Business of LinkedIn is -- business

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye is pacing in his plain, half-empty office here and excitedly scribbling diagrams on a white board, like a football coach or a Pentagon general.

Nye -- a former executive at Procter & Gamble, Intuit and Advent Software -- is only a few months into his job as CEO of LinkedIn, a fast-growing start-up that runs the popular professional-networking website of the same name.

Already he's facing huge tasks: hiring good people; keeping a small company of 150 employees running steadily; warding off rumors of merger talks, or a possible initial public offering; taking on nearby Palo Alto rival Facebook, the largest online social-networking site and much-profiled media darling that is luring business members from LinkedIn.

"So many dot-com start-ups are flash-in-the-pan companies that weren't built on core values for the long term," Nye says. "If you want to build ...