Eric Ly’s “Social Graph” Built LinkedIn
By James Moreau | 09 Feb, 2026
As the founding CTO of LinkedIn, Eric Ly transformed how 400 million professionals connect.
Eric Ly is the co-founder and founding Chief Technology Officer of LinkedIn, the platform that digitized the handshake for a global workforce of over 400 million users.
A pioneer of the “social graph,” Ly was instrumental in designing LinkedIn’s core architecture and search capabilities that aided his vision for using technology as a tool for human connection. This concept steered LinkedIn from a 2002 Silicon Valley startup into its eventual $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft in 2016.
Since his departure in 2006 the serial-entrepreneur has founded three companies – networking facilitator Presdo in 2007, its spinoff blockchain project, Hub in 2017, and credentialing servicer KarmaCheck in 2018, where the 57-year-old currently serves as CEO.
Prior to LinkedIn Ly honed his expertise as a software engineer at IBM, Vinod Khosla’s Sun Microsystems, and General Magic.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ly emigrated to the United States at age six due to the Vietnam War. Raised in Sunnyvale, California he graduated with a bachelor of science in symbolic systems from Stanford in 1991, a master of science from MIT in 1993, and earned a doctorate in computer science from Stanford in 1994.
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