Jeff Weiner on Establishing a Plan and Culture for Scaling | Blitzscaling 19

This is session 19 of technology enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Alan Blue and Chris Yeh. This class features Reid Hoffman interviewing Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn. This podcast has been produced by Greylock Partners. For more podcasts, class notes, slides and videos, please visit greylock.com so it is.

My pleasure and honor to introduce Jeff Weiner. He and I actually had been hearing about each other for some number of years before we finally met. I think we were actually at a conference dinner table arranged by Adam and his folks.

Boulevard brainstorming session, February 2008. No, no, no, this is Kirkpatrick days.

Yeah, exactly. And then started talking to each other about how it is that we build these amazing products and companies in Silicon Valley and eventually had the enormous good fortune to work together, not by accident. And so. And so with that, let's open to. So I persuaded you to come take a look at LinkedIn and try out LinkedIn. And you arrived and there's roughly 400 people at the company. What was the situation on the ground as you found it?

So it was December 2008. We had 338 folks, and I found an incredibly talented group, not surprisingly, that Reid and my predecessor, a guy named Dan Nye, had assembled and even before my first day, had already started to familiarize myself with the company through Reid, through some of the investors that were at Greylock, where I was in the IR at the time and had recognized that there was much more to it than met the eye. Which is interesting because to this day, when people come inside the company to interview or they want to talk about where we're headed, a common response is, wow, I had no idea how much was going on or how big this could potentially be. So I found an enormously talented group of people and a platform with almost unlimited potential within the specific context of creating value for professionals, creating economic opportunity for a global workforce. I also found a situation where there, even though it was 335,038 people, there were a lot of different things taking place. There were a lot of bets that had been placed. And Reid, for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to know him, or first principles, one of Reid's first principles is preserving optionality. I think it's one of the reasons he's been so effective as an investor, and it was one of the reasons I believe that LinkedIn reached critical mass was because of the various areas in which the company was. Was investing to see if they could generate critical mass and scale at some point, though, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself essentially the question, if you could only do one thing, what would it be? And that's another way of thinking about how you define your core. And at that point, I think there was a good understanding of the potential avenues the company could take in terms of defining its core more specifically. But there was a fair amount of activity taking place for a company of that size.

And so what did you. Because part of the reason we opened there is not just it's the narrative arc, but it's the scaling part, because we had gotten to what in our language is essentially a village and now it's a nation in terms of the size of the base. And we were not actually particularly well set up for really getting the scale. There were a bunch of different kind of internal things that we're going to go through some of the specifics of. But how did you look at it from a scale thing? Like, what were the things you said? This is the things I need to do in the first 100 days. This is what we need to be prepped in order to do. Here's how we focus. Go back to then and think, okay, this is what I saw. And these were my first 100 days in terms of what I was doing.

So the first hundred days was a lot of listening. So I had a chance to meet with essentially every employee of the company, certainly every team, either through one on ones or round bag lunches. Then we did a series of deep dives for every product line and business, business line. And was just trying to learn as much as I possibly could about the company, the team, the direction it had been heading, the direction where people wanted it to go. So there was a lot of listening. Rather than develop a 100 day plan, it was make sure I had a chance to understand where the people who knew the company best thought it was going and where it had been. At that point, I thought we were in a position where we needed to make some choices and decisions about defining the core. And based on my previous experience at a company like Yahoo, which was involved in a lot of different businesses, by design I mean, Yahoo helped organize the Internet for the masses. That was one of the reasons Yahoo was able to generate so much value so quickly. But in the later years, I think that same advantage, that same value proposition that Yahoo had established became an Achilles heel. Because it was involved in so many different business lines, it invites a lot of competition within each of those verticals. And a company that could focus exclusively on one thing within that vertical, say Google and Search or Amazon and E Commerce, for example, I think has a much higher likelihood of being successful. So that was one of the most valuable lessons I learned while I was at Yahoo. And LinkedIn was the next company I had a chance to be a part of. I did an EIR stint in between, and I wanted to make sure that we had a very clear sense of what our core was and what it was we were trying to accomplish. And so one of the first things I did with the leadership team was codify our mission, our vision, our addressable opportunity, our strategy, our priorities, our measurable objectives, our culture and our values. And while that may sound like a lot, it's basically how a company defines its narrative. And it fits all on one page. And you don't have to limit yourself to one page, but it's an excellent forcing mechanism to be able to very clearly and simply articulate what a company is about, what it's trying to accomplish, how it wants to accomplish it.

So go through a little bit of what those details are, because that preparation for that scale was one of the very first things I learned from you.

So I guess I would start with delineating clearly between mission and vision, which a lot of companies have a tendency to use synonymously. And I think it's a lost opportunity. So for me, a mission is an overarching objective that everyone at a company can participate in. It should be measurable and realizable, and hopefully it's inspirational. So our mission at LinkedIn is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. And when we talk about professionals in that context, we're talking about an addressable opportunity of about 780 million knowledge workers and students, pre professionals. The vision is a dream. It's true north, and if it's done properly, is really designed to inspire people so they have something to reach for. And historically, at least for me, a vision wasn't necessarily something you operationalize or something you plan around, but it does provide some shared sense of purpose for an organization. And one of the things that's been so fun and exciting about LinkedIn, and we'll probably get to it a little bit later, is that we're now in a position where we're trying to operationalize our vision. We're trying to operationalize and manifest our dream, which I've never been a part of before, and it's pretty cool. So our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. There's over 3 billion people in the global workforce. So that's the vision. So I'm seeing some hands. Do you go to folks during the class? Yeah, I'm wondering.

So a lot of people talk about vision and missions and important to the very core.

How do you know when it's time to either articulate or re.

Articulate?

Why would you wait to do that?

Yeah, because the question's on the mic. So interpret the question as you.

So when do you know it's time to codify or define mission and vision? And how often do you revisit? Is that. Why wait? Why wait? So I wouldn't wait. So I think Reid and The founders of LinkedIn probably had a pretty clear sense of where they wanted to take the company, whether or not it was codified as a specific mission statement. And remarkably, you can go back and it's on slideshare, it's up on LinkedIn, but you can go back and look at the Series B. Yeah, the Series B deck that was provided to Greylock. Yep. And it's crazy how accurately Reid and the founders articulated where they want to take the company many, many years down the road. It's not surprising if you know Reed and you know the team, but at any rate, whether or not they actually took the time to codify statement, they had a very clear understanding of where they wanted to go. For me, coming out of Yahoo and having seen that situation, I just felt it was really important to define that as quickly and early on as possible. It just so happened that's when I joined the company. It was at 338 people. If I was founding a company today, one of the first things I would do is codify a mission.

Actually, the key thing to understand is it wasn't that we didn't have a mission and a vision, although we didn't articulate them with that kind of language. That's useful. It's the question of the format for how it is you get a common language across people. When you're at 300 people going to 10,000, and that isn't actually as important to get a common language in your 15 people, the common language, we're all in the same room. Hello. We're talking to each other. So that doesn't matter. But when you're beginning to plan to get to scale, actually, in fact, figuring out how it is, you're going to have 10,000 people on the same language. That was the thing that Jeff looked around and said, okay, we're not set up for that. We may have the mission and vision in mind, but we're not set up for that yet. And that was like basically what you did in the first two months, I think.

Put another way, when your organization's 15 people and you're essentially all in the same room, that's your office. If you want to have an all hands and discuss the direction of the company, or revisit the direction of the company, you say, hey, everyone, can I get your attention? That's an all hands. When you're 150 people, maybe you crowd everyone into the cafeteria and maybe you're all on the same floor or not. At 1500 people spread across multiple cities, you don't have that luxury. And so things like your mission statement, your strategy, your target audience, your core value proposition, your culture and your values aren't codified. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do strong leaders. And so they will project into the vacuum what they bring to the table and their own wants and dreams and desires. And that's how hypergrowth companies can start to go off the rails, is that you don't have clarity around your sense of purpose, what you're trying to accomplish and how you want to accomplish it. And so people start to project into that vacuum the way they think things should be done. And it becomes very difficult to keep a group of people on the same page as you achieve greater and greater scale that way.

