[MUSIC]
Jeff, thank you very much for your time today.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> [CROSSTALK] have you here.
>> Yeah, it's great to be here.
>> Let me start off by saying that we usually ease in to those conversations
with lighter topics, however,
there is a very special topic in everyone's mind this week.
And that is recent immigration policies.
So, we are 40% international and it's affected us quite deeply.
So as a CEO representing your company to the public,
how did you think about reacting to last weekend's executive order?
>> Yeah, first of all, it's great to be here, thank you so much for having me.
>> Thank you.
>> So there's different ways to go about addressing an issue like that,
and you have to think about, your audience, your constituencies and
who you're trying to reach and what your objectives are.
The first thing to keep in mind in a situation like that, at least for
us at LinkedIn, is the well being and the safety of our employees.
We, like the student body here, have a number of immigrants at the company.
We have a number of people who have yet
to become citizens who are here on working visas and green cards.
And we want to make sure that we could identify anyone
who was a citizen from one of the named seven countries.
And that they were here and present and accounted for and safe.
And we want to also do that for their immediate family.
So that was the very first consideration.
The next thing we wanted to do was make sure that we were making
clear how people could get involved if they wanted to help and make a difference.
As a company, our vision is to create economic opportunity for
every member of the global workforce, all of them.
That is irrespective of country of origin, ethnicity, religious belief.
And we have had some ongoing programmes to help
refugees find work that started in Sweden and we had some success there.
So [INAUDIBLE] success we extended that programme to Canada.
And with the executive order that was announced here last Friday, we accelerated
the launch of, what we call the welcome talent program here in the United States.
We also wanted to make sure that employees who wanted to get involved,
understood that through our employee-based foundation, they could contribute and
we could allocate those funds to efforts that are making a difference.
Then there was the third kind of dimension of this which is making clear,
at least from my perspective, where I stood on this and it's important, I don't
feel the need to comment on everything, to be able to comment on anything.
And from time to time there are going to be issues that I feel are important for
me to address, and they're important to our employees.
And this is one of those times.
And in a situation like this, least to my experience,
one of the things that I've learned is that you have to strike
a very delicate balance when you're expressing personal belief vs
expressing belief as a CEO, because you're representing your employees, your company.
And in this particular instance, I felt the need to express my own views on this.
And that was that this country, the United States, was founded
on our first principle and belief that all people
should have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
And America- >> [APPLAUSE]
>> That America has truly been a land of
opportunity.
It is a country and an economy that was largely built on the tireless efforts
of immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life for themselves and
their families, that ultimately created a spirit of entrepreneurship.
And were able to innovate and introduced products and services and
build companies that employed many, many people and
made a difference in a lives of so many in this country and beyond.
And I shared through social media the statistic that some people maybe less
familiar with but that 40% of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or
the children of immigrants just as one empirical point to support this idea.
And then again coming back to our vision as a company where this becomes
aligned is our position, our purpose to create economic opportunity for
every member of the global workforce.
And so I was expressing that position and at the same time, and
you asked the question, how is the CEO do I address this, it's very important for
any of you that go on to start your own company, join companies,
become senior leadership or become a CEO yourself, that you recognize that not
every employee within your organization may agree with you or
may agree with the people they work next to day in and day out.
And this was a very valuable lesson
that many of us learned during this election cycle.
Because a lot of folks in California vote a certain way, in Silicon Valley
vote a certain way, within a specific company, may vote a certain way.
And so, as I was expressing these thoughts, I wanted to make sure that our
team understood that mine was one opinion, that other people within the organization
may disagree, and that we should be respectful of those disagreements.
We want to create an environment where people feel like they belong
as long as that's consistent with our culture and values.
And again, that is an organization and an environment where all people,
irrespective of their country of origin, their political leanings or affiliations,
their creeds, their orientation, it is independent of all those things.
We're going to treat one another with compassion and we're going to take care of
one another, we're going to be respectful of one another.
>> Thank you very much for that.
We've been having a very rich debate over the past few days internally between both
classes and
drawing the line between our personal reactions to what as an institution
we need to represent, has been a tricky, I'll say at least, discussion.
So thank you very much for this perspective, it's great.
And before we go into the specifics of LinkedIn, I wanted to get your take on
another topic that could potentially have very high impact on the workforce.
So a couple of months ago you addressed the LinkedIn employees and
you told them about what some people refer to as the fourth industrial revolution.
So can you tell us a bit more about that concept and how you think it's actually
going to shift the dynamics of the workforce and the economy as well?
>> Yeah, absolutely, so this was a theory that
I first became familiar with through the World Economic Forum,
they were talking about the fourth industrial revolution.
The first, mechanization, largely based on the steam engine.
And the second was mass production, and that was largely based on
the introduction of electricity, division of labor, assembly lines and factories.
The third was automation and that followed electronics, early stage computing and IT.
And this fourth industrial revolution based on robotization.
And the technologies and
the innovations underpinning this fourth industrial revolution includes robots.
AI, sensors, autonomous driving, etc.
And what's noteworthy about this Fourth Industrial Revolution is that,
in the first three cases, new innovations, new technologies gave rise to
companies that generated massive gains in productivity and new job opportunities.
