Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn Corp. and its three main venture backers will own a combined stake of $5.14 billion. It has been a long road for the founder and it has been eight years leading up to this day, the first IPO by a major US social networking site.

“Any solid returns like this are clearly a great thing and there’s been too few of them in the past decade,” said Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, a technology merger-and- acquisition advisory firm in Menlo Park, California. “This was not an overnight success by any means.”

The shares went from $49.25 to a major $94.25 at around 4pm NY time. At the closing price the market value of LinkedIn was around $8.91 billion.