So let's shift to culture. Because actually I think one of the. If you look at some of the arc of how you. Some implicit things in terms of what Eric Schmidt said, some very explicit things, Reed Hastings said, some of the things that Brian Chesky was saying. Actually, in fact, one of the.

That's quite a lineup you had in here. Yes, should be attending this class.

But actually, in fact, one of the visible, but not often commented on secrets of how it is Silicon Valley companies achieve strong scale is actually they all have some strong culture. They define it differently, they implement it differently. But that creation of culture, which creates a horizontal norm across the various people. And so therefore you're not completely beholden to vertical command structures as a way of you're expanding your bandwidth and your capacity organization, the culture is one of the key glues that does that. And that's actually one of the things that is a key part of the scaling. So you get there, we have a culture, but we haven't actually really defined it in a way that to grow. What are the things that you started doing to put a culture in place that would enable scale codifying?

Yeah, I think it starts with having a shared understanding of what culture is. So that could be a Rorschach test. So we had a shared understanding. I believe culture is the collective personality of an organization and it's not only who you are, but who you aspire to be. And the aspirational component is critical. If you don't have the aspirational component baked into the culture, what happens is you start to define the cultural dimensions of the company. And if you're not constantly walking the walk on those dimensions, then when the leadership gets up in front of the company and starts presenting the culture, people are rolling their eyes and they start cracking jokes about the fact that it's all kind of bs. It becomes like a Dilbert comic strip. When you factor in this notion of aspiration it provides and gives the company permission to not necessarily constantly be doing everything that it ultimately wants to do. There's that aspirational component, which is we want to reach and ultimately become that kind of company. So I think that's a really important part of it. I would also clearly draw a distinction between culture and values, which again, some companies have a tendency to use synonymously. And values are nested within a culture. Values help a company to define its culture. And values for me are the operating principles upon which a company and its leadership make day to day decisions. So there's culture and there's values. By the time I joined LinkedIn at about 330 people, 340 people, there was an increasing demand for the culture. And the first time I was asked that question, I probably just made a joke, cracked a joke like a Dilbert comic strip. Because at the companies I'd been at previously, it wasn't necessarily something that was of great focus, where a lot of energy was placed. And as the CEO of the company, I started getting asked that question more, more and more increasingly, which was, what's our culture? And as I reflected on why people were asking, I realized it comes back to the same concept that we talked about a moment ago, which is nature abhors a vacuum. And when you don't have a codified culture and you start to reach this level of scale, your hiring increases, the rate of hiring increases. And at some point you're going to be hiring and recruiting people from companies that already achieved scale. And they're going to bring their own cultural baggage from the companies that they worked at, where they were inculcated and they figured out how to do things. And if the company doesn't have a codified culture, they're going to start manifesting whatever the culture they've learned. And they're coming with. This is particularly important when you're trying to expand globally and you're setting up new offices that aren't in the same place as the headquarters. And you want to make sure that the leadership that's setting up the offices in these remote locations are good cultural actors. Because if that's not the case, they will set up the office with their own culture and where they want to take the company. And that's a very good way of leading to a bad outcome. So, interestingly enough, there had already been an exercise underway when I joined the company, a bottoms up exercise, which I thought was really interesting, that a guy named Arvind Rajan, who had led our talent efforts, he was working on a project where he had identified a few employees and was asking them about values and culture. So when I got there, I wanted that work to continue. But I sat down with the leadership team and we started talking about the kind of organization we wanted to be a part of and what kind of personality we collectively believe that the company should be manifesting and espousing. And we wanted to make sure that it was the kind of organization that we would aspire to, to work at and that we would be inspired by. And so there was a fair amount of time spent on wordsmithing and getting that stuff right. And words have power, especially when you are laying the foundation for an organization like this. With regard to values, I find that organizations that have the most effective values are those where the leadership, the founders, they are using as values the things they find themselves, the mantras they find themselves using most often. Because what's critical in terms of manifesting culture and values is walking the walk. So it's easy to talk about this stuff and it's easy to paint your walls with your culture and values and hand out mouse pads and those laminated cards you stick in your wallet. But at the end of the day, if the leadership of the organization is not modeling this behavior, if you're not recruiting people against your culture and values, onboarding against it, developing your talent against it, and evaluating performance against it, that stuff's really not worth the paper it's printed on. And so you want to make sure that you've got buy in from your leadership, that they believe in it, that they're going to model the behavior, that they're reinforcing it. And you also have buy in from your broader employee base that also feels like they were part of defining that culture and defining those values.

And so one key part of this is Leadership. So part of, again, one of the things you started pretty quickly doing is systematizing how do you develop leaders? Like, who are the key leaders gonna be? Are we gonna define and fit a culture that will then become a horizontal norm? But also, let's create a way that leaders are improving. We have second venture leaders. So how did you approach the how do we grow leadership within a company as we're gonna scale?

So I guess it begins with recognition that two of the most important continuums an organization and leadership team need to navigate as they achieve critical mass and scale are first, this idea that there's a continuum with problem solving on the one end and coaching on the other, and a second continuum where you have tactical execution on one end and you have proactive strategy on the other end. And when cultivating and developing a leadership team, one of the first things that you need to do is make sure the leadership understands the importance of coaching. And what happens is more often than not, a startup, say with 15 people is successful because the founders and those founding employees are really good at solving problems and getting shit done. And so as the organization continues to scale, they knee jerk to that aptitude, they knee jerk to that skill set. After all, it's one of the reasons they've been successful. But as you're adding people into the organization, as soon as they experience a problem, they come to you as a leader. And if you're knee jerking to solving the problem for them, the next time they experience the problem, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to come right back to you. And so if you can take the time to start to evolve along that continuum and recognize the fact that you have great skill at solving problems, but you need to really invest in coaching other people to solve the problems for themselves, that's where you start to achieve real skill at the leadership level. And it gets even better when you can coach others to coach their teams. That's when you achieve true scale separately. You've got tactical execution and proactive strategic thinking. And that requires time. So to make that shift, you know, executing is something that teams get really good at as they are achieving success. Otherwise they wouldn't be having that success. And you have to carve out cycles, you have to. I like to bake in about 90 minutes of buffer time in my daily schedule. And that's time where I can catch my breath, I can connect dots, I can synthesize, I can catch up, I can have extemporaneous discussions. That's time where I can Start to think proactively. And if you're not carving out the time to think proactively, it's going to be really difficult to lead the organization because you're going to be constantly firefighting and constantly reacting. So you want to be able to take the time to start to think ahead and so you can lead the organization in that direction as opposed to unfortunately playing catch up with your competitors. Because once you start playing their game and reacting to their moves, it's basically game over. So both of these continuums require a shift. When you're a 15 person company, what it takes to be successful as a 15 person company, you better be good at problem solving and getting shit done. That's a huge part of it. You have a vision, you have a concept. You got to build the prototype, you got to raise the finance, you got to hire the. I mean, it's a boom, boom, boom. As you start to get bigger, as you start to reach that kind of scale, critical mass, you need to start to begin that evolution across at least those two continuums.

And one of the things that actually kind of surprised me is something that would never occur to me, you actually hired some coaches into the company. So why don't you say a little bit about that? Because that was the kind of thing, like precisely the kind of thing a startup guy would go, that's insane. This isn't a person who's building a product that we're shipping. What the heck are we hiring this person for?

