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7correct to beat the crowd
40 free LinkedIn trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
LinkedIn is the social network people open for work rather than for fun, and it has been doing that job since before most of its rivals existed. Behind the job posts and connection requests sits a surprisingly eventful company history: a start among veterans of an earlier dot-com success, a stock market debut that stunned Wall Street, and one of the biggest takeovers the technology industry has seen. This quiz covers that story from the first days to the present. Expect questions on the founders and chief executives, the companies LinkedIn bought and the one that bought it, everyday features such as vouching for a colleague or messaging a stranger, the software its engineers gave away, and the court cases, data breaches and national bans that made headlines. It is written for anyone who uses the site, works in recruiting, sales or marketing, or simply enjoys business and technology trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more about the network behind your profile.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which tech giant bought LinkedIn in 2016 in what was then its largest acquisition ever?
Microsoft
Microsoft paid $26.2 billion in cash, and LinkedIn stayed its biggest purchase until the Activision Blizzard deal of 2022.
Q 02LinkedIn's official history says the company began in 2002 in which part of Reid Hoffman's home?
Living room
Living room is where LinkedIn says it began, skipping the garage of Silicon Valley legend. The site went live months later, on May 5, 2003.
Q 03Which daily puzzle did LinkedIn launch in 2024 alongside its first games Pinpoint and Crossclimb?
Queens
Queens was one of LinkedIn's first three games, which refresh every day, time each solve and let players compare scores and streaks across their network.
Q 04What color is the #OpenToWork frame that LinkedIn job seekers can add around a profile photo?
Green
Green is the color of the #OpenToWork ring, and showing it is optional: members can instead signal recruiters only, which adds no frame to the photo.
Q 05On which stock exchange did LinkedIn shares start trading in May 2011 under the ticker LNKD?
NYSE
NYSE trading in LinkedIn began on May 19, 2011, eight years after the site launched. The LNKD ticker lasted until the company was sold in December 2016.
Q 06Which country blocked LinkedIn in 2016 for not storing its citizens' data on local servers?
Russia
Russia's block followed a Moscow court ruling that was upheld in November 2016, and LinkedIn's app was pulled from the country's app stores two months later.
Q 07LinkedIn engineers named their open-source key-value data store after which Harry Potter villain?
Voldemort
Voldemort was built for highly scalable storage, but LinkedIn moved all of its systems off it by about 2018 and later announced a replacement called Project Venice.
Q 08What happened to LinkedIn's share price on its first day of trading in 2011, after an IPO at $45?
It more than doubled
It more than doubled: LinkedIn closed at $94.25, up 109 percent, after touching a 171 percent gain during the day.
Q 09LinkedIn paid a $13 million settlement in 2015 for sending members' contacts repeated what?
Reminder emails
Reminder emails were the problem: the court found members had agreed to one invitation going to their address book, but not to the two follow-ups sent in their names.
Q 10LinkedIn announced in November 2023 that its worldwide membership had passed which milestone?
1 billion
1 billion members arrived about twenty years after launch. LinkedIn had needed more than a year to sign up its first million, a mark it reached in August 2004.
Q 11Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn after serving as a top executive at which dot-com era startup?
PayPal
PayPal hired Hoffman as chief operating officer in 2000, and its sale to eBay two years later freed him to start LinkedIn and back other young companies.
Q 12Reid Hoffman was among the first investors in which rival social network, launched in 2004?
Facebook's first financing round included Hoffman, who had also arranged the meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and the round's lead investor, Peter Thiel.
Q 13Reid Hoffman was an early donor to which AI lab, later leaving its board in 2023?
OpenAI
OpenAI counted Hoffman among its first donors, and he resigned his board seat in March 2023 to avoid conflicts with his own AI investments.
Q 21Which LinkedIn feature was scrapped in September 2021, under a year after its worldwide rollout?
Stories
Stories reached every LinkedIn member in October 2020 and was gone eleven months later, while an older casualty, the Answers forum, had lasted about six years.
