We caught up with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner yesterday, just after his first earnings call as a public company CEO. In an earlier segment we talked about the surprisingly good quarter LinkedIn had; in this one we talk about the company’s insane roller-coaster of an IPO.
I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no pedophile scandals, privacy uproars or stories of meth pipes and abandoned cats. He insists the team wasn’t distracted amid the media frenzy….yeah, I have a hard time buying that too. But he points out that the added pride associated with working at a company worth upwards of $9 billion increased the intensity to execute. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that talk of the company being overvalued lit a spark in the company too.
Weiner and I also talk about LinkedIn’s stunning user growth this quarter, whether companies should reexamine that late 1990s idea of IPOs as marketing events, and whether that user pop is sustainable.