It just goes back to the same concept, you know, coaching. I've been at companies where you bring in coaches or you bring in HR experts or, I mean, we've all been there and it's an eye rolling experience and it doesn't feel like it's worth the time. And the last thing in the world a startup that's just going wants to do is bring somebody in to do that kind of stuff. But if you want to successfully scale, you're going to need a leadership team underneath you who's going to help you make that happen. Otherwise you're not going to be able to execute at scale. And once you begin to recognize the importance of coaching, of mentorship, of development, of understanding and taking the time to understand what someone wants to accomplish with their career, their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their insecurities, their vulnerabilities, you can start to play to their strengths. You can start to complement those areas where they need help. And that requires time and it requires people that know how to coach. And if you're fortunate enough you'll have a leadership team that inherently is good at coaching. I think you would be, I think it would be an unusual set of circumstances where an organization that is just in the throes of scaling would find themselves in a situation where they couldn't benefit from professional coaches. And so in our case, one example would be a guy named Fred Kaufman who wrote a book called Conscious Business. And I had a chance to meet Fred at Yahoo. He was brought in to help and it was one of those situations where I expected an eye rolling experience. As a matter of fact, I don't even think I went to the first session that I was supposed to go to and members of my team came back and said, this guy's amazing. And they gave me a handout that had been, I think it was an excerpt from the book. And it stayed on my desk for a while. And at some point I actually remember flipping through and I was like, this is different. And eventually the executive team at Yahoo was encouraged to spend some time with Fred together. And I was extremely impressed. And we just developed a friendship. I consider him a mentor. And so he's been enormously influential on my career ambitions and what I'm hoping to accomplish and the way he's provided some feedback and guidance there. And at one point I just invited him to join LinkedIn and to be a part of our team and he thought he was done ever working for a company again. But I think the platform is so uniquely positioned to help Fred accomplish what he wants to do, which is, for lack of a better term, open. Sourcing his wisdom and his experience and the things that he's written about and sharing that with the professional world, which he's in a position to do uniquely on LinkedIn. So that would be an example. And he's been, as you know, he's been invaluable. Yeah.

So a lot of these people want.

To have professional coaches in their careers. A lot of students, and you say, well, this guy's really different from what. Yeah, thanks, John. So the way I've described Fred in the past. So he was, he studied economics at Berkeley, ended up at mit. I think he, he was a Prof. At mit. He was a professor at mit. I believe he taught accounting. He ended up doing a bunch of work in organizational development. He is like a Buddhist libertarian. And I don't know that he would officially describe himself as either of those things, but if you think about first principles in Buddhism, compassion and things of that nature, and you think about libertarian ideals in terms of thinking about systems and the way systems can maximize value. You combine that with his economics background, he's about the most enlightened person I've met in business. Business. I've really never used that word with anyone else I've worked with. He's enlightened. I know of no other way to describe Fred, and it will be difficult for you to fully appreciate what I'm describing until you meet with him and then you'll sit down with him and he'll start talking. And about 10 minutes into it, you're like, whoa, that's Fred. Can you say that again? Every time I've spent time with Fred, literally without exception, every time I've spent time with Fred, I have learned something that changes my perspective in some way, great or small. And how many people can you say that of? So he's very unusual in that respect. Very unusual. He's not a traditional coach in that respect. Interestingly enough, he founded a firm called Axiolint, which was designed to help coach leaders. And he wanted to change the way the business world operated by virtue of working with the leadership teams of these companies for maximum scale and hopefully help these leaders to become more conscious and more mindful. And it's been a lot of fun working with them. We're very fortunate to have them at the company.

One way to understand kind of run of the mill coaches, and Fred, who is unique as a difference, is typically run of the mill coaches go, here's how I try to give you energy, like, yeah, you can solve that problem. Let me reflect confidence to her, Let me listen to you, and then you solve the problem yourself, that kind of thing. Fred actually approaches it trying to give you conceptual tools in order to solve problems. So, for example, one of the tools that Fred added to his tool chest as a function of coming to work for you is that one of the things, the final thing you said to him that got him to get off, he was basically on a sailboat in the Caribbean, which is what he was planning on spending all. He still does a lot of free diving doing that was. He said, okay, I guess I'll come work for you. He said, don't come work for me, work for the mission. He was like, yes, actually, that's the definition of good leadership. Because you're not actually creating a personality cult. You're actually saying, we're all working for this mission together. And that's exactly the kind of conceptual tool that every leader should use when they're trying to chart out creating a culture. And so he's, oh, I got to Write something about that.

I'll give you another example, one of our favorites that those of us at the company use quite a bit. So we'll make this a little interactive. So it's in the context of global maxima versus local maxima. And it's virtually an unsolvable equation in terms of how do you get people within an organization to lift themselves outside of their respective area, their functional area, for example, their business line, to try to maximize value for the overall company. And it's a really, really challenging thing to solve for. So in all of the time he spent with a lot of great companies, some of the most valuable companies in the world, no one's ever really been able to solve it. And so at this point, it's not about solving that equation. It's about doing it better than your company competition. So the way in which Fred tries to get across how challenging this can be, or at least the concept, is as follows. So any soccer fans here in the class? All right, wow. Just out of curiosity, any NFL fans? I'm doing a straw poll now. Any baseball fans? No. For some reason, all sitting here, there's a cluster of baseball fans around John, around John Lilly, around John Lilly. So with regard to soccer, what is the job of the goalie? For those of you that know soccer, you can explain it to someone. What's the job of the goalie? What is that? Preventing the ball from entering the goal. That's a very formal way of describing it. Okay. What were you saying? Manage the defense line. Okay. Another one of the response plays of the goalie. Anyone else? No one else wants to. What's that? Provide confidence for the team. Okay. Yeah. Start the offense with the outlet pass. Yep. Yeah. Usually the goalie is the captain for a lot of teams. So they're sort of like the lead from behind. Okay, captain, lead from behind. Anyone else? What's that? Have you ever heard this exercise before? The reason I asked is because no one's ever gotten it right who hasn't heard it before. No one does. No one does. We all say exactly what you. I mean, this is a pretty sophisticated group. It's a great set of answers. It's usually prevent the other team from scoring. So I like how nuanced the responses were here. The goalie's job is the same as the other 10 players on the field. It's to win the game. If the goalie's job is to prevent other team from scoring, then they're going to be really interesting in their statistics. And preventing their job is to Win the game. If that means the other team scores, but they can somehow help out in another way so that their team scores more goals, that's what they should be doing. And it's the same for every player on the field. And as soon as you start to think your job is solely and exclusively focused on your responsibilities as it pertains to your position, that's local maxima. And if that's the way all 11 players on the field are playing, you know what the outcome's going to be. But when a coach gets a group of people buying into a program and a philosophy like a John Wooden, a Mike Krzyzewski, you know, some of the Nick Saban, amazing things happen. And you get teams that win and win and win because they buy into the program. They're buying into something bigger than themselves. And for us, it's that sense of purpose. And, you know, Jeff Bezos likes to talk about the difference between missionaries and mercenaries. It's another way of talking about this idea of an individual maximizing value for themselves and seeing the world through their lens versus being a part of something bigger than themselves. So that's an example of the kind of insight that Fred brings to the table. And it's unusual for a coach to be that insightful that often.

And since we're on Fred, let's go to this. I reordered the questions for this one. Let's go to compassionate management, because Fred's book, Conscious Business, High Priest of Capitalism. But compassionate management, the Buddhism in the libertarianism, is also something that you essentially take to heart in scaling an organization. So compassionate management, what is it? Why is it important? How does it help you scale?

