Your Pivot Might Feel Like a Disaster. You Have to do it Anyway. A conversation with LinkedIn's Dan Roth

Hey. Hi, this is Suzy Welch, and I want to know what is your answer to this question?

Should you jump before you're pushed? And when you jump, what happens then?

Dan Roth jumped before he was pushed, and this is is what happened next.

Every day was a challenge. I'd gone from being the editor of this big digital property to being at a company where no one knew what I did or what I'd accomplished. They didn't care about that at all. And it was really soul crushing. Like, literally, I was calling my mom, being like, I don't know who I am. I don't know what I've done. I mean, only knew myself as a journalist. Being a journalist was my identity.

Today, Dan Roth is very happy being the editor in chief at LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn, that place where you're spending all your time scrolling and looking for your next job and wondering, hey, should I jump before I get pushed? So, welcome to Becoming youg, the podcast where I endeavor to help you answer the question, what the heck should I do with my life? If you're in a job that you're not sure you like and it happens, or you're in an industry that is really changing, and I mean, let's face it, who is not, and everybody is saying your whole industry is just not going to be around anymore, then you're probably beginning to think about the question, how do I pivot? Well, this is the episode of the Becoming youg podcast where you're going to get some courage for that pivot, I hope. I think so. And you're going to hear the true story of a very big pivot, and as told by my very good friend, the editor in chief at LinkedIn, Dan Roth. And you know what? This pivot story is not clean, it is not shiny, and it is not easy, because real pivot stories never are. It's filled with doubt and anxiety. It's filled with Dan calling his mom, okay, but there is something good, something great on the other side and something that makes it all, all worth it. And you know what? Pivots usually work that way. Listen, I think you know in your heart and in your bones that it needs to happen. We know it there first. But I want you to know it in your brain, too, because you need all three functioning for the really big pivot to happen and to have the confidence to carry it out. And if you want that, if you want it, heart, bones and brains, baby, then stay tuned, because that conversation is coming right up.

Dan, hi. Welcome to Becoming you.

Oh, thanks for having me.

We're so happy you're here. All right, so you're the editor in Chief of LinkedIn News, and you have without a doubt made the platform what it is today. You were there from its very, very get go, and you've completely transformed it, and you're going to continue to transform it, and you're epic. Okay, let's just agree on that.

I love it. Okay, okay, fine.

All right. We're all in agreement. You know, I talk about the area of transcendence. You have heard me talk about area of transcendence in my class, which is just another word for purp, lies at the intersection of your deeply held values, your aptitudes, what you're uniquely good at, and your economically viable interests, the things that call you emotionally, intellectually, but will also pay you. And recall this, your area of transcendence, this sweet spot at the center of it all. And actually, you were with me from the very beginning with you came and spoke to the earliest classes of becoming you. And everyone loved you so much, dare I say it, you are the very much in your area of transcendence. I mean, you are right there at the intersection of your values as I know them. I've known you for what, 20 years almost, right? Your aptitudes. Obviously, no one in the world could do the job better than you could. You're incredibly good at what the job needs and requires, and you know yourself well enough to delegate what you're not great at. And you've always been a news person and you are in the sort of newest version of what news actually is today. And so you are the postermind for area of transcendence. And so I want to spend some time today talking to you about how you got there. Okay. Because it was not a straight line.

No.

So in a minute, we're going to get to all the details of how you made the decision to make the most central pivot in your life where you leapt from the cozy known of the career that you set out to have. You were at Fortune and you took this gigantic, scary leap into the unknown and to build this incredible life that you have now. But before we go and have that story, let's just get a little background on you before that. So you were born in Kentucky, were you not?

I am, Yep. Louisville, Kentucky.

It just doesn't compute. Okay. You just, I mean, because you're such.

A New Yorker I've worked with who are like, when they find that out, they're like, I just assumed you were a New Yorker. Like, it just doesn't make sense?

Yeah. Like, you know what my fun fact is, is that I'm from Oregon. I always say that's the most exotic thing about me.

People must never believe that.

