Reid Hoffman | Transformational Moments

Hello, this is Chris Yeh, the co author of Blitzscaling. And I am once again joined by my co author, Reid Hoffman. And today we're going to be talking about a very special person, Jeff Weiner, who recently handed over the reins at LinkedIn and whom Reid, you've known for a very long time.

I have indeed. It's the closing of an era. This is one of those deeply moving, at least personally moving kinds of times and podcasts because Jeff and I have worked together for 11 years, so that.

Is quite a stretch. And it was 11 incredibly successful years because during that time LinkedIn went from, well, it was a successful startup into a company that is one of the pillars of the Internet. And during that time I think Jeff played a major role.

Jeff played an instrumental role. One of the things that I've published on LinkedIn is how Jeff essentially is that part of hiring a CEO isn't just hiring someone who is amazing, who has the right skills, who brings the right network, who brings the right intelligence product sensibilities, but also who has the character, the depth of commitment, the belief and the mission as kind of first and foremost to be essentially a later stage co founder. And that, that's actually part of what you're looking for in CEOs of organizations. And that was part of what made Jeff a very strong co architect of LinkedIn's global impact.

Well, let's turn back the clock to the start of your relationship because I think it's very important for people to understand just where this relationship came from. So how did you first meet Jeff and what were your first impressions when you met him?

So I met Jeff because one of my other partners at Greylock, James Slavitt, who I'd gotten to know through Greylock because he was a young VC then and David Z brought him to the LinkedIn boards and he was so helpful and useful that I was spending time talking to him and he said, well, you'd really love this guy Jeff Weiner at Yahoo. And I was like, yeah, I've kind of heard of him. He's like, no, no, no, you've heard of him, but you should really meet him. And I was like, okay. And so then I noticed that Adam Leschinsky was pulling together this Fortune dinner and I noticed that Jeff was an attendee. And so in that dinner, Jeff said his usual, said some smart things about how to think with the tech industry and so forth. And I walked up to him afterwards and I said, hey, James Slavidus told me I really should get to know you. Let's grab a coffee or something. And he's, oh, yeah, I've heard about you too. Yeah, that'd be great to do. And so we went and grabbed a. I think it was a lunch. It was either a lunch or a. Essentially a coffee. It was at a lunch place. And we talked for a couple hours. And then later, this is a few weeks later, and he said, hey, will you come and talk to my team at Yahoo? He was one of the two executives who was working for Terry Semmel at Yahoo at the time. He was kind of the word, it was Terry. And then he and Toby Koppel were the two big zones of kind of macro things. And not surprising given where Jeff and I ended up. Jeff was responsible for the Yahoo network and network properties and so forth and a lot of the consumer facing things. And so he said, come by and talk to my exec staff. And so I said, all right, well, I'll get to know Jeff a little bit this way. And I came by and I gave a critique of all the things that I thought that Yahoo should do differently or better and whatnot. And Jeff's interactions were just, you know, picture perfect, which is. I'm intellectually curious. I'm not defensive. I'm saying the things that we did. Well, I'm listening to things you're saying. I'm integrating or bringing it into a group conversation. I actually wanted his people to talk and interact more than he did because his. One of Jeff's many superpowers is he is a leader of a team. He thinks about business with analogies to kind of team sports. And how do you bring teams together and how do you lead the teams and how do you have the team act really well. And that his function is being a team leader, not, hey, I'm the hero and everyone follows me. It's like, no, no, I'm a team lead, but I'm in the team. I'm of the team. And you saw that. And then after that, we, you know, started regularly grabbing dinners, usually dinners, because we had enough time. And then when he left Yahoo, it was part of the reason he also, he went to both Excel and Greylock as an eir. And so he joined Greylock as an eir. And then of course, I started talking to him since then as well.

So a couple of interesting things that came out of that origin story, which was not actually one that we've discussed before. The first is, in classic Reid fashion, this relationship came about because of the network, because you and Jeff had James in common. There was Somebody to really be the transitive property of trust there. And so you're already predisposed to liking and engaging with each other. The second is the characteristic of Jeff that really drew you in, which is that he was what we've called an infinite learner. So somebody who is not defensive, somebody who is open to criticism. The fact is, in that very first interaction where you laid out what you thought they'd done wrong and what they could do better, his response wasn't, well, that's a bunch of hoo ha. His response was, wow, let me think about how I can use this to get better. And then, of course, the final thing is just the nature of the reference checking. I think we've said before many times, the references are the most important. And so getting to know Jeff and, and his team and seeing how he interacted with people was probably a crucial way in which you divine Jeff's character and what kind of leader he was.

And just the last point, knowing that James had worked for him at Yahoo and said that Jeff was one of the best executives he'd ever seen was, like, super impressed. Working for him would work for him again. That's the kind of reference that, when you get that kind of reference from someone that you rate, someone you think is super amazing themselves, that you then, you know, track carefully.

