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 42 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
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.”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Cohen: Global job skillsets will change by at least 65% by 2030
“By twenty-thirty, they're going to change by at least 65%.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
Cohen: LinkedIn is growing at its fastest pace in 20 years
“We're growing the fastest we ever grew right now.”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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%.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Cohen: Product management cannot be learned in a classroom
“You can't sit in a classroom learning how to do product. You have to build.”
Cohen: Most product launches are 0.6, not zero-to-one successes
“Most launches are never zero to one. They're like zero to .6. They're never great. And like moving it from .6 gradually to really finding product market fit.”
Cohen: 50% of early LinkedIn creators got commercial inquiries within a month
“We had a creator. It actually started with some early creators and we found that 50% of them in the span of a month after creating on LinkedIn, we're getting reached out to people saying, Hey, maybe you can do a session with my team, do a workshop on your craf…”
Cohen: LinkedIn does not offer revenue sharing to content creators
“We don't do ref share. Your opportunity of LinkedIn is your voice. It's what you create. It's your reputation. It's your brand.”
Cohen: Mature company founders shift from operations to spiritual guidance
“But if you think of a company evolving with multiple founding moments that are still shaped by the original vision, then you have a more expensive way to think about The role of a founder. And I think it's becomes a lot more in spirit and guiding than in opera…”
Cohen: LinkedIn's annual revenue more than tripled over six years
“Revenue for LinkedIn more than tripled.”
Cohen: LinkedIn's 'follow' feature is growing 200% year-over-year
“Actually, follows right now is one of the most impressive growth trajectories at LinkedIn. It's growing at 200% year over year.”
Cohen: Define success metrics before building, not retroactively post-launch
“I always like to start with before you launch, before you even start building, what is success? Like, you know, once you launch it, what should be going up into the rights that should be excited about? Don't tell me in retrospect because, you know, then you're…”
Cohen: Retention is the true test of product-market fit, not adoption
“Ultimately you have success with a product when you have real adoption and retention. People actually find product market fit. They're coming back to the product to engage with it. That's when, you know, you really have something and adoption by itself, you kn…”
Tomer Cohen: Talent hiring has historically favored pedigree over measurable skills
“Talent marketplace has been built on pedigree and experience and not necessarily on the skillset you have, because that was not easy to measure.”
Cohen: Platform growth and trust exist in a fundamental trade-off
“Usually there is a trade-off between trust and growth, right? Because you want to allow for a lot more growth in the system. You want to reduce friction. When you read restriction, you also allowed, allow usually for bad activity to engage as well. And the mor…”
Cohen: Resolving team disagreements quickly requires a single designated decision-maker
“Whenever there is an escalation or a disagreement, we try to solve it really quickly with one person. It's a person on the team. It's always a person that has the decision On how to resolve the situation.”
Cohen: Incumbents hold major AI advantages in compute, talent, and distribution
“If you're an incumbent and you already have the infrastructure for AI, the talent for AI, you're already have a leg up in this race and you should be using that. Incumbents have existing market share. They have already an existing customer base and that custom…”
Reid Hoffman reframes binary choices with unexpected 'option orange' alternatives
“I would come to Reed and I'll say, Hey, there's option A and option B and help me think for those. And he'll give me option orange that I haven't even thought about before.”
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.”