And there is increasingly a belief that in this
latest Fourth Industrial Revolution that may not be the case.
That the new technologies may actually displace more workers and
jobs than they create.
And certainly,
that was the case in this body of research from the World Economic Forum, where
they predicted, well, 7 million gross jobs would be eliminated between now and 2020.
2 million would be added through the advent of new technologies,
so we would lose 5 million jobs.
And there are some that believe that is a highly conservative estimate.
That more people than that will be displaced as a result of new
technologies and innovation and you can see this now and start to feel it.
And sure enough, at this year's Davos event that's hosted by
the World Economic Forum, there was a general consensus that one of the key
points to come out of this one, the key learnings was this whole meme,
this whole idea, has been discussed now for years.
It's been predicted for years.
And if you talked to attendees this year, they felt like something had tipped.
And whether it was heads of state or CEOs, founders,
there was a general consensus that it was no longer a prognostication.
It was actually happening.
And all of you have probably seen this anecdotally, week in and
week out, if you're following business news.
It seems like literally every other week,
there's another story about a major factory that has decided to deploy
robot technology that will displace tens of thousands of people.
Or a major retailer and major warehousing infrastructure that has
grown the number of robots being deployed by tens of thousands.
Or autonomous driving which has the potential to happen far faster than anyone
could have anticipated.
And for those that don't know,
trucking, it's the number one profession in California.
A lot of people don't realize that.
And what happens to those folks?
I think it's absolutely essential that any time there are stories about
these new technologies, it's wonderful to be excited about innovation and
things that could potentially unlock tons of value on a global basis for people.
But I think it's also equally important, if not more important,
every time we see these articles to understand what's happening to the people
who are being impacted and potentially displaced.
What programs are we putting into place to reskill these employees?
Are they being certified in new skills for the jobs that are and
will be as opposed to the jobs that once were?
Where is the spirit of entrepreneurship and
the investment and the energy in vocational training and
innovation in how we train people to take on these new technologies and
the job opportunities created by these new technologies?
How are we leveraging infrastructure that we couldn't have even dreamed of
decades ago?
Take LinkedIn as an example, when you look at the data we have,
we're developing the world's first economic graph and
our understanding take any locality in the world.
And we're in a position now where we can understand the fastest growing jobs within
that locality, the skills required to obtain those jobs.
We can understand the skills of the aggregate workforce within that locality.
We can measure the gap and then we can provide this data to junior colleges,
vocational training facilities, even four year universities and
help them to create just in time curriculum.
This is the kind of thing, I think, increasingly as a society,
we need to be spending more time on understanding and solving for.
>> All right, so actually you've touched the point, I was about to ask you next,
which is educational reform is something that you're very passionate about.
So let me rephrase the question and ask are there any systems out there that you
think will provide the better match to the shifting economy and
the needs of the workforce moving forward?
>> Well, coming back to education reform because it goes well beyond how
we're going to reskill displaced workers, I think from a generational
perspective it starts with primary education and then K through 12.
And we need to make sure that increasingly, we are providing schools and
teachers the assets, the curriculum, the technology they need
to bring our students into the 21st century successfully.
Rote learning and the same things that were deployed to help people train for
the industrial revolutions that came prior, that we talked about.
For those who don't know, well, we'll do a little bit of pop quiz.
How many in the audience know why there is summer vacation in American schools?
>> So that kids could go harvest.
>> So the kids could go harvest the fields.
When was the last time any of you went out harvesting the fields?
>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, do you know why in part,
we sit in rows and why rote learning was such
an important part of primary school, anyone, yeah?
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah, assembly lines, so
we exist in a different world and
increasingly the world has become more digital more networked.
Things change much faster than they've ever changed.
That's not anecdotal, it's empirical.
And so, we need to teach critical reasoning.
We need to teach creative problem solving.
We need to teach collaboration.
We need to teach compassion.
We need to change the way in which we're training the future workforce.
I think there are now technologies that we could take advantage of,
that will help teachers and help administrators focus more and
more of their time on teaching these skills.
And we can leverage adaptive learning platforms to teach more of
the commodity-based skills, the basics.
And we're still in very early innings in terms of being able to fully deploy and
take advantage of these new technologies.
We were talking a little bit about the importance of vocational trainings, so
moving beyond the generational change, that's going to take years, but
we gotta start investing in that right now.
But what about the workers being displaced today?
We need to go all in on vocational training.
And historically, and speaking of in the US now from a societal perspective,
I think, we've placed tremendous emphasis and
weighting on degrees from prestigious four year universities or graduate schools.
And that matters and it's important.
But it's also important for people who are going down a different
path to have access to an education, where they can develop a skill and
a trade that they can utilize to earn a living and create a career path.
And you see this in countries like Germany that have done this extraordinarily well.
And so this isn't just a technical issue, it's also a societal and a cultural issue.
>> Thank you very much for that.
Now, we want to get to know you a little bit better, so
we're going to take you a little bit back to the start of your time at LinkedIn.
>> I thought we were about to do, this is your life.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
they start flashing pictures from my childhood.
>> That's what I would have done, if immigration wasn't an issue there.
