WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Look What Happened To LinkedIn's First Employees

No matter how you look at it, LinkedIn is one of the stand-out Valley success stories.

It has forever changed how we find jobs and network with business colleagues. Jeff Weiner is ranked as the best CEO in the nation, according one rating service, and cofounder Reid Hoffman is a Valley A-lister, worth almost $4 billion.

But it wasn't always like this. LinkedIn was founded in December 2002, with a couple handfuls of people. And a few months after it launched on May 5, 2013, it was in danger of being a bomb.

People weren't joining the service, until Hoffman "sat down with the team and said, if we don't solve this, we're dead." They came up with one idea: let people upload their email address books to see which of their friends had joined.

Thankfully that worked, the site went viral, and today it's a $25 billion company with 313 million members in over 200 countries, and an employer of 5,700.