Marc Cenedella is upset! He is so upset he is lashing out at something Reid Hoffman said nearly a year ago at World Economic Forum in December 2010 (the Ladders' researchers must have been working on digging something up on him for months):
Privacy for Old People Says LinkedIn Founder
And I understand - LinkedIn went public and made X amount of millions in cash for Mr. Hoffman (I hope my readers understand that, like the rest of the public-stocks billionaires, he cannot really turn the $1.6 billion of his shares into liquid assets overnight). Mr. Cenedella, who started The Ladders barely two months after LinkedIn was launched in 2003, had wet dreams about being exactly in Mr. Hoffman's position by now.
I have no fucking clue why would he be dreaming those dreams. It's not that he created anything original. There were already other job boards with premium memberships and listing fees before The Ladders. The only differential he had was the $100K+ executive appeal (which, as you know, they just dropped - see my September 24th post). Did he think that those minute bells and whistles would be sufficient to build his value as an attractive investee?
You didn't really think that Marc was upset about your personal privacy, did you? Well, he did at some point - he was a man of ideals. When he started his company he did the right thing - he declared in the Terms & Conditions that he will not share, sell, etc. members' information. And indeed, I don't know anybody who gets spammed because of their usage of The Ladders. It's the other job boards that got their emails too: Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, etc.
But big bucks are big bucks - they manage to bend out of shape the purest of idealists. And now, when Marc is alone in his office or his kitchen writing his blog, he is jealous, devastated, and desperate to kick himself in the nuts for not doing what all other amoral Internet moguls do, namely selling every single shred of your privacy in exchange for a golden bonanza Hoffman experienced on May 19th this year, when LinkedIn's IPO closed at the double of the entering price. (By the way, now it's at four times of the initial offer.)
So, he is upset and the post linked above is his way of letting the buildup of negativity out. Well, Mr. Cenedella's motivations aside, Hoffman's remarks in Davos are wrong on so many levels, it would take me several more posts to break it all down( don't worry, I am not going to). This is exactly what I would expect from someone who "made it" in the way Mr. Hoffman did, though. What's the implication here? Even if you are 18, but is concerned with your constitutional rights for privacy, you are "old" and square? And if you want to be perceived as young and hip, you should disregard all privacy concerns?
Statements like that don't upset me because they are "politically incorrect," as Marc Cenedella claims - I don't care about that shit! They upset me because they are politically dangerous and stupid. How intellectually limited one should be to mix up the teenagers' exhibitionism with privacy issues? Are you that confused? You don't see the difference between people, on their own accord, making decisions to disclose information about themselves and your selling their connectivity and interests profiles to third-party predators for an enormous gain? This proves once again that nowadays success, even in business, has nothing to do with intellect.