Getting the most out of LinkedIn with Editor in Chief Dan Roth on Press Profiles

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What makes the top reporters covering business and finance tick? Each episode of Press Profiles "turns the tables" on the most influential reporters and editors in the industry. They’re used to asking the questions, now they answer them. Hear how they started in the industry, their most memorable stories, the ups and downs, and where the news cycle is headed next. Today's episode features LinkedIn's very own Dan Roth:

 Russell Sherman 

Welcome back, everyone. This is Russell Sherman, and you are listening to Press Profiles, where we turn the tables on some of the top business reporters in the industry to hear all about their background, how they got into reporting, their favorite stories and memories, their take on the industry, and a whole lot more. Today we are joined by Dan Roth, the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn, the man that helped turn LinkedIn from just an online spot where you posted your resume to a place where all the most interesting business conversations are taking place these days. So, we'll talk about that transformation as well as his stints at Fortune, Wired, Condé Nast Portfolio, (remember that?), his run-in with Pat Robertson, his kids, his dogs, bourbon; we got a lot to cover. Here now is Dan Roth on press profiles.

Dan Roth

Hey, Russell, thank you for having me. That is by far the best intro I've ever gotten. I don't think bourbon has ever made it in the intro for me and I appreciate that. It's important.

Russell Sherman 

All the important things, we're going to cover all the important things. Alright, so where should we begin? I think we should start in Kentucky, right? I mean, where else? Small Town guy from Kentucky? Tell me about it.

Dan Roth 

I’m from Louisville, so, I'm from the biggest town in Kentucky. So, take that for what it's worth. But yes, I certainly never expected to be where I am today, meaning New York, I think I grew up assuming that where I would end up was maybe Chicago would be the biggest, Nashville, more likely, but that is how I thought about where my life would play out.

Russell Sherman 

So, you're from Louisville. What brought the family there?

Dan Roth 

My grandfather was an accountant in Chicago, had gotten his degree from night school at Northwestern, and was auditing different companies, and he was sent by his firm to Kentucky to audit a hotel in Kentucky. And, he fell in love with Louisville, where I grew up, brought his, I don't know if they were married at the time, or they were dating, but he brought my grandmother there, from Chicago also, and they set up life in Louisville. And, then my dad went to Northwestern also, and he met my mom who was from upstate New York, they got married and they moved to Kentucky, and that's where I was raised.

Russell Sherman

Great place to grow up?

Dan Roth

Looking back, it was a great place to grow up, and I certainly loved the experience and I look at it fondly. But, I could tell you that by the time I was in high school, I was like, I am ready to get out. There's got to be something else out there.

Russell Sherman 

Is that where you first caught the journalism bug?

Dan Roth 

Yeah. I was someone who cared about school, but I was kind of distracted. I liked it, but I didn't totally get it, or I wasn't really sure what I was doing all day. And the first time that I really found that I didn't mind putting as much effort into something as possible because the reward was so high, and that was working on the newspaper. So, my sophomore year in high school, I got on the student newspaper, and it just clicked for me. It was the ability to talk to anybody, to ask anyone questions, to be able to go wherever I thought there was something interesting and to be able to talk to anybody. It was just so intriguing. And I remember one time, my humanities teacher, pulled me aside, asked me to stay after class. And he said, “Hey, you're on the newspaper. I think you should look into this question of how much money the school was spending on administrators versus spending on teachers. Because every dollar they're getting, they're actually adding an administrator and they're not spending it on teachers.” And I just remember thinking, like, I'm like this 15-year-old kid, and this adult is asking me to do something that he can't do himself or that he doesn't know the answers to, or he doesn't feel comfortable asking these questions. And that sense of just because I work on a newspaper, I'm able to go and talk to administrators and talk to the school board and ask these questions. To me, it was like one of these mind-blowing experiences that really changed my life. And, from that point on, it was like, alright this is for me. The other part of it was that I grew up in a very business-oriented family. My dad is an accountant. My older brother’s always interested in this stuff. The conversations with my mom and my dad and the family at the dinner table, and at the Shabbat table in particular, was always about business and what's going on. And, I loved their stories. I can't say I totally got what they were talking about all the time, but there was something in the storytelling about the rise and fall of businesses and how they were managing around certain issues, that I was just like, I love this, there's so much drama here. From a very young age, probably since I was a junior in high school, I knew I wanted to marry journalism and business and become a business journalist. I don't think there are many people out there who wanted to be a business journalist in high school, but for me, that was always where I wanted to end up.

