Eva Shang

She came to Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry as an undergraduate from the suburbs of Philadelphia; The Harvard Crimson lists her as a member of the Class of 2017 (’17). She recalls having spent only six semesters on campus.⁠[1]

Entrepreneur writes that she entered Harvard College intending to become a civil rights lawyer.⁠[2]

At Harvard she founded the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Reform and tutored at prisons across MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry; the guest biography on Legal Talk Network instead describes her as the founder and executive director of the Student Alliance for Prison Reform while she was a student at Harvard University.⁠[1][3]

The Harvard Crimson writes that she spent a summer interning at a public defender’s office in Washington, D.C.; Above the Law wrote in 2016 that she had worked as an investigator at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., which provides free criminal and civil legal services to indigent people, and that she had pursued “access to justice” through protests, articles and volunteer work. She said: “I started to realize pretty quickly that the justice system is stacked against people who don’t have money for lawyers.”⁠[1][4]

She took creative writing classes, wrote op-eds as a member of The Harvard Crimson’s Editorial Board, and interviewed with “every single consulting firm” offered through Harvard’s career services. The Harvard Crimson writes that Professor Caroline Steiker, who taught her freshman seminar, later hired her as a researcher at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and wrote in an emailed statement to the paper that the creativity of her writing is “still vivid a decade later.” She recalls being rejected from the Harvard Advocate eight times.⁠[1]

In January 2015 the Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky described her as a sophomore at Harvard University.⁠[5]

She and her sister, Melissa Shang, launched a petition on Change.org asking the toy company American Girl to create a “Girl of the Year” character with a disability. The Philadelphia Daily News wrote at the time that the petition, posted on December 28, 2013, concerned the 2015 “Girl of the Year” doll and already had more than 60,000 signatures; the article gave the name of Melissa’s 17-year-old sister, who started and posted the petition with her, as “YingYing” and described her as a Harvard University freshman.⁠[5][6]

The article described Melissa as a 10-year-old fifth-grader with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which it called a form of muscular dystrophy, who used a wheelchair or a walker; she said: “For once, I don’t want to be invisible or a side character that the main American Girl has to help.”⁠[6]

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in 2016 that she was 17 and Melissa 10 when they started the petition; it eventually drew nearly 146,000 signatures, and American Girl, a subsidiary of Mattel, acknowledged the request but turned it down. The sisters also gave a local TEDx talk together, “Why Girls With Disabilities Matter.”⁠[7]

In January and February 2015 the sisters crowdfunded a novel on Kickstarter, raising more than $6,300, three times their goal; they then began writing and finished the manuscript that September. Melissa wrote the novel with her help.⁠[7]

She co-founded Legalist with her Harvard classmate Christian Haigh (Christian G.B. Haigh, Class of 2017, in The Harvard Crimson). Entrepreneur writes that they met at a campus club and that Christian Haigh was interested in data scraping; a correction in TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry states that he was enrolled in a joint bachelor’s–master’s program at Harvard. In a 2024 interview she said that Christian Haigh had been studying economics and computer science, and that “we’ve known each other for over 10 years at this point.”⁠[1][2][8][9]

She recalls that Christian Haigh decided to scrape the Massachusetts state court records website and bought two Mac minis for the job, which he set up in her Harvard dorm room. Entrepreneur writes that the pair first planned to scrape and repackage Massachusetts court records, and that the next step, she says, was “a little bit unclear”; LawNext writes that the company was originally going to rate lawyers using public court records.⁠[9][2][10]

Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry wrote in August 2016 that the pair had spent the first half of 2016 working on a legal-analytics startup whose original idea was to pull case records and calculate this information for lawyers. Legalist’s website gives 2016 as its founding year.⁠[11][12]

On June 21, 2016, the Thiel Foundation announced 29 new fellows of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry for 2016, chosen from more than 6,000 applications worldwide; each received $100,000 to “learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths like college,” along with mentorship from current and former fellows and the foundation’s network of technology entrepreneurs, investors and scientists. She was eighth on the list, with Cambridge, Massachusetts, as her hometown; the announcement described her as a co-founder of Legalist, a legal analytics and alert platform that helps lawyers track new developments in case law so that they can represent their clients more effectively.⁠[13]