They don't. All right, listen. So you wanted to be a journalist. Give us the, you know, the version of your life growing up. You. You almost knew. You want to be a journalist when you were a young kid, right?

Yeah. I mean, I knew. So I grew up in Louisville. Dad is an accountant. My grandfather's an accountant. Like, there was a chance that I would go into. I think there were hopes that one of our. My brother, my sister, I would go into that line of work. I was never good with numbers, but I loved the storytelling around what I would hear my dad and my grandfather and my mom talking about what was going on in the kind of community around them. And it was always, like, grounded in business. And I just thought they were amazing stories. And I fell in love with the storytelling aspect of business. And I fell also in love with journalism. So when I was in high school, I was like a mediocre student. And then I joined the school paper. And as soon as I joined the school paper, I was like, oh, this is for me. I think some people have this. Maybe you had this where you start reporting and you're like, this is. I get to ask anyone any question. This is the best. This is a dream job. And I remember when I was in high school, I had a teacher who made me stay after class one time. He said to me, I just need to talk to you about something. You know, the school is spending a lot of money on administrators, more than they're spending on teachers. And I think you should dig into that. I think there's a story there.

You got tipped off by professor. I love.

I was like, this a teacher? Not even a professor. I was 15. I was like, oh, my God, he's treating me like an adult.

Yeah.

And I get to go do this thing now. I never did the story. I wish I had done it. Maybe I'll go back and do it. But that was. From that point on, I was hooked. And I was like, this is it. This is what I want to do.

And how focused were you then you went to Northwestern to their amazing journalism program, and you were full steam ahead.

Yeah. And I knew I wanted to do journalism. I went to Northwestern because of the journalism program, and I studied economics there because I knew I wanted to be a business journalist.

I mean, this is very specific to be a 15 year old who says, I want to be a Business journalist. I mean, hats off. I mean, I happen to know your mom, and she is fantastic. So I'm gonna give. I'm gonna give credit here to your amazing. Your amazing mother very.

Gave me great advice. Always my mom, always.

Yeah, sure. All right, so you're there, and you do what all of us did in those days, which is you went to a small newspaper, right?

Yeah, that's right. I worked for the Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina. And you know, when I was in school, the one thing they said is, like, you take the job you get, you go anywhere and you start learning because the important thing is doing the job. So I moved to Raleigh and I covered tech in Raleigh. The smallest growing. This was 95.

95.

And so it was the beginning of the dot com boom. There were a lot of companies in Raleigh and I was covering them, and I loved the work, and I did not love living in Raleigh. What Just wasn't like, it wasn't for me.

Louisville was that much better.

I thought I was like, I want to go back to the South. And then I went back to the south and I was like, I'm not sure. I think there's maybe something else out there. All right. And then I got a job at Forbes. I applied. I kind of sent my clips everywhere. So again, like, total business journalism track.

This was the way we did it.

That's the way you did it.

This was. There was like a path you gone on. How many years were you with the little newspaper in rally before you?

Nine months.

Oh, you just. You were out of there, man. All right, so then you went to Forbes. Forbes, okay, tell us about that.

I got a job at Forbes as a fact checker. So that was at the time, the. The starting rung. And I just worked my ass off. Forbes. Yeah, I was traveling everywhere. I mean, it was exactly the career I had always dreamed about.

You had the career you had always dreamed about, and you had it pretty young.

Yeah.

And what you think at that point you thought, smooth sailing from here.

In my head, I had a ladder. I was like, I'll be a fact checker reporter, senior reporter. I'll become an editor. Editor of this. Then eventually editor of Business Week. That was my goal.

Okay, what happened?

Well, I started moving up the ladder. I moved to Fortune. I was the tech editor at Fortune at a pretty young age. I then went back into writing, and I would kind of go back and forth every year. Writing and editing started at Conde Nast Portfolio, which was supposed to be the Vanity Fair of business. And I was their first writer. And we built that magazine, left there, went to Wired as a writer at Wired. And so I was at all these amazing places as the economy was changing and all of us were spending our time on digital sites, reading on first our computers and then our phones and not reading on magazines. I still loved writing for magazines. I still love doing the big stories, but my time was really being spent on digital. That being said, I didn't see this transformation. I knew this was the world was where the world was moving, but I wasn't ready to make that change.