>> [LAUGH] Okay.
>> But essentially, back when you look at when you first joined LinkedIn.
>> Yep.
>> Transitions are very difficult,
especially when it's a very fast growing environment.
>> Yeah.
>> So what were the key success factors that kind of made the hand over
between Reid Hoffman and yourself smooth?
>> Reid Hoffman, Stanford alum Reid Hoffman?
>> Yep.
>> Symbolic systems, anyone, symbolic systems that you're under in?
>> I had him in a class last year as a guest.
>> Did you?
>> Yeah.
Good man, very, very bright, extraordinarily thoughtful,
and that's actually a part of why our hand off was so successful.
So I first met Reid, as the Dean said, at a dinner.
We were at a restaurant in San Francisco and we were doing some brainstorming for
an event we titled Brainstorm and they wanted to talk to about 20 or
30 folks from the Valley about their ideas for event material and the agenda.
And I remember Reid answering a question that's been posed, and
I was really struck by not only his intelligence but
how he was coming at it from a different perspective.
And we have been told by different people who knew us that we should meet at some
point.
So we had a chance to meet on that occasion.
And little piece of trivia, Reid was actually the last guest speaker I
brought in to talk to my team when I was an executive at Yahoo,
before I ended up leaving the company.
At any rate, when LinkedIn elected to make a change at the CEO level,
for those that don't know, Reid had been the founder and CEO.
He had then hired a professional CEO, a guy named Dan Nye who did a wonderful job.
And Reid was the president of product, reporting to Dan who was the CEO,
who then reported to Reid as the chairman and founder of the company.
>> [LAUGH] >> What could possibly go
wrong with that construct?
>> [LAUGH] >> So
it didn't work out the way people had hoped.
And the two of them had a great deal of admiration for one another.
That's not what it was about.
So when Reid was looking to make a change and he asked me to get involved, he said,
I was at the time, I was an executive in residency at Greylock, and
LinkedIn was a portfolio company.
And I understood they were making a change and someone said,
would I be interested in helping out?
I said absolutely.
That's one of the reasons I'm here.
So I'll take a couple of days a week and I'll help Reid out in any way I can.
And he said, okay, you should go meet with him.
I said okay.
So I go and meet with Reid.
We were actually in his house.
And I think I was sitting in a LinkedIn bean bag chair with the words innovation,
and everything had an In logo on it.
And he said, so I have two lists.
I have an interim CEO list and a full time CEO list, and
you're the only person on both lists.
So what do you say?
I was like, whoa!
Whoa, what?
I was going to volunteer to help.
He's like, no, no, you gotta come in and let's make this happen.
So I agreed that I was going to start on an interim basis
because I had just left Yahoo.
I was there for a number of years, and
I wasn't sure how quickly I wanted to get back into a full time position.
And I said as long as he was open to having me full time and
I could start interim, I'd be open to that.
And he said as often as you're open to being full time,
you'll start as interim and then we'll see how it goes.
I said great.
The night before I joined, I called him.
I was going to start as interim president with all the responsibilities of a CEO,
but interim president.
And I called him and
said so, you're still going to be the CEO, at least in title symbolically.
I'm coming in as interim president.
Which decisions would you like to make and
which decisions do you think I should be responsible for?
I want to make sure we had clarity before I started.
He said, this is easy.
It's your ball, you run with it.
I go, what?
He said, yeah, you're going to make all the decisions.
That's why I'm bringing you in like this, and I just learned what not to do.
Now to give you an indication of truly how thoughtful he is, he went a step further.
And over the course of the first ten weeks I was at LinkedIn,
Reid was out of the office, he scheduled trips and travel, for
roughly six to eight weeks of that time.
Because he recognized, no matter what we explained to people, that muscle memory
was still going to be in place and people were still going to go to him.
So he literally physically took himself out of the situation so
I could build that connective tissue with the organization.
So between that and between the graciousness of my predecessor,
Dan Nein, the way he handed off the baton.
In a situation like that,
the person who's leaving the company can sometimes be angry and bitter.
And they can poison the well to some extent.
And Dan did the exact opposite.
He operated with absolute integrity throughout the entire process.
The last thing I would say is one of the most frequently asked questions I
got when I first joined LinkedIn was, what's it like working with Reid?
And that was code for what's all the drama happening between you and
the founder of the company?
And what people didn't realize was I joined LinkedIn,
not in spite of Reid, but in large part because of Reid.
I had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for him.
I wanted to work with him.
And he's gone on to become one of my closest friends,
someone I would certainly go to for advice.
And we've had a wonderful partnership ever since.
>> Well, you've built a great thing.
>> Thank you.
>> And you stress on purpose-driven culture.
So what is the purpose of LinkedIn and
how did that translate to the culture that you guys built over there?
>> Yeah, so I mentioned earlier our vision to create economic opportunity for
every member of the global workforce.
We separate vision and mission at LinkedIn.
Some companies use these synonymously, and I think that's a lost opportunity.
Vision for us is the dream.
It's true north.
It gets us out of bed every morning, coming in to work.
Mission is an overarching objective for
the organization that is realizable, measurable, and hopefully inspirational.
So they play two different roles.
Our mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive
and successful.
We believe deeply in our mission.
We believe deeply in our vision.
And our sense of purpose is one of the things that defines us as an organization.
It's not just the what, however.
It's also the how, our culture and values.
It's not just about what were trying to accomplish and
the results that we generate.
It's how we go about doing that.
And increasingly, I think both purpose and the idea of culture and
values is what attracts people to join organizations.
That's certainly the case with the younger generation, with the millennial
generation, where you find time and time again people seem to be more driven
by purpose than they do some of the things that mattered perhaps more historically.
Compensation, title, these things are still important.
But I think talking to more and more younger people,
purpose and what the company is ultimately trying to accomplish, and the impact
it's going to have in the world, that seems to be more heavily weighted.
And it's not just among employees.
It's also increasingly customers who, by virtue of social media,
have a transparent view into how companies operate.
And increasingly, they're interested in making purchasing decisions,
not just by virtue of the quality of a product, but what the company's all about,
what the company is trying to accomplish and how they're trying to accomplish it.
And regardless of whether or not the company is making clear how they're going
about their business, people are going to find out in this day and age.
So I think purpose plays an important role in terms of inspiration, motivation,
not only of your employees, but also in terms of building a relationship
with your end customers and all the key constituents within your ecosystem.
>> So that purpose, if I walk into an average office floor
in a LinkedIn building, and I walk in, what are the cultural components?
What am I going to feel out of the group that represents
the purpose that you just talked about, of creating economic opportunity?
So you're going to get a sense, I mean, if you literally ask people,
they would tell you we have five cultural dimensions, we have six values.
And in summary, if you ask people to define our culture,
they would say it's a culture of transformation.
Transformation of the self, transformation of the company,
transformation of the world.
The other four, integrity, collaboration, humour and results.
With regard to our values, the first value that I'll tell you about and
our most important value, is that our members come first.
Not at the exclusion of everything else we do.
It's not members only, but it's members first when we're making decisions,
because without our members we don't exist.
Relationships matter and nested underneath that is to manage compassionately.
To be open, honest, and constructive.
To demand excellence.
To take intelligent risks and to act like an owner.
And I would have a fairly high degree of confidence.
That if you picked random people out they'd be able to summarize that for
you fairly accurately.
And the reason for that is because as an organization, we've made a commitment to
not just talk the talk, and put it up on the walls and distribute the laminated
cards that people put in their wallets, but to walk the walk.
And we do it through our recruiting process and ensuring that people
are not just experienced, and don’t just have the right skills, but
are also going to be a fit for our organization.
We reinforce it on their first day through the onboarding process.
We develop against it through learning and development, and
how continue to educate and groom people throughout the organization.
And we evaluate performance against it.
And this comes back to what we're talking about with regard to purpose.
That it's not just about the results you get within our organization.
It's also about how you went about doing it.
>> And it seems to some extent straightforward,
when you're physically in the same space.
And you can kind of have your finger in the pots of what's happening But
what about when you're bringing in thousands of people across the globe?
How do you track it?
How do you make sure it's still there?
>> It's an excellent question.
And the reason I'm smiling is I think this is where a lot of hyper-growth
organizations have a tendency to potentially go off the rails.
The reason being, when you're in hyper-growth mode, there is so
much demand for your products or services.
You're trying to keep up with that demand to the best of your ability.
And more often than not, you have to hire a lot of people to do so.
Whether it's people who are producing the project, engineers,
product people designers, web devs, etc.
Or the people selling the product.
Or the people who we're supporting the teams that are doing so, and for
taking it to market, etc.
And so there's a natural inclination, even if you've really spent the time and
energy to define your mission, codify your mission, codify your vision,
codify your culture and your values.
What you'll see from time to time is people compromising on
those things to keep up.
And I'll give you an example of this, an actual thing that happened.
So early on in our hyper-growth mode I remember sitting around a table
with a number of senior executives.
And we were evaluating the candidate who was going to fill a very
pressing need for us.
And as we were reviewing their LinkedIn profile,
you didn't think I was going to say resume, right?
As we were reviewing their LinkedIn profile, the person who was
sponsoring this particular prospect said, look at this background.
Look at the experience, the skill set, the things they were involved with,
the companies they worked for.
I would add that they're not a cultural fit per se.
I have some concerns but we'll take care of that.
We'll coach him, we'll put this person with the right mentor,
we'll make it happen.
You know how often how that works out?
>> [LAUGH] >> So it's very rare, very rare.
There are exceptions, but
seldom does someone change their stripes in a situation like that.
And what happens is, exactly to the point of your question.
When you're all, you start up a company and
you're basically all under the same roof.
You may all be in the same room.
And as you grow, maybe you're occupying different floors within the same building.
It's still pretty easy to communicate,
it's pretty easy to take the pulse of the organization.
You're going to hear about things that aren't working out.
You can get involved and fix them.
As soon as you start to really grow and expand to multiple offices,
multiple cities, multiple countries.
Imagine bringing that person into your organization and
having them lead a particular operation, where you're not physically proximate.
And they're bringing their own baggage,
they're bringing what they believe is the right thing to do.
And you're not around to help course correct.
So they're now hiring people against what they believe is the right thing to do.
And you're growing so fast, this dynamic
is taking place across multiple functional areas and multiple cities.
And before you know it, you're going to have a very, very significant problem.
So what you want to have happen is what happened,
fast forward about six to nine months.
Sitting around a similar table, similar group of people,
evaluating a similarly important candidate.
Person says, look at this experience, look at these skills.
Not a cultural fit, let's move on to the next candidate.
And I was like, all right.
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> And where you're really
on to something,
is when that conversation starts taking place without you being in the room.
And that's when you're on a path to successfully scaling the talent within
your organization and your culture.
>> You talk a lot about managing compassionately,
you just referenced it in your answer.
So what does that mean, and how does it translate in your daily routine?
Just feel to see how that looks on a daily basis.
>> Yeah.
So managing compassionately is about putting yourself in another
person's shoes and seeing the world through their lens or perspective.
Classically defined, that's for the purpose of alleviating their suffering.
Within a business context I believe it doesn't have to be limited to
alleviating suffering.
It can be helping them.
Helping the team, helping the organization.
And day in and day out, whenever any of us are dealing with other people,
there are going to be times where you're disagreeing.
There's going to be conflict.
As a matter of fact, you probably had some conflicts today that you could think of.
And if you were to go to any company, anywhere in the Valley, or
anywhere in the world for that matter.
And you say, how many of you have had some degree of conflict
throughout this working day?
You'd have a fair number of hands go up.
And what typically happens when people experience this conflict is one party,
one person is going to start to escalate emotionally.
They're going to get angry,
they're going to get defensive, they're going to go on the attack.
And more often than not,
the person on the receiving end of that may have n empathetic response.
Which is to feel the anger that the other person's feeling and
become angry themselves.
It's important, by the way, to distinguish between empathy and compassion.
It's really important if you aspire to managing compassionately.
A lot of people, particularly in western society, including myself 15,
20 years ago, would use empathy and compassion synonymously.
Empathy is feeling what another person is feeling.
Fundamental building block to compassion.
Compassion is maintaining enough distance where you can actually
do something about the way the other person feels.
If you are strictly having an empathetic response,
to put in the parlance of the Dalai Lama.
If you were walking along a trail in the mountains and you came across a person who
was being crushed by a boulder on their chest, and they were suffocating.
The empathetic response would be for you to suffocate as well.
And if you're suffocating, you're no longer in a position where you can help
them The compassionate response is to reflect on the fact that, not for
too long if they're suffocating, but to understand that this person is suffering,
and to do whatever you can to alleviate that suffering,
get the boulder off of their chest.
What does that mean, what does that translate to in a work environment.
You're sitting there, you're in a meeting and there's a disagreement.
They'd get angry.
You would normally get angry,
you would normally get defensive if they're getting defensive.
And this goes back and forth.
And it becomes very challenging to resolve.
But what if, rather than just blindly mirror their emotion,
or in other cases, often times people just assume nefarious intention.
Well, how dare this person disagree with me, or
attack my belief, my recommendation?
They must be political territorial, they must be ignorant.
As oppose to the compassionate response
being a spectator to your own thoughts and especially your emotions.
So taking a step outside yourself and understanding what's going on.
Maybe that person is having a bad day and it has nothing to do with you or
anything you said.
Maybe you pushed a button in that person where they had something
traumatic happen to them, five years prior unbeknownst to you.
Maybe you're talking about a subject that the person is less familiar with and
they’re feeling a little bit vulnerable,
little bit insecure about looking bad in front of their peers.
I could go on and on with all the potential reasons that this person
maybe acting the way that they are.
And the more you can take the time to understand that, the more you can connect
with the person and constructively begin to understand where they're coming from
and work towards compromise or the very least work towards a shared understanding.
That's managing compassionately.
And more often than not, especially younger less experienced executive
like myself was ten, 12 years ago.
We have a tendency to expect everyone around us to do things the way we do them.
That is natural.
It's egocentric, not egomaniacal, okay?
It's egocentric and that's human nature.
But you're not going to get the best out of the people you're working with if
you're constantly holding them up against a lens or
a bar of what you yourself are capable of and precisely how you do things.
What makes far more sense,
where you're going to get much more value, out of those individuals in the team.
Is when you understand, their strengths, their unique strengths,
you play at their strengths.
Where you understand areas for improvement, and
you coach them on those areas for improvement, or
you change their role,such that it is better aligned with their strengths.
And when you can do that, when you can begin to do that,
you start to unlock value that's not possible.
When you're only thinking about the world through your own lens.
And so, managing compassionately has been something I've been aspiring to do now
since first realizing this.
And like I said, it's probably coming up on 12 plus years at this point.
I say aspiring because it's really, really hard to do.
Because we're all human and we all have buttons that get pushed.
So if anyone out there that decides they do want to practice more compassionate
work, recognize you're not always going to be able to do it and that's okay.
The aspirational component that's really important.
>> I'm sure most of us after this talk are going to empathized with you and
try to feel what it's like to build a $26 billion company.
The best, [LAUGH] that's promising.
You're one of the very few CEO's that survived multiple growth transitions.