Q 22A phone app LinkedIn bought in 2011 scanned which paper items and turned them into contacts?
Business cards
Business cards were the target of CardMunch, the app maker LinkedIn acquired in January 2011 and still listed among its own apps two years later.
Q 23Which former Yahoo executive led LinkedIn as CEO from 2009 to 2020, through its IPO and sale?
Jeff Weiner
Q 14Which LinkedIn feature, added in 2012, lets a connection vouch for a listed skill with one click?
Endorsements
Endorsements were criticised as meaningless, so in 2016 LinkedIn began highlighting the ones that come from coworkers and mutual connections.
Q 15On LinkedIn, which label appears beside the name of a friend of one of your direct connections?
2nd-degree
2nd-degree is the label for people linked to someone you already know, and LinkedIn lets you invite them with the Connect button on their profile.
Q 16Which kind of LinkedIn member data was stolen from about 6.5 million accounts in a 2012 hack?
Passwords
Passwords were taken in scrambled form, but experts faulted how weakly LinkedIn had protected them, and in 2016 another 100 million logins from the same breach surfaced.
Q 17In which country did LinkedIn shut its localised site in 2021, replacing it with a jobs-only app?
China
China had a censored local version of LinkedIn from 2014, and the jobs-only app that replaced it, InCareer, was itself closed in August 2023.
Q 18Which European capital has hosted LinkedIn's international headquarters since it opened in 2010?
Dublin
Dublin got the office in 2010, and by late 2016 LinkedIn was planning 200 more hires there to bring its Irish workforce to 1,200.
Q 19Which online course site did LinkedIn buy in 2015 and later rebrand as LinkedIn Learning?
Lynda.com
Lynda.com cost about $1.5 billion and dated back to 1995, when animator Lynda Weinman started it to support her books and classes.
Q 20Which reaction can LinkedIn members give a post, alongside Like, Celebrate, Support, Love and Funny?
Insightful
Insightful is meant for a post that makes a great point or shares helpful advice, and LinkedIn suggests using it on posts about tips and tricks.
Jeff Weiner arrived as interim president in December 2008 and, after 11 years as chief executive, moved up to executive chairman in June 2020.
Q 24Which software company's rival bids in 2016 drove up the price LinkedIn's eventual buyer paid?
Salesforce
Salesforce kept pushing its offer even after LinkedIn agreed to negotiate exclusively with its buyer, and the final price came in about 22 percent above the first plan.
Q 25Which site for hosting presentations did LinkedIn buy in 2012 and then sell to Scribd in 2020?
SlideShare
SlideShare launched in 2006 as a kind of YouTube for presentations, and LinkedIn paid about $119 million for it before passing it on eight years later.
Q 26Which Silicon Valley investment firm led LinkedIn's Series A funding round in late 2003?
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital led the round within months of the site's launch and kept buying: in 2008 it joined a deal that valued the five-year-old company at roughly a billion dollars.
Q 27What name did LinkedIn give its 2012 plan to map every job, skill, company and worker worldwide?
Economic Graph
Economic Graph was set as a ten-year goal by LinkedIn's chief executive, and its data later showed New York City which tech skills were most in demand.
Q 28Which invite-only LinkedIn program, launched in 2012, features leaders such as Richard Branson?
Influencers
Influencers began in October 2012 as a showcase for well-known leaders sharing professional advice, and by 2016 the list had grown past 750 names.
Q 29Which widely used data-streaming software was built at LinkedIn and open-sourced in early 2011?
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka was named by co-creator Jay Kreps, who liked the novelist Franz Kafka and reasoned that a system optimised for writing deserved a writer's name.
Q 30LinkedIn's court battle with analytics startup hiQ Labs became a landmark case about which practice?
Web scraping
Web scraping won the first rounds, when an appeals court let hiQ keep harvesting public profiles, but hiQ was later found in breach of LinkedIn's user agreement and settled.