The Harvard Crimson writes that in 2016 she received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, which required her to drop out of college and work full-time on Legalist Inc.; Gizmodo and Business Insider also wrote in August 2016 that she was a Thiel Fellow who had taken $100,000 from Thiel’s foundation to build Legalist. MONTCO Today writes that the $100,000 grant came from Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, the co-founder of PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry.⁠[1][14][11][15]

In a 2024 interview she described the program as “a hundred thousand dollar grant that’s given to people who drop out of school,” and said that she and Christian Haigh left Harvard University in 2016 (“We drop out of Harvard in 2016”); TechCrunch writes that Christian Haigh dropped out with her when they were accepted into Y Combinator. The Harvard Crimson writes that she felt trapped by the paths open to her after graduation—public-interest work, a corporate job or law school; she said: “I didn’t want to go and be a servant to the elite.”⁠[9][8][1]

She recalls that the pair “got into Y Combinator the summer of 2016 just off of this legal analytics idea”; Above the Law writes that she led Legalist through Y Combinator’s S16 (Summer 2016) program. MONTCO Today writes that the pair received $1.5 million from Y Combinator.⁠[9][16][15]

Entrepreneur writes that Y Combinator’s general counsel advised them that lawyers, who bill by the hour, are not incentivized to use analytics, and suggested that they use analytics to invest in cases instead; she recalls his words as: “I don’t think this legal analytics thing is gonna work out for you.” Business Insider wrote that they pivoted to litigation finance in July 2016 to help small businesses.⁠[2][9][11]

In July 2016 the sisters self-published the novel Mia Lee Is Wheeling Through Middle School; they had talked to a few publishers, none of which shared their vision, and their agent was Clelia Gore of Martin Literary Management. Its heroine, Mia Lee, is a sixth-grade stop-motion filmmaker who uses a wheelchair; she runs for president of her school’s video production club, her campaign posters keep disappearing, and she and her friends try to prove that her opponent is the thief. Melissa based the character on herself.⁠[7][17]

The Bookshare catalog record gives the publisher as Woodgate Publishing, the year as 2016 and the ISBN as 9780692746905, with Melissa and Eva Shang in the copyright line. In early August 2016 Rebecca Cokley, executive director of the National Council on Disability, organized a launch party for the book in Washington, hosted by the HSC Foundation; the 50 guests included disability advocates and a group of deaf women visiting from Ghana.⁠[17][7]

In August 2016 she pitched Legalist at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, arguing that litigation funding could become an “explosive asset class.” Business Insider wrote that Legalist was then funding only business-tort cases and avoided personal-injury claims to escape the “ambulance chaser” image; it typically provided $50,000 to $500,000 per case and negotiated for up to 50% of the settlement, found cases through lawyers who had signed up for its original analytics service, and paid out of its own bank accounts.⁠[11]

At Demo Day the founders said that Legalist had funded one lawsuit for $75,000 and expected a return of more than $1 million; she said that, on average, $1 spent on litigation financing returned $1.40. Gizmodo wrote that Legalist’s algorithm used 58 variables, including the presiding judge and that judge’s current caseload, and had been trained on cases going back to 1989 to estimate how long a case would take and what risks it carried.⁠[14][11]

Coverage at the time often compared Legalist with Peter Thiel’s funding of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which had come to light that year; she said: “That’s the kind of thing we’re staying away from here.”⁠[14][11][1]

On December 21, 2016, Above the Law introduced her as the chief executive of Legalist and noted that neither she nor Christian Haigh was a lawyer; she said: “We are not lawyers, but we are huge legal-data nerds.” She described litigation finance as “a natural extension” of her interest in access to justice.⁠[4]

The article explained that Legalist used big data and proprietary algorithms to help small businesses fund lawsuits against larger opponents, on a non-recourse basis that she called “a lot like contingency-based fees,” but for commercial cases; applicants included local ice cream manufacturers, bakeries, family-owned vineyards and small toymakers. The firm assessed cases from a short questionnaire filled in by the client and the attorney together with public records, and its algorithm estimated time to resolution and likely outcomes from factors such as the speed of a court’s docket and how often its cases settle; she said: “Algorithms sound scary – but in reality, it just means using past data to inform future decisions.”⁠[4]

