Losing My Religion on LinkedIn

There are many good reasons I'm not an English major.  One is T.S. Eliot.  Another is Hart Crane.  Oh, and then there's Gravity’s Rainbow.  I could go on, but suffice to say I knew there were people much smarter than I who could divine intelligence and beauty where I could only see pretentiousness and befuddlement. 

Stephen Hawking reminds me why I am not a physicist, especially when I attempt his books purportedly written for the layman.

I could not survive in Hollywood because I could never make Transformers, thinking it would return a single cent to investors.

And Math?  Ha.  The day they informed me that “1.9” (with the "9") repeating endlessly was actually “2” I knew to look elsewhere.

But, of course, there was always business.  Even in medieval times the manly first son would go off to war, the brilliant second son would join a monastery, and the third idiot son always had commerce.  Make it for one, sell it for two and thereby put bread on the table.  

Let Walt Whitman sing the body electric (and someone else interpret)--I could at least comprehend the supply chain.

Then along came LinkedIn, a nice enough bunch of people who ran a sleepy little Internet company that had developed around it a legion of bemused users and a brand statement that went something like, “I use LinkedIn but don't know why."  

At some point the company finally opened up its platform to developers allowing for the launch of a couple of modest apps, and in the process upgraded its brand statement to, “I use LinkedIn because I can’t find anything better.”

This week LinkedIn went public, telling the market it made $15M last year on sales of $243M and didn’t expect to make any money this year.  On that happy news, stockpickers drove the value of the company up to $8.9B.

That’s some math I can do.    

That’s also an admirable accomplishment, the way you might admire an art forger who just sold his first Rembrandt for $175M.  By the time the fraud is detected the money will be long gone.  Except, in this case, some of the money is expected to cause the prices of luxury homes in Silicon Valley to skyrocket.  So, we’ll get two bubbles for the price of one, as well as a legion of start-ups (think: PayPal) from a set of newly-minted millionaires.     

One day, sophomore year at Brown, I was sitting in a Religious Studies class arguing that the Book of Job had two obvious endings, probably written by two different people, the result of some botched editing.  But the really smart kids in the class--I mean, the kids who would go on to write great Christian commentary or become Rabbinic scholars--were  saying, “No, if you think about it long and hard enough you’ll understand it's all one big, happy, consistent book.”

So, as I had with T. S. Eliot and English, I swore off Religious Studies.  The Book of Job repeating endlessly did not come out to a whole number for me, no how.

Sad to say, LinkedIn may have done that again for me.  The really smart people are saying something that doesn't square with addition and subtraction, much less higher math.  And these are not people who learned about Dutch tulips way back in college and forgot the story—these are folks who lived through (and often barely survived) the most recent bubble.    

I’m thinking maybe it's time to pick up my old, beat-up Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and give it another whirl.  It may start to make some sense right about now.  Join in with me, if you will: “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table. . . .”

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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