LinkedIn’s pitch deck clearly and immediately shows the problem: “There is no effective, trusted way for professionals to find and transact with each other online”. It outlines how the solutions that exist already fail.
The next few slides use eBay, PayPal, and Google to show how networks improve existing services, then position LinkedIn as the next application of that idea. These comparisons make the opportunity clear, though another company’s success does not prove LinkedIn will succeed.
^Slides 10 and 11 back up the pitch with actual growth exceeding earlier projections. This suggests demand and an ability to execute, but membership growth alone does not prove that users make useful connections or will pay. The slides acknowledge this, though, and note that PayPal (worth $400m at the time of the pitch) waited until it had 4 million registered users before taking revenue.
^Slide 22 shows market size through comparable businesses: $2.8 billion in search advertising, $0.8 billion in job sites, and $0.6 billion in personals sites in 2004. These figures suggest substantial opportunities for advertising, listings, and subscriptions, but do not establish how much of those markets LinkedIn could realistically capture.
As an investor, I would ask: How many members return regularly, what percentage will become paying customers, and what evidence supports those assumptions? I would also want a clear explanation of risks and a plan for addressing them.
I paid attention to how the slides were built out: There wasn’t much text, and the titles asserted bold and simple claims. For our Sanity Check pitch next week, I want to borrow those clear headlines and pair each claim with evidence.