So as you referenced, you soon developed a very different relationship with Jeff as you brought him on board as LinkedIn CEO. But I've heard from you before that that was a relatively long courtship. What was that process like? It wasn't like you just said one day, hey, Jeff, can you be CEO?

Well, there's probably three parts of the question answer. The first is there was a courtship of persuading Jeff that, you know, who had. Who had had a plan when he had, you know, after he had taken his time off from left, Yahoo, Taken a little bit of a sabbatical, was starting to gear up. He had a plan that he was working on that it was like, no, no, LinkedIn is a better part of your plan than your plan. And because, you know, part of it is it's like, oh, I'll give you advice and, you know, maybe I'll be a board member or something. I was like, no, no. I think, actually, in fact, I think you want to work full time. And it didn't take long after he started engaging, but it was the. Stop paying attention to this other thing that you're working on and pay a lot of attention to this and evaluate it carefully. The second part of it, and these are things that I give advice to all entrepreneurs on. Is that part of hiring key roles? And it could be like a key engineer, a key product person, an executive. And then of course, most of all a CEO is to really invest the time. And part of investing the time is that even though Jeff and I had already known each other, had already been doing some work together and so forth, to establish whether or not we would be a good partnership, a good way of kind of taking LinkedIn to the next level where he would be the CEO and the CEO is in charge for this, is to spend a bunch of time talking through how you work together, what your rates, your strengths and weaknesses are things that you wish that you had learned, that you wish you had done better when you were younger, which mistakes had you made? So we had a wide ranging set of conversations. So when I later went back and added up, I think it was about 30 hours of conversations where some of them were walks and all the rest, and some of them were like deliberately difficult conversations. It was like, well, let's, let's say what were some of the things that you really screwed up at gig X and gig Y? And we did it both directions because it was a partnership. And so that was really key. And then of course, even though I'd had some good experience with Jeff, you went and you went around and you dug in to a set of other references as well. And I called other folks just to make sure, because you could be blind to your own perspective. You could not realize how someone affects other people. The way they interact with you could be different than the way they interact with other people could be. You haven't seen them in the right stress circumstances or other kinds of things yet. So there's a variety of questions you get to in references. Even you go, oh my God, I just spent a great 30 hours with this person. And it was, you know, it's given me a lot of confidence. I think we could be great partners. I think we could really work on this. I think it'd be the right king of this project to be the person leading it into future and into massive scale. But even with all that, you still want to do that. And so all of that was part of it. And sometimes you don't have the luxury of everything, you know, the benefit of Jeff being in EIR and being able. So we could spend the time and do that. Sometimes when you're recruiting someone from a different job or something else, you know, you have to be more selective and it can't quite work at that but that is the aspirational goal. And so that's what we did. And even then, when we brought Jeff on, Jeff was still a little uncertain. And so we started with a look, why don't you just come on as an interim president, helping me as CEO, but we'll run it like you're the CEO so that we can both see. You can see that was the top thing. And I could see that this is a good thing. And I, of course, had to work it through the exec staff, because normally when you bring that kind of folks, everyone says, well, that's fine, but why don't I keep reporting to you? You're like, no, this is actually, in fact, we think that Jeff should be the CEO. This gives us a way to. Because Jeff's comfortable with this. This gives us a way to see if it would work. And within a month, it was like, yep, this is clear. Right? Let's build this out. And obviously, the history has already shown, but Jeff is literally one of the spectacular tech CEOs. And obviously we'll probably go more into that throughout the rest of it. But it was like the era of taking LinkedIn from 400 employees and kind of a, hey, the business is working and we're kind of profitable. And we got a bunch of good ideas too. We are a global, like, offices in many cities, whatever the number of thousand, 12,000 was the last time I paid attention to the number of employees. This huge organization that was completely rebuilt and retooled for the way that it operated. And Jeff was the architect and the grower of all of that. And his CEO tenure was one of those fairytale entrepreneurship scaling business success stories.

And a huge benefit to you personally as well, because I know one of the reasons you brought Jeff in is you've described before how Jeff is brilliant at things like running staff meetings and doing these things that a CEO does that while you could do, wasn't necessarily the thing you were ideally suited for.

Yeah. And like, for example, how do you put together an executive team? What's the way that that executive team functions at a very, you know, at a 10 out of 10 level and so forth. And I learned a lot from these things, working with Jeff, observing what he did. Like, if I were to go do that again, I now know how to do that much better from the learnings and the tutelage from working with Jeff and observing him. And then actually, one of the things I love about Jeff, it's part of the thing that made me really realize, as, you know, I look for explicit learners. Not just learners, you know, infinite learners you were talking about, but explicit learners. Because explicit learners share their learnings and they teach. And Jeff is one of those teachers. And so part of the joy of working with Jeff is not just the watching a 10 out of 10 executive do their thing, but also that as you're working with him, he's saying, well, here's why I'm doing it this way. Here's how I think about it this way. This is why I think about it this way. Right. And that then obviously not just improves your game, but also helps you pass along those learnings, be part of a team that's improving their performance. And so those are all the many things amongst Jeff's superpowers.

