LinkedIn Venture Capital Investment Memo from Bessemer Venture Partners -

Looking at LinkedIn alone, 80% of its 900 million members have a say in business decisions, totalling a pool of 720 million potential prospects.[14] As a lead source, LinkedIn has unlimited potential. But then again, so does a gold mine — and that potential is useless without a lot of heavy equipment to get at the gold.

21 Rachleff points out that LinkedIn and eight other professional networking sites, including Jigsaw, Plaxo, and Six Degrees, were founded at about the same time. But because of LinkedIn’s early traction and expert management team, it attracted funding from two top-tier VCs, Sequoia and Greylock. By the time it went public in 2011, LinkedIn had rai

But for LinkedIn, the large pool of people who have simply filled in their work profiles, even if they hardly ever visit the site, is the fundamental basis of the site’s value. That’s because LinkedIn’s revenue was derived from job postings and premium subscriptions paid for by recruiters who wanted upgraded features to find and connect with potent

There are people like Bill Gates who are at the top of the professional hierarchy. He gets more requests for intros than he can deal with, and everyone who knows Gates will be asked for intros to him. At the launch, LinkedIn wouldn’t have made sense for people like Bill Gates. But there’s a mid-tier of successful people who are still building and h