No, no. I mean, I remember it myself. Everybody was saying, it's all going to go digital, so everything's going digital. And I remember actually saying to a group of reporters, magazines are the perfect technology. You can hold them in your hand and turn the page. Even though we were covering it, we were. We didn't want that change. That's right. Like, we would literally write articles saying the change was coming, but we were having trouble buying into it ourselves because we loved journalism the way it was.

Exactly. And I'm sure we're going to get into this, but even you're seeing this with AI.

Yeah.

Like people realizing they're using AI for certain things. They're realizing they can go to ChatGPT or, you know, Gemini and get something that they're already doing in their current job. And they know all of us know. I think you could sense when the future is coming for you. Yeah, but you don't want to believe it. At the time, I did not want to believe it.

You did not want to believe it. Dan, Today I stood in my classroom with a bunch of undergraduates, and I said, all business schools are preparing students to go into jobs in consulting and finance that are not going to exist in five years. And they just stared at me with, like, frightened eyes as if they were hearing this for the first time. But like us, they have heard before. What? What you and I were hearing. You were hearing was, everything that you're doing is going to go away. But still, you would get up every single morning and keep doing what you were doing.

I wanted to believe. I believed that what I was doing was important. And then the first eye opener I had was my editor at Wired, a guy named Bob Cohen, who's now the editor or the publisher of the Baltimore Banner. He was the number two at Wired. He left the magazine, which is one of the best jobs in journalism, and he left to go become the editor of the Atlantic.com.

That now doesn't sound surprising or weird at the time, it was groundbreaking. It was this idea of leaving the top of print and going into the dot com side was not something people did.

What'd you think?

I didn't. I was shocked. And I remember saying to Bob, like, what are you. What are you doing? Like, this doesn't make any sense.

Right.

And Bob said, you know, at some point, we all know this is where things are headed. And at some point the digital side is going to realize they don't need my skills. It's like right now they think they need my skills, but they're going to realize they actually need people with digital skills. And I'm going to go over there before they make that realization.

So I'm going to jump before I'm pushed.

Yes, exactly. I mean, this guy was like, he had my. He had the job I wanted.

Yeah.

And if he was leaving that job, what does that say about the job that I was hoping for, the job I'd always dreamed about? I connected the dots between my. I remember which. The left. Which. Whether it's the left brain that's analytical or the right plane, but the left brain, which was saying, this is where the future is going and the right brain is saying, this is what I love doing. They kind of came together. The realist in me was like, I know, of course this is where the future is. And I can't play make believe anymore.

Yeah.

There is no world where print is the future.

You know, what you thought is, I cannot change the reality.

That's right.

The reality is that print is going away. That thing I love is going away. The only thing left to change is me. And I'm going to leap into it.

Someone else I worked with said one time, you know, journalism is going to be done with me before I'm done with journalism.

Yeah.

And I was like, I'm not prepared for that.

It was one of those, don't ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for the moments, wasn't it? All right, so then what happened? So you've. Then he realized, oh, my God. That, you know, this person I admired just jumped before he's pushed. I've got to do it. So what'd you do?

All right, so two things. One, what got done to me so Wired. I got laid off by Wired in the financial crisis.

Okay.

And they said, we'll keep you on contract. We just can't have you on staff anymore. And I was like, oh, this is the start.

Yeah.

Of what is going to become job layoff. Job layoff.

Okay.

And I got to move. And Fortune at the time was restarting their website. They shut down their website for some reason and they realized they actually needed a website and they were looking for someone to build it. And so I said, that's going to be me. So I wrote a memo.

I remember I was, did you know how to build a website?

I knew nothing. I took the Bob Cohen idea of, I'm going to convince them that I know something. I just need to know a little bit more than they know. I. I have to make this move.

Okay?

So I'm going to make this work.

All right?

And so I wrote this memo and they liked it.

Okay.

And they hired me to be the editor of Fortune Digital. So overseeing Fortune.com and anything else that we were doing. Magazine. It felt great.