Yeah. So I'll start by describing a story. It was a personal experience that I had, which is when I decided to aspire to a first principle of compassionate management. And then we can talk a little bit about the definition and why I believe it's so important, so valuable. So many years ago, I worked for someone, I was part of their staff meeting, and our boss, as a team was growing increasingly frustrated with one of the team members, who was a really good person and brought a lot to their role, but didn't do the role the way the boss wanted them to do the role. And so our boss got really frustrated with them. And the frustration came across and manifested itself in kind of this passive aggressivity where there were jokes made at my colleague's expense. And you could sense how frustrated our boss was becoming with this person. And it was undermining the boss more than anything else. And it created a lot of discomfort in the room whenever it would happen. And it wasn't constant, but it happened enough that it was uncomfortable. So during a one on one that I had with my boss, my manager, on one particular occasion, I said, the next time you grow frustrated with our colleague, rather than make a joke at their expense, rather than kind of express frustration, raise your voice. You should go find a mirror and yell at yourself because that person's in the role as a result of you. It's your choice whether or not they're doing that job. It's your choice as to how they approach their job. If you don't like the way they're doing their job, you can coach them to do it differently. You can play to their strengths, you can put them in another role, you can transition them out of the company. But you leaving them in this role where you're increasingly frustrated, that's on you. And so he thought about it and said, let me give that some consideration. A couple weeks later he came back and he said, gave it a lot of thought. And I want to thank you because you were right. That's exactly what I was doing. And I'm going to change the way I'm approaching this. I'm going to play to this person's strengths. And as he was saying this, I realized I was doing the exact same thing to someone on my team. I mean, the exact same thing. And in that moment, I said, I need to manage more compassionately. I need to put myself in the shoes of the people that I'm working with. I need to see the world through their lens and their perspective. I need to coach them where I can coach them. I need to play to their strengths. I need to understand what it is that they're trying to accomplish. I need to understand what it is that triggers their insecurities or their vulnerabilities. And by virtue of being in the role that I was in, that was my responsibility. I say aspire to manage compassionately because it's really hard because to truly be compassionate. First of all, I'm not talking about conditional compassion. So after I'll talk about this with a team, oftentimes they'll come back in a few weeks and say, so I've got this down when it comes to the people I really like working with. But there's this member of the team I don't really like at all. And having trouble and compassion is not conditional. That's when it's required most, is when there's people that you don't see eye to eye with. And it's challenging because we get triggered so easily. We'll be in a discussion with someone, they may say something that we feel like is too aggressive. You become defensive, you put it back on them, and before you know it, the whole thing's escalating. And oftentimes, in those situations, rather than assume nefarious intention, which was what a lot of us have a tendency to do when we've been triggered, when we become emotional, we just assume the other person's being territorial or political or out to get us or trying to insult us when they could be having a bad day. Or you may have said something that triggers something that they experienced long before they ever worked with you. Or maybe you're talking about something that they're not as knowledgeable about, and so they start to feel a little bit insecure. There's a litany of reasons the person may be on the attack. And when you start to feel that emotion, to the extent you can become a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional, which is very, very challenging, but doable, then you can start to ask yourself, why are you responding this way? What's triggering you, and where are they coming from? You can put yourself in their shoes, see the world through their lens, and you'll be amazed at the extent to which you can change the direction of that discussion and that conversation or that potential argument. One thing that's important to note here is that there's a difference between compassion and empathy, which most people in at least Western society have a tendency to use synonymously. Empathy is feeling what another person feels. Compassion is a more objective form of empathy where you see the world through their lens, you understand how they feel, and then you're in a position to do something about it so that you can alleviate their suffering. For example, if they're suffering. And the way the Dalai Lama describes this is this really powerful visualization. Not that it will ever happen to any of us here in Silicon Valley. But if you were walking along a mountain trail and you came upon someone who had a boulder on their chest and felt this sense of suffocation, the empathetic response would be to feel the same sense of suffocation which would render you helpless. Now you're experiencing what they're experiencing. The compassionate response is to recognize that they're suffering, that they're suffocating. Maybe that happened to you at some point, and to actually do everything within your power to alleviate that suffering, to take the boulder off their chest, and that's a really fundamental difference. And oftentimes you hear people talking about the importance of being empathetic. And empathy is certainly a fundamental building block in terms of compassion, recognizing what another person's feeling. But you want to be able to maintain that space so you can actually do something about it. That's part of the key. So this all goes into this concept of managing compassionately. And I think if organizations can learn to do this at scale, it's a complete game changer.

And how the first two sub questions on this first one is how does compassionate management help you get to scale? How does it help you navigate the progression to a scale organization?

That's a great question. So I've never been asked about it specifically in the context of scale. So I think it comes back to this notion of coaching and how organizations that successfully scale are investing in their leadership and helping their leaders lead their teams and helping them coach their teams so that they can lead without them being in the room. And to the extent you can start to manage compassionately, you are reducing conflict. And every time there's a conflict, there's going to be churn. And the resolution of that conflict, the reconciliation of at least two parties that aren't on the same page, it takes a lot of time and a lot of cycles. And over time, if that conflict continues to build, if it's not resolved, it corrupts the foundation upon which people are building their relationship. And a huge part of scaling, and we've talked about this quite a bit, in my opinion, a huge part of success successfully scaling, I'm talking about some of the most valuable companies in the world is trust amongst the leaders and trust amongst the employees of that organization who've worked together over time that have each other's backs, that have developed a sense of shorthand with one another, they can to some extent predict how someone's going to respond to certain situations. And it is beyond a competitive advantage when you've got that kind of trust, when you have that kind of shorthand. And compassion helps to develop that compassion helps reinforce the fact that we're all on the same team, that we're all in this trying to realize the same mission, the same vision, manifest and execute against the same strategy. So that's where I think it can be a game changer.

I think this answers the second part, but I'm going to ask it anyway just in case there's anything you would add, which is how does compa. Most people, when they hear compassionate management tend to think squishy feely people like you because you're being compassionate. They think it tends to be a distraction away from a focus on results and actually competitive advantage in winning games. So that's part of the reason why they tend to discount it because they tend to have this model of no action. In fact, unless you're just totally barbaric about going for results, nothing else matters. But actually, in fact, compassionate management helps get to results. And some of that you just covered. But if there was anything you wanted to add to that, that was actually one of the things I thought was a useful lens that most people don't frequently think about on this.

I mean, at the end of the day, I think one of the most important drivers of long term value within an organization is the speed and quality of its decision making. And you'll look back on companies that have created outsized value and they're going to be able to count on 12 hands the number of decisions that change the trajectory of that company. The challenge is that that's retrospectively that they can identify which decisions those were. When you cultivate trust, when you cultivate compassionate management, you put yourself and your team in a position where you can be making high quality decisions faster. When you're not being compassionate, you're constantly thinking about why somebody has the intention or the motivation that they do, why they disagree with you, where they're coming from, what they're trying to accomplish at your expense. And you start to multiply that through an organization of hundreds if not thousands of people. And you can do the math, I mean, it becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of the cycles that could otherwise be spent trying to fight against a competitor, or trying to make a more informed decision or a better decision or revisited decision, or learn and grow. So I think it just builds a very strong foundation regardless of. Reid mentioned another really important point that's worth calling out, which is this idea that compassion is a soft skill or it's touchy feely, or it's an eye roller, this new age concept, the strongest people I know are the most compassionate. True, unconditional compassion requires almost superhuman strength and self confidence and a sense of who you are and not allowing other people to get you to question that, and not falling prey to vulnerabilities or insecurities and those triggers, but rising above it and putting yourself in the other person's shoes. I'll give you another example of where it requires real strength. And one of the most common questions I get is if you're managing compassionately, how do you ever let anyone go that's not a compassionate thing to do. It turns out when someone's struggling in their role, the least compassionate thing you can do is have them stay in the role. And for those of you that have ever worked at a company or been in business and you've seen someone struggle, it's actually a really difficult thing to watch because they lose their self confidence, they lose their sense of self and they start to become a shadow of who they used to be. And that energy builds on itself and they are taking that energy to their team. They become less effective. You become less effective by virtue of letting that person remain in that role and they're taking that energy home to their families. And so by virtue of trying to turn the other way and allow that to persist because you don't want to make a hard decision, you make it worse and you increase that person's suffering. So in that particular instance, the most compassionate thing you can do a, you could try to help them learn the skills they need and provide the coaching they need to be effective in their role. But to the extent that's not possible, you want to transition them out as gracefully and constructively and compassionately as possible. And for anyone that thinks that's a touchy feely thing or a soft skill, try it sometime because it's one of the hardest things you'll ever do as a manager.

