The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 77 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sze: Analytical VC partners fail if they cannot make decisive investment calls
“So there's so much uncertainty prospectively, and one of the most important things for a young partner is to have the ability to do the work, but then make the call, to put down some bets. And one of the other failures we've seen in a partner is they can be re…”
Sze: Bonding with Reid Hoffman in China led to LinkedIn investment
“We sat at the back of the bus each time on every stop on this tour through China, and we just mind melded. It was great. We got along so well. We were fast friends, and that led to the investment in LinkedIn and me inviting him to come to Greylock”
Early-stage SaaS companies cannot hide fast growth from LinkedIn headcount tracking
“So if you're an early stage SaaS company, you can't really hide if you're growing fast. People can check your LinkedIn headcount, see how fast you're hiring on the website, what type of people.”
Choi: LinkedIn retains acquired engineers above overall company average
“For LinkedIn, fortunately, we are actually trending slightly above that”
Choi: LinkedIn had three acquired founders leading main business lines
“At one point, for example, at LinkedIn, we had three founders running the three key business lines at the company”
Choi: LinkedIn Corp Dev prefers starting startup relationships at seed stage
“In many cases, it's at seed level. And again, it doesn't mean that there has to be anything transactional about the relationship, but it's good for us to start interacting at that stage if they're in a space that we're interested in.”
Evernote and LinkedIn succeeded in China by granting local leaders autonomy
“For a long time now, people have pointed to Evernote and LinkedIn as being decent deployment that happened in China. And both of those cases, they hired very local sort of general managers or heads of China. It gave them the freedom to build their own teams, l…”
Levine: Bessemer's LinkedIn investment generated a 100x return despite others passing
“Invested in LinkedIn, the two existing VCs thought the price we were paying was so crazy that they invested nothing in the round. I think that round ended up at something like a hundred X return.”
LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner is the best at defining corporate vision
“Jeff Wiener at LinkedIn, I think, is probably the best at doing this, right? Really being clear about a vision, and a mission, and strategy, and culture, and values.”
Network-connected software is the next major evolution in B2B enterprise
“The thing we saw very early on was in the consumer world, we were all moving to networks. This idea that cloud was going to be about the same applications as we had on our desktop, but delivered through the browser was breaking down and we saw a whole new gene…”
Nash: Reid Hoffman's handover to Jeff Weiner is the model CEO transition
“You know, Reid Hoffman, who I'm very close with is obviously the founder and has been the person guiding LinkedIn since the get-go, but the way that he brought Jeff Wiener on board and kind of empowered him to run that company I think is a model for how those …”
Hanson: Reid Hoffman stepping down as LinkedIn CEO was smart and selfless
“I did promise that I'd divert everybody to Founders Friday episode two for more on that but my serious answer is going to be Reid Hoffman and I know I mentioned him before with the Alliance, but I think in terms of a founder who, one of the things I really adm…”
Campus Job Built Student Brand Equity Where LinkedIn Fell Short
“The company has really created a brand at A place in the hiring market where LinkedIn doesn't have a huge brand yet and we believe that the first job that, the first jobs even, that a student or a kid gets are really emotional and a powerful place to build a b…”
Wienbar: Founders Should Use Customized LinkedIn Messages for Cold VC Outreach
“I think the more thoughtful place to do a sort of a cold outreach is on LinkedIn. But please don't link it, you know, ask to link to me just with the canned, you know, I'd like to connect with you, but I think a lot of deal flow both on Twitter and LinkedIn wh…”
Lisa Wu: Norwest rarely converts cold inbound pitches into actual investments
“We get a lot of inbound via LinkedIn and also through our website, and we do review each of those opportunities that come through those, but it's actually pretty rare that an opportunity that comes in through those channels actually converts into an actual inv…”
Seek mentors through inner circles, not cold LinkedIn outreach
“I would more use the inner circle, more, more you know, people that you have just by happenstance met along the way.”
Cohen: Gen Z and entry-level professionals are LinkedIn's fastest-growing demographic segment
“So for example, at LinkedIn, one of our fastest growing segments are Gen Z's and entry level professionals.”
Cohen: LinkedIn has 900M members and 60M company profiles
“We have a consumer platform that caters to nine hundred million members, sixty million companies on LinkedIn, almost every job and skill in the world on LinkedIn, almost every piece of professional knowledge and information is on LinkedIn.”
Tomer Cohen: LinkedIn's member base more than doubled over six years
“Our memo base more than doubled.”
Cohen: LinkedIn uses a 'brief back' process after product reviews
“We have a new process we started a while back, which is called brief back. The team itself, which presented, they send a summary of the session with the feedback and all the key action items they have and the ETAs for the key areas they're going to work on.”
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Roblox took between 8 and 17 years to IPO
“LinkedIn was eight to 10 years to going public. Facebook was 10 to 12. You know, Roblox, 17 years.”
Choi: LinkedIn Uses a RAPID Framework for Internal M&A Approvals
“We at LinkedIn have implemented something called a rapid process. There is one usually executive level sponsor who will, on R&D usually, who will recommend this acquisition. The other R&D person, for example, the head of engineering for that particular group, …”
LinkedIn had no dedicated user experience team in early 2007
“When I joined LinkedIn in the beginning of 2007 they didn't even have a user experience team, right?”
Digg was dismantled and sold to Washington Post, LinkedIn, and Betaworks
“At the end of 2012, what happened was that Dig was really split apart into kind of three different deals. The first was that a lot of the folks, the people, and the tech went to Washington Post, and then the second was that a bunch of the patents went to Linke…”
Transmedia Capital gained Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn stakes via startup acquisitions
“Well, those Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Twitter were all through acquisitions. Scan was a company that was acquired by Snapchat. Snappy TV was acquired by Twitter, and Nozzle was acquired by LinkedIn. So that's how we have positions those companies.”
Jack Zhang personally sourced Airwallex's first 100 employees on LinkedIn
“I hired the first a hundred people in Airworks by myself on LinkedIn.”
Polovets: LinkedIn had five or six engineers post-Series A in 2003
“And so I spent a couple of years there just when the engineering team was like five, six people most of the time.”