Okay.

To slightly terrifying. I mean, I was like, it was a lot of imposter syndrome.

Yeah.

But it's the right place I want to be. And once I believe that, by the way, then I was all in and we built something really cool. Fortune.com was, I thought, really good. Hired some great writers. We were putting, we were producing things really quickly. We were getting a lot of attention. And then I had a meeting with, on the sales side. So as an editor, you don't really, you really focus on the content. You're not really focused on the business, the site, or at least that's the way it used to be. But occasionally you do drop ins with advertisers. So I did a drop in with an advertiser and this advertiser was talking to the sales rep and said, I know you're trying to convince me to buy at Fortune. I know you give me all this amazing data about who reads Fortune, who reads fortune.com, but Google is telling me they can reach the same audience. You reach actually a much bigger version of the same audience. You reach at a fraction of the price. Why wouldn't I just go with Google? And I remember sitting in that lunch being like, why wouldn't you just go with Google? You knew it and I knew it. And I was like, I am not on the right path still. This is still not the right place.

I mean, the bells are really tolling at that point, weren't they? What year was this?

This was 2011. 2010.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So here you got somebody like the canary in the coal mine saying you've got a really good proposition. And you, you were riding high. You were like, I'm nailing this, right? I'm doing it. And then the basic business case for it was Vanishing in front of your eyes because of Google.

Yes.

So what happened?

So at the time, I was building an app at Fortune called the Fortune 500 plus, and to make this work, we needed an API from LinkedIn. Now, I'm saying that to you as if I knew what I was doing. I did not. But I had really smart people at Fortune who were saying, we need to get. This is how an API works and you should go to LinkedIn. So I flew to LinkedIn. LinkedIn at the time was a pretty small company. It was a resume and connection site. You would connect with, you would build your. Your digital resume. You would then connect with people.

It was kind of a big nothing.

Yeah. I mean, it was like everyone had a profile on LinkedIn, right? And then you never went back to it.

But it was not journalism.

It was definitely not. There was no content on the site, actually, at the time. You could link your Twitter feed to it, and that was it. So you'd go to LinkedIn and the feed was just people's Twitter feed. There wasn't much. Right. But I needed. What they had, was something that we really needed to Fortune. So I flew out there and I. I met the. The then CEO when I was. When I was there. And we headed off a couple weeks later, he called me up and he said, we're going to move into content. Why don't you come join us as the first editor?

And I would like to say that I was like, I've been waiting for this. But that was not true. I left there and I thought, LinkedIn getting into content like that makes no sense. It's this digital resume site. Like, what is that?

It was sort of beneath you.

It was. They didn't even know exactly what an editor did. The CEO did, but no one else at the company had any sort of real idea. So I wouldn't say it was beneath me, but it was very different. It was not a media company. I talked to my wife about it, and I realized that LinkedIn had a better chance of becoming a media company faster than Fortune had a chance to. Of becoming a tech company. And we had to be a tech.

Company because Fortune was gonna have to be Google. So you were sort of making this calculated bet in your head is like, can Fortune outrun Google faster than this resume site becoming a content platform?

Figured, by the way, that even if it doesn't work, I'm in for two years. I committed to two years, and I figured, I'll go, I will learn how a tech company works, and I'll meet New people. My network at the time was all people like me who were jumping from media company to media company, getting fired, getting. The places were getting shut down. And so you were asking other people in similarly dire straits for jobs, and that didn't seem sustainable. So I was like, I will go to LinkedIn. I'm going to learn how a tech company works. I'm going to meet all kinds of new people, going to change my network, and then I'll go back to traditional media, and I will apply everything that I've learned.

I want to just say that on this point, I quote you constantly because you have one time said to one of my. It's one of my classes, just remember this. When industries go down, they go down together. And you have to have irregular relationships with people. So what you were saying is, all my friends are journalists, and we're all gonna be competing for the same jobs on this sinking ship. That's right. I'm gonna go become a tech person. I'm gonna jump industries entirely. I think that you're making this sound like an easier decision than it was so hard. Okay, so talk about this decision.

