When Microsoft bought professional networking platform LinkedIn for $26 billion (€23.9 billion) in 2016, it took the tech world by surprise. It was not only the company’s largest acquisition at the time, it was also a staggering sum to pay for a social network.
What Microsoft did next was even more surprising: it left LinkedIn alone to get on with things. As it turned out, that was the best thing that it could have done.
Pre-takeover, LinkedIn had revenues of just under $3 billion: the most recent data show that has soared to almost $17 billion.
“I’m very proud that as a 21-year-old consumer internet company, we are growing faster than we ever have,” LinkedIn chief executive Ryan Roslansky says. “That’s very rare. There’s kind of a natural evolution of consumer internet companies where they usually grow rapidly and then usually fall pretty rapidly. But we’ve been growing and continue to grow.”
Microsoft’s ownership has been a net positive, he feels, offering the company an opportunity to grow that it may not have been afforded had it stayed as a public entity.
“It’s really a testament to the thesis that Satya Nadella [Microsoft CEO] had about what LinkedIn could be inside of Microsoft,” he says.
“What hasn’t changed about LinkedIn is this continuous focus on professionals creating economic opportunity, trust, high-quality growth. Being part of Microsoft has actually allowed us to focus on that.
“When you’re a stand-alone public company and every quarter you need to try and hit an analyst number, you do shorter-term growth hacks to try and grow the company. Sometimes that can come at the expense of creating quality experiences.”
Things are different for LinkedIn as part of a multinational giant like Microsoft. It offers a shield of sorts against the glare of the outside world, and with Microsoft’s own revenues topping $249 billion last year, the $17 billion earnings of LinkedIn while “wonderful”, Roslansky says, are also a drop in the Microsoft bucket.
“That flexibility that we have to think longer term, to focus on quality growth, I think, has been one of the biggest reasons that we are growing to who we are today,” he says.
Despite predictions of LinkedIn’s demise over the years, the platform has held on. It now has more than a billion members in 200 countries worldwide and has branched out into recruitment, events and upskilling workforces.
The most important thing for any professional to understand is that there is no preordained path
The last is a particular passion of Roslansky, who joined the company in 2009. He has been instrumental in some of the company’s biggest steps in shaping its LinkedIn Learning platform, which aims to train up the Irish labour force as they navigate the changing world of work.
There is a nice synergy to it all. Roslansky founded his first company while he was in college, in his first year to be precise. Back in 1997, Housing Media was one of the first internet property and rental classified directories.
At the time, he says, he did not know anything about designing websites and used a Lynda Weinman web graphics book to get the site up and running.
More than a decade and a half later, as LinkedIn’s chief product officer, he oversaw the $1.5 billion acquisition of lynda.com, the online training business that Weinman and cofounder, Bruce Heavin had built.
That became LinkedIn Learning, and has gone from strength to strength. The service offers everything from practical skills such as data analysis using Excel to soft skills for effective communication and, lately, introducing users to artificial intelligence (AI).
Roslansky’s path to LinkedIn wasn’t a straight one. After founding Housing Media, he left college in his second year to run the business full-time with his co-founders. They sold to USHousing.com in 1999, and Roslansky moved to Yahoo, where he spent five years working with Jeff Weiner. After that, there was a pit stop at Glam Media, before Roslansky eventually followed Weiner to LinkedIn as one of the new chief executive’s first hires.
“Many people think the secret to success is to follow a carefully planned linear path towards your ultimate career goal,” he says, “but, in reality, I think the most important thing for any professional to understand is that there is no preordained path.
“Focus less on the job you want in 10 years and more on growing your skills and constantly learning. Leave room for the unexpected. Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. Career paths are different for everyone, and you don’t need to have it all figured out now.”
Roslansky headed up product at LinkedIn for 11 years, until he was appointed chief executive in June 2020, with Weiner moving on to the role of company president. That was in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, and just in advance of LinkedIn cutting 6 per cent of its workforce.
“When Satya Nadella asked me to do this job as the CEO of LinkedIn, it was pre-pandemic and it was really based on the idea that what LinkedIn needed to thrive and survive was product and business expertise. That’s kind of the background that I had come up in, because the seas were pretty calm, we’re part of this bigger company, you know, we’ve got a really strong culture, but it’s all about the product and strategy.
“And then I take the role and all of a sudden the questions that I’m having to figure out are, you know, how do we help north of 10,000 employees work, not from the office. What are our vaccination policies? All these things that I never thought I would have had to answer in my life, all came within the first couple of weeks of doing the job.”
LinkedIn was also providing a platform to support other companies through the same process. Some companies needed to maintain in-person work, others were trying to hire remotely or work from home. All were in uncharted territory.
“I didn’t know that this much complexity could possibly exist at one time. And you look deep inside yourself and you say, ‘I’ve got two choices here. I can quit, I can run away from the situation, or I can just double down, lock in and take this one-by-one and address all these challenges that have never had to have been addressed before'.
“As a brand new CEO, the level of complexity was outrageous at the time. We had a lot of people around us that wanted to figure this out.”
Things have certainly steadied for Roslansky since then. LinkedIn has just officially opened its new Wilton Park campus in Dublin, with Roslansky in attendance.
