SlideShare was founded by Rashmi Sinha, Amit Ranjan, and Jonathan Boutelle. Venrock will see a 15x return on their investment in SlideShare.

“A company, at its core, is a set of beliefs united by a vision. When we founded Rapportive, we had one simple belief: we would build software that you don’t have to remember to use. Our software would be an intrinsic part of the tools you use every day. It would be there when you want it, and out of the way when you don’t,” stated Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra.

LinkedIn is adding about two new members per second and hit 150 million members in over 200 countries and territories. Revenue for the first quarter in 2012 is projected to be $170-$175 million. Revenue for the full year is expected to be in the range of $840-$860 million.

Hoffman also currently serves on the board of 8 companies including Mozilla and Zynga. Hoffman also divides his time amongst three non-profits.

“I’ve never made a significant move, decision, without consulting him,” said Shopkick founder Cyriac Roeding about Hoffman.

Although Hoffman often received B’s and C’s in middle school, Hoffman was extremely focused as a child. When he was 5, he made his dad keep reading “The Lord of the Rings” to him in bed. His dad said “Apparently, I wasn’t reading fast enough” so the “bookmark moved further and further ahead.”

When Hoffman was 12, he showed up on a Friday at the offices of Chaosium, the game development company behind RuneQuest. RuneQuest was a fantasy role-playing game that was published in 1978. Hoffman gave the company a manual marked with suggestions in red ink. Hoffman was given a job and received a check a few weeks later for $127. “It changed my father’s view of what I was doing,” said Hoffman. “He realized I could make a living out of this.”

In 1985 when Hoffman enrolled at Stanford, he decided to major in symbolic systems. This was the studio between computing and human intelligence. He became friends with fellow student Peter Thiel at Stanford. When Netscape went public in 1995, Hoffman and Thiel watched what happened closely. Hoffman knew that social media was going to be huge, but his first company flopped. In 1997 Hoffman launched a company called SocialNet, which focused on online dating. SocialNet would pair people with similar interests, but nobody was interested in signing up. After Hoffman partnered with a newspaper in Arizona, only 2 customers had signed up.

Frustrated by the lack of growth, Hoffman quit SocialNet in 1999 to join Thiel at PayPal. At PayPal, Hoffman was the go-to guy for meeting with the credit card company executives that was not sure whether they trusted the payment services company or not. Hoffman managed all external relations. “He was the firefighter in chief at PayPal,” said Thiel. “Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires.”

After PayPal went public, Thiel and Hoffman both became multimillionaires. Thiel went out and bought a Ferrari, while Hoffman bought an Acura instead. He still drives that same Acura today. Hoffman decided to take the money he earned and invest in other start-ups.

LinkedIn currently has 135 million registered users across 200 countries. The company has been able to turn a profit in six out of the last seven quarters. However it took the company five years to turn its first profit. The first year was the hardest for LinkedIn because Friendster was the most popular social network and LinkedIn was considered dull.

“One of the things I thought of every week was, ‘What happens if we don’t make this? How do we die gracefully?’ ” said Hoffman.

In 2008 when the economy was tanking, a lot of people joined LinkedIn for their premium job and recruiting services. It was around then that Hoffman decided to replace former LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye with Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo! executive.

LinkedIn has grown quite a bit in value since going public. LinkedIn’s membership has doubled annually for each of the last seven years. However LinkedIn cannot afford another bad quarter otherwise its share price would be slammed and they would lose talent to the next big thing in tech. Hoffman tries not to pay attention to the markets though. He said he has checked LinkedIn’s stock price only six times since May.

The Update stream is currently the most used area of their mobile application. Groups was one of the most requested feature for the mobile application. LinkedIn also made their mobile website in HTML5, which includes a lot of the same functionality of its native app. Currently LinkedIn has 120 million users.

[TechCrunch]

LinkedIn “pulled a Facebook” recently and used profile photos in ads on the professional social network, and the users got angry. Now the site is recoiling from the backlash and changing the in-house ads program to keep users’ photos out of it. As PC Mag reports, the entire fiasco stems from a privacy policy change LinkedIn made in June, which allowed the company to collect data from users’ profiles and use it in social ads.

The social ads feature was turned on by default when it was introduced, forcing users to actively opt out instead of being given the option to opt in. The changes were announced via blog posts, but LinkedIn users were not directly notified.

Even though Wall Street is in a volatile state, the market is showing signs of strength. According to Renaissance Capital, the number of offerings is up 15% to 93. The proceeds have more than doubled to $28.5 billion. These offerings have grown due to many technology companies. Due to the strength of the recent technology IPOs, I believe that current economic conditions will not deter companies like Groupon, Zynga, Zillow, and LivingSocial to postpone. All of these companies have been successful in their respective market shares.

[TechFlash]

“In the second quarter, we saw record levels of members, unique visitors, and page views, while revenue growth further accelerated…Going forward, we plan to continue to invest in our team, technology, and products in order to increase the value we deliver to members and realize the full potential of the LinkedIn platform,” stated LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner.

LinkedIn’s members grew to 115.8 million, which is a 61% increase from Q2 2010. LinkedIn saw 81.8 million unique visitors per month during the quarter. Page views were at 7.1 billion, which is an increase of 80% from Q2 2010.

[TechCrunch]