How to Expand Internationally with VP of Growth @ LinkedIn

Hello everyone. They used to say, "When America sneezes, the world catches a cold." I'm curious how many people have not heard of this. There are quite a few folks. That's okay because it's becoming less and less true. What the phrase refers to is the singular impact American economy has on the global economy. And what's happening today is that the world is very different. If you look at the global economy, while US is still the largest, there are other contenders. If you look at China, Japan, and India combined, essentially the same size as the US. And this chart is representing, the area represents the size of the economy. So you can see Europe is a pretty big block here as well. And the point here is that there are massive opportunities outside of the US today that all of us need to be thinking about. And if you care about growth at all, which I'm sure all of you do, The picture is even starker, not even close. So what this is showing is the breakdown of $6.5 trillion growth in the world GDP from 2017 to 2019. And China has lion's shares, more than one-third, so $2 trillion. US, just half of that, a trillion. And India and Europe combined is the same as the US. So lots of opportunities outside the US, but despite that, companies are not capitalizing fully on these global opportunities. If you look at S&P 500 and break down companies between those who have more global exposure, so 50% of their revenue is coming from outside the US, represented by green, and compare their growth in revenue, growth in earnings to companies that have less than 50% global exposure. It's a huge difference. You grow much, much faster when you start focusing on global.

But despite that, only 43% of S&P 500 revenue today is coming from outside the US.

And I wanted to set this context because a lot of people do not still get this and If they know about it, then they think it's too hard to capitalize on these opportunities, and I'll show you today that it's not actually. And I'll do that by talking through LinkedIn's growth story, which is the next thing I'll talk about, and then we'll go into the key lessons we have learned as part of growing LinkedIn. So before I go into LinkedIn, my context, I am VP of Growth at LinkedIn for international growth and data products. I've been there 7 years and it's been amazing to be part of this growth story in that time. Most recently, as part of Microsoft acquisition, I'm also leading the product integrations with Microsoft. So when you think about LinkedIn's growth, let's go back all the way to 2004. We have this tradition at LinkedIn of taking these milestone photos and it started in 2004 when you see these 12 people, very early folks, were taking the first of those photos for the 500,000 member milestone. There's a funny story about that. The team had bought this really nice expensive bottle of whiskey. They were saving that for actually the 1 million member milestone. And it was early days, so growth was slow. And they were waiting and waiting and waiting. And one day they figured, hey, 500,000 is a big enough milestone. Let's open the bottle. 13 years later, 2017, last year we celebrated 500 million members. That's 1,000 times growth, and it's been amazing journey to see that. And that growth would not have happened if LinkedIn wasn't global. You cannot get to that scale with just US. In fact, if you look at LinkedIn membership, it's distributed all over the globe. In fact, looking at EMEA as a region, US and Canada as a region, they're roughly comparable. Asia and Pacific is not that far behind, and even LATAM, that's 75 million members. So pretty wide representation from across the globe. We have offices in 32 cities across the world, and it's not just about the number of members. If you look at engagement today, 70%+ of our engagement, which we measure by sessions, actually is happening outside the US. So that global growth story has been very important for LinkedIn. And what I would like to do is walk you through the early years and break this growth curve into 3 distinct stages and walk through how our journey unfolded over these years. So the first stage is from the years 2003 when the company was founded to 2007, and this is when you're just starting to figure out what the right product is, you're talking to users, and building and finding product-market fit. What was important here was that LinkedIn built growth into the product right from the beginning, and that was really crucial. If you are a marketplace or if you're a network, you have to do that because if there are not enough users, nobody will get value out of it. And then Reid Hoffman and the founding team, they kickstarted the viral growth by actually pulling in their contact list and inviting people. And that was a very good set of people that modeled the behavior for community because they were entrepreneurs, they were VCs, founders, etc. At the same time, soon after we launched public profile. Now imagine before LinkedIn, when you had a meeting, what did you use to do? You had no idea if somebody reached out to you and you're meeting them about them. You could Google them, but mostly it was just their public website. And now LinkedIn changed that through public profiles. And that became a really big driver for us for growth because we capitalized on that behavior and human curiosity and showed people when they search on Google whoever they were looking for. And then through that, people realized, oh, I should have a profile too. So that was a big growth channel in form of SEO for us. Now what's interesting is without doing anything, Even in this first stage, the international growth started to happen. And that was because the product was in English, but a lot of the world speaks English. And because we are growing widely, and a lot of people in US are connected to people in UK and Canada and Europe and India, those people started to join the network, although very slowly.

But we started to get some numbers, and during this period we reached about 17 million members.

So the next phase is the 2008 to 2011. So those 4 years, the growth really accelerated, and that was because we started a cross-functional growth team, which is really important as you think about growth and growing internationally, having a dedicated cross-functional team whose true north is driving that growth, that's fundamental. This team was really focused on acquisition though, And what they were doing was they were identifying our key channels.

