2003: LinkedIn started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman and the site officially launched on May 5, 2003. LinkedIn is one of the oldest mainstream social platforms, older than YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
2004: LinkedIn took a major step forward when it added the feature of uploading your address book to invite your colleagues, introduce groups to start building communities and even embraced partnership with American Express to promote their offerings to its clients.
2005: LinkedIn started to get into business mode with the launch of its jobs and subscriptions paid options and moved into an even bigger office (it’s fourth in three years). Membership scaled to 4,192,941 at the start of the year.
2008: LinkedIn start to extend away from its US base with its first international office in the United Kingdom and opened up both French and Spanish versions of the platform to its 33,077,647 members at the start of 2008.
2011: This is the year things got very serious with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange (at $45 per share) and even hosted a town hall meeting with Barack Obama, the current US president. At the break of the year LinkedIn had over 135 million users.
2014: LinkedIn has grown substantially with more than 5,400 full-time employees with offices in 27 cities around the world to reflect its footprint in more than 200 countries. Fastest growing area is graduates and students as they start to realise and leverage the platform.
LinkedIn today: LinkedIn has topped 315 million users globally which statistically is the majority of professionals. A research suggests estimates between 350 to 600 million business professionals on the planet, so over 50% of the business professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn.