[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]
