“When you're starting out, understand the one thing that you want to be able to accomplish above all others. “As companies scale,” he added, “they end up doing more things, and that's the nature of it, but with less focus and greater breadth. “And focus on fewer things, because with fewer things, you'll be able to do them better, it's easier to communicate, it's easier to internalize, it's easier to execute upon.” “It would start with focus, and being able to very clearly articulate what it is that the company is ultimately trying to accomplish, and for that mission to be as singular and unique to that company as it can be,” he said. CNBC's Lauren Hirsch contributed to this report.Since Weiner meets so many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, I was also curious about the advice he gives to start-up founders. Tomer Cohen, who has been with LinkedIn for eight years and is currently vice president of products, will become its head of product, Weiner wrote. "He has been essential to the company's success ever since: helping to build our Marketing Solutions business, developing LinkedIn's Influencer program and publishing platform, overseeing the home page and Feed, running all of our consumer products, championing the acquisition of, and co-developing our prioritization framework for the Microsoft integration," Weiner wrote of Roslansky, who came to LinkedIn from Glam Media.
Like Weiner, Roslansky spent the early 2000s at Yahoo Weiner said Roslansky was the first hire he made after joining LinkedIn. alongside Bob Daly, and Weiner followed Semel to Yahoo, AllThingsD reported at the time of Weiner's move. Weiner was a protege of Terry Semel, a co-CEO of Warner Bros. He worked on an entertainment website there and came up with the business plan for Warner Bros.
Weiner has said he adopted the phrase from Mike Krzyzewski, the coach of Duke University's Blue Devils basketball team.īefore joining Yahoo, where he had responsibility for many of the company's consumer-facing products, including email and search services, Weiner had spent more than five years at Warner Bros. The phrase has become common among LinkedIn employees when they congratulate one another for announcing new jobs. In the post Weiner used the phrase "next play" five times. "Last summer, I began talking with Satya about transitioning from my current dream job to my next one and helping him decide on my successor as CEO," Weiner wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the news on Wednesday. In June he characterized his role as a dream job during an interview on CNBC. In addition to running LinkedIn, Weiner has served on Microsoft's senior leadership team since the acquisition closed. "All the growth we've been seeing has been in the way we've been operating our own businesses," LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue told CNBC on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month. Microsoft has generally permitted LinkedIn to operate independently, although some integrations of the companies' products have come about since the deal.
Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2017, the software company's biggest acquisition to date.
In mid-2009 he became LinkedIn's CEO, replacing co-founder Reid Hoffman, and in 2011 he took LinkedIn public. Weiner joined LinkedIn from Yahoo to be the business social network's president in late 2008.