LinkedIn is valued at $8.79 billion after its first day as a public company. Founder and chairman Reid Hoffman and friends are drinking champagne tonight, that is for sure. It is the highest valuation after an IPO of a tech company since Google astonished the world in 2004.
It is mildly amazing for a social network that has never been profitable and never made more than $250 million in a year. What are investors seeing that the rest of us cannot? In a word … Jobs. This is what Job Board 2.0 has become — data rich and interactive across a social graph. Hoffman is now laughing his way to the bank, surfing his huge wave of data.