By Business & Finance 
The opening of LinkedIn’s €85 million EMEA headquarters cemented the company’s commitment to Ireland.
September saw the doors of LinkedIn’s new EMEA headquarter’s in Dublin officially opening, making it a fitting time to award FDI of the month to the professional networking and recruitment website and app.
LinkedIn first set up in Ireland in 2010 with just three staff. Now the operation has grown significantly with the new purpose-built 17,650 sq metre building home to the 1,200 staff.
The new offices were officially opened in September by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar praised LinkedIn for its commitment to Ireland in 2010 when “we were in the middle of one of our darkest periods economically”.
The Dublin office now serves the entire EMEA region with staff from 55 different countries fulfilling roles in sales, marketing, customer service, finance, analytics and engineering.
Sharon McCooey, head of LinkedIn in Ireland (and one of their first three employees here) called it, “a magnificent commitment to Dublin,” noting it is the group’s only real estate investment outside of the US.
The building, spread over five floors has a range of facilities designed to attract top staff, including a soundproofed music studio, state-of-the-art gym, restaurant with clean eating options and a pizza oven, coffee bar, roof terrace and games room.
Founders
LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman and some former colleagues from SocialNet and PayPal in December 2002, and launched six months later. With early signs looking promising they attracted initial investment from Sequoia Capital, achieving profitability by 2006, a year in which their user base jumped from over 4 million members to almost 8 million. They opened their first international office in London in 2008 and launching Spanish and French versions of the site. In 2011, they celebrated their eight anniversary with becoming a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in December 2016 for a sum reported to be in excess of $26bn. As of April this year LinkedIn boasted 500 million users from over 200 countries, with versions of the site/app in 24 languages. LinkedIn has more than 10,000 full-time employees with offices in 30 cities around the world.