She argued that when clients fall behind on fees, lawyers should tell them that litigation financing is an option, and that failing to do so is “a costly omission – and frankly, in my opinion, an unethical one.” The article also named Y Combinator and the Thiel Foundation among Legalist’s backers and noted the Boston Globe’s statement that Legalist had accumulated a database of 15 million court cases from all over the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry.⁠[4]

LawNext and Above the Law write that Legalist raised its first fund, of $10.25 million, in 2017 (TechCrunch gives $10.2 million); LawNext writes that the fund financed 38 cases. She recalls that “it takes us a full year to raise our first $10 million fund in 2017.”⁠[10][16][8][9]

She recalled in 2020: “When we launched Legalist’s first fund three years ago, I was 21 and had just dropped out of college.” Entrepreneur writes that she described the roughly $10 million fund as “cobbled together” and that it returned 1.7 times net of fees.⁠[16][2]

On March 30, 2017, she was a guest on the Legal Talk Network episode “How Algorithmic Data Finances Litigation,” discussing Legalist’s use of algorithms and data to underwrite litigation finance for commercial cases.⁠[3]

Above the Law writes that she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018.⁠[16]

Institutional Investor writes that by 2018 Legalist had found attractive deals but had little capital, and made three co-investments with a large publicly traded firm, which she said was not Burford Capital.⁠[18]

In a 2024 interview she said that CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry has a “law office study program” in which one apprentices under a lawyer to prepare for the bar exam, and that she had been considering law school. From 2018 she and Christian Haigh went through the program under Legalist’s then general counsel, whom she named only as Curtis; it took almost five years, and “we ended up taking the bar exam last year and we both passed.” She said that this former general counsel “shaped everything that Christian and I know about litigation.”⁠[9]

Since 2018 she has written the Substack newsletter “silicone valet,” subtitled “essays about growing up.” The Harvard Crimson writes that the essays open with “Dear friend” and range over aging, homesickness, “wunderkind syndrome,” money, “reproductive futurism” and High School Musical; she keeps a separate diary for processing emotions and publishes on Substack only once she has reached conclusions she thinks are worth sharing.⁠[1][19]

She said: “I think I’m a good storyteller.” She added that she had not been very good at writing because “I didn’t have anything interesting to write about,” and that she had no formal plans for a larger literary project but hoped to write a young-adult novel someday.⁠[1]

On September 17, 2019, TechCrunch wrote that Legalist had raised $100 million for a new fund, roughly ten times its first; LawNext wrote that the investors in this Fund II included insurance companies, endowments and funds of funds, and that it would finance 100 to 200 commercial cases over two years. TechCrunch described her as 23 and Legalist as an 11-person company; the fund was structured like a private-equity fund, with a traditional management fee and carry, and had a five-year life.⁠[8][10]

TechCrunch wrote that Y Combinator owned 7% of Legalist and that its other stakeholders included Vy Capital and Refactor Capital. Of the 38 cases funded from the first fund, about half had been settled, decided or otherwise resolved, and more than 80% of those had ended favorably; she said: “We can’t talk about fund returns, but we scaled up our funds 10x.”⁠[8]

The article explained that Legalist took only commercial cases needing less than $1 million in funding, often breach-of-contract disputes, which she likened to something “akin to seed-stage investing”; the firm scraped state and federal court records for indicators such as whether a court favors plaintiffs, which kinds of cases tend to win, who the judge is and where a case could be dismissed, and “our algorithms help our two underwriting attorneys perform diligence more quickly.” LawNext wrote that Legalist covers litigation costs, including attorneys’ fees, deposition costs and a business’s working capital, and is repaid only if the case produces a recovery.⁠[8][10]

LawNext wrote that Richard Posner, who had retired from the Seventh Circuit in 2017, announced in June 2019 that he was joining Legalist as an adviser; in a statement released by the company she said: “Technology allows Legalist to fund ‘David versus Goliath’ cases brought by small businesses.”⁠[10]

