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…

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"…

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…

"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.…

Max Levchin, the cofounder of PayPal and the CEO of Slide, measures nearly everything, down to the optimum price to pay for an engagement ring. If he needs a metric for self-importance, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, provides one. He occupies 78 out of 294 pages, more than…

Let's ignore the fact that Powerset's core technology is only licensed from Xerox PARC. Even then, we're disappointed in today's public debut from publicity-ridden search engine Powerset. Cofounders Barney Pell and Steve Newcomb intended to create a "natural language" search engine that allowed users to phrase…

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington tried and failed to score a ride from Davos back to California on the Google plane. No surprise, since the plane — owned by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, not the company they run — only seats 25 people.

LinkedIn is off the block, cofounder Reid Hoffman told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We have had (buyout) conversations with all the usual suspects, but I think an IPO is by far and away the most likely outcome," Hoffman said. He suggested, however, that such a public offering might not happen for at least another…

The first gold-rush miners to make any money during the 1840s were the ones who stopped digging and started selling shovels, according to Timesman Brad Stone. Today a similar operation from Mark Pincus, Tribe.net founder and early Facebook investor, announced $10 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, Peter…

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "…

At 23, Mark Zuckerberg is already a conference-circuit regular — seen at last month's TechCrunch40 and again at this month's Web 2.0 Summit. But even fans ding Zuck's presence as dull, wooden and robotic. Is he shy? Nah, "He just doesn't care," says a coworker. Despite his current heavy rotation in the media, he only…

Valleywag hears that LinkedIn, which has largely missed out on the social-networking buzz, is getting ready for its closeup. Employees were getting lensed today at a photo shoot, which is usually a sign that a company's about to get the cover treatment, or at least a major feature story, from a big business…

What to make of Ross Mayfield's open call for an executive to replace him as CEO of Socialtext, the wiki-software startup? When a founder leaves the CEO role, venture capitalist Fred Wilson has argued, we should say that he's "stepping up," not "stepping down," citing the example of LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman.…

I found myself at home in Palo Alto the other day, involuntarily offline thanks to a wonky broadband connection. So I headed to Coupa Cafe to get caffeine and log onto its Wi-Fi hotspot. And, just maybe, overhear an entrepreneur and venture capitalist doing the Sand Hill Road mating dance. Greylock's David Sze likes…

Fans of Time Inc. tech title Business 2.0 have taken the bold step of starting a Facebook group to show their support for the troubled publication. So far, the group has amassed over 50 members, including Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, Quittner's wife, New York Times columnist Michelle Slatalla, Gizmodo editor…

Reid Hoffman's replacement by a professional manager as chief exec of LinkedIn all looks smoothly handled. The business network's founder, like a man planning his own funeral, interviewed his own successors. He remains as chairman. From colleagues, the classic refrain: Reid is "brilliant", which usually means that…