So yeah, I had a question. How does compassion management fit with diversity on multiple levels, not just ethnic and racial? How do you get people that grew up in a certain socio historical context to move beyond that and engage in a compassionate relationship with people that have a very different understanding of the world?

So I think in part through experience and I think what you just articulated is one of the most important reasons to be building diverse and inclusive teams so you can learn more about how other people see the world. And if you're surrounding yourself with a homogenous way of viewing things, you're never going to be in a position where you can better understand someone with a different perspective. And you know, we were talking earlier about one of the most important things you can do to maximize long term value is make high quality decisions quickly or with speed. And to make the right decisions, you want the right people around the table. You want people who are going to poke holes and play devil's advocate and shine a light on things you never could have imagined or envisioned by virtue of their own experiences that complement your own. And if you're just surrounded with clones and mini mes, you're all going to be saying the Same thing. It creates this cacophony of oneness or sameness, and you'll have no chance to be competitive in that situation. So there's a guy on my team, Mike Gamson, and he was saying he's not interested in building out a diverse team because it's in vogue or it's the right thing to do. He's interested in diversity because he likes to win. You know, I thought that was a great line.

And actually, as much as I like the phrase I'd never heard before, cacophony of oneness, I just made that up. I know I haven't heard that one before. I like the phrase, actually. In fact, part of the whole question is usually in winning, you actually have to be highly adaptive. And if you don't have some diversity of skill set and perspective that is communicating and collaborating well together, usually will not adapt to some curve that's coming. Now, it's not universal, adapt us to everything, but it's essentially like a battle line of some diversity of skill sets, knowledge reflexes, and then cross coordination and collaboration in order to figure out how do we adapt, how do we learn as an organization in order to solve this problem? Especially when you scale on a global level, we have cultural and cultural norms about labor and their relationship. And that's why the culture was the first part of this, because it's the cross connection. And then it's a question of, okay, how do you get that culture to also be highly performant in adapting and.

Scaling, and how do you allow for subcultures to develop in a constructive way? So you were just mentioning this idea of managing a global organization. We're in 30 cities around the world. When you travel to any LinkedIn city anywhere in the world, you know you're at LinkedIn. It's really special. I think it's an enormous competitive advantage. You also know you're in Mumbai or you're in Beijing or you're in London, because there is this sense of allowing these local cultures to flourish as well. And the same holds. It's an interesting metaphor for us as individuals and employees. So we want to continue to build towards this overarching culture that we've defined for ourselves at LinkedIn. But we also want to celebrate individuality and we want to celebrate diversity, and we want to celebrate the things that make us different. And you've got to constantly be striving for that balancing act.

So, shifting back to these questions, great question. So what did you track as changing at LinkedIn when you went from 338 people to 1,000 to 5,000 to 10,000. And as a partial prompt, how did your sense of how you used communications internal to the company, how did that change, and what was the evolution of that tool as a way of keeping a unified focus and set of priorities and actions?

So the change harkens back to something that we described and discussed earlier, which is this notion of connective tissue and communication as an organization scales. So when you're all in the same room, it's much easier compared to when you're in 30 cities around the world. So one of the devices that I think we've used to great effect, and it's not just anecdotal, we do an employee voice survey. We've been doing it biannually now for many, many years. And one of the things that consistently scores the highest is the fact we do an all hands every other week. So I do an all company all hands every other week. It started literally in the cafeteria. We got all 338 employees together. And today it is broadcast to all 30 cities in which we operate. And if teams are not in time zones where they can watch it live, they tape it and they get together and they do a happy hour at the end of the week. And in that all hands, we focus on our priorities, our operating priorities, and we walk through what's happening at the company for better and for worse. And it's completely transparent. And that device has proven to be invaluable in terms of the repetition necessary to ensure we're all on the same page with regard to the narrative, mission, vision, value, props, et cetera, shining a light on the things that are working so we can leverage best demonstrative practices, so we can celebrate what's working, so we can provide the right kind of recognition and gratitude, and perhaps most importantly, to identify when things are not working so we can get everyone at the company chipping in and trying to help figure out how we can improve those situations, how we can learn from them. So I think the all hands has been invaluable. The biggest change that I've noticed at various inflection points that probably would not be too far afield from the numbers that you threw out. And one of the most valuable lessons I've learned and one of the most important values that we have that needs to be reinforced is what we described as acting like an owner. And I believe the most successful companies at scale are companies where individual employees talk about the challenges the company faces or the opportunities the company faces as we and not the company. And when they start to get frustrated or bothered by something and a company that's going to ultimately, I think, inevitably experience challenges, they're going to say, why does the company do it this way? As if the company is something in the distance. It's this faceless bureaucratic machine. And it's not them. We're the company. The leadership runs the company. I'm not talking about me or even my directs. I'm talking about the people underneath them, constantly reminding our vice presidents that they run the company day in and day out. And it's important to remind them of that because they're each going to project their own baggage from when they worked at large companies where they didn't feel like they were a part of things, where they didn't feel like they could change the direction of the company. And I vowed that if I was ever in a position where I was responsible, ultimately responsible for a company, that people would always feel like they could make a difference no matter how big we got. And so reinforcing that, it's inevitable. You go from. I mean, make up the numbers. You go from 100 to 500 to 1,000, 5,000, et cetera. And at each one of those inflection points, you can just feel it. I mean, it's tangible. People start to feel like it's this machinery that's beyond their control when it's not ever. As soon as you start to think it's beyond your control, guess what happens? It's beyond your control. As soon as you start to think like a victim and not like someone that can ultimately influence the outcomes, that's exactly what you become. So if you can flip that model, and it's not just about saying this, it's about reinforcing that. It's the way it works, where people then feel like they can express the things that they're frustrated about, they can come forward with solutions, and you will practice those solutions. You'll execute against those ideas. That reinforces the fact that we're all owners, we're all stakeholders. This is our company. It's we. So I think that's an important recognition.

I think that's probably. Unless there was something you wanted to add to the building. LinkedIn to a global company. I just figured, because I think we've covered that. What are the unique lessons that you've encountered from LinkedIn being a couple combination of both a consumer and an enterprise company, having both aspects to it?

