Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, BYOE (Bring Your Own Employee), BYOP (Bring Your Own Person). You mentioned – Well, I was going to go into the sort of second things, I think it’s a good segue there. The second reason, we kind of talked about identity and Office 365 there, I think that as it extends to Dynamics CRM, it's hugely valuable to know an entire person’s work history when you are trying to sell something to them. So imagining, you know, the problem with Microsoft’s world view before is this is John Smith and he was at Company A. There is also a John Smith at Company B. We don’t know if those are related. I’m sure there’s attempts to make sure they’re related but the magical thing that LinkedIn nailed is all the incentives are aligned for them to make money off of you wanting to make all of your information accurate. So, if you can have this holistic view of identity when it comes to customers, that’s incredibly valuable also. I agree and I want to jump into with something that I’ve been thinking about is with regards to this acquisition. Ben and I were texting about this earlier. The way I think about LinkedIn is it’s such a canonical example of the power of a network effect and the value of the asset of LinkedIn’s network that they've built, and I’ll get into this in a little bit in tech themes. But if you take for a given for the moment that the network effect and the defensibility of that means that their professional network that they built basically can almost never be disrupted and Lord knows many people have tried over the years despite the product being really crappy and all these other things. What can you build on top of that? We talked about how LinkedIn doesn’t monetize via ads really. They’re sort of like they did recruiting first. That was the most obvious. They nailed it like they owned that industry. But then it's also really obvious like they should do sales and having partnerships and like what I use LinkedIn for and probably many of our listeners. They’ve kind of really dropped the ball there. Then you think about like man, could Microsoft with the LinkedIn network asset on top of that really execute where LinkedIn hasn’t? I think there’s a big opportunity there.…

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