LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: “We Can Go Public Any Time We Want To”

Next up in my series of interviews recorded at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week is Reid Hoffman , the founder and CEO of LinkedIn . I spoke to Reid for more than twenty minutes in the lobby of our hotel about a wide range of subjects, including LinkedIn's product plans, fundraising activities and revenue. LinkedIn has raised over $100 million in financing - roughly $75 million of that was in 2008 alone. The company has been profitable for the last two years, Reid says, and has $80 million in the bank. I spoke with Reid at length about whether he'd consider a merger with Facebook (he's buddies with most of the Facebook execs that attended Davos and was spending a lot of time with them). His flat out answer is "no," there aren't any discussions going on with them. And he insists that personal and professional networks shouldn't be linked. At the very least they need to stay separate brands, he says. Meanwhile, LinkedIn continues to grow like a weed, adding a million new registered users every seventeen days. With that $80 million in the bank and 2 years of profitability, he's not being unreasonable when he says, near the end of the interview, "We’ve been profitable for the last two years, so when we want to IPO we can do that." The full transcript is below.