Opinion
Weinman realized her hired CEO held more power than the founders
“And I realized very late in the game that the CEO had more power than I did. And more power than Bruce did.”
Insight
Weinman: Offering free content is the enemy of a successful business
“You know, we sort of felt that free was the enemy of a successful business.”
Opinion
Weinman: Competitor Skillsoft did not have my respect, envy, or attention
“I never really thought about them as a competitor, to be honest. They weren't even really on my radar. I did, they didn't have my respect. They didn't have my envy. They didn't have my attention.”
Insight
Weinman: Scale New Topics by Empowering Connected Domain Insiders to Curate Instructors
“So what you do is you find another me, you find somebody who is an industry insider at the top of their field, who knows everybody. And then they were empowered to, you know, curate who they were going to invite to come in as teachers and oversee the quality o…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LinkedIn never contacted Lynda Weinman during her post-acquisition consulting agreement
“Yeah, I mean, they had a consulting agreement with me, not with Bruce. I think it was for three months. They never once called me.”
Insight
Lynda Weinman: Wealth acts as an accelerant of existing personal traits
“Wealth is, is an accelerant. It's like, if you're a really greedy person, it makes you more greedy. If you're a really generous person, it makes you more generous.”
Assertion Supported
Weinman created Star Trek Mac animatics directly for William Shatner
“I had an assignment to do animatics, an animated storyboard on a Mac, and I worked directly with William Shatner on One of the Star Trek movies, and I had never done anything like that, and I had to build the Starship Enterprise, and I had no idea how to build…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lynda Weinman purchased the lynda.com domain name for just $35
“And sure enough, it was for 35 dollars, so I bought it.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Weinman: Lynda.com reached top 100 global websites by web traffic
“There were times where we would look at where we ranked in the world in terms of traffic, and we would be in the top 100 websites in the world, you know, because we were just so early.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Weinman: web design book became the best-selling in the world
“And it was, at the time, the best-selling web design book in the world, used at every college.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lynda.com generated $1.7 million in revenue in its first year
“In the first year, our revenue was 1.7 million dollars, which to us was just, you know, we'd never imagined.”
Assertion Supported
Weinman: Lynda.com laid off over half its workforce in 2001
“We had to lay off more than half our people.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lynda.com dipped to $1M in revenue and 9 employees at its low point
“Even the year, I think our worst year, We did a little over one million dollars in the year and we had like nine employees.”
Disclosure
Weinman: Lynda.com dropped books, DVDs, and classes to go all-in online
“We had sort of this moment of reckoning right around 2005, 2006, and it was, what do we do that's different from all the competitors in the field? What's our differentiator? And we made the decision. It's the fact that we're delivering online and that's our co…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Inbound investor interest in Lynda.com surged at $10 million in revenue
“I remember when we hit this sort of magic number, ten million in revenue, that the phone started ringing off the hook with people wanting to invest in us.”
Opinion
Weinman: LinkedIn Was the Perfect Suitor for Lynda.com
“It was not, it didn't feel perfect at the time, but it was the perfect suitor with the perfect business and the perfect time, and even though, you know, they've done something different with it than what we were doing, I know it's been super successful for the…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
ZZ Top bought 1,000 Ray-Bans from Lynda Weinman's early boutique
“I had ZZ Top buy, like, a thousand Ray-Ban sunglasses for me one time to give out at concerts.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lynda Weinman bought the first Apple Macintosh for $2,500 on credit
“I bought it at a, with my May Company credit card for 2500 dollars for the very first Mac, which if I had saved it would be worth, you know, fortune today.”
Disclosure
Weinman: Lynda.com was 100% bootstrapped without investor funding
“We had never taken investor money at all. It never, we never, even that word startup just wasn't in the vernacular at that point. I mean, we were really old school. This was a bootstrapped business, 100%.”
Lynda Weinman