Conventional Valley wisdom: The chaos in the public stock markets won't affect private companies, right? Wrong. In August, LinkedIn had set plans to let employees sell some of their shares to investors. Interest in the company had been keen, given its stated plans to wait to IPO rather than sell out. But the stock-sale plan was conditioned on the Nasdaq index staying above a certain level. It has since fallen through that floor, meaning employees will no longer be able to sell their shares. And we hear Bain Capital, a major LinkedIn investor who's backing the stock-sales plan, has the right to walk away if the Nasdaq doesn't recover by mid-October.

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