Jeff Weiner on Establishing a Culture and a Plan for Scaling

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Jeff Weiner on Establishing a Culture and a Plan for Scaling

So it was December, 2008. We had about, we had 338 folks, and I found an incredibly talented group, not surprisingly, that Reid and my predecessor Dan Nye had assembled.

And even before my first day, I had already started to familiarize myself with the company through Reid, through some of the investors that were at Greylock, where I was the EIR at the time. And had recognized that there was much more to it than met the eye, which is interesting because to this day when people come inside the company to interview or they want to talk about where we're headed, a common response is, wow, I had no idea how much was going on or how big this could potentially be.

So I found an enormously talented group of people and a platform with almost unlimited potential within the specific context of creating value for professionals, creating economic opportunity for a global work force. I also found a situation where there, even though it was 338 people, there were a lot of different things taking place. There were a lot of bets that had been placed and Reid, for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to know him, or first principles, one of Reid's first principles is preserving optionality.

I think it's one of the reasons he's been so effective as an investor, and it was one of the reasons I believe that LinkedIn reached critical mass was because of the various areas in which the company was investing to see if they could generate critical mass and scale. At some point, though, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself essentially the question if you could only do one thing, what would it be? And that's another way of thinking about how you define your core.

And at that point, I think there was a good understanding of the potential avenues the company could take it terms of defining its core, more specifically, but there was a fair amount of activity taking place for a company of that size.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/jeff-weiner-on-establishing-a-culture-and-a-plan-for-scaling