blitzscaling session 9: village stage
TRANSCRIPT
Class Structure: Organizational Scale
Org Scale (employees)
User Scale (B2C users)
Customer Scale (B2B)
Business Scale (rev)
OS1: Family 1s 10,000s 0 <$10M
OS2: Tribe 10s 100,000s 1s $10M+
O3: Village 100s 1,000,000s 10s $100M+
OS4: City 1,000s 10,000,000s 100s $1B+
OS5: Nation 10,000s 100,000,00+ 1,000+ $5B+
OS1: The Household
Identify a non-obvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage and/or approach. Iteratively build a product with strong product/market fit
OS3: The Village
Identify, plan and execute the core business you will scale up.
… with a plan to scale more
OS3: The Village
Identify, plan and execute the core business you will scale up.
… with a plan to scale more
… and do it fast
OS3: The Village
1. Articulate the core business you will scale up first
2. Identify critical steps to scale that business3. (Hyper)grow an organization to execute it4. Finance for hypergrowth and future growth
OS3: Articulating the Core Business
Goals for the core business:1. Create continued growth2. Generate growing revenue3. Build competitive advantage4. Grow strategic assets for later opportunities
OS3: Critical Components to Scale the Core Business
• What must you do to scale the core business?
• Across growth, revenue
• Product and Technology
• Go-to-market (sales, marketing)
• Partnerships
Viral Growth Engine Continue viral engine improvements to drive member growth and critical mass within professional context
Example products: Reg. optimization, New User Experience, In-Box, Outlook Integration, SEO, Address Book
Tabl
e st
akes
Professional Identity ecosystem Establish leading identity ecosystem by building upon unique database of 60M+ members
Example products: Profile improvements/game dynamics, SEO, Search, APIs, Mobile
Professional Insights & Knowledge Sharing Be the essential source for professional shared knowledge and business intelligence
Example products: NUS, Sharing tools, Groups V2, Inapps, Outlook & Twitter Integration
Gam
e ch
ange
rsVa
lue
Firm Foundation Improve and scale site resilience & reliability, development productivity, data reliability, API’s
Measurements: uptime, load time, developer activity,
Underlined: New focus in 2010
Data
Targeting & analytics
WVMP, MyStats
Matching
PYMK
Warehousing Mining
Global Monetization Leverage unique business model to monetize assets while adding value to members on a global basis
Example products: Online Jobs, Recruiter, Premium subs, Display Ads, Self-serve Ads, Business Pages
Strategic Stack
Strategic Stack
Security Addressbook bcard SkillsCode Modularity Profile - Engagement Apps / InAppsProductivity Tools APIs Career CenterDistributed Computing Rec Engine / Intelligence SalaryData Reliability / Scale Engine / WVMPFeature APIs MobileReg Optimization / NUX Business PagesPYMK International - LanguagesSEOAddress BookProfile - DataInbox / CommCore SearchNUS / SharingGroupsStandardizationA/B Testing PlatformOnline JobsSubsRecruiterPayment PlatformsDirectAdsDisplay SupportCS Tools
Core Strategic Venture
OS3: Organization
• Your organization has to change fundamentally
• The right CEO
• Key executives for critical areas
• Core mission, culture, and values to enable rapid distributed scaling
• An HR function that can hypergrow
• Necessary processes to allow large groups to work together
• Navigate necessary changes among founders and early employees
• Robust reporting to allow business not only to learn, but also to plan
© 2009 LinkedIn All rights reserved. Confidential 60
LinkedIn Values and Culture
Members Come First - Candidates are also our members, leave them feeling great about LinkedIn regardless of our decision to hire or not. Be compassionate, offer to take a candidate for a quick walk, for a break, offer snack/beverages if they look tired.
Relationships Matter - Candidates will either advocate us, say nothing about us, or speak negatively about us based on how we treat them. Glassdoor.com and other sites/blogs keep all companies on their toes in terms of reputation and sharing stories.
