In case you were wondering where I was last night, I had the chance to go up to San Francisco for the LinkedIn “In the Black” party, to help celebrate LinkedIn’s first year of profitability. The Web Strategist blog has some great coverage and photos.

What are the chances of a web startup making it? 5%? 2%? not very good for most? We should take a lesson from business networking tool LinkedIn.

LinkedIn celebrates over 14 months of profitability, which is an amazing feat for the thousands of web companies in Silicon Valley that sprout.

Check out the full post here.

For me, it was a chance to actually wear a suit and take Carolyn up the city – not something that happens every day with two little ones at home. There was a very warm feeling at the event – something about the LinkedIn culture is incredibly open, friendly and very human.

As a bonus we discovered several friends also at the event. The funniest introduction at the party was pre-school related – apparently being the father of Jacob Nash has its privileges. They were the parents of one of Jacob’s pre-school classmates, and I believe the direct quote was, “Jacob Nash is a really big deal in our household.” It’s possible that this is Jacob’s world, and I’m just living in it. 🙂

The food & wine was excellent, but my personal favorite of the evening was the chocolate. A wonderful table of extremely rich chocolates with exotic infusions like tea and grapefruit. Even a small exit gift of gorgeous truffles.

It was wonderful to be included, and a great night out. I can’t wait to get started next week.

Congratulations to the entire LinkedIn team.

Update (5/21/2007):  Two great posts on the event on the LinkedIn blog, and on Mario Sundar’s blog.  Check them out.