There is an update now on the article. Could be a very wise move.
"Update: Spokeswoman Kay Luo and co-founder Konstantin Guericke have since responded. Both said the change had nothing to do with the financing. Hoffman hired a recruiter almost four months ago, and interviewed 72 candidates. Hoffman wants to build LinkedIn into a multi-billion dollar company, they said, and realized LinkedIn needed to scale, which means giving more attention to management issues, something that isnt his strength. His passion is in the product, said Guericke, rather than in sorting out management stuff. Nye is a protege of Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, someone Hoffman respects, Luo said.
Amazon (and others) will sell you time on a massive grid. Amazon's is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and it seems like it might be a good alternative to a VPS -- the elasticity of each instance would be a boon to a quickly growing web service.
I am currently developing my startup's software on a dedicated server running FreeBSD, and I am paying some attention to making it so it will scale (probably in a load balanced cluster).
To this end, I have set up FreeBSD jails (low overhead chrooted full installs) so that I can test splitting up the application in various ways.
I would imagine that a transparent grid system would reduce the need to worry about scalability issues for many uses.
"Update: Spokeswoman Kay Luo and co-founder Konstantin Guericke have since responded. Both said the change had nothing to do with the financing. Hoffman hired a recruiter almost four months ago, and interviewed 72 candidates. Hoffman wants to build LinkedIn into a multi-billion dollar company, they said, and realized LinkedIn needed to scale, which means giving more attention to management issues, something that isnt his strength. His passion is in the product, said Guericke, rather than in sorting out management stuff. Nye is a protege of Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, someone Hoffman respects, Luo said.