One, if you can pull it off, it's fantastic. Very high degree of difficulty because that's not one thing, it's two things. And the more quote unquote things you try to do as a company, the higher the degree of difficulty. And it's probably exponential at some point in terms of each incremental thing you add to the company. It's just that many more things you need to communicate, that many more things people need to internalize and grow Grok. That many more things people need to execute against. It just creates more and more room for error. So in a perfect world, your company would only produce one thing and it would do it with the smallest team possible. And it's just easier, it's just not realistic if you're going to continue to scale. Although times have changed. I mean, you see what WhatsApp was capable of doing and before that Instagram. And Mark seems to have a pattern developing here where he's acquiring these kinds of companies. So things have changed. It doesn't require the same number of resources, the same amount of time capital to achieve certain scale, doesn't require the same portfolio approach to achieve certain kinds of scale by virtue of technologies, by virtue of how global the world has become and interconnected. But if you're going to try to do more than one thing, it goes back to knowing who you are, what you're trying to accomplish. And that starts with your narrative. We are the stories that we tell. So storytelling is the oldest known form of communication, right? Cave drawings. And that's just innate. It's just part of who we are as human beings. And we communicate through narrative. So your mission, your vision, your strategy, your value prop, your culture, your values, that's an organization's narrative and you need to define that and codify it and reinforce it. And one of the most important things that we've reinforced from very early on, recognizing that we're trying something with a higher degree of difficulty. An enterprise business built on top of a consumer web platform is our most important value. We have six values and the first value is that our members come first. And when you have an enterprise culture, an enterprise sales culture, that would not normally be the case that your members come first or that some consumer web platform comes first. What would come first is the next sale and hitting quota. And results and results matter to us. It's an important part of our culture. And demanding excellence is one of our most important values. But it starts with members first because we're unable to execute against any of our enterprise business lines if we don't have a flourishing member driven ecosystem. So our members come first and the Only way we've been able to pull off this idea of building enterprise businesses on top of the consumer web platform is because the person that runs those enterprise salesforces, thousands of people, recognizes that our members come first. And he is one of the most steadfast leaders at the company when it comes to manifesting culture and values. And trust me, he is not just talking the talk. He manifests it in quite literally everything that he does. He models a behavior constantly to the point sometimes you're just like, really? But over time, you start to recognize and appreciate how strong a competitive advantage you can build as a result of that. His name is Mike Gamson. And as Mike likes to say, he's not hiring salespeople or sales leaders. He's hiring business people and business leaders. And he's not just saying it, he's actually doing it. And that's one of the reasons we've been able to pull that off. It's still very challenging, as you know. Yeah.

So I still have a stack of questions. Oh, go ahead, Chris. I was just going to say I.

Was just curious if there are other.

Things, like people or books or any other things that have been as useful or similar levels of usefulness to Fred Coffin to you.

Useful in any capacity or useful in a specific context.

Scaling company scale. I'm going to say scaling companies because it's class.

Okay, you're saying scaling companies. You're saying in the context of being.

A CEO, being a CEO is fine as part of scaling a company.

So conscious business would have been one of the books. Second book would be Art of Happiness. So that's Howard Cutler, and it's on the teachings of the Dalai Lama. And that was the book where I learned what compassion truly meant as opposed to anecdotally projecting my own experiences. That book was a game changer. That book has been on my nightstand since 1998, and I've only read it once cover to cover, but I just like seeing it because it brings me right back to the messages that I learned and took to heart. And then a third book, which does touch on scale, but in a counterintuitive way. And Reid is very familiar with the individual. A book called Mountains Beyond Mountains. And it's the biography of Paul Farmer, who created an organization called Partners in Health. And Paul grew up extremely poor, very impoverished in the south in the United States, was brilliant. Ended up going to Harvard, studying medicine, becoming a doctor professor. And one summer when he was a kid, he worked on an orchard and he worked alongside some Haitians and He was so struck by their values and what was important to them and the way they lived their life, he never forgot it. And when he became a doctor, recognizing that Central Haiti is literally for those that don't know, the poorest place in the Western Hemisphere, he started commuting from Cambridge, Massachusetts to central Haiti and helping one person at a time with their health care and word. And then he would fly back. He was doing this on weekends. It sounds insane. And as if that wasn't insane enough, he started to. Word started to spread. There were so many people that started showing up that he recognized he needed to build a facility and generate more resources. And so he started this organization called Partners in Health. And one of the partners and founders, co founders, was a guy named Jim Kim, who now is the president of the World bank. Which is the moral of the story. It turns out that in helping one person at a time, I mean, he would help one person at a time where he would hike eight hours each way to help one person in Central Haiti. Even after he had established the facility, he would hear about someone who was very sick, who needed him, and he would hike on foot eight hours in one direction to help them hike back, take care of the rest of the people that were at the facility, and then fly back to his day job. And it turned out that they learned so much about helping the poorest among us in terms of their health care, in terms of tuberculosis, in terms of malaria, in terms of hiv. Jim eventually went down to Peru. He did the same thing. Word spread to certain African countries. I think Russia picked up on this. They just fundamentally changed the way the World Health Organization, the way the United nations, the way countries thought about taking care of their poorest. Because historically the calculus had always been it's not worth it from a return on investment perspective. And by virtue of helping one person at a time, they completely changed the game. And so the lesson there, and this is why it's a bit counterintuitive, is coming out of Yahoo. I always thought it was about massive scale and working on platforms that reached hundreds. Back then it was hundreds of millions. Now it's billions of people. And what I learned from that book is sometimes you can scale on a global basis by helping one person at a time. And that was a complete eye opener for me.

And by the way, just the parallel for the class to think about this is frequently the way that you get to things at scale is you start with things that don't scale. And remember what Brian Chesky was saying about what he did early in New York. So there's this pattern of starting with things, sometimes at things that don't scale and then you're getting the things that scale. And this was the community healthcare worker model and so forth that Partners in Health did. So I'm going to ask you one more question. I have a stack. So in case there are limited questions from the audience, because we have about 20 minutes, then I will go back to that after I ask my question, I'm going to ask Alan, ask the question that he would have asked that I haven't in this hour.

Right.

Since he's also been on this journey.

You've been here the whole time. It's not like he's easy to miss, by the way.

So I'm giving you a minute to be on the spot or a second to prep. Being a product CEO. Why is it so critical to success in these companies in the Valley to be a product CEO? And what is the way that you do that effectively?

So this is a leading question because I was hired to be the CEO in part because I am a product person. And Reid and I both share a very strong conviction that the most valuable companies in Silicon Valley, the most valuable Internet companies, are led by product people. You could have been a product manager, you could have been an engineer, you could have been anything that would have developed your product sensibility. But at the end of the day, these companies create value through their products. So I don't think it's a big stretch. I think the further removed a CEO or the leader of an organization is from, the product itself is from the core of how value is generated within the company, the more challenging it's going to be for that company to create value sustainably over time. And sometimes you probably have situations with founders that created that first product. And then unfortunately, there's too many layers that develop between them and the day to day development of that product. And I think the most valuable companies, I mean, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you know the names, they're all product people. First and foremost, they're about products. In Jeff's case, it's about product and customers. He's about, I mean, that is his product. He said, I just shared this the other day. It was a quote from way back when Amazon was first starting. And he said, Amazon wasn't a bookstore, it's a customer store. That was pretty cool.

I was gonna ask about hiring. I mean, obviously LinkedIn, you grow tremendously over the past six years, seven years with CEO and you've always said at company meetings that talent is our number one priority, number one principle in terms of where we are. So how do you think about the changing needs for hiring as a company passes the thousand person mark and now is that the 10,000? How is the world of hiring different now than it was when you started?

In some regards it's not different at all. And I'll come back to that in a second. And in other regards, it's vastly different. So the machinery that goes into hiring at scale, once you achieve critical mass, when you're at 15 people and you're hiring single digit people to add to the team, that's something the team can do. When you're at 150 people trying to scale to 300 and you need double the size of the company, at some point you're going to need to have dedicated recruiters. When you're at 300 and you're growing to 3,000, you're going to need sourcers and then you're going to need people to support them and you're going to need recruiters and schedulers. And the apparatus, the machinery behind recruiting at scale is quite substantial. So in that regard that changes. That's very logical. What shouldn't change, but unfortunately does, is once you recognize who you are as an organization, your culture, your values, the more you can hire against your culture and values and not compromise, I think the more likely you are to be successful. And where a lot of hyper growth companies go off the rails is they need to grow from 150 to 300 to keep pace with the competition, to develop that next breakthrough innovation, to hire salespeople, to fulfill demand, to hire people in GNA functions, to be able to support the rest of the organization. And without putting butts in the seats, there may be a fear that it's going to limit the growth of the organization. And so what happens inevitably is, whereas you've set the bar very clearly and explicitly in terms of where you want to hire, who you want to hire, the quality of people, the cultural fit, you start to compromise. So for example, you'll see someone, they'll come in and on paper, LinkedIn profile, for example, they have great skills. But for whatever reason during the interview process, you got the sense they're not going to be a cultural fit. Where an organization's headed for trouble is when you sit around with your hiring team, your hiring committee, whatever decision making process you have for recruiting, and someone says, look at the skills of this person, we interview them, they're not a cultural fit. But we'll make it work. We'll coach them. There'll be a process of osmosis here. They'll just figure out how we do things and talk to folks who have hired in that situation, and they'll tell you that inevitably it did not work out. It actually created a bunch of problems. And where an organization's in a position where it can scale effectively is the next time that conversation is had, it's look at the skills of this person. They're not a cultural fit. Let's move on to the next candidate. And when your team is having that conversation without you needing to be in the room, that's when you're onto something, and that's when you can truly scale, at least scale the hiring process.