Now, part of what is also great about the example that you gave and sort of the outline of how Jeff came on board is it illustrates two other important things. The first is it wasn't just that you spent a lot of time with Jeff, although you did. It's that you also had those difficult conversations. You were deeply honest, you were deeply open. It requires being vulnerable and it requires trust. And if you couldn't do that, how could you possibly trust the other person?

And how could you be good partners? You know, Jeff has a very good phrase. You build trust through consistency over time. And I completely agree with this. You know, other elements obviously to dealing trust are you can navigate conflict. So you get into conflict with someone, you get into kind of tough, difficult area, you're vulnerable, as you're saying, and then you say, oh, we can handle this well together. Okay, great. Now I know that if we run into it, we can raise it easily, we can navigate it. I have confidence that, you know, we can use any crises we run into to become better partners, to become better learners, to become more trusting of each other. And that was all part of the initial set in terms of going into it.

The other thing that comes through is the fact that you brought Jeff in as the interim president. And this echoes something that we wrote about in Blitzscaling that we actually took from our other friend John Lilly over at Mozilla, which is that when you're bringing in an executive from the outside to a tight knit team at a startup, oftentimes it's better not just for them, but for the organization as well, to bring them in at a certain level and allow everyone to say, oh, of course, Jeff should be CEO instead of ramming it down people's throats.

By the way, broadly, that's the right thing to do. As per John Lilly and other things in this one, actually, in fact, the organization was roughly, he's the CEO, right? So the interim part was a combination of Jeff's desire to have flexibility, because part of it was a unique thing of persuading Jeff that because he, super smart, had some interesting plans that he should give up those other plans for this. And then the second part is whenever you do these things, you should do them in partnership and mutual. So it was like, well, look, if you want to do the kind of try before you buy, why don't we make it mutual? Why don't we see if it kind of works on both sides? And so it was more of a way that if it wasn't working, it was a graceful way for either party to say, hey, this isn't the right thing. Of course, both Jeff and I thought that the likelihood of that was very small, but that allows it easier kind of doing it. And then I think Jeff, by February was like, oh, yeah, I could see how this mission, the company's mission, LinkedIn mission is my mission. The kind of thing that I want my impact on the world to be about how I've ranging from how I've enabled talent to have the best possible opportunities it can to participation in education in ways that improve everyone, but especially of course, meritocratic, disadvantaged people who are bright and young and driven and don't have the economic opportunities, all the way to the fact that business can actually be run with compassionate management that actually, in fact you can have as your virtue, compassion as your top operating characteristic. And that actually can be associated with performance, which the vast majority of people don't understand. I can do like all of that can be a part of the impact and part of what I'm doing at LinkedIn both as building LinkedIn as the company, but the impact that LinkedIn has in the world. And as we were talking about that. Cause we still have. Well, not during COVID but until Covid, we had monthly dinners and we'll have again. But those are the kind of things we would be talking about at the monthly dinners because we use those as a kind of alignment of mission macro strategy environment we're in. Whereas we used one on ones and meetings during the week as tactics. And how do we solve this problem? What do we do here? And how do the pieces need to come together? And so all the mission stuff was broadly within that context. And by February, Jeff was like, yep, I see it. Because that's essentially when you say, well, I'm a co founder, is not only do you have the gravitas to be driving within the company, but you have the. This mission is my mission. Like a part of what my life is about is this and the meaning of it, the impact of it, the direction of it, the thing that where I go, you know, this is the good in the world that comes from my having worked intensely to try to make the world a better place.

110% committed, in other words.

Yep. Or 200% or yes, but yes, not quite the. It goes to 11 now, you've had.

A long career as an entrepreneur investor in which you've worked with many well known CEOs. We won't name them all here, but suffice to say a number of them are known by just a single name. That's how famous they are. So what about Jeff's particular skills and approach to leadership makes him so effective? What causes him to stand out in your mind as as such an effective executive?

