Profile · Founder
Eric Ly
He wrote some of LinkedIn's first code. Now he wants to put a blue checkmark next to your resume.
Eric Ly — engineer, founder, and a patient builder of trust.
He wrote some of LinkedIn's first code. Now he wants to put a blue checkmark next to your resume.
Eric Ly spends his days thinking about a small problem with enormous consequences: how do you know a stranger online is who they say they are? At KarmaCheck, the company he co-founded in 2019 and runs as CEO, the answer is a background check that does not take two weeks to come back. He is trying to give hiring managers in hospitals and staffing firms something close to instant, verifiable truth about the people they are about to employ.
The framing is deceptively simple. Ly has said he wanted a "blue checkmark" that would appear next to profiles and resumes - a signal that the credentials are real. It is the same itch he has been scratching for two decades, because the last time he tried to verify who people were professionally, the company was called LinkedIn.
In June 2024 KarmaCheck raised a $45 million Series B led by Parameter Ventures, money aimed squarely at the slowest, most frustrating corner of hiring. The pitch is technology plus people: AI to speed up turnaround and accuracy, human experts to handle the parts that machines get wrong.
Technology is easy. People are hard.
- Eric Ly, on his most memorable career lesson
Eric Thich Vi Ly was born in Saigon on January 15, 1969, and came to the United States as a child in 1975. He grew up in the orbit of Silicon Valley and attended Homestead High School - the same school Steve Jobs once walked - where he set up desktop publishing on Macintosh computers for the student newspaper. The wiring between people and machines fascinated him early.
At Stanford he studied Symbolic Systems, the interdisciplinary major sitting at the crossroads of computer science, linguistics, and the mind, graduating with distinction in 1991 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His classmates would become a who's who of the industry: Reid Hoffman, Marissa Mayer, and Apple's Scott Forstall. Then came the MIT Media Lab, where his 1993 master's thesis built "Chatter," a conversational telephone agent - a talking assistant decades before anyone said "Hey Siri."
Out of school, he landed somewhere remarkable: the very first Java team at Sun Microsystems, working on a language that would go on to run much of the internet. Stops at NeXT, IBM, and General Magic followed, the last of which was building mobile software long before the smartphone existed.
In 2002, Ly joined Reid Hoffman and a small founding group - Jean-Luc Vaillant, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke - to start LinkedIn. As the founding chief technology officer, he helped architect the early product: the networking model, the search algorithms, the core features that let the site reach profitability and a fast-growing user base. He had already co-founded Netmosphere, a Java collaboration startup acquired by Critical Path, and Tresidder Networks, a mobile software company - but LinkedIn was the one that stuck in history.
By the time Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion, it was the world's largest professional network, with more than 400 million members. Ly had long since moved on to new things, but the connective tissue he helped lay down was now wrapped around the working lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Helped design LinkedIn's networking and search architecture and core early features.
Registered members by the time of the Microsoft acquisition.
Connecting people to meaningful opportunity - the mission he says KarmaCheck now completes.
After LinkedIn, Ly kept building. In 2007 he launched Presdo with $35,000 of his own money, which became Presdo Match - a tool to help conference attendees find the right people to meet. From 2008 to 2011 he served as a venture partner at Wellington Partners, the Munich-based VC firm, sitting on the other side of the table. He later founded Hub, a blockchain-based trust protocol, chasing the same question from a different angle: how do you encode trust between strangers?
A profile of him was once headlined "Eric Ly Lets the Game Come to Him." It is a fitting description of a founder who is methodical rather than loud, an engineer who would rather get the architecture right than chase a headline.
"Artificial intelligence holds immense potential for the staffing industry, but understanding its true capabilities and implications is vital."
"Background checks and credentialing have long been among the most frustrating steps of the hiring process for both candidates and hiring managers."
"Solutions need to be accessible and easy-to-use, which is harder to accomplish than simply making capabilities available."
"I was also looking for a 'blue checkmark' that would appear next to profiles and resumes."
"Respect that they are each different, and have different ways they want to work."
On using ChatGPT for the business: fact-check the answers, "because it's based off of a ton of information that is both accurate and inaccurate."
Born Eric Thich Vi Ly in Saigon, Vietnam.
BS in Symbolic Systems, Stanford, with distinction (Phi Beta Kappa).
MS from the MIT Media Lab; thesis "Chatter: A Conversational Telephone Agent." Joins the first Java team at Sun.
Co-founds Netmosphere (later acquired by Critical Path).
Co-founds LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman; becomes founding CTO.
Launches Presdo with $35,000 of his own money.
Microsoft acquires LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.
Founds KarmaCheck to modernize background checks.
KarmaCheck raises a $45M Series B led by Parameter Ventures.
The mission that started at LinkedIn - connecting people to opportunity - needs one more thing to work online: verified truth about who people really are.
- The idea behind KarmaCheck, in Ly's framing
Ly sat down with TechCrunch to talk through three decades of building - the wins, the failures, and what he would tell a founder starting today.