[new_here]

I’ve read and listened to quite a bit of stuff from Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale, LinkedIn’s pitch deck etc) and have never found him or any of his advice particularly convincing.

Maybe I’m speculating wildly here but it feels like the main thing that made LinkedIn successful was that it was a first mover in the business social network space that used every dark pattern and email notification they could conceive of at a time when users were less cautious about their privacy. Now they have their moat and defend it with every trick they have. Their social auth API provides watermarked profile pics and they drop attributes without any notice.

If that’s the way you want to do it, I guess that’s your choice. But the professional social networking space could seriously use a breath of fresh air.

[ardit33]

If everything was "just timing and luck", then we would be using friendster, myspace, ICQ, AOL Chat, and bebo today, instead of facebook/twitter/instagram/snapchat/linkedin

There is something more than that, and good execution is crucial, and it is good to know on what worked well, and what didn't work out for both the current winners and past losers.

I think Reid has good things to say about what worked for them back than, and take it like that.

There is no rulebook on startups, as all of them have different patterns, but reading on what worked 2003-2010 (pre-mobile times), is not going to hurt anyone.

Dismissing the success as just being merely 'dark patterns' + timing, seems a bit short sighted.

[alkibiades]

you proved that not everything is just timing and luck but you didn’t prove that nothing is. The difference between it and myspace is something so much better than it came out that is surpassed the network effect. while there isn’t really anything compelling to replace linkedin in its base feature set that it started with.