There are a number of world class CEOs and a number of world class tech CEOs. Satya Nadella is an obviously amazing CEO. Reed Hastings. There's a stack of these folks who are well known as just amazing CEOs. I don't mean to cut short the list, but I could take the whole podcast just saying these, these. And the thing that's interesting is that just like a players so called or anything else like how people are superstars are not all the same. Everyone has actually in fact a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has different superpowers, which is one of the analogies that I like. And Jeffs, I think come a lot from creating a intensely driven culture. Obviously there's different cultures. So I'm going to go into Jeff's culture because obviously Reed Hastings is also a intense culture, first person, as is Satya. But Jeff kind of says, okay, here is a culture of compassionate management and performance. Here's the way that we take how we learn from each other as kind of fundamental. Here's the way that we make our performance metrics for individuals embedded in team performance metrics. So it's yes, you do have individual metrics, but they're embedded within how do I think of myself as part of the team. And so those kinds of like we are team is a very central part of how Jeff operates. The knowledge that the primary thing he's doing is getting. It's kind of like the CEO can kind of say, look, I will help set direction and resolve, but then I am trying to get everyone to row their best and to coordinate the Right way. And then my job is to help kind of facilitate, nudge, enable command on occasion, that performance and that direction. And so, like, how do you do onboarding and how do you do professional development within it, and how do you do performance reviews collectively? And how do you have everyone feel like we are part of that team? And how do you set a cultural drumbeat and how do you use communications for that, which includes, you know, like, one of the things that Jeff said that stuck in my mind is by the time that you're getting bored of yourself, saying a message is just the beginnings of when the organization's hearing it. Right? So it's like a version of my if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late. The whole idea was having a kind of emotional tell for where you are because you, generally speaking, will resist releasing your product because you want it to be the perfect thing you want to show everyone. And this is for consumer Internet software primarily. Well, Jeff's is until you've actually getting done, dreadfully bored. And you shouldn't project your boredom dreadfully bored by the thing you're saying, you haven't said it enough to really stick in the organization. So comms is another part of that. And then the other thing that Jeff's master at, and I've never seen anyone better than him at this, is he constructs a set of dashboards which kind of bubble the whole organization through, where he himself is such a student of those dashboards. Like, one of the things we saw about six months in was that he called a product lead on a morning and said, there's something wrong with your product. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, there's something wrong. The number doesn't ring right. It doesn't cohere with the other numbers. And there's something in this number. And the only reason this number would be different would be not right and not cohesive with these other numbers is because there's something wrong with your product. And they went and found that the email notification thing had quit and wasn't sending out email notifications, and that that had gotten reflected in that specific number. But the point of the dashboards is not micromanagement. The point of the dashboards is he's got a view of the entire scope of the play that's done in a common ground that everyone can see that he becomes a deep student of and awareness of such that when he looked at it and said, well, that number looks wrong to me. Why does that number look wrong. And he had gotten up at like 5 in the morning in order to start looking at the numbers. That number looked wrong to me. But then these other numbers don't look wrong. So why would that number be wrong and not these ones? Oh, it's probably here, right? So then you would just call that product lead and it wasn't, you have a problem or I want to sit in your staff meeting or you need to do this specific thing. It's you need to look into this because clearly there's something that's a little off. And then the product lead called back, said, yep, we got the re email notification process restarted. The old notifications will go out in the right way and da da, da, da. And so that dashboard focus is another of Jeff's superpowers, but he blends it in to the team management, the team performance and the team learning. That is so much part of how Jeff leads.

And if I hear what you're saying, it sounds like, as opposed to heat vision or x ray vision or super strength, it sounds like most of Jeff's superpowers are, are in the area of the team, are in the area of getting more out of other people, which is really what being a CEO is about.

Yep, exactly.

Now, one of the things you said earlier caught my attention, which is you referred to Jeff as a co founder of LinkedIn. Now he joined the company in 2008. Company was over five years old at that point. Can you talk about the idea of companies having multiple founding moments and why you think Jeff is a co founder at LinkedIn?

I think it's one of the things that Jack Dorsey, I think was the first one who came up with the multiple co founding moments that I had heard, maybe there's others. And I thought that was a very smart thing for Jack to say. So I've thought about it and developed it since then. The reason you really want to look at this is because ultimately companies succeed and thrive when they are being driven by, by someone who has the missionary passion for what this company should grow into, what impact it should have, and has a kind of a mission in the world. Because ultimately if you're just managing it for the kind of business metrics, you know, it's like, well, what is our growth number, what is our EBITDA number? You know, what is our revenue number, you know, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, kind of, you know, cags, you know, whatever the ltv, you know, blah blah. You do all the classic business oriented MBA stuff. The problem is that ultimately it doesn't necessarily lead to short term, but it kind of tends to over time. There are exceptional leaders who do all that stuff who stay very long term focused. But ultimately that kind of long term of look, I'm investing in things where I don't know what the exact return on capital investment will be. I don't know if it'll actually, in fact really, ultimately really add to our profitability line. But I know it's the right thing for, for a vibrant, healthy company that has the right product or service for its market, for its customers, for its employees. And that's part of the reason why I'm investing in this. It's of service to the mission. And oh by the way, that's another thing that actually jeffrecruiting, again focused on team. Part of the way that I learned from Jeff about how to recruit is not come work for me, of course you're working for the CEO, but it's come work for the mission. And both you and I are working for the mission. And that may be a particularly good lens for thinking about how this kind of co founder status come up. Because what you need is you need to say, okay, so someone has to be able to contribute the way a co founder does. Now in a sense the early co founders is easiest because you've got your by default dead, you've jumped off a cliff, it's not going to work. And if you could actually make the company into something you've really contributed. And there's usually, you know, usually the company starts only with the founder and the co founder so it's like pretty significant contribution, especially if you manage to get anywhere. Then of course as the company begins to grow, it's harder to come in and say, hey look, I'm a co founder. It's like, well you have to have that position and the CEO and some other positions, but the CEO is the primary position where that becomes possible. And part of the lens that, that Jack had me kind of realize was to say that the mistake that people had been making in recruiting CEOs is they were just looking for only the purest athlete, only the best CEO, only the world class recruiting, managing, culture, et cetera, et cetera, and not also co founder. Where the co founder goes, this mission is part of my life story. Like I would be contributing to this mission even if I wasn't CEO, even if I wasn't paid because I might be contributing a lot less because I didn't have another job or something else. But this would be the kind of thing I would be contributing to because that's the thing that I really want to see happen. And that's what I want. I want the longevity, the long term impact, the creation of this company as an institution that will last for decades, maybe centuries. To be part of my story, the part of the story of the impact I had on the world. And so that was part of the reason why it was very early matter of fact, I kind of surprised Jeff with it. I think we were on some press call or something. I described this and Jeff was like, oh. And it was like he hadn't heard it. And it was because I just kind of internalized it. I thought it that way. It wasn't a oh look. Let me now anoint you, sir Jeff, co founder of LinkedIn. It was, this is what you're doing. This is how you're operating. You're having the co founder level impact. You're bringing this enormous set of things that make this company do magical things in the world. Create a company with a amazing internal functioning and culture and performance. You're a co founder. It isn't Reid says it, it's just you are right as part of it. And then I also then later did a post on this because I thought it was important to get everyone to really focus on look, you're trying to make these companies do these amazing things that when you hire a CEO, it isn't just the athlete, it's an athlete plus co founder.