>> Hm-mm. >> So went from private to public and
then through the Microsoft acquisition.
What keeps you the right man for the job?
And what were the different challenges that you had on each stage?
>> So in terms of the challenges at each stage it's funny
you find the question that way.
I used to get asked after I first join the company about six,
nine months of being there.
What keeps me up at night?
And, beyond having a newborn at the time,
which was keeping us up, literally keeping us up at night.
In terms of the work, it wasn't keeping me up at night, per se, but
what I constantly and vigilantly focused on was the idea of focus and scale.
That was the case when I first join the organization we had 338 people,
that's the case today we had more than 10,000 people.
Focus and scale.
Focus is understanding not just your mission and vision and
your culture and your values but your core value proposition.
What is the value that your going to bring to the people that you serve your members,
your customers, etcetera.
And all too often particularly among its hyper road companies.
You see organizations that break on something that introducing new prior to
service and there's massive, massive demand.
And they go on this hyper growth journey, but they don't necessarily take the time
to codify and really specify their core value proposition.
If you want to visualise, think about a target, and
the bullseye is your core value proposition, the manifestation,
the product or service that's going to be the clearest manifestation of your core.
Value proposition, our core value proposition is to connect our members and
customers to opportunity.
And when you draw this target, you start with that bull's eye.
And then you can add concentric circles, and those concentric circles are what's
possible, the adjacencies that are possible as you extend from your core.
If companies do take the time to define the core,
and that's one of the classic mistakes is they don't take the time to do so.
But if they take the time to define the core, the next most common
mistake I see in hyper-growth situation, is to draw resources away form the core
too quickly in pursuit of the next bright shiny object.
And as the result of that you leave your core vulnerable.
And if you had success there's going to be a lot of competition waiting for
you to stumble.
And they've seen what you've done, and
there going after your core and then they go after the core.
And you're in a position where you have to react to the competition now.
And you have to draw resources away from that growth opportunity,
back to your core.
And you're whip selling people within your organization.
Now you're reacting as opposed to being proactive and strategic and
that is no good.
So, clearly define and codify your core, make sure
your first managerial cycle, your first dollar of capital, your first resources
are going into the support of building that core and achieving critical mass.
And once you achieve critical mass, then take incremental investment and
invest it into strategic opportunities and
what we like to call venture plays or venture bets.
So that focus is critical.
It's also really important that people take the time to understand skill.
And again with regard to hyper growth companies, a lot of organizations and
the people leading this organizations become fixated on innovation.
And at times that happens at the exclusion
of putting the right building blocks in place, to support scale over time.
And scale, Brastax comes from less glamorous things.
It comes from investing the right people in talent, it comes from investing in
the right process, it comes from investing in the right infrastructure.
And that will lead to future innovation and success.
But if your focused on innovation at the exclusion of those things where you're not
taking the time and energy in prioritizing those elements, those foundational
building blocks, it's going to be very, very difficult to scale the organization.
Over time.
The last thing I would add, if we're talking about a company in terms of
multiple phases, is as an organization matures and it comes out of hyper growth,
which inevitably happens to virtually all organizations,
although if you look at Facebook's most recent results, they're still growing 50%,
$32 billion revenue run rate, which kind of defies gravity.
Very unusual.
But as organizations mature and their growth rates slow,
it's really important to get ahead of that dynamic.
And that starts by being very honest with yourself
about your addressable opportunity.
And I think all too often, companies kind of get a little too
fixated on the marketing material and how they position the organization,
what the company is capable of doing,
and they're not necessarily honest with themselves about the real addressable.
And if organizations just use these theoretical numbers and constructs, and
they don't really look under the hood in terms of where saturation is going to
occur, you're going to end up reacting to slowing growth,
as opposed to proactively addressing it.
And ideally, laying the ground work and layering an investment that
enables you to add the next S curve before that growth decline begins.
And that is absolutely critical towards sustainable growth.
And you see it amongst the modern tech titans increasingly.
These organizations making huge investments beyond the core,
and they're being very proactive, very strategic about it.
And that continues to help them sustain growth and unbelievable levels of skill.
>> That sounds like, of course, that we should have you in the GSB.
Yeah, just pulling it out there.
>> Well, Reed, in all seriousness, Reed and
a few friends of his taught a course here on blitz scaling.
When they talked about how the scaling or the dean is going, yes, he did.
>> [LAUGH] >> All right.
>> The LinkedIn team just or the LinkedIn team built a $26.2 billion company.
The largest acquisition that Microsoft has ever made.
It's quite an accomplishment, so, congratulations.
>> Thank you.
>> How do you envision the future with this partnership?
What are they going to change?
>> So, in terms of change, I'll tell you what it doesn't change.
It doesn't change our sense of purpose.
It doesn't change our vision or
our mission, and that was critical to getting the deal done.
So, when Satya and
I first sat down before the deal was announced, we both agreed that we
would have to have at least two dimensions in place in terms of strong alignment.
One was sense of purpose and the other was structure.
And with regard to sense of purpose, it turns out that our mission,
that worded differently than Microsoft's mission, to empower every individual and
organization on the planet to achieve more, are actually quite similar.