Yeah. It was not an easy decision. First of all, I was on a really good career path. I was on the path I'd always wanted to be on. It felt like a radical change. And it was a pay cut that was a big part of it. The Time Inc. And the media companies paid in cash, and it was a regular paycheck. And LinkedIn was like all tech companies was a lot of stock and it was a small salary.

How much? Like, how much of a pay cut?

It was probably a 30% pay cut.

Oh, my God. That's a lot of money. When you got a life.

Yeah. When you have two kids and you're like, it was worrisome.

30% pay cut to go to be in tech.

Yeah. And it was a very hard decision.

How'd you make it?

It was a lot of conversations with people at the company, at LinkedIn. It was a lot of conversations with my family, my parents, my brother and sister, about whether I should take this risk or not. And you know what really helped me was talking to Jeff Weiner, who was then LinkedIn CEO. And I was kind of dragging on this process. And Jeff called me up and he was like, what's stopping you from doing this? And I said, you know, Jeff, I don't think you totally get this, but as a journalist, when you leave media, you're done, you're out. It's like being in the priesthood. Like you leave being a priest. What I assume this is true is you leave being a priest and you can't come back. You've hung it up. And I was like, I'll never get a job in media again once I do this.

That must have felt huge for the. For the boy from Kentucky who.

I was like, I'm done. And Jeff said, are you sure that's true? I said, what do you mean? He said, are you sure you're right that you can never go back again when you leave? And I remember I was standing outside the timing building. I was, like, on my phone, walking up and down the street in midtown, and I was like, oh, no, I'm not sure at all. This is something that I've been led to believe, something I learned in journalism school, something that we talked about as journalists over drinks. You know, make fun of people who have left. Like, I can tell you, Suzanne, I remember, like, at the time, my colleagues, when I left Fortune, they said some not super nice things to me. No. Very few people were supportive of it. I remember this one editor who I really looked up to, said, I used to think you were a journalist. I guess you're not. And to a journalist and to someone who dreamed of being a journalist, that was a knife in the back. Maybe in the front.

Right in the chest.

In the front. Yeah. And it really shook me.

Identity.

It was my whole identity. That's right. And it took that one question, are you sure? To make me realize that I was wrong. I was totally wrong. And it was that conversation that made me realize I should take this job.

He also said something else, too, which we have to admit here, which is that you were taking this 30% pay cut and they were going to give you stock. And you were like, what good is that to me? And he asked you a question, too, about that, didn't he?

Yeah. So I was right. I had really negotiated hard, and I said, I want all cash. I do not want stock. And we went back and forth, and eventually LinkedIn came through with a all cash offer for my salary. And I got a call from Jeff who said, hey, I just heard about your salary. And, you know, it's great. I'm glad you came to a, you know, conclusion, but I just want to ask, have you ever worked for a company where the stock went up?

And I said, no, no, I haven't. He was like, it can make a pretty big difference in your life. Like, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I think you should consider it. Did you and I. Then I did consider it. Yes. And I gave up on. I went all the way, unwound all those negotiations, went back to the original offer. Took the original offer. When I took the job, there were a couple big things. Number one is my title. When I came in, they said, your title is going to be copy editor. Now, in journalism, copy editor is a very specific job where you sit on a desk and you just look for commas. And it is a profession for certain kinds of people who are, like, really amazing at grammar. It is not senior. They didn't know.

Okay.

They didn't know. This is how much they were not a media company. Yeah, that was a great, great title. So I said, I'm not. That's not my title. My title is executive editor.

Okay.

And they were like, fine, that's your title, Executive editor. And by the way, that was one point. I was like, oh, I get to make stuff up. I can say things, and I don't have to take what I'm being told. I can shape my destiny.

Right. There's something to be said here about how open you were to these conversations. I mean, I think in trying to do an autopsy, if you will, on how you pivoted and which is what a lot of people ask about, you let him challenge your assumptions. And, I mean, another person might not have. You were open to being persuaded.