And I think it's so important because when you think about the great companies, they have to reinvent themselves. They don't just keep doing the same thing over and over again. They need that multiple co founding moment. They need somebody who really believes in that mission is going to carry it forward. One of the great examples of this, although it does involve somebody who was a founder more than once, is Apple. Where immediately before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Apple was run by Gil Amelio, formerly of National Semiconductor. And Gil had come up with, as an internal watchword for his management team, the acronym dsuv. And he pushed everyone to maximize dsuv, which was distinctly superior user value. So everywhere there were signs about dsuv. And of course Steve Jobs came back to refound Apple. He threw all that out and he said we're going to make things that are insanely great. And that's one of those great examples of somebody who is a corporate athlete versus somebody who is truly a visionary and missionary.

Yes, exactly.

Now one of the key contributions that Jeff made In addition to LinkedIn was to our book the alliance, that's the management and leadership book that we wrote with our friend Ben Kaznoka. And what Jeff did is he really helped us come up with the idea of a foundational tour of duty. Can you talk a little bit about how Jeff helped us come up with the idea and also how he served as a great example of it then and also today?

The alliance started as a combination of two insights that we felt needed to be shared with the world. So one was when we wrote the Startup View and said, look, here is what everybody, Ben Castnoca and I and Chris, as always as an advisor, said, here is the fact that every individual needs to now think of themselves as the entrepreneur of their own career. Relatively few people will start companies. Some of the companies will be individual consultancies, some will small businesses, some of them will be global businesses. But nevertheless, the attributes of being an entrepreneur are now what you need to have as a career. Because the so called career ladder, career escalator is now being transformed into a jungle gym. And that's the only way that modern careers will happen. And you not only see that in the US which is a more entrepreneurial country, but also even places like Japan are heading in that direction. So that was one about people's individuals. And the second was we'd been seeing that pattern within Silicon Valley because it's extremely common for a person to work at multiple companies here, even multiple of the great transformative companies. And actually, in fact, it's part of what makes Silicon Valley really work. Because as these people go from, hey, I was working at Google and now I'm working at Facebook, or hey, I was working at LinkedIn and now I'm working at Airbnb. As these company transitions happen, people bring with them like, oh, well, here is how we did culture and here is how we did performance management. Here are the metrics that, that we looked at and here's how we thought about testing web pages, and here's how we thought about product design and so forth. And that combination and recombination makes the entire all of Silicon Valley an intense learning network, which is part of what makes all the companies very strong. And that kind of goes against the common wisdom of kind of like, well, actually, in fact, you just want to recruit the Star A players as early as you can. You want to keep everyone in and everyone stays in the company. And that's how you work. Because, you know, it goes back to how Procter and Gamble and, you know, way back when to IBM and these kinds of things. As an Instance, say, no, no. This other pattern is extremely important for fast learning, especially in technology. But anything else? For market adaptation, for company adaptation. Because these companies don't stay solid. They actually, they grow, they evolve. Like culture evolves. You know, the one set culture, it's like, no, no. If it's just on a rock, that's a problem. You actually want to be evolving in a pattern that's cohesive to you are your identity, you are who you are, but you're learning and being better and improving. That's what we decided to do. We originally wrote, as you know, Chris, we wrote an article for hbr. We sent it over to hbr and HBR said, well, we really like the book. And we went, oh, okay, well, I think we could write a book because we can just look around to how we operate. So we sketched some stuff and as always, of course, since Jeff is a superstar here, shared it with Jeff, and Jeff looked at it and said, look, I get all your arguments. I think all your arguments are right. I think those are good foundational, important things to have as everyone's skill set. But you're really neglecting the actual importance that there's still like, even though it used to be the whole company, it's still actually really important that there's a core. It can be not always 100%. Well, it's always important you have a core. The core can be very small. The core can be larger. Like different companies, different cultures, etc. Could shift that. But you need to have people who are like, no, no, actually, in fact, I'm working here for decades that this company is my life's work and is what I'm doing. Because there's a bunch of good attributes that come out of it. Not just kind of the culture carrying, but also as teams play together, they make decisions around speed of making decisions shorthand, in communication ways to kind of make a strategic call and then make a play happen and do so by the fact that they are well polished in working together and that because they've been there and they've been referring that team play and they've been team playing together for a long time. And in particular, that's also very important when you look at like the exec staff and so forth. And so we talked about it a lot and I said, you know, actually, you're right, it's important. Like we were pointing out, like, there's this new transformational tour of duty that no one's talking about. No one's really managing to that. No one's really acknowledging that if you don't do that, you're actually creating a culture of distrust in your company because you're essentially creating a two directional lie between the employee and the manager. And you must be doing this, otherwise you have this problem. But you're also right that there's also a place for this kind of foundational core and that you need to have both. And so we talked about it with Jeff, we added in the foundational tour. The irony is not lost on me. It's like, well, here's a founder kind of adding in from a co founder, adding in from a later co founder, like, oh, no, you need to have a foundational tour. But it was extremely good input. And then I also got to the look, here is the way that these kinds of tours of duty come together and here's the way you can look at it. And then the specific, in your specific company, you might be a tiny amount on foundational tours, a huge amount on transformational tour, or you might have a lot on foundational tours. And some transformational tours it could be. Depends on the company, depends on whether or not you're blitzscaling. Depends on a whole set of different things. But Jeff was, as usual, on things that involve scale management, critical in advice and construction of the theory and the application.

