Recessionary times should be glory days for LinkedIn, as people furiously network on the business-contacts website for scraps of work. But instead, it's LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye who finds himself out of a job.

A tipster reports high drama at LinkedIn, the business-networking site. The company is funded in part by Sequoia Capital, the Valley's new high priests of doom and gloom — and, our source claims, Sequoia has told all of its portfolio companies to cut costs by 10 percent. LinkedIn's big-hearted chairman, Reid Hoffman (shown here), reportedly doesn't want to lay people off, but he and CEO Dan Nye are said to be engaged in a power struggle over this and other issues. Layoffs could come today — possibly an exercise in cleaning house rather than a reaction to the economy, though we hear LinkedIn has been missing financial milestones. Here's the tip:

A correction on our previous post about LinkedIn's financial woes: Contrary to our tipster's assertions, plenty of LinkedIn employees use the company-provided shuttle bus from San Francisco to Mountain View. The bus even has its own Twitter account. That account is private — but it links to a public, annotated route map on Google Maps. CEO Dan Nye and marketing VP Patrick Crane, among others, have their home addresses listed. Other employees have left notes, in plain view, about their commuting preferences. "Your privacy is our top concern," LinkedIn's privacy policy states. But if the company is so slapdash about guarding its own employees, can it really be trusted to protect users? Here's an embedded version of the map:Click to view
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A LinkedIn tipster tells us that even as the all-business social network raised $53 million from Bain Capital and other investors in June, at a $1 billion valuation, it sought to pull in another $25 million from Goldman Sachs and failed. More damningly, he claims that CEO Dan Nye lied on-air when he told Fox Business earlier this summer that the company is profitable. Inside the company, it's known that LinkedIn has "now missed every financial objective set by Bain Capital after investing in us." The missed targets are not a secret, the tipster tells us, because paranoid managers spend a lot of time blaming each other in front of the minions. "It's a shame, "our tipster writes, "because it was a good company before it became so full of false confidence that it passed on the window of opportunity that was there to sell for good money." The best bit: LinkedIn now has its own commuter bus, like Google and Yahoo, running from San Francisco; it's not widely used by employees, so some joke that the bus exists so managers can throw colleagues under it. The full rant:

LinkedIn's jobs page gives off the impression that life at the business-networking website is one nonstop Rock Band jam session. But a clearly disgruntled, entertainingly foulmouthed tipster says that backbiting is the real office entertainment of choice. The company's operations department is "like a fucking morgue" after a "housecleaning," he says. Lloyd Taylor, the company's vice president of technical operations, a splashy hire from Google last year, seems to have generated more than his fair share of complaints. In company meetings, CEO Dan Nye and founder Reid Hoffman describe the ruckus as "culture changes." Embarrassingly for a company which says it helps employers vet job candidates and is trying to break into the recruiting business, these problems sound less like culture clashes and more like plain old bad hires. The tip:

You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result.

Want to see LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye flinch? Do what Fox Business correspondent Liz Claman did this morning and ask Nye if rival social network startup Facebook has expressed interest in acquiring the company. "It just seems like it would be a perfect for say, a Facebook, to join up, to link up with you guys," Claman advises Nye. Suddenly a happy little conversation on camera turned awkward. Did he flinch because Facebook had expressed interest? Or because, unlike Claman, he knew Facebook wasn't even sniffing around — an admission that would call into question LinkedIn's value right when Nye's gunning to take the company public? That moment, above, and the full interview — replete with Nye's nonanswers about acquisitions and IPOs — below.

Sean Parker has had a hand in some of the Valley's biggest successes. His first company, Napster, took the world by storm, but didn't make Parker rich. His second, Plaxo, just sold to Comcast. And his third, Facebook — well, say no more. Except for the bit about him getting kicked out, according to Mark Zuckerberg's legal testimony, for a cocaine arrest. (Parker characterized the incident as "a misunderstanding.") That and more is covered in the 21 pages Sarah Lacy devotes to Parker in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, new book about Web 2.0. The index page where Parker is listed:

A tipster writes in with a first-person account of what's happening inside LinkedIn — and it's not pretty.

LinkedIn is off the block, cofounder Reid Hoffman told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We have had (buyout) conversations with all the usual suspects, but I think an IPO is by far and away the most likely outcome," Hoffman said. He suggested, however, that such a public offering might not happen for at least another year or two. One ex-LinkedIn exec said that's much too long a wait.

LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, touring New York to brief journalists on embargoed news we already reported, told CNET that LinkedIn's backers have "great confidence in our independent path." CNET takes this for code that the rumored News Corp deal is off. Nah. It's just good negotiating. LinkedIn still may not sell, but if it does, Nye's billion-dollar posturing will ensure the site isn't sold cheap. It's a lesson some overeager startup flippers should take to heart.

News Corp. executive Jeremy Philips wants to get himself LinkedIn. But the business-oriented social network has just hired a fancypants new CEO, Dan Nye, who's told Fortune there's no way. No way, that is, unless Philips and his boss Rupert Murdoch pony up "a lot more" than a $1 billion. Ah, finally Nye is starting to understand the rhetorical game Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plays so well.

Quietly useful social network LinkedIn outgrew Facebook from October 2006 to October 2007, according to numbers from Nielsen/NetRatings. In that year, Facebook grew 125 percent to LinkedIn's 189 percent. Too bad LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, who's been hinting at an eventual IPO, can't come close to matching Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Steve Jobs impersonations. Proclaiming your company will change media for the next 100 years will get you laughed at on Valleywag. Laughed at all the way to a $15 billion valuation.

Do you ever stop and feel sad for Friendster? Me either, but if there was any room in your tiny, cynical hearts, you could. Yet another social network that's not the original is talking about taking big money moves. This time it's LinkedIn. CEO Dan Nye recently told Newsweek the company isn't interested in acquisition offers, but that an eventual IPO is likely. The only potential hitch, of course, is Facebook's newfound popularity among business professionals.

LinkedIn is opening its site to developers — kind of. "We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open API letting people do whatever they want," says LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye. "We're not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other." Party pooper. Will they at least have the greatest app ever? (Photo by Life On The Edge)