Above the Law published Gaston Kroub’s written interview with her in two parts, the second on July 14, 2020. She said that Legalist had just announced that it had invested in more than 100 cases through 81 investments, averaging about $500,000 each; she called Legalist “the first litigation finance firm to use machine learning and AI technology” to source and underwrite investments, and said that it was one of the few litigation funders managed entirely by nonlawyers, although it now had many attorneys on the team; in its early days other funders had co-funded a number of cases with it.⁠[16][20]

She said that Legalist was the only litigation funder specializing in cases requiring less than $1 million in legal fees, which she saw as the base of the litigation “pyramid”; COVID-19 had pushed many clients and attorneys toward litigation funding for the first time, and Legalist had deployed more capital in the second quarter after the pandemic began than in any previous quarter (the text reads “Q2 of 2019”). She said that since its first fund in 2017 Legalist had invested in cases involving police brutality, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, prison conditions and wrongful conviction, and had worked with leading exoneration nonprofits and AmLaw 100 firms.⁠[20]

She said that the biggest misconception about litigation funding was that it is not mission-driven, and that legal-ethics objections such as champerty had declined, pointing to MinnesotaMinnesotaMinnesota is a state in the north-central United States and the most northerly of the 48 contiguous states; its capital is St. Paul and its largest city is Minneapolis. It was admitted to the Union on May 11, 1858, as the 32nd state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,706,494.Open the full entry’s recent abolition of champerty.⁠[20]

MONTCO Today’s article of April 22, 2022, drawing on reporting by Matt Wirz of The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry, wrote that she was 26 and that Legalist had raised about $400 million over the previous six months or so; after years of struggling to find investors, she said of those who had turned her down: “I don’t blame them,” and “If I were an allocator, there would be no reason to take a 20-year-old dropout with a computer seriously.”⁠[15]

The article quoted Legalist’s website as saying that the firm “uses data-driven technology to invest in credit assets at scale,” with litigation finance as its flagship strategy: it uses AI to find the cases with the best odds, backs plaintiffs’ lawsuits and earns a percentage of court judgments; she said that about 80% of the lawsuits Legalist backs are won, against an industry average of 65–75% that she gave.⁠[15]

Institutional Investor wrote that she and Christian Haigh launched the firm as 20-year-old Harvard University dropouts after completing Y Combinator, and that Legalist then managed more than $650 million and aimed to reach $1 billion by the end of the year. Besides its litigation finance fund (targeting 20% net returns with a five-year lock-up), it ran a strategy of lower-middle-market debtor-in-possession bankruptcy loans and an evergreen government receivables fund, and was raising a second bankruptcy fund; she said that it had moved into new strategies to avoid competing head-on with Burford Capital and Parabellum Capital.⁠[18]

The article described how Legalist’s platform crawls PACER and more than 200 databases covering state courts and government contractors; an internal tool the team calls a “truffle sniffer” and machine learning sort the data by case type, party and event and feed a decision tree that determines whether to finance a case. Legalist sends customized automated emails to parties in the selected cases, about 20% of whom reply with interest, after which underwriters pursue a term sheet. She said: “If we have data origination right, it’s much easier to send term sheets in a few weeks.”⁠[18]

The article added that she rejects a “cutthroat” finance culture and wants to “grow the pie,” naming Rishi Ganti of Orthogon Partners as an inspiration; that year Legalist built a board with former Nuveen and Canyon Capital executives and attracted endowments, foundations and insurers; she put the litigation fund’s success rate at about 80% and said: “Litigation finance is definitely uncorrelated and counter-cyclical.”⁠[18]

On October 24, 2023, Entrepreneur wrote that she, at 27, had started the fund out of a garage at 20; Legalist’s second fund had raised $100 million and it had raised another $400 million over the past two years, managed almost $1 billion for institutional investors and used its technology in strategies beyond litigation finance. She called it “very unusual for college students to start a hedge fund” and said that she had no plans to leave anytime soon.⁠[2]

The article added that she recruited Dominique Mielle, a former hedge fund manager and author of the memoir Damsel in Distressed, to Legalist’s advisory board, which Legalist was trying to fill with women who had been hedge fund general partners.⁠[2]