I talked about viral growth and SEO.

And then breaking it down into the drivers and optimizing each of those drivers. But we also started focusing a lot more on international expansion. So this is when we started translating the site into French and German and a bunch of other languages. And what we observed was every single time we translated into a new language, Very easily we'll double our growth rate in that market.

So that's like a starting point, we'll talk more about it, and it doesn't have to be that expensive. You can do it in-house, you can find companies that will do it for you, but really material needle mover.

And at the same time as we started getting global members, we created a global sales team to capitalize and monetize that growth. And then the third stage, which started in 2012 and lasted to last year, is where we really scaled our growth team. So we moved from just acquisition and signups to actually looking at an entire member lifecycle. So we are looking at activation, how people connect with others, how do we retain and reengage them through notifications. And we started focusing on quality growth because the engagement became more and more important. So LinkedIn, this stage went from just being a place where you respond to recruiters and find jobs to actually staying up to date with your industry and engaging with other professionals.

And that's why we moved from signups to quality signups and to what we call engaged quality members.

So these are people who have a large enough network, they have a good profile, and they're engaging repeatedly with LinkedIn. We also accelerated international expansion at this stage massively. One, we expanded the number of languages we supported to 24. So that gives us pretty broad coverage. We invested very heavily in mobile and partnerships. So this is the time when mobile is taking over the world. And internationally it was more important because in markets like China and India, they kind of bypass desktop and email.

So we had to do mobile. And partnerships became a very important channel as well, which I'll talk more about later.

We also started realizing that Yes, the localization effort is good, but there's some markets that are going to be harder and we'll need dedicated teams to go after them. So for China, India, Germany, and Japan, we had dedicated teams who were just focused on those markets.

So that can become important too, depending on the difficulty of market.

And we continue to expand the global sales team through this. So that gives you a pretty good context in overall framework for how LinkedIn's growth worked.

And now I wanna dive into the key lessons that we learned during this growth stage.

So the first one, which is really important for any business, is you have to start with developing a prioritization framework because you don't want to be in endless meeting with different people saying, "Oh no, I think that market is important. No, I think we should invest more in Europe." and not have a common basis and common language to talk about it. And how you build that framework, you know, you have to think about how it matters to your mission and vision. LinkedIn is a very mission and vision-driven company.

So our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. So you have the word global right there. So that was easy.

Our mission is connecting world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

Same thing, we're talking about the entire world's professionals.

From that perspective, we realized that we want every single professional on LinkedIn, and that was helpful because sometimes you'll have these debates with the sales team, "Oh, are members in a certain market, like India or Brazil, really that valuable?" And we said, "Fine, they're not valuable today, but it's still important to our mission." And what we believe is over time we'll be able to monetize them as well. After you've figured out that, then obviously you have to look at a number of dimensions. And you're looking at how good is your product market fit in these markets. So just because you have product market fit in the US doesn't mean the product also works equally well in a different country. So you can assess all of these markets in that dimension. You can look at what's your headroom for user or customer growth. And finally, you can look at what's— how valuable those users and customers are, and what's the monetization upside. So this chart here on the side, This is just illustrative, doesn't represent LinkedIn's priorities, but you can plot something like this. And the benefit of that is it will automatically cluster things. So you'll see here that US shows up pretty low on the user upside because you're probably doing well there. That's where you started, product market fit is good.

But then other markets, there may be more growth opportunities. In some markets you may not have product market fit.

And you can put that together to say, hey, We can think of some markets as core, which is we have good product-market fit, we're gonna invest in them, and they're gonna be relatively easy and predictable to monetize. Some markets are strategic where maybe the product-market fit is not as good, but they are really important, they're big markets, you have to get it right, so it's worth making the effort and making that strategic investment in them.

So usually a market like China or India and some of the Europe would fall fall under that.

And then finally, there may be markets that are just too hard. So Japan is such a market for us, and we think of it as a venture market because we're not really sure if LinkedIn's value propositions work in Japan because people really don't change jobs that often.

So there's this concept of employer loyalty, lifetime work, and median number of job changes is 1 in people's career. So you have to do something different, and we believe we can, but you have to think through very carefully.

And the final point there is make this a long-term opportunity analysis, so it's not about where the world is today, look at where it's going.

So where are the opportunities of the future going to come from, and make sure that is baked into this analysis. So if you do this, you will have a pretty good portfolio of core strategic and venture markets, and everybody can be aligned around that, and you, at any given time, you can allocate your investments accordingly. Between those 3 categories.

