Yahoos get LinkedIn
Posted August 16th, 2006 at 9:48 pm by Bradley Horowitz, VP, Advanced Development
6 Comments / Filed in: Guest Opinions, Working at Yahoo!
We recently invited Reid Hoffman, founder and CEO of LinkedIn, to Yahoo!. Rather than asking Reid to give a talk at a podium, we opted for a “fireside chat” format, and I had the privilege of serving as the “chatter.”
Reid’s resume is almost absurd. In addition to having a lot of old school Web 1.0 cred (as an executive at PayPal), Reid is involved as an investor with just about every category-defining Web 2.0 company out there: Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Technorati. He also sits on the boards of Six Apart and Mozilla. When asked what a good investment strategy for Web 2.0 is, he responded “to invest in Web 2.0 in 2003.”
The first question I asked was of the audience: “How many of you are not registered members of LinkedIn?” Of the perhaps 125 people in attendance, maybe one or two sheepishly raised their hands. This kind of penetration is typical in high-tech companies, according to Reid. LinkedIn (for the two non-LinkedIn members reading this) is a social networking site where you use your business relationships and networking capabilities for hiring, relationship building, business development, reference checks, and so on.
Given that Reid and Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield hold philosophy degrees (from Oxford and Cambridge, respectively), I asked Reid whether he felt this contributed to his bent for social software. (Answer, paraphrased: Philosophy helps you think, thinking is good, so — yeah, sure — it probably helped.) One of Reid’s criteria for evaluating companies is asking, “Which of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to?” (For LinkedIn, it’s “greed.”)
One of Reid’s most interesting responses came when he was asked why, if LinkedIn was a social network, there weren’t photos of the users on the site. Great question! Photos, he said, were complex in the business world. They could even lead to discrimination based on age, sex, and race, and LinkedIn didn’t want to facilitate that. Reid thinks there’s a place for photos in a professional context, but LinkedIn is still figuring out the right social balance.
The event was part of a speaker series hosted by our TechDev (Technology Development) group, which is run by Caterina Fake, she of Flickr fame. The team has the broad charter of facilitating and harvesting “grass-roots innovation” within Yahoo! and the TechDev Speaker Series (one of many at Yahoo!) is designed to provoke new thinking. In addition to hosting entrepreneurs like Reid and Philip Rosedale, CEO of the company that produces the multiplayer online game Second Life, we’ve brought in pundits like Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail”; information architect Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy”; and leading academics like Judith Donath and John Maeda of MIT Media Lab. But perhaps the most fun and surprising speakers were industrial performance artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, renegade mashup pioneer Mark Hosler of Negativland, and Ken Waagner, who runs digital distribution for the band Wilco.
Now that we’ve whet your appetite with some unabashed name-dropping, we’ll try to get you in on the action by putting video footage of future speakers online. Whenever we get permission from these visitors, we’ll put the files up on Yahoo! Video. It will be way cool. Stay tuned.
Bradley Horowitz
Vice President of Product Strategy
(Average: 4 out of 5)
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6 Comments Add your own
Balakumar Muthu | August 17th, 2006 at 5:29 am
It’s would be highly interesting and very informative for readers like me, if videos of such events are added !! :)
Silvio Eberardo | August 17th, 2006 at 8:03 am
It´s interesting to follow the sucess of LinkedIn in the business social networking area. Here in Brazil we have Google´s Orkut (very very popular, but unuseful for business purposes) and we also use LinkedIn, and its concept remains related to business.
Silvio Eberardo - Brazil
Joseph Hunkins | August 20th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Seven deadly sins appeal = clever!
Tarik Sansal | September 19th, 2006 at 9:21 am
Brad, this is an unrelated comment.
I’m looking for a head of Pruducts for a Disruptive Real Estate Portal which I’m launching.
I’m previously started OnTargetJobs, now # 5 job site online (#2 largest vertical).
I would be grateful for high quality executives you know.
Position in Bay Area or NY/NJ.
Candidates can email me confidentially.
I can be emailed at 917 656 9950
Ally Barstow | October 2nd, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Brad, I truely believe that the next generation of search engines will have social voting integrated into them. I’m looking forward to seeing more Web 2.0 type websites. I will also have to give LinkedIn a try, I’m not a user now, but it sounds interesting.
Music Generation | October 10th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Social voting will be a fact, well maybe.
But web 2.o is here and we have to learn how to use it properly.
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