NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 90 of 150

Correct — D, LinkedIn. In June 2016 Microsoft announced that it would buy LinkedIn, the business and employment-oriented networking service, at 196 dollars a share in an all-cash deal worth about 26.2 billion dollars. It was the largest acquisition Microsoft had ever made at that point. The deal was still awaiting clearance when this paper was set in September 2016 and closed on 8 December 2016, with LinkedIn keeping its own brand and running largely independently afterwards.

• (a)PartnerUp — A real but small business-networking site aimed at entrepreneurs looking for co-founders and partners. Nothing of this scale was ever proposed for it, and it is in the list only to look plausible beside the real answer.
• (b)PerfectBusiness — Another small networking platform for entrepreneurs and investors. Like the other two wrong options it is a genuine site, which is what makes the question a test of reading rather than of guessing.
• (c)StartupNation — A resource and community site for small business founders, not a professional network of LinkedIn's size, and never the subject of a Microsoft bid.

LinkedIn was founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman with a team drawn largely from PayPal and Socialnet, and launched on 5 May 2003. It built its business on professional profiles, recruitment and business-to-business advertising rather than on personal social networking, which is what made it attractive to Microsoft — a company selling productivity software to the same professional audience. Microsoft's stated logic was to connect LinkedIn's network of professional identities to Office and its business software.

The item is straightforward for anyone who followed the news that June, and the three wrong names are chosen so that recognition alone decides it — all three are real, all three are business-networking sites, and none is remotely of that size. Two things have changed since the paper was set, and both matter to a reader today. First, the deal itself had not yet closed at the time of the exam; the word 'announced' in the stem is exact, and completion followed in December 2016. Second, 26.2 billion dollars was Microsoft's biggest purchase in 2016 but is no longer its biggest — the Activision Blizzard deal announced in 2022 was several times larger. So the fact to carry forward is the pairing of Microsoft with LinkedIn, not the superlative that went with it in 2016.

• Microsoft announced the LinkedIn acquisition in June 2016 at 196 dollars a share, an all-cash deal of about 26.2 billion dollars.
• The transaction closed on 8 December 2016, and LinkedIn retained its own brand and a large measure of independence.
• LinkedIn was founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman and colleagues and launched on 5 May 2003.
• LinkedIn was Microsoft's largest acquisition until the far bigger Activision Blizzard deal announced in 2022.

• Assuming that unfamiliar option names must be invented; here all three wrong options are real, if small, websites.
• Carrying forward the 2016 superlative — LinkedIn is no longer Microsoft's largest acquisition.

NDA takes one or two business or technology headlines from the months before the exam and asks them as plain identification items, so a monthly note of big deals, launches and appointments is enough preparation.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  LinkedIn, the professional networking service, was co-founded by

  • (a)Reid Hoffman
  • (b)Jack Dorsey
  • (c)Kevin Systrom
  • (d)Jan Koum

  Answer(a) Reid Hoffman — he founded LinkedIn in December 2002 with a team largely drawn from PayPal, and the site launched in May 2003.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn was completed in which year?

  • (a)2014
  • (b)2015
  • (c)2016
  • (d)2018

  Answer(c) 2016 — announced in June and closed on 8 December of that year.