And that is absolutely one of the ways we try to improve our books. We try to make sure that not only are we drawing on real life examples, but we're actually talking with the practitioners, the people with the superpowers like Jeff, who can read and say, yeah, well, maybe it should be this way, or I think you're overlooking that. And that ability to learn, the willingness to seek out that kind of feedback has always been, I think, one of your hallmarks as well. But speaking of books, our other book, Blitzscaling, talks about how the transformative, iconic technology companies of today and tomorrow are being built. And it's all about prioritizing speed so that you can achieve enduring leadership in a winner take most market. And if I look at the history of LinkedIn, that is clearly a company that dominates its professional social networking market. So what kinds of scaling techniques did Jeff employ at LinkedIn to help achieve that market leadership and maintain that market leadership? And what are some of the lessons that you learned from Jeff that we then incorporated into Blitzscaling?

So Blitzscaling, as you know, Chris, is prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. And Jeff was mostly doing what we call fast scaling, which is actually, in fact, because Jeff is so focused on Dashboards and efficiency and processes for allocation of resources. And the notion of, like, you know, 70% of your energy goes to your core business, 20% goes to adjacent. 10%. In adventure bets, make sure you're at least 10% so that you're actually, in fact, experimenting with some bold things that could later lead to new cores or new, you know, adjacencies that help development, you know, this whole stack of things. Jeff is very systematic as a leader, as a thinker and is doing these systems. And so what he essentially, a lot of the stuff that get added in the blitzscaling out of the stuff that I learned from Jeff was, which of the places, when do you start building these systems and where do you put the systems to really accelerate? Where the system helps you accelerate speed. Jeff hasn't. And LinkedIn tend to do as much blitzscaling because LinkedIn was in a space where you actually, in fact, could be assessing, you know, the ROI and tuning it and tuning efficiency in order to play it out. And so he was doing a variety of the fast scaling techniques, which, of course, are in the same tool chest. Right. It's actually, in fact, not like, oh, and then we go to tool chest number two. The differences in fast scaling and blitzscaling have a lot to do with, well, how well can you measure it? Are you actually in an environment of uncertainty or not? Do you do things in a way that you go, look, we'll sort out the efficiency later, because just the raw speed is what matters. Jeff was like, well, no, no, we want to scale as fast as possible, but like, you know, here's the way we figure out and open up offices, here's the way that we make the offices sync with the current offices and so forth. And he was focused on the efficiency of a platform across the entire company. And so those kinds of things were tools that were put into blitzscaling but were learned and done from what Jeff was doing at LinkedIn, which is fast scaling.

And there's an incredibly important insight in that, which is when we talk about blitzscaling and we talk about growth in an environment of uncertainty, that environment of uncertainty doesn't have to be the same for every company. And if you are like Jeff, really gifted at building dashboards, instrumenting, monitoring, really assessing what's going on out there, you may have less uncertainty than your competitors. You may be able to move faster than your competitors without even necessarily having to accept that much uncertainty. To the outside world, you're blitzscaling because they can't see why you're doing what you're doing, but internally you're able to fast scale.