Well, I talk to people a lot about making changes and going along on the ride, and it always surprises me about how much they spot the problems and not the opportunities. What I loved about what Jeff did in those situations was he just challenged me. These weren't hard challenges. He just asked a question. And so I think you got to get people to answer for themselves this question of what's the worst that can happen? Walk me through the downside.

Yeah.

And when they verbalize it, hopefully they see that the downside maybe isn't that big, or maybe they're making up what they believe the downside is.

Right.

But it takes them saying it. And so I try to challenge people in the exact same way.

And also, I mean, part of what I'm hearing you say is that there's just a cost to not changing.

Absolutely. If you look over the last seven years, I think it is the skills that are required to do any job have changed by about. I think it's 15 to 20%. And so if you started the job within five years only, only 85 of those skills are the same ones that you started with. That's going to change in the next three years to something like 60 of the skills are going to change. So the job you're doing in three years from now are going to require skills that you didn't even dream of. Three years.

It's not true for me.

It's true for all of us. Absolutely.

I've changed so many. It's true for you too, right?

But, you know, I heard you one time, I was in one of your classes, and you said something great, which was. And it totally caught me by surprise. You were, you were asking students to prepare to give talks about different industries. They had to present how these industries worked, came over the exact industry.

Bingo.

Yeah, industry bingo. And you said to your class, how many of you chatgpt to do this? And I don't know, maybe 20% of the class raised their hands and you said, great. That is great that you did this. And at first I was taken aback. I thought you were going to get mad at these people. But you, you're pointing out to students that they have to use every tool that's available to them. And to not use tools is crazy because everyone else is going to do it. And if it makes you faster and you can apply what you're actually good at, like you can lean in on where you're good, that's all that matters. You have to learn to develop these new skills.

I mean, with ChatGPT, I, I, when it first came along, I sort of, I actually wrote a piece for the journal called AI Grief, which is, oh, my God, not again, not more change. And then I thought, here we are again. And I just dove right in. I mean, I totally dig it, and I think it's fantastic. It's going to change what you do when I do.

I wanted to be a business journalist, but when I went back, I tried to figure out what is it that I loved so much about it.

Yeah.

What I loved was getting people to tell me their stories, loved hearing people's stories. I could get people to talk at me all day long. All I want to do is hear people's stories. There are other ways to do it than going out and reporting. There are other ways to do it than business journalism. And so if I think about storytelling and getting people to talk as being what I love doing, where. How do you describe what you're doing?

I mean, I say, you know, the thing we're going for is to feel exquisitely alive.

Yes.

That's what it feels like when we're in the area, in our area of transcendence. Right. You feel exquisitely alive. Like there is not another place I want to be. So, I mean, it's like, okay, if that's what your core purpose is, then you can got to change with the, the times to be achieving it in different ways.

You can, and you can achieve it without doing. The tools that I required on the notepad and the pen and the picking up the phone and calling people were just tools.

Yeah.

For being able to achieve this transcendence.

You're. You're like the classic post AI person. You're just a series of commas. You're a tech entrepreneur, you're a business journalist, you're a storyteller. You're just all these different things. Did you know along the way what your aptitudes were? 99% of the time we are intuiting what our aptitudes are and we get sort of beat around by the world. Find out what our aptitudes are. You were really lucky that you knew very young what you wanted to be and what you were good at.

I wasn't sure what I was good at. I knew what I liked doing. Yeah. And I had mentors who were super helpful to me and they saw aptitudes that I didn't realize that I had. Yeah, I could, I could walk you through when I was in at LinkedIn and freaking out about what I. The decision I had made.

Go ahead.

Every day was a challenge. I'd gone from being the editor of this big digital property and of running different parts of magazines to being at a company where no one knew what I did or what I was there for or my seniority or what I had accomplished. They didn't care about that at all. And it was really.

Soul crushing. Like literally I was calling my mom, being like, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I've done. I mean, only knew myself as a journalist. Being a journalist was my identity.

And it's like your identity was wiped clean.

Yeah, wiped clean. And it was like, does it even matter? I wasn't even proud of what I had done. I wasn't sure it mattered because it didn't matter to anyone else there. And when you do something that you have always dreamed of doing and then you lose that, it was just. It was super. It was very, very difficult.