Different wording, and we have gone about it differently.
We built a professional network and
we're increasingly investing in building out the world's first economic graph.
Microsoft, historically through software and increasingly through the cloud.
But we're trying to accomplish the same thing.
Satya is extremely purpose driven.
And Microsoft, under his watch, has become an increasingly purpose driven,
it's very important to him.
So, we had alignment there.
So, you could check that box.
And then, we turned in that discussion to structure, and
I didn't know what to expect.
I didn't know what he was going to say.
Was he going to ask me to move up to Redmond and for
the organization to relocate?
And he said, so, I think, in this case, it's really important that LinkedIn
continues to be independent, and he had made independence.
So, we were talking about what Facebook had done with WhatsApp and
Oculus, and of course, Instagram.
What Google has been able to do with YouTube, and
increasingly you see these organizations at enormous scale.
Being able to acquire companies and really preserve what has made those companies
successful, and allow those companies to continue to build off of that.
But at the same time, leveraging the broader assets of the organization.
And that is very much what Satya and
I were hoping to accomplish with this combination.
So, LinkedIn continues to pursue the same mission and vision.
We continue to do so in a way that manifests our culture and values.
We have the same leadership.
We're doing the same work, but we have an opportunity now to leverage Microsoft's
customer footprint of over a billion individuals that use their software.
And to leverage their extraordinary investment in advanced technology.
And to leverage all of that talent.
And to accelerate the realization of our mission and vision.
And that's the hope.
>> So, we have one final question before we move on to the Q and A.
You mentioned interview with Oprah that in your early 30s
you had a bit of a very fundamental change on your perspectives on life.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And that led to a better you.
I would say that it is fair to say that most of us around here
are still in search of that better version of ourselves.
So, can you tell us a bit more about that transition and
any pitfalls that we shouldn't or should watch out from?
>> Dude, you went all Oprah on me.
I mean, that's a full- >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH]
>> You went full Oprah,
who did an amazing job, by the way, up here.
>> On this stage.
[LAUGH] >> Yeah, I have seen that interview,
she was fantastic.
So, you may be referring to an interview I did with Oprah on Super Soul Sunday.
>> Yep.
>> And she was asking,
how many of you watch Super Soul Sunday, any Super Soulers?
Will, you better get your hand up man.
>> [LAUGH] >> Will didn't even, thank you, Will.
So, Oprah had done some research and done her homework for the interview.
And she said, in reading one particular profile in the, that
I had been known in a prior role before I got to LinkedIn to be very intense.
[LAUGH] Which I think would be putting it somewhat euphemistically.
And I am intense and I was intense.
We talked a little bit about my management practices at the time were I was expecting
people to do things the way I did them and I would go frustrated.
And it's not like yelling and throwing things frustrated, but
frustrated nonetheless.
Different management style though when I have to.
And she said what lead to you managing compassionately and
what part of your practice?
And I told her about some specific things that had occurred within my role at
the time.
But at the end of the day, the biggest difference for
me personally was meeting my wife.
>> Okay.
>> And my wife led to a very different perspective for me.
And she valued things that I hadn't placed as much value on historically.
Things like kindness, and love, and
gratitude, and it changed everything for me.
And I'm very, very fortunate to have met here.
And you hear all the time,
I wouldn't be in this position if it weren't for so and so.
But in my case, it's absolutely the case.
>> Thank you very much for that.
>> Sure.
>> I'm going to open up the Q and A now.
There we go.
>> Jeff, thanks for being here and for your candour today.
My name's Holly May, I'm an alum from the class of 2016.
I want to go back to where we started the dialogue.
And as you think about as an executive and as a visible person in the valley,
how do you think about which topics to speak on and which not to?
And in the current context, we've seen a lot of execs talk about
the Executive orders and yet these weeks starts Black History month and
that hasn't gotten an equal amount of attention, how do you think about which
topics to show up on and which not to and the consequences of those choices?
>> Yeah, so interestingly enough we have a lot of activity
plan within LinkedIn on Black History month.
And it's been led by an amazing employee, resource group and
our leadership there and we're excited about that.
You asked an excellent question and
my first response would be there is no formula for this.
There's no cookie cutter approach to this.
It, at times, is a deeply personal decision, I think it's really important
to know where you stand, if you're going to be in a position of leadership.
To know what your company is trying to accomplish,
to know how it wants to accomplish it,
to be very clear with people about those values and where you draw lines.
And where you're willing to compromise and where you're not.
And when those lines get crossed, to do something about it,
to speak up, to take action.
And at the same time to recognize that your personal beliefs maybe at
odds with the personal beliefs of people that worked within your organization.
And that as long as people who disagree do so in a mutually respectful and
compassionate and constructive way that is consistent
with the way in which you want to go about your business.
Consistent with your culture and consistent with your values, that every
individual within an organisation should feel as if they belong there.
So that's the approach that I've taken, that we take as a leadership team.
But it's going to be different depending on who you're talking to, depending
on what they're trying to accomplish, depending on their own experiences.
Thank you so much for being here and sharing all the information with us.
And I'm Akasha and I'm an undergrad freshman.
Two real quick questions.