Open, Honest and Constructive - consider this as you answer the candidate’s questions and as you write your own feedback after the interview.
Demand Excellence - consider this not only of the candidate but yourself regarding how you conduct the interview... don’t focus too much on technical/analytical skills so they overshadow your assessment of the candidate’s creativity and vision.
Take Intelligent Risks - If the candidate doesn’t have the experience in the talent solutions space or social media, or if you initially rate as B+ rather than A+, as yourself if they have the raw materials and potential to become an A+ within a short timeframe.
Act Like an Owner - Talent is our most important asset. We expect our employees to act as an owner in each decision they make, no matter how big or small.
Transformation of world, company and self
Integrity
Collaboration
Humor
Results
People/Recruiting/Hiring
● Best people produce best outcomes
● Need to keep bar high in the hiring/recruiting process
● Need to understand our limitations and bring outside expertise where needed
● Need to be flexible in our resource allocation (it is okay/desirable to move around the organization to apply key personnel to key projects)
● Onboarding/Ongoing Training/Mentoring are key.
Why technologists want to work at Linkedin
● Having a positive/lasting impact on the world by developing products that create economic opportunities for people on a global basis.
● Building systems that scale and perform is paramount (think 10X).
● Data drives our solutions: Searching, querying, analysis of this data in real-time, near-real time, or batch creates value for our users, and our paying customers.
● The business models (Subscription, Corporations, Advertising) are a diverse source of revenue that require real value propositions, and technical excellence in delivery.
● Combining speed of execution with quality solutions, while still pushing the envelope on new/improved features requires engineering skill sets that are unheard of in traditional enterprise computing, and are hard to find even in the Internet.
● Engineers will constantly learn/use new technologies to create leading edge solutions.
● Great engineers want to work with great engineers.
● Constant improvement requires new talent/additional expertise to solve new/difficult challenges.
● When you come to work here, you will, by definition, have a large impact. ~ 150 technologists today
● Access to the senior leadership is real, actual, and actionable. CEO->VP->Director->Manager->Engineer
What do we want? ● Scrum vs. Waterfall: not the question; want best quality in timely fashion; good
outcomes depend on good engineers + good engineering practices (AND function required here)
● Prioritize the list of Infrastructure + Product features merge sorted: We apply resources against that list, and the result is 2 clear choices, either add more people or cut the line higher so that some things don’t get done (ideally there is no distinction between features and infrastructure in our shop)
● Will have multiple serving data centers running: ETA likely > = 1 year
● Architecture: we will tease apart dependencies for our 180 subsystems so that we can have SLA’s for each one that we can trust and adhere to. All calling services must be resilient to failure of called services. (Service oriented architecture)
● The Data scaling concern demands a solution: Examples: Comm, DWH, volume of members, search index.
● Reminder: We have scaled this most excellent service successfully to this point. Now we need to go to the next level. Think 10X and 100X. How would we solve for that?
Release Process Gap – Changes Needed ● The Current Process – What we do today
● Testing earlier for features: Example: the 26 feature branches in R951.
● Stabilizing the code base for integration
● Practice on staging
● Deploy a well tested reliable solution on prod
● Concern with this model ● It’s a long cycle (see previous slide) 2.5 week duration due to merges, compatibility testing, configuration
validation, heavy track team involvement etc…
● We still have large releases with many dependencies (some of which are not understood) which increases our risk
● Inconsistent tooling across environments (Do we have enough envs?)
● Many release processes are still manual
● Post release hangover that says fix on fail: Bug fix releases are an assumed part of the Release Process. Our goal should be to eliminate the need for this step.
● What do we want? ● Shorter cycle
● Smaller releases with “no” dependencies decreasing the risk. Each component released must be able to be pushed and rolled back if needed.
● Automation for push-button releases (What if we were deploying to 5,000 servers not 500?)
