Management
Reid Hoffman
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
As Chairman, CEO, and co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid drives the company’s vision and strategy. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal where he was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations, and banking/payments infrastructure. During his tenure at PayPal, Reid was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid also has held management roles in significant technology companies, including Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. In addition to LinkedIn, Reid serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart, Kiva.org, and Mozilla Corporation. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master’s degree in philosophy and a Marshall scholarship.
Jeff Weiner
President
As President of LinkedIn, Jeff oversees all of the day-to-day operations of the company. Jeff joins LinkedIn with over 14 years of experience as an internet executive, including current positions as an Executive in Residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Jeff spent over seven years in key leadership roles at Yahoo!, most recently as the Executive Vice President of Yahoo!'s Network Division, managing Yahoo's consumer web product portfolio including Yahoo's Front Page, Mail, Search, and Media products. In addition to LinkedIn, Jeff serves on the Board of Directors for Donorschoose.org and Malaria No More. He holds a BS in Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Steve Sordello
Chief Financial Officer
Steve joined LinkedIn from Tivo, Inc., where he served as Chief Financial Officer. He previously was CFO for Ask Jeeves until 2005, leading the company through a transition from unprofitable back to a profitable, high-margin company. During his tenure at Ask Jeeves, revenues and earnings grew significantly, and the company’s market value increased from under $40 million to over $2 billion when the company was acquired by IAC/Interactive Corporation in 2005. Steve’s career also includes working in senior finance roles at Adobe Systems and Syntex Corporation. He holds an MBA and BA from Santa Clara University.
Allen Blue
Vice President, Product Strategy
Allen is one of the co-founders of LinkedIn. He was formerly Director of Product Design at SocialNet.com, a social networking service supporting dating, recreational and professional activities, where he was responsible for product design and implementation of SocialNet’s member-data focused business model. Previously, Allen has worked as a contract product and web designer for a variety of clients including PayPal and Microsoft’s Virtual Worlds project. Allen also lectured in Drama for three years at Stanford, where he graduated with honors with a BA in Drama and a BA in English, and was winner of the Golden Medal for creative excellence.
Bill Crane
Vice President, Engineering
Bill’s focus is on leading the LinkedIn Engineering organization. He brings over twenty years of software engineering experience to LinkedIn. In one of his previous roles, Bill served as the Vice President of Engineering for E-LOAN (Nasdaq: EELN) where he drove development of the popular financial website from its initial concept through initial public offering. During his tenure at E-LOAN, Bill was named one of the "10 Hottest CIO's" by American Banker Magazine. Bill has also served as the Vice President of Engineering at Proofpoint, Redline Networks (acquired by Juniper) and Network Computing Devices (Nasdaq: NCDI). He has also held development and management positions at Sun Microsystems and IBM. Bill holds a BS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.
Patrick Crane
Vice President, Marketing
Patrick served as Vice President of Marketing for the Yahoo! Network Division before joining LinkedIn. At Yahoo! he was responsible for taking Yahoo! Answers to market in 2005 and for marketing the product to its position today as the #1 Q&A site on the web. Patrick also led the marketing of Yahoo! Mail, helping it become the world’s top web mail provider in 2006 as measured by comScore. Prior to Yahoo!, Patrick served as Marketing Director for Vodafone U.S. and launched Australia and New Zealand’s first wireless internet portal, extending some of the services into the Japanese market. He is a graduate of the University of Huddersfield and Henley Management College, both located in the United Kingdom.
Kevin Eyres
Managing Director, Europe
Kevin Eyres is focused on developing, leading and delivering the company’s strategy and growth initiatives in Europe. Prior to LinkedIn Kevin was European Managing Director at SideStep. Kevin was previously the General Manager of AltaVista International, prior to the acquisition by Overture, and a Director at Shopping.com. Eyres started his career as an engineer at Compaq Computers where he spent ten years leading development teams during Compaq’s hyper growth phase. Kevin holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Texas in San Antonio and has six patents.
