Eric Ly

Ly started his professional career in technical positions at Steve Jobs' NeXT (acquired by Apple Inc.), IBM, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), and General Magic.[9]

In 1995, Ly co-founded Netmosphere, a software company enabling project management collaboration utilizing Internet technologies such as Java. Menlo Ventures invested in the firm, which was subsequently acquired by Critical Path, Inc.[10] In 2000, Ly co-founded a mobile software company called Tresidder Networks in which Industry Ventures invested.

In 2002, Ly co-founded LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman, a Stanford schoolmate, and several other co-founders, including Jean-Luc Vaillant, Allen Blue, and Konstantin Guericke. When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2B, it was the world's "largest social networking site focused on the working world" with more than 400 million registered users.[11]

As LinkedIn's founding CTO, Ly "helped create some of its core product features, which enabled the company to reach profitability and a quickly growing user base."[12][13]

From 2008 to 2011, Ly served as a venture partner for Wellington Partners, a Munich, Germany-based venture capital firm whose investments include Xing and Spotify.[14]

In 2007, Ly launched Presdo with $35,000 (~$44,721 in 2021) of his own money.[15] The company first built a meeting scheduler chatbot described as "pure, refined, focused, with a fairly deep understanding of how real people, not just 'users,' think, act and want from their online apps."[16] On the suggestion of Loic Le Meur and others, Ly was persuaded to adapt the meeting scheduler to conferences where it could help attendees arrange face-to-face meetings. The technology evolved into a mobile app called Presdo Match, "that facilitates networking" and "provides a searchable directory of attendee profiles (imported from LinkedIn when desirable), makes connection recommendations, and highlights which contacts from existing networks are in attendance so users can send messages and schedule meetings with other attendees."[17] Presdo Match was launched in 2010 at the LeWeb conference, "the biggest European Internet conference."[18][19] Ly subsequently expanded his marketing efforts for Presdo Match globally.[20]