The opening was a landmark moment for LinkedIn. It is the second largest campus for the company outside the US and the focus is firmly on sustainability – the site has hydroponic gardens and the now almost-obligatory bees on the roof that tech companies in Ireland seem to have adopted.
LinkedIn has been in Ireland since 2009, the year he joined the business. Back then, the Irish operation was a modest affair, with only three employees. Today it has more than 2,000 and it is still recruiting.
Amid the excitement, it is easy to forget that the plans for the new Dublin HQ have been scaled back from their original vision. When the company confirmed in January 2020 that it had signed a long-term lease with property company Iput to let 40,000 sq m (430,560sq ft) of office space in the Dublin 2 development, it was for four buildings at Wilton Park. That would have given the company the option to grow from the 1,200 staff numbers it then had to as many as 4,000 staff, if needed, with an eye on the medium to long-term growth.
But that was only a few weeks before the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic became evident and, with it, a lasting impact on office culture. With multiple, extended lockdowns came a shift to remote and hybrid working at the company that has persisted. LinkedIn no longer needed quite as much space; revised plans would see it occupy two of the buildings and sublet the rest.
By early this year, it had moved into Four and Five Wilton Park, two interconnected buildings that Roslansky officially opened at the start of this month.
Ireland has one of the fastest rates of AI skills adoption. It’s the fastest in all of Europe and the fifth fastest in the world
He doesn’t put a figure on the exact dollar amount the company has invested in Ireland, but he is keen to stress just how important the State is to the tech company, describing it as “a significant investment”.
“Ireland is just a special place for LinkedIn, not only because it’s our EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] headquarters. LinkedIn does really well in Ireland,” he says.
There are 3.5 million LinkedIn members in Ireland, a fraction of the overall 1.1 billion worldwide, but Roslansky says Irish users are more engaged than those in the US or UK.
“As we start the second quarter of the 21st century, 10 per cent of the jobs that exist in the world and 20 per cent of those in the United States did not exist when the century began. And even for jobs that did exist, on average the skills needed to do any job in the world have already changed by 25 per cent since 2015, meaning even if you aren’t changing your job, your job is changing on you,” he says.
“With all of the change happening in the global labour market, you want to be a population that is over-indexing on skill-building right now. And we’re seeing that Irish professionals are moving quickly to learn AI skills and capitalise on this shift to an AI driven economy.
“Ireland has one of the fastest rates of AI skills adoption. It’s the fastest in all of Europe and the fifth fastest in the world.”
The pandemic isn’t the only challenge Roslansky has faced. He has had to steer the business through the turbulent waters of the tech lay-offs that dominated headlines after dust from the pandemic had settled. In 2023, LinkedIn announced two rounds of job cuts – initially cutting more than 700 jobs as it shuttered its Chinese jobs app and, later, almost 670 positions across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams.
Like many companies in the sector, LinkedIn will have to navigate the geopolitical tensions that have sprung up between the US and the international community as the US president Donald Trump’s administration flexes it muscles on international trade and an “America first” outlook.
LinkedIn has had to deal with changing landscapes before though. It has survived by focusing on building its platform, regardless of who is in office, while keeping an eye on the political developments. Roslansky remains philosophical about tackling challenges.
“When I was growing up, my dad had a quote taped to his phone that said, ‘When the sea was calm, all ships alike showed mastership in floating’. True character is defined in those moments when things aren’t going your way.
“Work life is turbulent. Sometimes the numbers are up, sometimes the numbers are down. Some projects will nail it, some projects will fail. Some people are easy to work with, some aren’t. The true measure of your character is how you react and operate when the seas aren’t calm.”
While it is important to keep an eye on the changing political landscape, there are other factors that are also pressing.
The world of work is going through a significant change as artificial intelligence reshapes roles. AI is becoming increasingly important to the recruitment business. From AI jobs tools to assistants to help you craft applications, the technology is being interwoven into almost every aspect of the recruitment process.
On a wider scale, it is changing the world of work in ways that are only seen once a generation at most.
“Through all these large work changes in the past, people always talk about ‘this technology occurred, and then eventually great progress happened in the world’. And I have no doubt that’s going to happen with AI, but people rarely talk about what happens in that middle part, the messy middle, where there’s a lot of uncertainty, there’s displacement, people lose their jobs.
“What the world never had in previous paradigm shifts of work was a platform like LinkedIn, and that transparency and that ability to understand and see what’s going on. A lot of what I’m focused on right now is ensuring that LinkedIn can stay trustworthy, can stay transparent, can help everyone understand what their job may look like or change through this AI revolution, and help minimise some of that messy middle to get to more of that upside at the end.”
CV
Name: Ryan Roslansky
Position: Chief executive of LinkedIn
Age: 47
Family: Married with three children.
Something you would expect: He is keen on upskilling, and has some LinkedIn learning certification to his name – alongside the 46 skills listed on his profile.
Something that might surprise: At the age of 12, he was invited to a tennis academy in Florida, alongside names such as Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova.
“I lived in a dorm room with seven other kids from around the world. It was a unique experience. It taught me a lot about myself, about thinking for myself and managing being on my own,” he says.
“It taught me a lot about the importance of learning and appreciating different perspectives. It was a remarkable experience that I was extremely lucky to have.”