So the next thing is you want to start and get some quick wins, right? So start with the really high ROI, very basic localization initiatives. And as I mentioned earlier, like whenever we translate our site into a different language, we get like immediate double the growth rate. So this is the easy one, and especially for a lot of enterprise products, there's not that much to localize. You can do it in-house, you can hire services, you can even crowdsource it to users. There are a number of ways of doing that, but that's the starting point. You have to really do it, and you'll see immediate ROI. But what does it mean to localize a market? So it starts with translation, but translation is not just word-to-word copy. It includes the meaning of it, it includes tone and voice. It includes things like in the US we refer to school very broadly.

In India, school just means high school, so you cannot use school as a translation. You have to talk about college and university very separately and very distinctly and so on. So you wanna take into account things like that as well.

The next thing that you wanna think about is for your key flows. You want to really optimize that copy by country. So you've done the translations, but quite often you'll see how you message a certain action to users makes a big difference, and that's the value of A/B testing different messages. And one of the things you can do is you can come up with different variants, translate that in your key languages, and test it differently for different markets, and you'll find some really good wins out of that because How people are motivated is also different from market to market.

So different incentives would appeal to different people. So that's a very easy test if you have the scale and also very high ROI.

And then you wanna start getting into a little bit more complex but still relatively simple things like local payment methods.

So different payment providers in different market, these days it's very easy if you go with Stripe or some other provider. So you wanna just make sure you're doing that.

Localizing content, so if you, are using content marketing to drive traffic. Again, making sure you have localized content. If you're talking about the companies that are using your product, don't just use the US companies.

If you are selling in Europe as well, then use those companies in that copy here and just have that. And again, hiring some local editors, local customer service, BD, marketing. You want to start doing that because those things are going to be very easy and allow you to scale. To scale in these markets.

So that's the first stage. After that, you want to think in terms of barriers to adoption.

A lot of what growth and expansion is, it's removing these barriers and friction points, right?

And you want to understand them both through qualitative research, where you talk to users and understand what are their pain points, what is stopping them from doing certain things? And also quantitative analysis.

So hopefully you are tracking every single user action, you've built funnels out of that.

Start looking at that by the country breakdown, and you'll see very interesting things pop out of that where, oh, this flow works so smoothly, but here you're dropping a lot of customers after, you know, when they're just ready to buy.

And that's how you'll figure out, oh, maybe the pricing is not right and do something about it.

And some of the common barriers are just the user input fields.

You know, you start, you get a product manager who's based in the US, always grew up here, like they'll design the flow a certain way and it won't make any sense in a different market in terms of the data they're asking. So if you're asking for zip codes, for example, or state, not every country has states.

Site speed is a very common one. So that was something we realized that our site and our experiences were working fine in the US and Europe, but when you go to India, it was really slow.

It's taking 5 seconds to load a page and nobody has the patience to wait 5 seconds to load a page.

So that led to a project we call LinkedIn Lite and we had a dedicated team go after the entire LinkedIn experience, strip it down to the bare bones, started with the mobile web experience, then built a LinkedIn Lite app And that has been a huge driver for growth for us in India.

And then we expanded it to developing markets. Now it's live in 60+ markets. So you want to figure out those things and then go after them. And finally, pricing is a big issue that the US price point and willingness to pay is very different compared to some other markets. So you definitely want to try that, and a general rule of thumb for a lot of the developing markets, you immediately want to slash it by a third. That's the price point around which you want to test. But a lot of people don't bother. And then they'd say, oh, we're not monetizing in this market. And it becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy of, OK, maybe we can't monetize here. But you have to really test the price point to figure that out.

Then you have to also think about the growth channels that you're building. in general, so for us I talked about SEO and viral growth— are they going to scale across the world or not? And data will tell you whether they will or not. For us what happened was both SEO and viral growth, we're depending on two channels, they both didn't quite work that well in the rest of the world as they did in the US. SEO was relatively easy because Google is still dominant in most of the world. We had to do some work around how you have content in multiple languages and still tell Google that this is the same content and not duplicate. But that was relatively easy. China, you have to work with Baidu and 360, so that's a different story. But we invested in that to make sure we get that right. Viral growth was very, very difficult. So if you think about LinkedIn's viral growth flow, what is it? It's basically people importing their contacts, connecting with people already on LinkedIn, and then inviting others who are not on LinkedIn to LinkedIn, and that's accounted for almost half of our signups, so that 546 million people, 223 of them actually were invited by somebody to join LinkedIn. Now the problem was the entire flow, everything was built based on this assumption that people have emails, and that was a fine assumption in 2003 when we were just building a product for the US, Didn't work out when you go to China and India and people bypass email for the most part. Also didn't work for a lot of younger people because email just became different.

It's for work or it's for companies communicating with you, and mobile became really, really important.

And then we had to go and do this massive project that we call Project Digits to take our viral growth engine from email and transition it to mobile phone graph.

