Eric Ly

From 2008 to 2011, Ly served as a venture partner for Wellington Partners, a Munich, Germany-based venture capital firm whose investments include Xing and Spotify.

In 2007, Ly launched Presdo with $35,000 of his own money. The company first built a meeting scheduler chatbot described as "pure, refined, focused, with a fairly deep understanding of how real people, not just 'users,' think, act and want from their online apps." On the suggestion of Loic Le Meur and others, Ly was persuaded to adapt the meeting scheduler to conferences where it could help attendees arrange face-to-face meetings. The technology evolved into a mobile app called Presdo Match, "that facilitates networking" and "provides a searchable directory of attendee profiles (imported from LinkedIn when desirable), makes connection recommendations, and highlights which contacts from existing networks are in attendance so users can send messages and schedule meetings with other attendees." Presdo Match was launched in 2010 at the LeWeb conference, "the biggest European Internet conference." Ly subsequently expanded his marketing efforts for Presdo Match globally.

In 2002, Ly co-founded LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman, a Stanford schoolmate, and several other co-founders, including Jean-Luc Vaillant, Allen Blue, and Konstantin Guericke. When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2B, it was the world's "largest social networking site focused on the working world" with more than 400 million registered users.

In 1995, Ly co-founded Netmosphere, a software company enabling project management collaboration utilizing Internet technologies such as Java. Menlo Ventures invested in the firm, which was subsequently acquired by Critical Path, Inc. In 2000, Ly co-founded a mobile software company called Tresidder Networks in which Industry Ventures invested.

Ly went on to earn a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 1993 with a research thesis ("Chatter: A Conversational Telephone Agent") on combining speech-user interfaces and artificial-intelligence agents.

Ly attended Stanford University and volunteered as a science writer for the Stanford Daily in addition to his studies. Ly was inspired by professor Terry Winograd's perspective that computers ultimately serve as communications tools for people. Ly graduated with distinction in 1991 with a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems and as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His contemporaries included Scott Forstall, Reid Hoffman, and Marissa Mayer.

Ly was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and emigrated to the United States in 1975 as a result of the American War. He lived in San Francisco, California, for some years, and when his parents found jobs in Silicon Valley, his family moved to Sunnyvale, California.

Eric Thich Vi Ly (born January 15, 1969) is a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur and investor. Ly was co-founder of LinkedIn, a social networking site designed specifically for the business community, where he served as its founding chief technology officer. He is currently the CEO and founder of a blockchain based trust protocol Hub.