Back first. You.

Yes.

So when it comes to management, people, like, I believe Wingsta has, like, the smartest people.

I'm just curious about, like, how do.

You manage the smartest people? How do you make them to, like.

How do you make them think what. How do you make them, like, do things that, like, you feel like the company should be doing?

How do you manage very smart people? I think that's the.

Well, the reason I was asking the phrasing is because I think it's helpful. So you said, how do I make them do the things that the company needs them to do? Yeah. So did you hear laughter behind your left shoulder? So it was John. I don't even need to look. And my guess is it was John. And John's laughing because of when you said, how do you make them do things? You don't make very smart people do anything. What you do is, hopefully you inspire them to want to take action. And it's the difference between leaders and managers. Managers tell people what to do, oftentimes without very effective results. Leaders inspire them to do it. And I've been very fortunate from a pretty young age to have the ability to recognize really talented people, people way more talented than I am, way smarter than I am. And once you can recognize those folks, if you can get an understanding of what they want to accomplish and you can find alignment between what you're trying to accomplish and what they're trying to accomplish, and you can authentically get across why it's such a strong fit, why their skill set, their unique set of skills, their intelligence, their resourcefulness, their passion, their compassion, how it can be brought to bear to create this huge amount of value on a global basis. Hopefully they're going to want to do that, and hopefully they'll buy into that and that's very different than telling them what to do. And especially with the kinds of people you were describing, like the smartest people you know, they're not going to respond very well to being told what to do. Yes.

So you mentioned Reid's first principle of preserving functionality. What are some of your first principles.

That you always come back to when you think about? So managing compassionately is my first principle of management. But you asked a very specific question. When I'm facing a complex decision. Yeah. To not make a decision before I'm ready, which took a long time to realize. Sometimes you won't always have that luxury. Sometimes you're going to have to make a decision before you're ready to. But if you're not forced to make a decision before you're ready to make a decision, give it time. Give it time. And I think too often people rush it. They don't have the right set of information yet. I'm not talking about analysis paralysis. I'm not talking about having the perfect amount of information. There's no such thing as perfection. But oftentimes, effective decision makers, they have pretty strong conviction. They're relying upon pattern matching and experiences. They're relying upon people around the table, that diverse set of decision makers and influencers. And they know. They know and they'll make the right decision more often than not. They're not not going to make the right decision every time. But if they're not feeling it, it's okay to hit the pause button and say, I'm not ready to make this decision. And I'm not sure everyone fully appreciates the fact that they have that ability, they have that opportunity. Also, once you make a decision, if you made the wrong decision, don't be afraid to admit it, learn from it, and then move in a different direction. And that's another common mistake, which is you feel like as the person responsible or the leader or the manager, that you can't show any vulnerability. You have to be perfect. Nothing could be further from the truth. The last thing in the world I want is to be surprised if teams understand that things aren't performing the way they had expected. I want to know that as soon as possible so we can do something about it. And I want to model that behavior for my team.

By the way, the one I think that's perfectly coherent and a good answer. But the one thing actually I learned from PayPal days was when you're in fast moving, intense competitive situations, which most startups are, the time frame that you have to make a decision is the time frame where you will not remove your foot from completely depressing the accelerator. So part of the decisioning I do is how much time do I have such that I maintain entire forward motion? And sometimes it's, I make a decision right now. And like, one of the things I picked up from PayPal was I will frequently make a decision right now and then say, do I have time to rethink it? Right. And if I go, oh, I have a toll tomorrow, it's like, okay, great, I'm going to rethink it until tomorrow. Which then plays into what you said. But it's an interesting play.

Another corollary is that at some point you do need to make a decision. The worst possible thing you can do is just allow it to sit there, and it just builds over time. And we're talking about scaling organizations, those things, they compound and compound. So after leaving Yahoo and I became an eir, I didn't know if I was burnt out on Yahoo. It was tough going towards the end. It was the extraordinary experience, and I wouldn't trade it for anything invaluable. But towards the end, it was pretty challenging on a number of different fronts. And I didn't know if I was burnt out on that specific situation or I was burnt out on operations. So I wanted to take some time off and I was in eir. And then the first day, literally, this sounds like I'm just making this up, but it's a true story. The first day I set foot at LinkedIn, I couldn't wipe the smile from my face. And one of the reasons was because we could make decisions in minutes or hours that in previous roles, I found companies requiring weeks or months if they ever made the decision at all. And to this day, when we're able to make a decision, a good decision, and we're able to make it in a timely way, I start smiling to myself. I'm thinking about, that's how you do it. Speed and quality of decisions. I can't emphasize it enough.

Second guy on the aisle here.

Yeah.

Economic graph that you plan to fill with LinkedIn. Sorry, elaborate on.

Oh, elaborate on the economic graphics. So I mentioned earlier that we're doing some stuff at LinkedIn that I've never done before, which is trying to operationalize our vision, the dream. And historically, for me, the vision is just that. It's true north. It's a dream. It's not something you actually do. And a few years ago, we recognized that we were growing our membership faster than we had anticipated. So when we originally Codified the mission to connect the world's professionals. We had 32 million members when I first joined December 2008. We recently surpassed 400 million people who signed up for LinkedIn. And a couple of years ago, it became clear we were going to be on a trajectory to exceed the midway mark to that 780 million. And at the time, granted, once we've connected the world's professionals, making them more productive and successful, there's plenty of work to be done on that front. It's not just about connecting and signing people up, but we did start asking ourselves what would come next. And where we ended up was bringing our vision to life. This idea of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, all 3 billion people, not just knowledge workers and professionals or students, everyone, everyone in the global workforce. And so the way in which we decided to go about that was by essentially digitally mapping the global economy across six dimensions. Six dimensions that we believed LinkedIn was in a very unique position to execute against. So the economic graph would mean having a profile on LinkedIn for every member of the global workforce, all 3 billion plus people. It would mean having a presence for every company in the world. When you include small, medium sized businesses, There are about 60 to 70 million companies in the world. It would mean having a digital representation for every available job opportunity offered by those companies. There's roughly, we estimate, on the order of 20 million jobs that would be digitally accessible that are open right now on a global basis. A digital representation for every skill required to obtain the jobs offered by those companies. Tens upon tens of thousands of skills that you could access through standardized data. A digital presence for every university, higher educational organization, a vocational training facility that would enable individuals to acquire the skills to get the jobs offered by those companies. And a publishing platform that would enable every individual, every company and every university to share their professionally relevant knowledge to the extent they're interested in doing so. And then we would want to take a step back and allow all forms of capital, intellectual capital, working capital, of course, human capital, to flow to where it could best be leveraged. And in doing so, we're hoping we can lift and transform the global economy. So that's the economic graph. So when we originally started talking about that, it was a vision and to some extent it sounded like science fiction. And what happened was over time it actually started to manifest itself. So we started investing in the infrastructure, the people, the teams. We made some acquisitions and what changed for us was asking what it would take to operate at economic graph scale. And I'LL give you a perfect example. When I first joined the company, we had somewhere in the order of 6 to 8,000 jobs that were posted on LinkedIn. And at some point along the way, we identified an addressable opportunity for professional jobs, high value white collar jobs of roughly 350,000. And that grew to about half a million. That was the addressable. We hit about 300 plus thousand. And on our way to that number, I think we were rounding about 250,000. I had a meeting with the team responsible for that, and as I had mentioned on a number of different occasions, I said, don't forget, you got to start thinking about how we can get all the jobs. 20 million. And I turned to leave the room and it occurred to me, and I had said it on multiple occasions with this specific team, in this specific context. They just thought it was a platitude, they thought I was just kind of throwing it out there. And so I turned around, walked back in, I said, you do realize I'm serious about this. And you could feel it for whatever reason, in that moment, it finally sank into the team that I meant it. And so they went out and developed a strategy and a roadmap to do it. And we ended up acquiring a company called Bright Brilliant Team. And we are now up to 5 million jobs that are on LinkedIn today available. And we have roughly two and a half times that amount that have been indexed. And we're just still thinking about the best way to offer those up in an index and make sure they're relevant and so forth and so on, scrubbing the data, de duping, all that stuff. And we're on our way to. Ultimately, the goal is to have 20 million jobs accessible on LinkedIn. You could do the exact same exercise with the number of members on LinkedIn, the number of companies on LinkedIn in terms of the skill sets. It wasn't enough for us to just identify which skills people needed. We ultimately believed that we should offer up coursework so that people could learn the skills. And we acquired a company called Lynda, which in my opinion was the last piece, fundamental piece of the building blocks that we needed for this puzzle. And the publishing platform started with 500 professional luminaries that we called influencers. And today, well, north, it's probably north of 250 million people have the ability to publish in long form on LinkedIn. And months and months ago we surpassed a million people that had actually taken the time to publish on LinkedIn in long form. So that's, it's not Just talking about it, it's actually coming to life. And really the only thing preventing us from achieving that scale at this point. Point is time. So that's the economic graphic in time.

