Networking

Almost as soon as Guang-Yu Xu was laid off from his engineering post at a Silicon Valley Internet company last month, he visited LinkedIn.com and updated his job status from "current" to "past." Through their interconnected contacts, he soon heard from headhunter Robert Greene, one of more than 530,000 recruiters trolling the professional networking site for job candidates. Within a few weeks, Xu had three offers. He started at Mint.com, a personal finance website, two weeks ago.

. -- Few Internet entrepreneurs practice what they preach as devoutly as LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman, whose business revolves around his belief that good fortune flows from good relationships. Hoffman, 40, has put that principle to work by mining his own vast network of Silicon Valley connections to rake in one Internet jackpot after another. A college friendship led Hoffman to PayPal and his first windfall when EBay Inc. bought the online payment service for $1.5 billion in 2002.

The Internet bubble of the late 1990s ended with a painful pop. When today's young entrepreneurs get together, the only bubbles they see are in their mimosas. Even as the rest of the business world frets about the gloomy economy, Silicon Valley is living the high-tech high life.

Dan Nye landed a job as chief executive of a hot Silicon Valley company without even dusting off his resume. Nye was an executive vice president at Advent Software Inc. when Reid Hoffman, chairman of social-networking company LinkedIn Corp., came calling. Hoffman hadn't found him through a headhunter or a classifieds site but through LinkedIn's vast who-knows-whom online network. Through the whole process, Nye said, "I was never asked to produce a resume, and I was never asked for a reference."

While playing "hospital" one day as a child, Rebecca Congleton Boenigk recalled her mother rushing into the room to teach her an early lesson in girl power: Just because you're a girl doesn't mean you have to play the nurse. "I thought, 'OK, I'll be the doctor,' " Boenigk said. Today, Boenigk runs Neutral Posture Inc., a business she founded with her mom, Jaye Congleton, 18 years ago.

san francisco -- Hoping to woo shoppers who say EBay Inc. has lost its folksy appeal, the world's largest online auction plans to launch its own version of a social networking service today and is promising other customer-friendly features by year's end. The new Neighborhoods feature encourages users to post photos, product reviews, tips and responses -- creating a far more visual and interactive experience than EBay's text-based discussion forums.

Since Dan Nye joined LinkedIn Corp. as chief executive less than a year ago, he has presided over dramatic growth even by Silicon Valley standards. Membership in the career contacts site has climbed to 17 million from 8 million, and the payroll to 200 from 60. Nye, a former executive at Procter & Gamble Co. and Intuit Inc., has made high-profile hires, including tapping Lloyd Taylor, formerly Google Inc.'s director of global operations, as LinkedIn's vice president of technical operations.

In the high-tech world, Southern California is almost as cool as Silicon Valley. Heather Schlegel knows this because she goes out almost every night. Schlegel, a chronic blogger and the owner of Purple Tornado, a West Hollywood consulting and event-planning firm, attends geek dinners, techie lunches and nerd happy hours. She was so overwhelmed by the opportunities that Purple Tornado recently created an online event calendar to help people like her keep track.

Rising before dawn, the head of Pfizer Inc.'s research lab in San Diego fills her thermos with coffee and follows the headlights of her Honda Element to the foot of 15th Street, where a beach parking lot is already filling up. Catherine Mackey, 50, trudges in her wetsuit across the sand beneath a murky gray sky, a new surfboard under her arm. A few other surfers are already in the water, hoping to ride the 4-foot breakers to shore -- and to network with people like Mackey.

Movie moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Weinstein Co. said it had taken an undisclosed stake in social-networking website ASmallWorld. The founders of Miramax Film Corp. led a group of investors including Bob Pittman, former chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner Inc., to make a "significant investment" in the site, which can be joined only by invitation from members.