How LinkedIn became interesting: The inside story | Tomer Cohen (CPO at LinkedIn)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I think it's so underappreciated, the turnaround that has happened within LinkedIn. Like I check it at least 10 times a day. What was the strategy behind it?

**Tomer Cohen** (0:06)
I stepped backwards, I was like, what is the potential here? If you start from the premise that LinkedIn ultimately is a platform for economic opportunity that sits on top of a very strong social graph, almost every aspect of economic transaction is possible.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:19)
Is there anything tactically that would just like, wow, that really made a big dent in people wanting to come here and post share interesting content?

**Tomer Cohen** (0:25)
To really set the new purpose for it, which was this is not a springboard for other products, this is not a traffic jumpstart, it's not an app sell feed, it's really about people that matter, talking about things that I care about professionally. The first thing we did was really making AI first.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
How do you actually like on the ground, help people shift their perspective and think AI first?

**Tomer Cohen** (0:43)
So it wasn't like, oh, we have this cool technology, what can we do with it? It was like, let go of what you've built, go back to the objectives you were trying to solve. And now with this technology, how can you do that objective better?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
There's so much I want to dig into here. Is there anything else you think would be interesting or useful for folks?

**Tomer Cohen** (0:57)
AI is the ultimate matchmaker. It's underutilized, it's misunderstood. It's really about...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:07)
Today, my guest is Tomer Cohen. Tomer is Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn, overseeing all teams responsible for building and creating LinkedIn products and experiences, including product development, design, business development, content creation and customer operations. During his tenure at LinkedIn, Tomer was head of the mobile team, led the effort to revamp the LinkedIn feed, and to many people's surprise, made it extremely interesting in a place I check regularly. And he was also at the center of shifting LinkedIn to an AI first mindset, which started way before AI became cool. In our conversation, Tomer goes inside the strategy, behind the transformation of LinkedIn's feed and how they approached making it a place that people wanted to check and make it much more social. We also get into the one mindset that Tomer credits for helping him rise so quickly within LinkedIn. Also, why Tomer's most repeated mantra is, we might be wrong, but we are not confused. And so much more, this episode is for anyone wanting to see what great product leadership looks like and wants to be inspired to think bigger. A big thank you to Shira Ghasarch, Dan Roth, Josh Redfern, and Sparsh Argawal for question suggestions that made this episode so interesting. With that, I bring you Tomer Cohen. Tomer, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Tomer Cohen** (2:27)
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:28)
Absolutely my pleasure. So as I was preparing for this podcast, I reached out to a bunch of people that have worked with you and asked them what I should ask you on this podcast. And interestingly, every single one of them said this one thing that I need to ask you, which is about this phrase that apparently you use all the time. So first of all, can you guess what this phrase might be?

**Tomer Cohen** (2:47)
I have a few. Sometimes people call them Tomerisms, but I would be... Tomerisms, I might be wrong, but not confused.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:54)
That's the one. Amazing. Okay. So let's talk about this phrase.

**Tomer Cohen** (2:57)
We don't say it so much anymore.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:59)
Okay.

**Tomer Cohen** (2:59)
Maybe... I think it's ingrained into the culture.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:01)
I was going to say that.

**Tomer Cohen** (3:02)
I mean, I think of this sentence already.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:04)
Those are the ultimate things where you don't need to say them as much anymore. Okay. So the phrase again is we might be wrong, but we're not confused.

**Tomer Cohen** (3:10)
Exactly.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:11)
Let's talk about this. So what does this phrase mean? And why do you find it so powerful and important to say often?

**Tomer Cohen** (3:17)
Yeah. It's like it's a simple phrase, but it has, in my opinion, so much depth into that. And ultimately, it's something I really believe in. It's rooted in clarity and principles that ultimately lead to leadership. And the first time I got the inspiration from it was from a startup founder I met many, many years ago. Their company was on the brink of failure. They had their last attempt, and they decided on a path forward. And after they decided on a path forward, he was still seeing people hedging in different directions.