How'd you get through it?

First of all, I just talked to a lot of people and I had people in the company that were really supportive. I had a few people. So I had a guy I worked with who got it. He kept saying to me, you were hired for a Reason he was like, you should talk in these meetings. You should talk about what you know. And I was like, I don't know as much as everyone else. They know the data. They know how to build this stuff. I'm just a journalist. All I know how to do is interview people. Like, that's. It's useless.

You had like a total crisis.

Oh, my God. Total crisis. Like, real meltdown. And so I had one colleague who was constantly. I'd go to him after meetings, he would come to me and he would just kind of.

But he wasn't a writer or anything like that. He was.

He come from Sony, and he was sort of like. He just kind of got. He'd worked with journalists before. He had friends who were journalists and.

Thank goodness for him.

Thank God. And then I had a. A product partner. So the guy who was running all of the content products with someone named Ryan Rosansky and who is now the CEO of LinkedIn.

Okay.

And Ryan had come from Yahoo. He had worked with other journalists and other editors before, and he wanted to build something big. And he kind of took me under his wing, and he was like, we're going to build something amazing here. He would call on me in meetings. Dan, what's your take on this?

Listeners, I just have to interrupt Dan here to tell you that all of this was happening because Dan happens to be an incredibly nice person that everyone loves. You won't give yourself any credit for this, but you had two people who became your champions and your advocates. Yes. Okay.

It was. I mean, I hope that happens.

Everyone happened to everyone. That. And that's the reality. But you were being such a good person and you were probably being pretty authentic with these folks, right?

I was pretty open and honest. Yes.

Okay.

About. I would love to say that I'm able to control how I feel or not wear my emotions on my face, but I do, and I did.

But in this case, your authenticity really helped you because they looked at you and they thought, this guy's really struggling.

Yeah. Ryan, who's now the CEO, said something to me one time. He was like, I can tell that you're a high performer. I could tell that you're someone like me who wants to get things done, and you're frustrated that you're not getting things done here. And I was like, I don't know how you could go back to the aptitude questions. Like, I don't know how he sees that, because I feel like a total flame out. But I was like this. That's exactly the way I feel. Like, I'm used to doing a lot, and I'm used to being great at what I do.

Yeah.

And I'm not. I'm not under what I'm good at.

With a pivot, there's going to be a period where you're not great anymore.

Yeah. There's something that my. My current boss, Tomer Cohen, says he's a big believer in growth mindset. And one of the things he says is that during. If you believe in growth mindset, it means you're constantly in failing mode. Because when you're pivoting to something new, you're a beginner.

Yep.

And when you're a beginner, you've gone from being good at something to being bad at something. That's part of how pivoting works, to your point. And I guess I just wasn't prepared for that. I definitely wasn't prepared for that.

That's why people are scared, though, that you probably. You think, okay, how bad could it be? And that it's that bad.

It's that bad.

Yeah. But also, I think part of the reason we're scared of pivoting is like, I don't want to be a beginner again. Yeah. And you did it. You thought, okay, I'll muddle through. But there was a while there where it was killer, right?

Yeah. It was probably two years. It was a long time.

That is a long time.

It was hard.

And then what? Did it slowly fade away?

Actually, let me take it back. It's probably 18 months.

Okay.

And then we launched original content on LinkedIn, and suddenly I was back in my sweet spot.

Yeah.

And it was great. I know how to get people to talk. I can get people to share. It was like getting Richard Branson and Jack Welch and Indra Newy and all these people to start posting on LinkedIn. And I was like, I know how to do this part.

Yeah.

And I now know how a tech company works.

Yeah. But I want you to be listening to this, my dear friends. I want you to hear this. That a pivot, which is very scary, has the potential to be hard at first, but it does not mean you retreat.

Yeah.

You did not retreat. Maybe you felt there was no place to retreat to, or maybe you just were stubborn enough to say, I've got to keep going forward.