Ellen Levy
Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategy
Ellen Levy was on the Advisory Board of LinkedIn for the first five years of the company before joining full time as head of Corporate Development and Strategy in April 2008. Prior to LinkedIn she was the founding Managing Director of Silicon Valley Connect, working with large corporations and entrepreneurs on opportunities for innovation; and the Network Advisor to global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Ellen was previously head of Corporate Development for both WhoWhere (sold to Lycos), and Softbook Press (sold to Gemstar/TVGuide). Before founding Silicon Valley Connect, Ellen ran the MediaX program at Stanford University, facilitating collaboration between corporations, Silicon Valley, and the University research community. Additionally, Ellen has held roles at Softbank, Apple Computer, PriceWaterhouse, and Clinton Global Initiative. She has a BA from the University of Michigan, and MA/PhD from Stanford University in Cognitive Psychology.
Deep Nishar
Vice President, Products
Deep Nishar is responsible for setting and executing the global product strategy at LinkedIn. He comes to LinkedIn from Google, where he helped shape the company's strategy in Asia-Pacific. Deep was also responsible for building Google's global mobile business. Deep holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he graduated with highest honors as a Baker Scholar, a MSEE from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a B. Tech with Honors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Deep holds 3 patents and was awarded the Google Founders Award, an accolade given to employees who have made extraordinary contributions to the company for his work on the Google Ads System Automation.
Arvind Rajan
Vice President of People Operations
As LinkedIn’s Vice President of People Operations, Arvind Rajan sees recruiting and retaining top talent at LinkedIn as a core competency and a strategic effort. Since LinkedIn is all about relationships, Arvind finds that he uses the site daily when it comes to hiring new recruits and finding new/innovative ways to develop the culture here at LinkedIn. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Arvind was the CEO of Grassroots Enterprise. Also a co-founder of the company, Arvind developed pioneering online grassroots communications programs for a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and nonprofit organizations. Arvind began his career with the Boston Consulting Group, and has held a wide range of leadership positions in emerging growth technology companies.
Erika Rottenberg
Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary
Erika is Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, Erika served as General Counsel for two public technology companies, providing valuable experience in dealing with the regulatory policies and challenges specific to technology centric public companies. Most recently, Erika was Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary, for Nasdaq-listed SumTotal Systems. Prior to SumTotal, Rottenberg was Vice President, Strategic Development and General Counsel of Creative Labs, the company that brought multimedia to the PC with the Sound Blaster sound card. Erika received her law degree from Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law and started her legal career at the Silicon Valley technology based law firm of Cooley Godward.
Lloyd Taylor
Vice President, Technical Operations
Lloyd Taylor joined LinkedIn from Google, where he was Director of Global Operations. During his three year term at Google, Taylor was responsible for scaling the Google.com infrastructure including data centers and server operations to support Google's post-IPO growth. His efforts helped the company scale its infrastructure by more than 500% while growing staff responsible for machine maintenance by only 80 percent. Previously, Lloyd was Vice President, Technology & Operations at Keynote Systems, where he grew the measurement infrastructure from 60 measurement agents in 10 domestic locations to well over 3,000 agents worldwide. Before Keynote, Lloyd was the founding technical executive for Digex Web Hosting.
Jean-Luc Vaillant
Chief Technology Officer
As Chief Technology Officer, Jean-Luc focuses on LinkedIn’s technical architecture. Jean-Luc is one of the co-founders of LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, Jean-Luc was as Director of Engineering for Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) in charge of the integration of video into MSN 6. Jean-Luc, a native of France, also served as Director of Software Development at Spotlife until the company was acquired by Logitech. Before that, Jean-Luc was VP of Development of MatchNet, which acquired SocialNet in May 2001. Jean-Luc has also held engineering management positions at Fujitsu Software Corporation and at the research labs of France Telecom. Jean-Luc holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Marseille and a post-graduate degree in Network Engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST).
