Excellent news today – LinkedIn closed its first day of trading on the NYSE at $93.86 per share. Although priced at $45 per share, trading opened 84% higher at $83 a share and fluctuated during the day before giving the company a closing valuation of just under $9 billion.  Always the unsexy Web
2.0 network, Reid Hoffman has created an increasingly essential business tool used now by over 100 million people worldwide. And suddenly Reid is the entrepreneur role model from the Valley – and quite right; as TechCrunch observes, LinkedIn “represents one of the few large-scale working examples of a freemium business model”.