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Comment by suking | Hacker News Reader

Almost $100/user, not even including active users... that is insanity.

At times like this I'm tempted to short the stock, or at least wait a month or longer until there's sufficient shares to short and not immediately get squeezed. It's just that unlimited downside, investor euphoria on social networking, and volatility makes me too nervous to do it.

If the unlimited downside scares you, why not buy put options?

Any recommendations for an options provider?

I think Options won't be available until May 27th so that they can count the # of actual shareholders, etc.

I probably should and wonder whether the price of put options gets inflated due to all the people who want to short? I could also put stop limits but the volatility makes that worse than options.

The current valuation is ~$8.5 billion, wikipedia puts them at ~100 million users. That works out to be ~$85/user.

The least they could do is buy each user a nice steak.

Don't worry, it only took an hour after your comment for the stock to break $100 and their valuation is now a cool $10 billion.

The way this stock is moving now, a stock price of $83 seems downright conservative.

The current valuation has jumped about 15-25% (from 88 to 110 per share) in the 10 minutes I've been watching it.

right now's not the time to pick nits on their valuation this whole thing is going to be completely out of whack for a while.

The comment I was replying to originally had "almost $1k/user".

Why? What does that have to do with anything? So lets assume I enter into linked in the fact that I have a 100 professional people who won't spit on my name, my employment history and some recommendation blurbs. How much is that worth to a hiring manager screening employees? Out of 20 candidates for a job its not worth much, but if they want to extend an offer its worth something. Also assume job switching every 2 years. So every couple of years some sucker would be willing to pay for that information. The thing I find funny is that the upgraded accounts that linked in flogs are violating your privacy for extra money. Can I check a "Not linked in's bitch" check mark?

If* LinkedIn becomes a key part of most companies' recruiting process, then it's undervalued.

(* Yeah yeah, right now it's not)

I don't think it is a matter of if, rather "when". Recruiters I know much prefer to find candidates on LI vs Monster and other services and I have a feeling this is only going to broaden and the appeal will continue to rise as future offerings and updates to employers likely roll out.

And, agreed that a price tag of $100 a head, if you will, is cheap in terms of value for marketing and recruiting/employment services.

On a side note, how I let this fall from my radar to get in on the rush at the bell and sell by lunch is beyond me. I hope others here weren't so lazy and picked up some cash.

4500 corporate customers, including 75% of the Fortune 100, are currently paying LinkedIn an average of $24k for recruitment services (ie. access to profiles for headhunting)

That is one of three revenue streams. All three have been growing 100% YoY, and ~60% of it is USA (ie. they haven't grown out internationally yet)

Imagine a Facebook IPO that reached $100 per user...

Not hard to imagine. 700M users at a $70B valuation = $100 per user. I guess that's why how the current valuation of LinkedIn comes about. And if you use this metric, and believes that LinkedIn's growth potential is significantly stronger than Facebook, you could even argue that LNKD is still way undervalued.

BTW I made a Tagxedo (word cloud) of this morning's LinkedIn News, and one prominently featured word explains all (the word starts with "F" and ends with "k" :D)

http://daily.tagxedo.com/may-20-linkedin-rockets-skyward-in-...

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