LinkedIn Co-founder: Microsoft had made other attempts to buy LinkedIn in the past

Back in June, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for a whopping $26.2 billion. There was a pretty big bidding war for LinkedIn, in which Microsoft went head-to-head with Salesforce. Today, Konstantin Guericke, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn stated that the software giant actually made previous attempts to acquire LinkedIn in the past. Guericke state:

"Microsoft since the early days had a standing offer to our VCs (venture capitalists), saying look, if you want to sell the company talk to us, so it's not a surprise that Microsoft ended up doing the deal,"

In the interview, Guericke revealed that he was "sad" about the acquisition — but he believes that Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn ultimately makes sense. Before the LinkedIn acquisition, Microsoft's biggest acquisition was Nokia (for $7.2 billion) — and it was a pretty huge failure. When asked if the LinkedIn acquisition would work out for both of the companies, Guericke stated that the LinkedIn acquisition will be "handled differently" after what happened with Nokia:

"I think it's very different situation. Nokia was not exactly thriving at the time when this happened. LinkedIn was thriving and it's kind of a career make-or-break for the Microsoft CEO (Satya Nadella) so I think it'll be handled differently, partly because of the lesson of Nokia,"

You can watch Konstantin Guericke's full interview with CNBC here.

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