● Don’t need to be fixing on fail because there are no bugs introduced into Prod
● Release when ready: (What does this mean?) a) Don’t release it on schedule because it didn’t pass our tests OR b) Release any module anytime with low risk. I want B.
LinkedIn - Confidential 2
Investment Snapshot
2008E Rev $82 million / 2.6x 2007
Members 20 million, adding 1M+ per month at ~$0 CPA
Unique visitors1
6.6 million / 2.8x y-o-y
Email addresses
384 million
Connections 260 million
Bookings ($MM)
2006 2007 2008 Subscriptions $6.3 $17.3 $33.0 Jobs 2.1 6.3 15.1 Advertising 2.1 7.8 30.1 Corporate 1.8 7.9 34.5 Total $12.4 $39.2 $112.6
Investors Sequoia, Greylock, Bessemer, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel
1 comScore January 2008 data
The next massive business model in technology
▪ ~ $0 CPA per member, 1M+ / month
▪ High margin product: all digital goods, micro cost of sale
▪ Highly scalable: digital goods, infinitely replicable
▪ Network effects: network between users, network between business lines
▪ Huge markets: recruiting, media, services, sales, productivity software and others
➢ Google for finding professionals
➢ eBay for Labor Markets
➢ Microsoft for Internet productivity
LinkedIn - Confidential 5
Summary
The Network
Key Differentiation: - Business focus: features, brand, network - Viral growth: entirely by individuals’ actions - Value scales with entire network (network effects) - Growing in every industry, globally - Organic growth into every business
LinkedIn - Confidential 6
Largest Professional Network
Domestic
Growth Days
0 to 1MM members 477
1 to 2MM members 181
5 to 6MM members 102
9 to 10MM members 60
18 to 19MM members 28
199 of top 200 markets grew 70%+ in 2007; 155 grew 100%+
0
5
10
15
20
5/1/03 9/1/03 1/1/04 5/1/04 9/1/04 1/1/05 5/1/05 9/1/05 1/1/06 5/1/06 9/1/06 1/1/07 5/1/07 9/1/07 2/1/08
Domestic International
Mill
ions
of m
embe
rs
Globally x4 larger than nearest competitor; 50x larger in the U.S.
LinkedIn - Confidential 7
Best and Broad Demographics
School: 58K HBS: 17K
School: 50K GSB: 8K
13K
32K
19K
13M University Alumni
31K
Employees: 58K Alumni: 23K
19K
Employees: 15K Alumni: 12K
Employees: 116K Alumni: 71K
1.9M F500 Employees
41
27%
$109,762
Demographics
Average Age
Average HHI
HHI >$150K
78%College Grad
Portfolio $250K+ 28%
1.2M Small Business Owners
2.2M Senior Executives
VPs at every F500 company
Source: @plan Winter 2007/2008, internal data
13K
Employees: 13K Alumni: 9K
LinkedIn - Confidential 11
Summary
Media Key Differentiation: - User generated content - Best of class demographics - Unique targeting capabilities - Organic growth in every industry, globally - Ability to scale across the web - Future possibilities with self-service, B2B lead gen
LinkedIn - Confidential 26
0$100
12.5$100
25$100
37.5$100
$100$100
Dice Monster HotJobs eBay Google Xing
LinkedIn Revenue Upside
$86.91
Mean:$34.05
Mean:$21.08
Mean: $10.52
Upside revenue opportunityCurrent revenue projections
Job boards Internet leaders
Business/ social networking
Revenue/worldwide unique visitors
$0
$200
$400
$600
$800
$1,000
2007 2008E 2009E
($34.05 Ave Rev/User)x 5.5MM Uniques)
($34.05 Ave Rev/User)x13.4MM Uniques)
($34.05 Ave Rev/User)x25.0MM Uniques)
LinkedIn potential revenue
The Bullseye
Jeff’s articulation of LinkedIn’s bullseye: Talent Solutions
Description of the business: Passive Recruiting and how it works.
