5. Secret Sauce
Q: How do I know it's almost graduation time at
University of Michigan?
A: The sudden increase of LinkedIn profile
connection requests in my Inbox.
Show of hands: how many people here use linkedin? How many you got an email from one of the IAs to connect on linkedin?
As you can see, we have the profile of our FABULOUS professor, Prof. Soloway. Primary product: A social network for professional networking.
LinkedIn offers working professionals- which is probably everyone here- user profiles which can be used for professional networking. Anyone may use LinkedIn’s search to find public data on known people: For example, I might use LinkedIn to find out information about a person I might be interviewing with.
There’s a Premium product, but AFAIK most people I know are content using the base product.
For businesses, LinkedIn offers advertising as well as tools for HR to find and reach out to prospective employees.
To the right we have Jeff Weiner, who is the current CEO. Mr Weiner was an exec. VP at Yahoo earlier and didn’t join LinkedIn until 2008, meaning the original founders went and found someone good at being an executive and hired him.5 cofounders: One ran Engineering, other CTO, another Marketing, another Product, and finally CEO. Interestingly, some of them left because they felt the super challenging problems LinkedIn faced in its early stages (like beating the competition) were solved and that the current problems (like sales force, advertising on mobile) were not as interesting
LinkedIn wants to create an “Economic Graph” similar to Facebook’s “Social Graph.”
Comprehensive digital map of world economy and connections within it
Data nodes: companies, jobs, skills, volunteer opportunities, educational institutions, and content
Vision for next 10 years:
LinkedIn wants to digitally list every job in the world
LinkedIn wants a connection from jobs to every skill required to have that job.
LinkedIn wants a connection from skills to all providers of those skills
Personally I think this is crazy, but I guess that’s why I’m not one of those important people with grand visions for the company
For LinkedIn, expansion is what’s hot.
China.
<pick something better…>
International expansion should be hot at LinkedIn.
Did anyone else get a LinkedIn request from one of the IAs? Who does NOT have a linkedIn account, and why?
Right now, students like us are encouraged to create LinkedIn accounts to help us find jobs, and I think having a LinkedIn helps. For most people there isn’t a downside to having one. Notably, Linked doesn’t have competition right now, making it the defacto goto application for prof. networking. How did they get there?
Secret Sauce: Quality- LinkedIn did things right, which drove high quality professionals to their site. Competitors did more things wrong, which made it so that they never became viral. Recruiters eventually found that they could find good talent through LinkedIn when it was otherwise impossible, allowing LinkedIn to grow as well.
So LinkedIn recently acquired Lynda.com for 1.5B.
Lynda.com is a site used for electronic learning, where users can take high quality classes and obtain skills.
LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to design training for the skills in demand, and wants to have more in-house control of that.
Here's what I bet their dream is -- use their data to figure out where the skills demand is, advertise it with their courses, offer certification designed to meet the need of employers, show employers the top performers in the associated classes, charge a hefty fee for connecting them, rinse and repeat.
Viadeo- French professional networking site, 50M
XING – European professional networking site, 10M
LinkedIn much ahead of its direct competitors…
Facebook: Rumored to be working on a major initiative that may compete with LinkedIn.
FB has like 10x the # of members
Rank 15th in world’s largest internet companies by both revenue and market cap
Twitter: also has market cap 33B.
Ebay, Yahoo, Salesforce all have around 30-60B market cap
Google, FB, Amazon have 150-370B market cap, which is like another tier up.
Good product
De facto tool for professional networking – everyone uses it. I think people will definitely continue to use LinkedIn for professional networking in the future.
Execution can be poor in some areas- notably the email spam (Do you know X, Y, or Z? You got __ views last week! X, Y, and Z are looking for candidates like you! Try a free month of Premium! ___ just joined! Want to connect? )
Expansion-wise, I think LinkedIn can start to do something with the vast amount of information it’ll be getting from having so many members
Endorsements are meaningless but recommendations can be really useful
LinkedIn isn’t as useful for reaching top talent because of how much spam they get