Exactly right.

The other thing that I think is very interesting about Jeff and Blitzscaling is that he created new bets, as you put it, the venture bets. As I think about LinkedIn's product, I think about something that actually occurred during the time we were writing these Books, which is LinkedIn's launch as a content platform. That's not something that was built into LinkedIn from the start. It's something that came out during the same timeframe as these books. And I can tell you, as a business writer, LinkedIn has become a probably the most important platform for sharing business ideas, which is not something that you set out with when you created LinkedIn.

No. And we did have a thought of the network as a platform by which from a combination of network, from engagement and from other professionals like you, that we might be able to create a lens onto the content that you would need today, this week, this month, this year, and facilitating that. That's still, you know, those ideas are still kicking around, but we hadn't really gotten to, because this is again, Jeff thinking he's leader. This could be a platform for leadership. This could be a platform by which people express thought leadership, express leadership within a company, express leadership as a manager or an executive. And Jeff went, hey, actually, in fact, this is actually a super important part of the business world. We should have it. Let's start it as a venture bet and then let's build it out of a venture bet into something. And that was indeed one of Jeff's many product insights and contributions. And Jeff, if obviously we're here, say, wow, but actually. And we'll get to Ryan Roslansky. But it was actually Ryan's and it was these other people. I was like, yes, yes, the right. And the great CEO goes, look, I hired people. They may have come up with the idea, they may have pitched Jeff on it. They certainly ran with it, they certainly owned it. But one of the things about being a CEO is you co own the glory and you co own the failures. Again, one of Jeff's many great characteristics as a CEO is, well, he's more focused on co owning the failures to be a good leader, but he co owns both.

And I reminded of another Jeff that we wrote about in the Alliance, Jeff Bezos, who while Amazon Web Services was not his idea to start with, it was something that he adopted the, that he stood up for in front of the board and which he was instrumental in making into such a hugely important business today.

Exactly.

Now you mentioned it, Jeff is now handing off the torch to Ryan Ruslansky. And Ryan is an executive who has worked at LinkedIn for 11 years, but he also worked for Jeff at Yahoo for another five years. So that's another great example of one of these long running relationships. Can you talk about what makes Ryan such a good choice to succeed Jeff and where you hope he's going to take LinkedIn in the future?

Well, I have perfect confidence in Ryan. One of the things that Jeff has kind of taught me about these kinds of leadership is that Jeff has been working on succession for years and he works on that with all of his executives. It's not just going, okay, I anoint one. It's the how do I improve everybody? How do you have everyone essentially, even if they're not necessarily, their mission isn't to become CEO of LinkedIn or CEO of this company, in this case LinkedIn. How do I still work with them in order to make this happen? But I tend to think one of the things you think is what function drives a company. And so you said there's product, there's engineering, there's marketing, there's sales, there's finance, there's operations, et cetera. And to some degree it's like, well, which thing is the most important strategic driver? Which thing is the most important thing to get right? Which thing is like all of these, all of them matter. But like you said, you put them together and you're saying, okay, which of these things is the one that should set a little bit of the harmony for all of them is the most important in most consumer software businesses and LinkedIn included, it's product. And so Ryan was for years a, an amazing product leader. Under Jeff, Influencer is just one of the many things he was doing before, you know, as kind of as the invention and innovation side. And you know, part of when I was talking to Ryan about his succeeding Jeff, one of the things that just came up in the first minute that was like, yep, Jeff's right. You know, my agreeing with Jeff is right, Brian is the right CEO was that he said, look, there's no way that I'm going to be. Ryan basically said, there's no way I'm going to be a better Jeff. Jeff's the best Jeff. So if I just try to do everything, only that Jeff is doing and no differences, I will by definition do it worse than Jeff. What I need to do is be a great CEO on Ryan, where I've learned everything, I've continued the great things that Jeff has done here. And then I'm adding in my new things and the things where I'm different in order to make this happen. And that's one of the things I want to talk to you about because again, I want to learn, like you didn't say this language, we're translating it in this podcast, but I want to learn and make sure that I'm adapting and I'm incorporating the best possible ideas into the plan that I'm going to set and, you know, what are the things that I should think about. And so he threw out some ideas which are part of future strategies. So we're not going to go from here, ask them various different kinds of questions on things that I had thought challenged me on some stuff, asked me some things about some other kind of macro strategic stuff. And then I was like, yep, this is the right thing. And so that's part of that kind of product orientation, the infinite learning. And also, and this is one of the things key because obviously in this podcast this is in part in addition to hopefully having specific pieces of information that are useful to the entrepreneurial community, it is also a tribute to the amazing job that Jeff has done at LinkedIn for 11 years and also with his career and as a leader and as a thinker and as a theorist and as a practitioner of being an executive and a CEO.

