Josh Elman (@joshelman) on X

I was in the midst of relocating from Seattle to the Bay Area to spend the summer and start business school in the fall at Berkeley. After six years of programming and leading a large engineering team building RealPlayer, I wanted to become a product manager.

And I thought I needed an MBA for that. I had applied very last minute and felt lucky to get a slot (the straggler round deadline is in March, most people applied by the normal Dec 31 deadline).

The internet and startups seemed dead at the time and I thought business school would be a great way for me to learn and understand “business,” the skills to be a product manager vs an engineer, and to get reconnected to things happening in Silicon Valley

We were a few years already into the dot bust and everything seemed bleak. Public company stock prices had fallen hard, except Google there were almost no interesting startups on the rise, Microsoft was stuck in antitrust goo.

The big jobs companies were Monster.com, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs. Monster advertised at Super Bowls. If you wanted a new job you had to make a resume, upload it to these sites, search and apply for jobs. Or get lucky emailing it around to ask your friends for help.

The prior fall Friendster had launched and was an interesting growing idea around connecting people, seeing who they knew, and trying to find dates. It wasn’t clear this was a business, but it was popular and the site had a hard time staying up.

So enter LinkedIn - see who you know and how they can help you get to who they know. It seemed neat enough but mostly all people remember from that first year is getting spammed by friends to join.

And there was another hot app at the time called Plaxo that would upload your entire address book and spam everyone to create a virtual contact with up to date information. It was hard not to accidentally spam everyone you had ever emailed. Many thought these were the same co

Anyway, by that fall I was starting business school and thought maybe social networking could be interesting. We were MBA students so spent a lot of time trying to debate and figure out the future.

I thought it would be really cool to go work on social networking and see if this could be the future. I saw an email on a college symbolic systems mailing list looking for engineers to join LinkedIn - particularly a windows engineer to build things for Outlook

While I didn’t want to go back to engineering, I emailed the LinkedIn CTO to see if I could help part time while in business school. I thought I could use my coding skills to get a foot in the door.

We met and he asked why I was in business school. I said I wanted to be a product manager. He said he needed a full time engineer, not part time. But, well maybe you should come here and product manage. My jaw dropped.

He then had me meet another cofounder and head of product and we got along great. They were just starting to look for their first product manager too. They had me meet Reid Hoffman which was the biggest meeting of my life at that point and an intense conversation.

My favorite interview question to this day was from him - everyone in a company creates artifacts. Engineers: code. Designers: visuals. BD folks: signed contracts. What about product managers?

Anyway more conversations ensued and I got an actual offer! To join a sub 15 person company as their first PM!! Problem was I would have to drop out of business school after only one semester.

A professor said LinkedIn would never make money (and even gave my friends a C when they did a project on LinkedIn later in school)

So ultimately I decided to take the plunge. And I became a product manager. And got to help LinkedIn grow and build products including launching LinkedIn Jobs and many other things.

It was my first step into product management and startups. And it changed my life.

I later got recruited out of LinkedIn through LinkedIn. Though I should have stayed much longer.

Happy 20th birthday LinkedIn! Thank you to everyone who has built the product and company. It changed my life, and the lives of so many many other users who found new opportunities and connections