But, I mean, I just had to. I had to make it work. I don't know how you coach through this. I don't know what you would tell your listeners and your students, but finding a Ryan Roslansky, to me, was the game changer was finding someone that believes in you and that is willing to do this with you. That was the difference between me flaming out at LinkedIn and me being where I am today.

No, that is. I mean, the importance of your relationships with people cannot be underestimated. I will say one other thing, though, that was helping you in the background. Okay. In the background, there was. There was this larger theory that it's better to jump than be pushed. And by going to LinkedIn, you were jumping forward, and you understood that you were doing it because if you'd stayed where you were, there was a cost to that, that there was. In a way, there was no staying where you were. Right. And that the train was gonna run you over. And so maybe part of what was propelling you forward, along with this incredible help from Ryan and others, was the fact that you. You were pivoting into something that you thought was the right way to go.

Yeah. I still believe this was the only path I had to figure this out. And I was learning. The other part is I was learning constantly. So if you are a learner and when you go through this pivot, like, every day is a torrent of new information, and you can either get into this defensive crouch and say, I don't want to hear this, or you can open up and say, I'm going to learn everything I can.

Look, one of the things you've said many times, and I say, I quote you constantly, is that the number one trait in the AI world for all of us, you and me and every single person, is adaptability. Yeah.

You have to be able to take feedback and change and realize that what you were doing yesterday might not be what you do tomorrow. And you got to just constantly, constantly adapt. And so what I like to say to my team is believe passionately in what you're doing, but not how you're doing it. So you have to say, like, this is super important that I get this accomplished, but I might not be accomplishing it the right way. So you got to be adaptable to how you do it.

So easy to say. And what you're saying is so true. And yet, like, just on the face of it, we are all, as human beings, being asked to adapt constantly, constantly to everything that we're doing. And it's almost like there's a human sort of capacity for it. But I love the way you face into it. And, I mean, you're just a story that is such an incredible story of pushing through it. I mean, and just think about, like, when we're sitting here next year having our next podcast together. Well, all the stuff that's going to happen between now and then, that will be mind blowing.

So excited about it. Yeah, that's the other. Once you start doing this, it gets exciting. Like, this was something I didn't realize was that change can be fun. And especially if it's working, I guess maybe it's not so much fun. It's been working. So I'm like, I love it. But I think about what's coming next and what else can we do? When you start getting into this mindset of, like, what else is possible, that's a fun place to be.

You know, if you could go back right now and say hi to Dan Roth as he was struggling to make that decision to go to LinkedIn, to leave legacy media, you know.com, legacy media, but still, and to take this leap to a tech company. What would you say to that, Dan Roth?

I would say a couple things. One, life is long, so take chances. At the time, I remember thinking, this is my last opportunity to take a risk. I've got two kids, they're going to get just more expensive. I'm going to be locked in. And it just isn't true. People are resilient and there's all kinds of opportunities. So I would say, life is long, take chances. And then I would just say, like, you can do more than you think you can do. And who you think you are doesn't have to be exactly who you are. I at the time was locked into this vision of exactly who I was, and I just didn't realize what else was possible. I didn't have the peripheral vision to realize what was next to me and where I could go in my career. And so I think that's just the kind of advice I would give is just be broader in your thinking. So I hear about things and I'm like, I'm going to learn that I can learn that anything is learnable.

That's right, Anything is. And the biggest thing to learn, though, is how big we can be. Yeah, yeah. You know, Dan, before we had this conversation, you were already in the hall of fame of Susie's Favorite People. I just think about the first time we met lo those many years ago when you came to ask Jack to write for LinkedIn, when you were building the platform and you showed up and you persuaded him, which was not an easy thing to do. But you have just been an inspiration to me and to my students. But I consider you such a good friend and I'M so grateful that my listeners are able to hear your story and its incredible wisdom. So this is my very long way of saying thank you so much. We will be having you back every three months for a refresher because you're so damn good. But thanks a lot for being on.

Well, thanks for having me, Suzy. This is great. I love doing it. Felt like a therapy session. So thank you for that. I've been taking me back in time and then into the future. So you're great at this. And so this is one of your aptitudes.

Clearly. That. Clearly. All right.

Thanks, Dan.

Sa.