LinkedIn’s Chairman Reid Hoffman is going to make a lot of money regardless of whether Facebook beats his company LinkedIn to the finish line by filing for an IPO first.  He is after all an investor in both companies.

But the folks over at the company pretty much understand that while there have not been too many Web IPOs recently, it’s imperative for them to get to the markets before Facebook. 

While the companies are very different (consumer vs. business), fundamentally, they are one and the same.  And LinkedIn - who this Sunday announced that in nine months they’ll open up their APIs - knows that it’s in a rush to sell shares to the public, because if the public had to choose between Facebook or LinkedIn, irrelevant of fundamentals, they’ll jump on the Facebook bandwagon like the media, bloggers, mainstream press and VC investors have.  This is noteworthy since the finance crowd has of note began to fancy Facebook, not only as an investment, but also as an actual business networking tool.

Incidentally, Eric Savitz of Barron’s agrees with this assessment, too.

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