So here it's a question about growing or blitzkating business inside a business and mentioning the acquisition of endo.com I believe it's much more than selling online courses.

So what's your vision for.

There is a convergence of industries like learning, publishing, certification. How do you see this going beyond and even more so with the complexity of business or a B2B business because the corporate market is huge, but also the execution of that market is very different from the execution of the consumer market, which brings a lot of. It's much more service oriented. The corporations demand much more services than the consumer basis. What we actually see, what's the vision? And we only have time for a short answer because I want to do one more question since a couple people.

Short answer is a platform approach where LYNDA evolves as a true platform. So for any enterprise, any company for that matter, that's developed its own repository of learning development materials, we want to be able to enhance those materials by virtue of offering them through lynda. And that could be solely and exclusively to the employees of that specific company. It could be to members and constituents within that company's ecosystem, like the developers. It could be to college students that helps build the talent brand of that organization and better prepares them to actually work at that company over time. So those would be some examples. And that platform approach wouldn't be exclusive to enterprises. There are content generators, there are events, conferences, television networks that I think are very interested in developing learning materials that could also take advantage of that. Is this the last one or you. Okay, got it. Can you talk a little bit about how you identify talent and how you identify talent at varying degrees, like above average, top 10%, top 5%, top 1%. So I don't have a formula for the percentiles per se. That would be an interesting model. Sounds like something Reid would do, by the way. And he probably has a construct in there somewhere in that brain of his. What I'm looking for depends on the role so broadly across any role, which may be the most appropriate given limited amount of time in this day and age. I'm looking for people that are, to your point earlier, extremely intelligent and not just kind of broad based aptitude or high iq, people who can learn very quickly, people whose learning curves are almost vertical, super steep learning curves, who love learning, who love continuous improvement, who Love operating within dynamic environments, who can gain fluency quickly in terms of new things, who enjoy synthesizing vast amounts of information, connecting dots, reaching conclusions, and sharing those conclusions and insights with other people. So that kind of intelligence, I think, is essential. Looking for people who are both passionate about the work that we do and the work that they do, and hopefully there's alignment there, who, if they wouldn't describe what we're doing as their dream jobs, it certainly brings them one step closer to their dream. That kind of passion becomes a huge force multiplier and amplifies the ability for people to create and contribute value. Looking for people who are compassionate to the point we were describing earlier. Looking for people who recognize that despite the fact that all of us are egocentric by nature, not egomaniacal, egocentric, we see the world through our own lens. People who recognize the importance and the value of taking the time to see the world through somebody else's perspective and who have some kind of experience or some kind of recognition of the value and the importance of that. And looking for people that I'd look for. Forward to working with. You know, I got to a point in my career where it's just not worth it to work with assholes and I don't care how much value they contribute. And, you know, Reid didn't ask me a question that I've been asked in a number of different settings like this. Fireside Chats is what's the most valuable lesson I've learned as the CEO, and arguably the most valuable lesson I've learned, which unfortunately I've learned on more than one occasion, is for the baseball fans in this section of the audience, it's leaving the pitcher in the game for too long. So for those of you who are less familiar with baseball, the metaphor is that pitcher on the mound. Potentially even a star pitcher who's pitching a beautiful game through the first five or six innings, and you can see that the fastball is losing a little bit of velocity and people are getting around on it, maybe even getting on base a little bit. Your team's still up. Manager comes out and asks the pitcher how the pitcher's doing. And a star pitcher, what do you think a star pitcher's gonna say? Doing great. Skip, go sit down. That's not. The manager's job is to just ask how the pitcher's doing and then take it verbatim and sit down. The manager's job is to assess whether or not the pitcher is gonna be able to win the game and position the team to win the game. And the most valuable lesson I've learned is once you recognize that someone may not be the right fit for the role that they're in, as soon as you ask yourself whether or not they're the right fit, you already know the answer. The question is what you're going to do about it. And what I've learned over time is that you have a very open, honest, constructive conversation. That's another value of ours. Transparently communicate where your expectations are, the fact that they're not meeting those expectations, and that you're going to do whatever you can to help them get above that bar. You're going to provide them all the coaching that they need, but you're going to do it over a specific period of time, and you're going to be very open with them as to whether or not you're making progress, you're not making progress. And if they're not in the most compassionate and constructive way you possibly can, you transition them either to another role within the organization or to their next play outside the organization. And that is a really key part of scaling an organization. So it's not just about identifying the right talent to bring into the company. It's also about assessing the talent that you currently have and sometimes making those hard decisions.

And if you wanted the backstory for when I did the share of the Ronin quote, if there is a question, there is no question. It was Jeff and I having this conversation actually over dinner. And then the last thing I will say is when Jeff was describing how he identifies talent, that was the reason. That was about 90% of the description of why I actually recruited you to be the CEO of the how many hours do you remember?

So it was north of 15 to 20. It may have gone to 30 plus 30 over time, but it wasn't John. The key is that for Reid, it may have been an interview. For me, it was a conversation.

And actually, all the best interviews are conversations, conversations.

And, you know, when I first joined LinkedIn, you can tell a lot about what's on people's minds by virtue of the questions they ask you. And so I kind of keep tabs on the most frequently asked question I get. And shortly after joining the company, by far and away, the most frequently asked question I got was, so what's it like working with Reid? And it was code for, what kind of drama are you experiencing by virtue of being a hired CEO and still having the founder at the company? And what people didn't realize was I wasn't at LinkedIn in spite of Reid being there. I was at LinkedIn in large part because Reid was there. So I wanted the opportunity to work together over time. And the time that we spent together before I joined formally gave us an opportunity to build that relationship and to take a lot of what would normally be very natural questions and variability and uncertainty. To some extent, we were able to really remove that and had already developed a relationship based on trust before my first day on the job. So I think that, you know, that was a very positive thing in retrospect.

And the detail of that is in the essay of when you're hiring a CEO, you're actually hiring a co founder, which is on LinkedIn, if you have interest. And with that, let's thank Jeff for joining us.