Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…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? Yeah, by the way, I'm glad you're finding great audience and traffic on LinkedIn. I think your content, actually, your content is exactly what we're trying to build for, it's expertise, it's advice, it's people you can learn from and it's also the views that really matter, not just the volume that matters. I think if we take a step back, there's so much conversation about zero to one products or scaling products, but you don't have much conversations about minus one to one products, like turnaround products. And I think there's obviously the perception of the market you have to deal with, but people I think in minus to one products, at least from my experience and we had a few at LinkedIn, pages is another one, helping businesses build their presence on LinkedIn. What you find is it's actually, most of the time it's internally harder to do because there's so much entrenched flows and processes and metrics that people are using on that specific area. So you almost have to change the inner workings of the system to make it work. Going back to the analogy of the mountain, if you start from the premise that I deeply believe in is that LinkedIn ultimately is a platform for economic opportunity that sits on top of a very strong social graph. Then really almost every aspect of economic transaction is possible and knowledge transaction is one of the most powerful economic transactions you can have. It's the biggest accelerant for an experience and we were always very strong at helping people get a job. We have seven hires per minute, but as we were building more and more knowledge and part of it was we bought LinkedIn, we bought Lynda to make it LinkedIn Learning a while back. Today we had 140 hours of learning every minute on LinkedIn happening across the feed and LinkedIn Learning, it's pretty powerful. And the transformation to the LinkedIn feed was exactly like you said. We actually were the first company to have a social feed, but I think we started wrong. So we started with basically activity feed. So it was like who changed what, who changed the job, who connected to who. It was more of like a tracking your network feed and it became more promotional in nature. So in a way just letting that be just naturally just moved into more of a promotional type of feed. And what we've done is we've shifted dramatically into building, actually this was one of the things I was excited about. So after I was leading the mobile team, there was no feed team, there was no unified feed team, there was no feed PM to an extent, I asked to do this role, nobody cared about it. I really believed in it. I have strong conviction about what I could do there.…

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