When the dust settled on LinkedIn’s IPO on Thursday afternoon, the company was valued at $8.9 billion, making it worth more than household names like JC Penney, Electronic Arts and Chipotle.
As the biggest Internet IPO since Google and the first pure social networking site to go public, its jaw-dropping opening-day surge of 109% will also go down as a watershed moment for the Web, as historically significant as the debuts of Netscape in 1995, TheGlobe.com in 1998 and Google in 2004.