So first one is what kind of innovation do you think is happening at LinkedIn and
what innovation are you concentrating more on?
And what advice to you give for undergrads who want
to start their companies?
>> [LAUGH] >> Have a good LinkedIn profile?
>> Okay, yeah.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] I'm the first in terms
of the innovation taking place.
We are, last year,
we completely overhauled our mobile flagship application.
We are in the process right now of rolling out a new version of
our desktop experience, that's build on a new front end framework called Pemberley.
That's going to enable us to iterate and
innovate up to ten times faster than what we could do historically.
So we've got some very strong building blocks in place.
We also have a very clear sense of the assets that we've been able to
develop today.
One of the things that we're going to be investing in
more aggressively is the application of artificial intelligence.
Both LinkedIn and Microsoft have amazing talent along those lines, and
Microsoft has invested very heavily in this area.
And we can bring that to bear on LinkedIn through things like
a bot experience that you could think of as your own personal assistant.
So we could provide a personal professional assistant to every member of
LinkedIn, whether that's calendar integration and
providing you the information you need to be better prepared for
the person you're about to meet.
Or ultimately making sure you have access to the right information to complete
a project.
There's a whole host of things that we're very excited about to bring to bear there.
We're going to continue to invest very aggressively in making our feed and
the content within out feed more relevant and more personally relevant.
We've only begun to scratch the surface there, and
what you're going to start to see this year are what we call Interest Feeds.
So we can take packages of content by virtue of machine learning,
social queues, and our editorial team and we can curate these packages.
So whether it's around the executive order or a major announcement by your company,
or a shift in the economy, you can not only see articles that were written
by publishers that you're following, or influencers that you're following, but
what people in your network are saying, and
the information you need to know right now as professional to make better decisions.
So we've only begin to scratch the surface there, so stay tuned on that front.
We are going to be starting to think about, how and this is somewhat consistent
with second part of your question, how we can create stronger marketplace
dynamics with regard to opportunities that our membership is seeking.
Not just jobs per se, although that's a huge priority for us, but say mentors and
mentees or people that want to get involved in philanthropic activities and
the non profits who could use their skill sets or their resources.
And for those seeking investment, if you're starting a company,
we've got a lot of people on LinkedIn who are very interested in investing.
And those are just a few examples of what would be possible with regard to those
marketplace dynamics, so stay tuned for that.
We're going to start to experiment with that as well.
And that's largely [INAUDIBLE] from LinkedIn and there's number of areas where
we're very excited to potentially integrate assets with regard to Microsoft.
So bringing in LinkedIn, LinkedIn Identity your network into the Office experience,
notifications within Windows, we're excited about the opportunity.
Microsoft Word is still the primary resource people use to create resumes, and
you can imagine the day where you're creating your resume, and
then a right rail appears, which asks you if you want to integrate that resume at
the click of a button into Linked In, refresh your profile, create a profile for
the first time, and then we can recommend jobs for you within that context.
So there's some exciting things we're doing along those lines as well.
In terms of advice, I would give to you if you're interested in starting a company,
I guess it wouldn't be to similar from the advice I would give anyone in the audience
in terms of how to optimize for their career path and how to achieve success.
And that would be first and foremost take the time to understand what it is you're
ultimately trying to accomplish.
And the more specific you can be, the more likely you will be to achieve it,
and you're going to manifest that in ways explicit and implicit.
And I don't mean this in some new agey predeterministic way,
I mean very practically.
The clearer you are about what it is that you want to accomplish,
the more you can clearly communicate that to the people around you.
The more doors are going to open up,
the more you're going to attract the right kind of opportunities.
So that's really important.
And when it comes to defining what it is,
you ought to know what you want to accomplish, try to optimize for
two things, your passion and your skill, not one at the exclusion of the other.
So that'll be first.
Second, would be to surround yourself with the best possible talent that you can.
And when I was younger, I used to think that was all about itching my wagon's
the right train in terms of my boss or mentor.
And as I gotten older, I've realized that is the world becomes more network,
as we become more dependent on knowledge, having the right knowledge at
the right time to accomplish certain objectives, it's really about people.
And so it's not just about who you work for, it's about who you work
alongside of and who works for you and making sure that you don't settle and
you don't compromise, in terms of where you set that bar on skill and
talent and on fit with your own values.
I think that's really important.
Personally, I like to work with people who dream big, who, can we curse here,
is that all right, okay, who get shit done [LAUGH] and who know how to have fun.
Not to be confused with constantly partying because it's going to be
difficult to get work done if you're constantly partying.
But knowing how to have fun as a proxy for being of like minds culturally.
So surround yourself with only the best talent.
And the third would be to always be learning.
The world is changing so fast right now.
There's an acceleration, it's like log or rhythmic, the rate of innovation.
And the days where you could study one thing and have a role or
a job guaranteed for the rest of your life, I think those days are long gone.
We have to constantly be learning, continuously learning.
And if you have a natural inclination or passion for that,
if you're naturally curious about the world around you,
you will be that much better positioned to continue to learn over time.
>> We're not Oprah's soul Sundays but we hope this was fun for you.
>> Yeah, it was great.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
>> [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]