Tomer Cohen: prediction

Transcript context

…I was just chatting with Vlad who worked at Airbnb for many years. He was actually my former manager at Airbnb and he reported to Brian for a long time and we talked about this trait that Brian also is really good at, is just setting crazy high goals. 10 X the goal that you thought you had and what would it take and it worked really well for Airbnb. So I love that you're doubling down on the same idea. Is there an example that comes to mind of one that you, some ambitious goal you set internally at LinkedIn that people are like, "No way," and then it ended up being effective? Actually there's a lot, when I think about our LinkedIn feed and thinking about when you started off, it was hard to imagine what that product could be because it was more of a promotional in nature product and I was like, no, is going to be a place where millions of people and not just tens of millions will come daily. And that's insane. That makes no sense based on the numbers today, but I don't start building from the numbers today. I start from [inaudible 00:15:04] I start backwards. I'm like, what this could be, what is the potential here? So how many professionals exist in their role? How many of them would love to find a place to share and engage with content? And this is my starting point. I start from there. So I don't start from the existence to set my ambition. I start from what this could be like based on really inspiration and excitement. Again, it's not detached from reality completely, but it's also not hooked to it. But then Basecamp could be a good start. You're not asking you to make it the next day, but if you don't have that ambition, there's no way you're going to hit that. There's just no way. And there's so many products across LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a 20 plus year old company that many folks did not give it a chance in almost every phase of it. And I think if anything, it's one of those that just keeps getting better and better every year. And part of it is you keep the landmark on. This really has the potential to do so much for so many people. It's really an economic platform. So if you play from that, one billion members, that's actually pretty small where we can actually go, I'm so happy you went to this example. This is exactly where I wanted to take the conversation. I was very much in the camp you described of LinkedIn, how could LinkedIn possibly become a place that I want to go and browse a feed and post content? As you probably know, for the longest time it was felt like this cringey place as you said, where everyone comes and promotes themselves, "Hey, I got a promotion or here's my company's new launch." And I think it's so underappreciated the turnaround that has happened within LinkedIn. I use it, I'm a multi-day, multi-Dow user. I check it at least 10 times a day. Most of my traffic to my newsletter comes from LinkedIn, not Twitter where people think, it's absurdly underappreciated and it's I think underappreciated what it took to make this happen. And when I saw you guys starting to try to make it a place people post content, I was like, no way, this is not going to work. Why would people want to share stuff on LinkedIn? And it's working, it's amazing. So I want to spend some time here and just try to go inside the strategy that you guys put together to here's how we're going to make this happen. Come, we've shared, you have this peak of here's what we could become. How did you actually turn this around? What was the strategy behind it?…

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