On June 27, 2024, the BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry podcast Masters in Business released host Barry Ritholtz’s conversation with her, “Eva Shang on Litigation Finance Funds.” The episode description calls her co-founder, general partner and chief executive officer of Legalist Inc., says that she leads its 35-person team of engineers, attorneys and analysts and is a member of the firm’s valuation and investment committees and board of directors, and states that she studied economics at Harvard College. At the start of the show the host said that Legalist had created “a white space”: there had been no dedicated alternative-credit fund, let alone one with nearly a billion dollars in client assets. She said that “we see our firm as a tech driven alternative credit firm,” targeting net returns of 20–25% across the fund; litigation finance was by far its largest strategy, and it also had “a couple hundred million” in a type of distressed lending in bankruptcy, DIP lending, and a couple hundred million more in government receivables—90- to 120-day receivables from federal or state government entities, paid directly by the government to Legalist.⁠[21][9]

She said that Legalist raised its first, second and third funds in 2017, 2019 and 2021, and that a fourth would launch later that year; its team had about 5,000 calls with attorneys every year, and many employees had been with the firm for five years or more. She recalled that the firm’s first loss was a $150,000 investment, which “threw into question our entire business model,” and in telling the story she said that she and Christian Haigh bought the $1.50 hot dogs sold at CostcoCostcoCostco Wholesale Corporation is a U.S. membership warehouse retailer that began operations in Seattle in 1983 and is headquartered in Issaquah, Washington.Open the full entry. She also recalled that when she was about 22 one of the firm’s advisers and limited partners, a billionaire, came by the office and advised her to “hire good people and retain them.”⁠[9]

Her closing advice to recent graduates was that “people should not be afraid to deviate from that traditional lockstep path.” Asked about her favorite books, she named Amor Towles, who had worked in finance before writing literary works, and said that her favorite of his works is the short story You Have Arrived at Your Destination; she also said that she was a big fan of Morgan Housel’s podcast on the psychology of money.⁠[9]

On April 28, 2026, Bloomberg Law wrote that Legalist, a California-based, tech-powered litigation funder, had closed its fourth and largest fund at $415 million, investing in commercial legal assets with a focus on single cases and portfolios, and that its assets under management across all strategies had nearly doubled over the past year to $2 billion.⁠[22]

As of November 2026 the “About Us” page of Legalist’s website lists her and Christian Haigh as General Partners and states that the firm, active in legal investing since 2016, manages about $2 billion for endowments, foundations, family offices and other institutional investors; the page gives its assets under management by year as $10 million in 2017, $10 million in 2018, $110 million in 2019, $181 million in 2020, $493 million in 2021, $668 million in 2022, $881 million in 2023, $1.0 billion in 2024 and $1.7 billion in 2025.⁠[12]

The page states that Legalist uses algorithms that scan court dockets, public filings and government records to find opportunities, that attorneys and investment professionals evaluate each one on its legal merits, downside protection and path to recovery, and that each investment is sized, structured and priced around the specifics of the matter.⁠[12]

MONTCO Today writes that she emigrated from China at the age of three, grew up in Paoli, PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry, and is a graduate of Conestoga High School. A Philadelphia Daily News column in January 2015 wrote that the family lived in Paoli and that her parents were Cheng and Sue; The Philadelphia Inquirer gave their full names in September 2016 as Sue Liu and Cheng Shang and wrote that the family had moved from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts about a year earlier.⁠[15][5][7]

Her younger sister, Melissa Shang, was born with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological disorder that causes muscular atrophy in the legs and arms; Melissa spoke at the United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry for the International Day of the Girl Child and in 2014 helped introduce Malala Yousafzai when she received the Liberty Medal.⁠[7]

She has said that her parents are immigrants who “feel like playing it safe is always the way to go,” and that when she started the company she was “basically just out of my parents’ house.” TechCrunch wrote in 2019 that her mother had asked when she would return to school; she said that her parents “really don’t understand it, but they can see that I like what I’m doing.”⁠[9][8]

In the June 2024 interview she said that she now had her own house and a one-year-old baby, and that the previous fall she had made Thanksgiving dinner for the first time.⁠[9]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]

Legalist: Official website: https://www.legalist.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Personal website: https://evashang.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19][1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/eva_shang (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eshang/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]