Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cohen: LinkedIn intentionally curtailed record viral feed growth to prioritize quality
“We made a core decision to curtail growth even at the expense of engagement that we've never seen at LinkedIn growing at such record levels to make sure we go back to the drawing board and we focus on trust and quality.”
Insight
Cohen: Product leaders must give up deterministic control when building AI
“You don't control the experience. AI is not deterministic. If you ever had an interaction with JGPT, it's, you know, you're, most of the time you're trying to, hard to anticipate how it would respond. And I give the analogy of a chef in a restaurant where befo…”
Insight
Cohen: LLM pre-training on public data diminishes historic incumbent data moats
“Technologies like GPT are already trained on all public data. They've read every book, every healthcare book. They've trained on every piece of literature, art, best practices. This, the whole idea of the pre-trained is one of the biggest inflection points of …”
Insight
Cohen: AI strategy must originate from the CEO, not be delegated
“But for many product builders, AI is something they delegate. I mean, it's like really delegated to the AI team or the engineering team. I think AI strategy starts from the CEO and makes its way down.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cohen: Massive startup innovation will emerge in AI model routing tiers
“If I think of like why I would expect to see some massive innovation and startups to show up, it's in this tier to really allow people to leverage multiple models at multiple call centers and resources and efficiencies, and then completely mask it from the dev…”
Assertion Supported
Cohen: Job skillsets changed by 25% over the past five years
“The skillset necessary to do a job changed by 25% in the last five to six years.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Cohen: Global job skillsets will change by at least 65% by 2030
“By twenty-thirty, they're going to change by at least 65%.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cohen: LinkedIn is using LLMs to create interfaces that morph to users
“One thing that we're already underway for us is to really take away the complexity and solve it with the idea of bringing in more of this new large language models, and in general, this new brain that can exceed on top of it. So instead of adding more features…”
Insight
Tomer Cohen: Great product leaders love building, not decision-making power
“You have a lot of people who are coming to product to make decisions. I don't think to think of those as the right product people. I think it's inherently in the love of building and trying to create change.”
Insight
Cohen: B2B purchasing is highly emotional and stressful, not just feature-based
“When you buy a B to B product, it's actually a highly emotional, stressful job, because if you're going to buy a widget for a company, for your company, that's going to cost 50,000 dollars, a 100,000 dollars, a million dollars, and it's going to take months to…”
Insight
Cohen: Early-stage founders must stay intimately involved in shaping product
“Now, if you take it all the way back to a startup, Or a young company, then yes, I will be very worried if the founder is not intimately involved in the product, either as the head of product or playing a key role in shaping the product, because ultimately it …”
Assertion Contradicted
Cohen: LinkedIn is growing at its fastest pace in 20 years
“We're growing the fastest we ever grew right now.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cohen: LinkedIn Stories failed because users want permanent professional content
“When we did follow-up sessions with members after that, it was clear that we completely misunderstood the job to be done for creators on LinkedIn. It wasn't about wanting things to disappear. It was almost like the opposite. People wanted things to last on Lin…”
Insight
Cohen: In-person product reviews outperform remote sessions in creativity and velocity
“I actually do my product jams in person. I feel there is an energy of creativity and discussion that you get in the room in person. It's, you can do it remote as well. It's, there's no, It's not that remote does not work, but I think there is an edge to doing …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cohen: Centralized AI models will trigger a massive tech software bundling wave
“So we are, in my opinion, going into a transformation of bundling when you'll see better, more efficient experiences done by one centralized brain, which is the AI model itself.”
Opinion
Cohen: Information AI models should prioritize factual objectivity over political correctness
“If you're trying to access information, the models should try to be as factual and objective as possible. And I think that kind of puts aside the notion of being politically correct.”
Assertion Partly supported
Cohen: Job skill requirements changed 25% over five years
“If you look at the skill set you needed for a job today versus five years ago, that has changed by 25%.”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2028
Cohen: Job skill requirements will change by 50% in five years
“You look at it five years ahead, they're going to be 50% different.”
Insight
Cohen: AI-first product design requires relinquishing control over user experience
“When you think in an AI first principle kind of way, You're really unleashing the idea of control. What happens basically in AI is you don't control the experience anymore.”
Insight
Cohen: Monolithic AI agents are wrong; systems require multiple specialized agents
“Building one agent to rule them all is not the right design. You want to have multiple types of agents.”
Insight
Cohen: Undertrained large AI models underperform well-trained smaller models
“If you have a large model, That is undertrained. It will underperform a small model, which is really well, like well, well trained. So you're just wasting resources and you're going to get like less efficient results.”
Insight
Cohen: A product leader's primary job is defining algorithm objectives
“My opinion as a product leader or a designer or an engineer or a product manager, like data is literally at your second most important job in your role. It's understanding how do you basically start to infuse all of data collection and make sure it's high qual…”
Insight
Cohen: AI delivers the most value when simplifying complex software products
“The more complex your product, the more impact AI could have in terms of simplifying it for your user base.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cohen: LinkedIn will not hire product leaders lacking AI willingness and aptitude
“I would not hire you to my org if you're, if you don't have the willingness and the aptitude to go deep.”
