LinkedIn Co-founder Konstantin Guericke - The keys to building a long lasting B2B Network

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Konstantin Guericke, longtime friend and co-founder of LinkedIn. Today, we'll be covering three main areas. Lessons learned from founding the world's largest B2B social network. Konstantin's insights to share with founders and operators who are creating today's new B2B communities, and advice for founders moving from idea to product market fit to scaling. Konstantin, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Konstantin Guericke** (1:14)
Hey, Ray. Good to chat with you. I'm looking forward to our conversation. You asked about the journey. When we started LinkedIn, there was five of us.
We roughly have similar age, so we all had about 10 years of work experience, I think. For the years before, about four or five years, I had actually been consulting. I'm doing B2B consulting. My expertise was in launching companies, and helping them establish their positioning.
The interesting thing was when I started this, I spoke with someone who had done this successfully, and they said, the first thing you should not do is create your own website. They said, because when you create a website, you just get random people contacting you, and you spend a bunch of time writing proposals and things like that, and that's just a waste of time. Because usually the people who end up hiring you should come to someone through a referral.
And so, I had a few clients to start with, so that was great. And then when I, you know, what I found out is over time, is when I was looking for a new client, I would basically have lunch with my older clients. And, you know, I always was interested to see how things turned out for them. But then usually I would became top of mind to say like, oh, actually, I know this person. They could really use your help and made a referral, and then it was always very easy. So, what I learned from that experience is that really to get new business, a lot of it is buyer referral, especially in kind of a services business and B2B. But I saw that this is similar to hiring people full time. People tend to prefer people where they know somebody who's worked with someone in the past. In sales, obviously, connection is always helpful, so you don't come in cold. But also in things like investment banking, where they're doing due diligence on investment, they want to get some information that's not publicly available, because that's really the competitive advantage. And so people often do not feel comfortable talking publicly, but if there's a shared contact that provides the trust, then it happens. So that was kind of the rationale as to how can we do these referrals in a more effective way than sort of randomly meeting up with an old colleague for lunch. Can it be done more efficiently so that one could find referrals in a kind of more targeted way if you're looking to get a referral to a certain journalist or maybe to a certain engineer or maybe to a certain director of IT? How do you know which of your contacts knows that person? And when we started LinkedIn, there was no such thing available. So we felt this would be a good thing to start.

**Ray Rike** (3:38)
Very interesting. And what's really interesting is LinkedIn is different because you had five co-founders. Was that just like-minded people who had a common vision? Or how did the five of you come together?

**Konstantin Guericke** (3:50)
Well, also it came together also kind of through referrals and shared contacts. So, for example, Reed and I had a common friend from Stanford. And she told us that both me and him were always telling her about business plans and ideas. And she said, you know, you two should really talk to each other because you guys got so many ideas. And I knew Reed for quite a few years where we would give each other feedback. We both had an interest in starting a company at some point. And then a couple of the other co-founders were from school and from a prior startup that Reed had worked with. again, kind of a tight team, people who've known each other for a while.