Recessionary times should be glory days for LinkedIn, as people furiously network on the business-contacts website for scraps of work. But instead, it's LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye who finds himself out of a job.

Reid Hoffman's heft regularly makes reporters turn to their thesauri for polite terms for "fat." BusinessWeek, to keep the tone of a new profile appropriately flattering, writes of his "expansive body." But the article is anything but expansive in its probing of LinkedIn's business. It focuses instead on how Hoffman…

LinkedIn, the richly funded business-networking website, is indeed laying employees off today. (No numbers available yet; if you know more details, please send them in.) But we know of at least one person who's skipping sticking around for the cuts: Reid Hoffman, the company's chairman and cofounder. He's in Japan,…

A tipster reports high drama at LinkedIn, the business-networking site. The company is funded in part by Sequoia Capital, the Valley's new high priests of doom and gloom — and, our source claims, Sequoia has told all of its portfolio companies to cut costs by 10 percent. LinkedIn's big-hearted chairman, Reid Hoffman…

The old way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss comes up to you, claps you on the shoulder, and acts all chummy. The new way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss leaves a glowing recommendation for you. Revision3's Damon Berger got one from CEO Jim Louderback five days before he was laid off from the…

Conventional Valley wisdom: The chaos in the public stock markets won't affect private companies, right? Wrong. In August, LinkedIn had set plans to let employees sell some of their shares to investors. Interest in the company had been keen, given its stated plans to wait to IPO rather than sell out. But the…

A correction on our previous post about LinkedIn's financial woes: Contrary to our tipster's assertions, plenty of LinkedIn employees use the company-provided shuttle bus from San Francisco to Mountain View. The bus even has its own Twitter account. That account is private — but it links to a public, annotated route…

A LinkedIn tipster tells us that even as the all-business social network raised $53 million from Bain Capital and other investors in June, at a $1 billion valuation, it sought to pull in another $25 million from Goldman Sachs and failed. More damningly, he claims that CEO Dan Nye lied on-air when he told Fox Business…

A senior chip design manager from PA Semi, Wei-han Lien, let a little light shine on Apple's plans for future generations of the iPhone and iPod by listing "Manage ARM CPU architecture team for iPhone" as his current gig on LinkedIn (Lien's profile has since been scrubbed from the site). CEO Steve Jobs had already…

LinkedIn's jobs page gives off the impression that life at the business-networking website is one nonstop Rock Band jam session. But a clearly disgruntled, entertainingly foulmouthed tipster says that backbiting is the real office entertainment of choice. The company's operations department is "like a fucking morgue"…

A tipster's discovered Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's LinkedIn profile and handily pointed out the poor intern who had to put it together's typos. Surprised anyone bothered to find it? Don't be. According to Google Trends, Sarah Palin gets more search queries than either of the two men at the top…

At a recent company meeting, management told LinkedIn employees they would soon be allowed to sell as much as 20 percent of their vested options at a $500 million valuation. Word leaked yesterday that Facebook plans to allow its employees to do the same. Both LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Facebook founder Mark…

In today's Los Angeles Times, reporter Jessica Guynn calls LinkedIn founder, Facebook investor and PayPal veteran Reid Hoffman "Silicon Valley's biggest social networker." Guynn means that just the way you'd think, reporting that Hoffman gains about 10 pounds per year, refuses to see a trainer and "doesn't step on…

Tech companies like to babble about openness and transparency. But try finding an engineer's phone number. Standard procedure is to hide company telephone and email directories from external eyeballs, lest a recruiter — or, more annoyingly, a reporter — use the phone list to cold-call staffers. One shining…

You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers.…

"We think we could go public on our numbers," LInkedIn founder Reid Hoffman tells Tech Ticker's Sarah Lacy in a video interview (excerpted below). But the company, which just raised $53 million, won't IPO because it would rather reinvest its profits and because the U.S. public markets are too turbulent right now.…