The LinkedIn Culture

The values of a company are always interesting to me - how are they communicated and does the company actually follow them?

Here's what I learned on day 1:

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG). Reid Hoffman (one of the founding partners) said that at LinkedIn our goal is to "can change the GDP of nations."

A smaller scale of that is that LinkedIn's vision is to increase economic opportunity to all of it's users (the working professionals of the world). That's a vision I can get behind. One of the things I wanted in the company I interned with was a chance to work on for a company whose product I really believed in.


David Henke spoke to us on the first day and had some thoughts about how LinkedIn ran. He is the svp of operations (I am supporting operations and engineering with my role in hr).

"Look at Yahoo around 5:00 and you'll see an empty parking lot. Look at LinkedIn at 8:00 and you'll see tons of people still here. I've never asked any of my department to work harder or later, but they do. Why?

We hire passionate people.

We want to empower our employees to solve problems. We want our employees to create value, so we try to get out of the way."

He also talked about the ideology on users coming first. I didn't write them down, but he talked about a number of instances where LinkedIn made changes to their products they sell that would mean less money for them, but would please their users. He pointed out that the short term sacrifices in revenue always come back in the long term user engagement and growth.

He also mentioned hierarchy.

"Yahoo has 13 levels from the bottom to the top. Are you (expletive) kidding me? If the Catholic church can do it in 6, then we can do it in less than that." I have been impressed with how few levels there are. I have 2 people between me and the CEO. That's it.

I'll post more later about how the culture actually works. It's been great so far!