LinkedIn IPO?

Looks like LinkedIn is lining up an IPO exec team…hoping to hit $100m in revs this year. LinkedIn replaced CEO Reid Hoffman earlier this year as well. Very interesting.

This concept of an IPO team reminds me of Steven Kaplan‘s research on the importance of the horse (technology, idea, etc.) or the jockey (management) in VC investment context. The slides linked here are pretty thick, but in short Kaplan cites CEO turnover at start-ups that IPO as an indicator that human capital is less important than non-human capital. What he fails to address is the fact that in many cases a very, very good start-up CEO who grows a company from $0 to $Ms (Reid Hoffman) is a completely different animal than an IPO/publicly traded company CEO who grows a company from $Ms to $MMMs (Dan Nye).