LinkedIn marks progress to IPO, hires ex-Tivo CFO

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Armed with a bevy of new managers from top Silicon Valley firms and explosively growing revenues, business networking site LinkedIn Corp. is gearing up to become one of the first big post-dotcom Internet IPOs.

LinkedIn, a buttoned-down sort of MySpace or Facebook for the corporate professional set, has seen its membership double to nearly 12 million users over the past nine months, Chief Executive Dan Nye told Reuters in an interview. It makes money from subscriptions, advertising and fees from job recruiters.

"What we are seeing is revenue accelerate and we expect that to continue next year," said Nye, who took over from co-founder Reid Hoffman as CEO in February. "We are projecting somewhere in the $100 million range next year."

Four-year-old LinkedIn of Mountain View, California turned profitable last year. But, as a privately held company, it declines to disclose more specific figures. The company, which has $30 million in backing from venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Greylock and Bessemer, is gearing up for an initial public offering, perhaps as early as next year.

LinkedIn users create online resumes of their work history, then invite business associates to connect to them by signing up to join their network of contacts.

On Tuesday, it announced three new executives, including Steve Sordello as chief financial officer. Last week, Sordello resigned from publicly traded TV recorder company Tivo Inc.. Previously, he was CFO at AskJeeves before it was sold to Web media company IAC/InterActiveCorp.

LinkedIn is also set to name Yahoo Inc. advertising executive Patrick Crane to head the company's first general marketing push. The British-born Crane led marketing for Yahoo's heavily promoted question-and-answer site, known as Yahoo Answers. The company also recently hired Anil Khatri, a former vice president of engineering at Yahoo.

"We are putting in place the management team of a $500 million company," Nye said. LinkedIn has 105 employees in all.

Unlike entertainment-oriented Web sites like News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook that cater to their users' social interests, LinkedIn focuses on connecting business professionals -- fellow workers, former colleagues, passing business acquaintances and job recruiters.

"LinkedIn is a productivity tool," Nye said of the site's no-frills functionalism. "We expect people to come to LinkedIn and accomplish tasks, then move on. We have no intention of becoming a social site. We want to remain focused on productivity that is important for professionals."

While over the past year, Facebook has been making inroads among business users, Nye said Facebook's appeal is social, not professional. That said, in the next several weeks, LinkedIn plans to release its own application within Facebook, he said.

A year or two ago, the chatter among Silicon Valley pundits, many of them avid LinkedIn members themselves, was that the company might have missed its moment. As Nye puts it euphemistically: "Our revenue stream was very much unproven."

Now LinkedIn has not one but three revenue streams -- a premium subscription service for active individual and corporate users, transaction fees from recruiters for job postings and online advertising.

"The question was could we make money doing this? The answer was, 'Yes.' All of them have worked. Our revenues come from a surprising balance between all three -- ads, subscriptions, corporate (recruiting) sales," Nye said.

LinkedIn's closest rival is Hamburg, Germany-based Xing, which changed its name from OpenBC last year. Its focus is on international markets by offering localized business networks in a dozen languages. It counted more than 2 million members in March, according to the company.