages were still in black and white… Okay, maybe it wasn’t that long ago.

As both a company and a tool, LinkedIn has changed dramatically. Here’s a quick “then and now” comparison of LinkedIn ‘03 and LinkedIn ‘08:

Note that many of the features present in LinkedIn today — including Recommendations, InMails, Groups Answers, and Jobs — hadn’t been built in May 2003. (But we were already thinking about most of them!)

I’ve also put together a small gallery of screenshots showing how LinkedIn has evolved through the years.  What will LinkedIn look like 5 years from now? 10 years from now? Only time will tell…

LinkedIn through the years

And finally — as a bonus to anybody who read this far — here’s an easter egg from the old days.  Probably the last page I finished before the launch was our Founders page.  It took forever to get everyone’s bio together so, in the meantime, I wrote a few on my own.  We didn’t leave it this way for long, but here’s a screenshot for posterity.

LinkedIn Founders Page, May 2003