Now let's return to Jeff for a second because again I hear the echoes as you describe your interaction with Ryan. It really sounds like those original interactions you had with Jeff so long ago as you were bringing him on board. So it really feels that close alignment. But with Jeff, you know, Jeff is really renowned for leadership, for Charisma. In 2014 he was Glassdoor's number one tech CEO. And then in 2011, you and he actually won EY's Entrepreneur of the Year as a team. So most people really know this public side of Jeff, this award winning CEO. What are some of the behind the scenes memories you can share that show off more of the private side of Jeff the person?

Well, this isn't quite the private side, but I'd say that one of the things that to give you since we just recently had the last town hall, the last LinkedIn corporate meeting with Jeff, his CEO and Ryan and others kind of said, hey, we're going to run this one. Jeff said, okay. And didn't really realize, I mean I think he knew that there was going to be a tribute coming, but it wasn't like he didn't, I don't think, realize I thought we Thought it was going to be, hey, oh, here's birthday cake. Kind of equivalent versus the entire meeting was orchestrated as a tribute, which I thought was deeply deserved and fitting. And it started with kind of like 10 transformational moments, things that I and Ryan and Steve Cerdello and and kind of other Zaki Zagaku had learned from Jeff. Each of us taking a few minutes to say, what is the thing that we learned? And I went through the co founder part, which is part of the thing, and said, oh, I should do this as part of our podcast with Gray Matter. And this is valuable content for the world, not just as a tribute to Jeff. And part of the culture that Jeff had set up is that business is like, we have this unfortunate thing in American business. Oh, it's just business. It's not personal, actually. In fact, business is personal involves people. It involves hearts, commitments, desires, sometimes fears. And Jeff is that kind of a leader and trying to be open. And one of the things that they did was that Jeff's favorite karaoke thing is Sweet Caroline. And so they orchestrated across the stay at home distributed thing. LinkedIn employees playing music, singing the whole thing. And Jeff's just started crying, right? Because it was the, oh my God, this is real. And actually, in kind of being there with them, I started tearing up too, because it was like, yes, this is part of the culture that you built, that the company went and said, what's a personal tribute that we could do that shares with you? Not just the, oh, here's a rendition of employee count X to Y, revenue growth A to B, D, all of which is true and known, but something that's more personal and emotional, that means something to you, that we know you well enough that we can do this and that we are telling you how much we've appreciated you. And the fact they knew him. That was the style of leadership and connection that Jeff drew and the fact that he was willing to tear up and to actually, in fact, share with the company. Because you could certainly imagine CEOs go, oh, I'm having a problem with that video connection. Click. But instead, no, no, I'm here with you and I'm. This is how much what you have done is moving me. And I'm here as a person and present too. So those. It isn't really a behind the scenes, maybe behind the scenes from the world, but was a most recent and a fitting part of showing the kind of person that Jeff is and the kind of culture that he built, that he created the foundation for and grew at LinkedIn.

That is an incredible behind the scenes look. And I can only quote Neil diamond and say, so good, so good, so good.

Exactly.

So now that Jeff has handed over the reins, he's still staying on at LinkedIn, he's taking over your role as executive chairman and he's explicitly said he's going to be focusing on increasing diversity and inclusion, which is a subject near and dear to our hearts. How important is it to have a co founder and better yet a leader like Jeff focus on such an important issue?

Critical. These kinds of things only really happen from the top. The fact is with diversity inclusion, if it's very obvious there's serious problems and if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. So whether it's glass ceilings, comp differences for women, for ethnic minorities, it only comes when the absolute leaders show. I'm committed to, I am putting in time and energy, I am putting in sweat, I am putting in blood and I am holding myself accountable, not just everyone else. And this is the way that I and that's the only way the changes stay on track, magnify and improve. So that is great. And a little bit more is part of. When Jeff and Ryan and I were talking about the transition, we said, well, Jeff, co founders like look just as how I feel today and how I felt bringing Jeff's like, I'm not going anywhere. This is super important. This is part of my life's mission. I'm going to be here as a co founder and as a deep ally through my entire work. Jeff and Ryan and I talked about it. We said, okay, Jeff should take my office, this physical space, he should take this physical space. I should move to another physical space. Because the same pattern by which I was working with Jeff, Jeff should work with Ryan. Now of course I will still be there working with both Jeff and Ryan at a different office, probably same floor, et cetera. Who knows we'll work that out. But that then has that right kind of we are on this mission together and I would fully anticipate in whatever, hopefully many years in the future, we transitioning from Ryan, Ryan say, well, okay, I'm going to take that office and this will be the new person and we will continue because we are all in service to this mission. This mission is more important and that's the thing that we are contributing to and that we all do this together. And that's part of the reason why LinkedIn I think is spectacularly not a individual ego driven shop, but is actually, in fact, we are all of service to this mission. And that's how we talk to each other.

Well, on behalf of Reid Hoffman, this is Chris Yeh, and thank you for listening.

Thank you for listening.