Linkedin taught me some Powerful Lessons about Purpose and Values

Nine and a half years ago, I joined my first large company, Linkedin, for a mix of largely unrelated and idiosyncratic reasons:

• I’ve loved networking so much that people for years had joked I was “JakedIn”

• I wanted to explore applying the networking, partnerships and business development experience from my time running a software development company within the context of a larger corporation, practicing what I’d later learn is called intrapreneurship

• I was an early user of social networks: in undergrad I helped host facebook.utoronto.ca, one of Canada’s first mainstream social networks, and I remain inspired by the OG Twitter: open-source, API based, network-as-infrastructure

• I needed a job as a result of a quintessential co-founder conflict.

The next 9 years involved far more growth and learning, more flights, airports and hotel rooms, more Zoom calls and Teams messages than I could ever imagine. At their core, they taught me my most important lesson, that living and working one’s values is more important than anything else, from money, to fame, to even social impact. Values define how much you value each of these things and what they mean to you.

Early at Linkedin, I helped my friend and colleague Scott Parish create a massive survey of purpose at work. It showed companies do better across every metric (sales, customer success, employee satisfaction, retention and productivity) when their employees’ values are genuinely aligned with their corporate values. Now, at the top of my list of work-related projects, I draft and revise the words I hope will be engraved on my tombstone (metaphorically, as I’m not exactly sure how I’m gonna be buried…) and how I would explain my work to my child (arriving in ~2 weeks!!!). These remind me to ensure I live my life and work in alignment with the person I want to be.

While my views on topics like the role of government, civil society and the public sector in our economy and society as well as technological interoperability, decentralization, competition and user data ownership eventually evolved away from Linkedin to the point where I felt I had to leave the company, Linkedin’s values remain powerful guides and successfully defined much of my time at the company.

For instance, Linkedin used to have a value that “relationships matter” and this has become amongst my most important personal values. Its meaning has changed: I used to form as many relationships as possible and 29K Linkedin connections later, this approach was wildly successful at generating a profit for Linkedin and a range of professional benefits. But as I explain in more depth in my latest User Manual, I now want to go deeper into the relationships I value most.

Part of why I had to leave Linkedin is because I am at the point in my career where I want to choose who I work with, how and when. This is particularly challenging within a large corporation. In most cases I nevertheless found Linkedin truly embodied the latest evolution of this value ”We trust and care about each other”.

Yet in some other cases, I felt Linkedin failed to live up to its vision.

For instance, the value that “We put members first” is powerful. If Linkedin and other companies can learn to put stakeholders other than shareholders first, they will succeed in the long term instead of at their next shareholder meeting. And they will build a healthier society and planet. Unfortunately, Linkedin’s layoffs an hour before its parent company Microsoft’s shareholder meetings led me to question whether it was prioritizing its employees or members over dollars. The friction I faced in attempting to advance member data ownership and interoperability similarly countered this value.

One value I will prioritize moving forward is being “open, honest and constructive”. Within Linkedin this primarily meant with each other but following in the footsteps of my father who was on Transparency International’s Canadian board, I plan to align what I say publicly, for instance about open data, in my work moving forward. Sunlight can remove not just the corruption Transparency International fights but can also help us live and work in alignment with more positive values like LinkedIn’s.

Linkedin’s vision to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce” was and remains particularly inspiring but also extremely hard to live up to. Linkedin advanced such opportunity for its powerful and paying members. Yet I now believe open and public technological infrastructure - from job boards and exchanges to open digital wallets, learning and employment records and open online learning and data - will better advance this vision than a walled garden containing perhaps the most valuable database of labour market information.

That said, Linkedin nailed many of its values and this is why I continue to believe it is one of the most impressive companies and particularly employers in the world. It truly “embod[ied] diversity, inclusion and belonging” and “We dream big, get things done and know how to have fun”.

Colleagues like Efrem Bycer, Amanda Penrice, Deanna Grady, Richard Wiltshire, Jennison Asuncion, Jay Singh, Chris Cohen and many more lived up to the belief that “talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not, and we realize our responsibility both on our platform and in our company to create a more equitable and inclusive world of work.” From its employee resource groups (see logos above) to testing the potential impact of its platform on any minority and even to open sourcing the Linkedin Fairness Toolkit, recognizing the importance of helping people measure fairness and bias, as well as detecting statistically significant differences in model performance across different subgroups, Linkedin excelled at building an inclusive, warm, productive and impactful community.

Similarly, by spoiling its employees from plentiful healthy meals and workouts at our offices around the world to incredible travel and team building opportunities, Linkedin built the best culture of any organization to which I’ve been exposed.

Linkedin also remained remarkably nimble and flat despite growing from under 10K employees when I joined in 2015 to almost 20K employees by my departure. This facilitated rapid development and deployment of new ideas. For instance, I had remarkably access to LinkedIn’s most senior leaders: I’m grateful to Farhan Syed, Dan Shapiro, Mike Derezin, Mark Lobosco (Sales) Jonathan Rochelle, Hari (Product) and Dan Roth (Editorial), among others that opened their doors and their minds to my often unorthodox ideas.

I hope to bring some of these lessons to my next organizations and remain grateful to my Linkedin colleagues for a remarkable decade.

More on the lessons related to workforce development and higher education, edtech, jobtech and HRtech and beyond in the coming months.

Till then, wish me luck with parenthood!

Endnote: Got this helpful response from my colleague Marium Hamid:

“…the nuance Jay might refer to is along the lines that I don’t personally think LinkedIn has failed its mission. I think that it’s not moving at the bold way and pace maybe people like you and I hoped for it to be. Much like many other things in life, I know you outgrew it and needed to have a bigger container for the ideas you want to test out. I feel like LinkedIn was the sandbox where you learned the rules of the games, but you are probably ready to break some of those rules as you look to the future.”