Linkedin Blog

We recently crossed an important and exciting milestone for the company. LinkedIn now counts over 200 million members as part of our network, with representation in more than 200 countries and territories. We serve our members in 19 languages around the world.

I’d like to thank each of you for helping build the LinkedIn network into what it is today. It’s been amazing to see how our members have been able to transform their professional lives through LinkedIn. You truly grasp the power of LinkedIn when you start to focus on these individual success stories.

If Richard Branson lost it all, what would he do to come back? How does he define success? And what role did luck play in getting him to the top of the business world?

LinkedIn members started the new year by diving into stories on how to improve their careers – and how to make sense of the Zipcar deal. A look at some of this week’s most-popular Influencer posts:

Zipcar and the Death of Entrepreneurship (Dennis K. Berman) Is it inevitable that an innovative – but largely unprofitable – company will sell out to a larger, less-sexy rival? The news that Avis Budget Group is buying car-sharing service Zipcar for $500 million brings sobering lessons for entrepreneurs, writes the WSJ’s Dennis K. Berman. Most startups will fail, of course. But the Zipcar deal proves that “even those that succeed often will do better in the hands of a bigger, if inglorious, owner.”

Editor’s Note: One of the key aspects of LinkedIn’s culture is Transformation: of Career, Company, and World. Our new Transformation series highlights inspiring stories like this one — Arda Ozdemir’s journey from Finance Executive to Wellness Coach. 

Six years ago, I was a Finance executive at a software company. I had worked incredibly hard for many years to get to this point, but now I was feeling unhappy and uninspired by my career. To make things worse, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do besides finance, but I knew I didn’t want to live the rest of my life like this. It was in this hopeless and dark place where my transformation story began.