And SMS-based invitations. And that was a massive effort, but it paid off because now we got to a point where for China and India, our viral growth engine started working, and that was really important for us to be successful in those markets.

One thing to keep in mind as you are early in the history of the company, thinking of these things upfront will save you a lot of work.

So if we had, thought about, you know, like, oh, it's possible that people could invite people over a phone number, we wouldn't have to go and manually scrub like 4,000 or 6,000 places in the code where email was being directly referenced and so on. Like, it was just too painful. But it doesn't have to be.

Same thing goes for payment methods.

Like, wherever you can come up with abstractions that will allow you to scale in multiple markets, definitely design for that.

So, Another vector that becomes very important internationally is partnerships and government relations. In the US, partnerships can be effective. For us, it wasn't the case.

We grew off the other channels I mentioned.

But once we were thinking about international growth, it was really fascinating. I think as US companies, we have this advantage of name recognition and mindshare. A lot of people internationally actually want to work with the US companies. So when we went to China, we started, we had 4 million members in a country that has 1.5 billion people and 160, 150 million professionals and students.

So very small, we did not have much to offer our partners to be honest, at that scale.

Despite that, we'd go and talk to companies and they'd be very interested because globally we were a large network and the Chinese companies were trying to make their mark outside of China. So there was an interesting play, which is why we were able to partner with basically the who's who of tech in China.

So Tencent, WeChat, Alipay, JD.com, which is the Amazon of China, Huawei, which is, you know, largest smartphone makers.

And those partnerships were very important to our growth actually.

And I think that's where even if that hasn't worked for you in the US, you have to just go and start those conversations. You'd be surprised how often it's not a dollar-for-dollar value exchange, and it could be a lot of soft stuff that you can bring to the table that companies would be interested in. Government relations also becomes very important because the regulations are very different in different markets, and that was one of the— things that LinkedIn got right as we entered in China. We are one of the few companies that have been successful in China because we learned from the mistakes that others had made in terms of just ignoring the government and just doing their thing.

So we talked with the government, we built those relationships, and we asked ourselves, what does it take to comply with the local laws? And that doesn't mean you give up on your philosophy, your principles, but you have to have that conversation and it's just like any other negotiation. But that's very important. And on the positive side, I think if you build a relationship with the government, so I have a picture of Jeff Weiner, who's our CEO, with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India.

It was like we planned a visit, we were able to strike a partnership with the government of India very quickly, which was helping, people get jobs in India, and it just did so much for our growth there because of the publicity it got, because of the new growth channels it started. So that's also a very important angle that, you know, the governments are looking to show results, and if you can, you know, like help them in that, they are very eager to work with you.

All right, so the final point is, Evangelize global growth early and often. And this is the last point, but I think this is as important as the first one of building that prioritization model because it's human nature to just focus on what's near us. So you'll tell people global is important and then they'll do their quarterly planning and they'll say, "Ah, yeah, we did some user research in San Francisco." This is what we heard.

This is what we're going to go and do.

So you have to really repeat this until you get sick of hearing it yourself.

You haven't repeated it enough.

And you want to make that part of the company's mission.

Why limit yourself to just one country? Why not target the entire globe? And get your exec team really excited about that, and then and have them become the evangelists because that will matter. That's how culture changes in a company.

And the interesting kind of funny part is, you know, we had a very good head of product in China, Henry, and he started this tradition of saying, "Hey, let's take a bunch of you guys to China." So he organized this trip and it was a whirlwind tour. We were there for a week. Through like 5 cities all across the length of China, met a lot of tech companies. But it had such a profound impact on everyone who was part of this trip in terms of understanding China, how big it is, how fast people are moving there.

And when those people came back, they became really advocates of no, no, no, we gotta go and do China right. And then we repeated, took that playbook and we did that for Japan and Germany and India. So that's a good tactic to get people really immersed in the market so they can understand it.

Awesome, so quick recap. We talked about international expansion, this big growth opportunity. A lot of people don't realize it. LinkedIn, super global company, 70% of our growth and engagement is outside the US, and we talked about 6 rules. So develop a long-term market prioritization framework. Start with the high-level, high ROI things first in terms of localization, starting with translation. Then think about removing barriers to global adoption in each market that you care about.

And then once you've done that, that's the basic stuff, you really start thinking about how to scale your growth channels to be truly global in nature. And partnerships and government relations, don't discount them. They can be big in these markets. And finally, always be evangelizing growth.

And final thought I would leave you with is this quote by—

excuse me—

this quote by Chris Gardner, who is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness. How many people have seen the movie? Yeah, so read the book as well. It's a really good book.

And he is such an inspirational person. His life story, it's amazing. And he says, "The world is your oyster.

It's up to you to find the pearls." So go find them.

Thank you.