Main point is the clarity with which we chose this target, and were willing to subordinate almost everything but user growth to it.
User Growth
User Growth understood as:
Viral tuning
SEO and Public Profiles
Some known user value (network updates via email, receiving job offers)
Some user value experiments (news, app platform, etc.)
Revenue Growth
Main focus on revenue growth will be growth of field sales
Reasoning for this
Some online sales, but not for big-$$ accounts
Other revenue sources beginning to enter the mix, but not core
Strategic Moats
Professional Identity would be primary moat
Defined roughly as size of network x quality of average profile
Main contributors were user growth and user activity.
Also first-mover advantage on passive recruiting would allow us to lock in customers.
But we also felt we needed to respond to Facebook’s F8 announcement, which might have created a competitor built on top of FB.
Future strategic assets
Non-Jobs brand
Potential discover of additional value propositions
improves brand,
Drives growth and profile moats
builds additional platforms for future businesses
Summary
A growing network of professionals with valuable profiles, driven by viral tuning and value experimentation
Will form the foundation for a sales-driven business focused on large enterprise accounts…
And we will do some competitive blocking on App Platforms.
Changing roles for founders/early team
Jean-Luc, engineering changes
New engineering group leaders
Turnover with new execs
Daily, 7-Day Cumulative Avg, Week over Avg 4 Weeks, Year over YearMetrics:
Signups
0
22,500
45,000
67,500
90,000
112,500
-40%
0%
40%
80%
120%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Guest Invites
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
-100%
0%
100%
200%
300%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Uniques
0
1,600,000
3,200,000
-80%
0%
80%
160%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Page Views
0
10,000,000
20,000,000
30,000,000
40,000,000
50,000,000
-100%
0%
100%
200%
300%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Searches
0
1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
4,000,000
5,000,000
-160%
0%
160%
320%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Premium Subs (New + Recurring)
$0
$40,000
$80,000
$120,000
$160,000
-80%
0%
80%
150%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Members Joining Groups
0
40,000
80,000
120,000
160,000
-80%
0%
80%
160%
240%
320%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Groups Created
0
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
-100%
0%
100%
200%
300%
6/8/
09
6/15
/09
6/22
/09
6/29
/09
7/6/
09
7/13
/09
7/20
/09
7/27
/09
8/3/
09
8/10
/09
8/17
/09
8/24
/09
8/31
/09
9/7/
09
9/14
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year
Job Dollars
$0
$10,000
$20,000
$30,000
$40,000
$50,000
-80%
0%
80%
150%
6/8/
09
6/17
/09
6/26
/09
7/5/
09
7/14
/09
7/23
/09
8/1/
09
8/10
/09
8/19
/09
8/28
/09
9/6/
09
9/15
/09
Daily 7-Day Cumulative Avg Week over Avg 4 WeeksYear over Year Add a Comment
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9/9/20094:10:27 PM
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W/W jobs increase driven by 10% morespend per buyer due to job pack purchasesand 8% better conversionFor Jobs on Wednesday, 8/19: Conversiondecreased 9% W/W but spend per buyerincreased 6% and traffic to the flowincreased 3%. We’re investigating the rootcause of the conversion decreases thatwe’ve been seeing.New subs bookings growth driven bygreater number of annual plans purchasedrelative to monthly plans (Business YR up24% wk/wk and Business Plus YR up 18%wk/wk)“W/W declines driven by drops inconversion and spend per buyer. All handsare on deck investigating if something inlast week's release or Saturday's Oracleupgrade is causing this.”Online Job sales were down –17% Y/Y at$39.7K but are trending towards being upY/Y in the next 3 weeks.Page Views came in at 45.8M for Tuesday,the largest day since 27th January and thesecond highest day ever, up 78% Y/Y.Signups came in at 108.5K for Tuesday, thelargest day since 27th January.The spike in the year over year numberstowards the end of May 09 is due to a siteoutage in May 08
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