Reid Hoffman describes the two years of building LinkedIn where it looked like they would fail

When we launched LinkedIn, we hoped it would just work. And we launched LinkedIn, and in the first, say, eight weeks, the number of people that were signing up for the Service were about 2,000 people per week. Now, roughly speaking, we probably could have gotten that many signups. If what we'd done is taken a phone book and had everyone in the company just calling people, saying, please sign up, please sign up, please sign up. That was about the rate that's not going to work. That's death. And so we knew we had to solve a growth problem. We had to get enough people inviting and getting people into LinkedIn. And so that's what we worked on for basically a year in order to make that work. And if that didn't work, value of LinkedIn, zero. Right? Like the whole thing goes to zero. There's nothing else. Then you get another problem and say, okay, well, we got people signing up, but okay, if we don't have a revenue stream, we also value zero because eventually you run out of money, you can't raise any more capital, you're gone. So we first launched job listings, and it had exactly the impact that we kind of, to some degree, both hoped and feared it would have, which is, oh, we know how to use LinkedIn now, but not a lot of people are buying job listings. So then we went to subscriptions and ads, and those got us to profitability. And that was when we went, okay, now I know that I have a company that can build something very large. And that was, I think, 2005. Right. So this all started in kind of late 2002. We incorporated in early 2003. So more or less, that was two years where you'd say of any particular week, right now, company doesn't exist. Yeah, you're building towards this future that you see.