Russell Sherman 

As a kid, was there a story that sticks out in your mind around that dinner table that you remember about business that they were all talking about that just really piqued your interest?

Dan Roth

I can't think of one in particular, it was always about real estate. There was always something interesting going on with like some land that someone was trying to buy. And some issues where there was a business on there right now, and they were arguing about their rent, and it was always just so much drama around these properties. It was like this piece of land in Kentucky somewhere, is raising all these questions. It was always super interesting.

Russell Sherman 

Let's discuss some of your early influences. I'm told that there was at least one editor early in your career that helped shape your approach. I'm not sure if that was in, you’re nodding, so I assume you know what I'm talking about.

Dan Roth 

I'll give you a run through of a bunch, but I can't even count the number of people who have had an impact on my career. It started with a guy named Sougata Mukherjee at the Triangle Business Journal, who was my first editor. When I left college – I went to Northwestern, I was in the journalism school there – and when I left to find a job, I applied to every business paper in the country. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I was like, I'm going to work at these regional business publications, and so I applied to all of them. And I got interviewed by the Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh and the National Business Journal, and the Triangle Business Journal offered me a job, they were the only ones, and I took it. So right after school, I've never been to Raleigh, I knew it was the Triangle, I moved to Durham, the company was in Raleigh, I was commuting an hour a day, I had no idea that these were not the same city, so…

Russell Sherman

What year are we talking?

Dan Roth

This is 95. And my first editor is this guy Sougata Mukherjee, who's still there. He just taught me everything that I hadn’t learned in school. He taught me how to interview, he taught me how to read SEC documents, he taught me how to be fast, taught me what to put in stories and what not to put in stories. And he taught me Hindi. I only remember very little of it now, but he would yell at us on deadline in Hindi to get our stories done. “Ho gaya, Ho gaya”, means done, done. And then we’d go out drinking afterwards in these like smoky bars in Raleigh, and it was so much fun. So, I was there for nine months, and really picking up an understanding of how to do this on the ground business journalism. And, I really didn't love Raleigh. I didn't love living there. And, so, I was trying to get out, and I applied to a bunch of places, but the two that I got some interest from were AdAge and Forbes. And I had gotten into Forbes through my brother who had a friend at school whose friend worked at Forbes and I sent my clips to him and that friend was Randall Lane who’s now the editor of Forbes. And Randall came through Raleigh one time on a reporting trip to do a story on SAS, I believe. And, we met then and we talked and he said, “You start sending your clips to the head of reporters at Forbes,” and I did that. And, it's funny, Forbes offered me a job and AdAge offered me a job, and AdAge was in Chicago. And I remember telling my parents, I was like, oh, yeah, I got these two offers, and I'm gonna move to Chicago and work for AdAge. And my parents were like, “What? You're definitely not doing that.” I want to be back in Chicago. I love Chicago. And they were just like, “If Forbes is coming, you go to Forbes.” And it was a different era at that point, there were like three big business magazines, and they were totally right. So, but I had two editors at Forbes who changed my life. One was Pete Newcomb, who's now at Bloomberg running the Rich List there, but he ran the Forbes 400. He taught me how to research people. how to understand people's finances, and find the stories in the numbers and how to really push back on the lies that some of these incredibly wealthy people were telling you about what they were worth, why they were worth much more than you thought, in the case of Donald Trump, or why they were worth much more than they were saying they were worth in the case of everyone else. And, so, learning how to do that from Pete Newcomb was great. And then Nina Munk was the other editor who had a huge impact on me; she went to Vanity Fair. And she was someone who just took me out of my college mindset of just doing a story and then hanging out with friends, into thinking about this as a career, and really becoming an adult in this and made me mature in the job saying like, “You've been assigned a story. You need to do everything you can to get the story, everything else you put aside, and you go and do this. And this is how you tell a story.” And she just sat with me line by line teaching me how to write. And I had to unlearn how to write, and I relearned at the hands of Nina. So, those were huge impacts on me very early in my career.

Russell Sherman 

So, Forbes, at for two years, then you move on to Fortune for eight years, pivoting between writing and editing, and doing a lot of really cool things, right? So, you're one of the few guys that interviewed both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at the same time, which is pretty cool, long story on Phil Knight about the time at Nike that he was about to step down. I love this: you traveled cross- country with Donald Trump as he searched for the perfect moldings for a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, spent a week working with companies as part of the Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work issue, whether that was selling gift wrap at The Container Store, or delivering packages at FedEx, working the door at the Four Seasons, that's a pretty fun eight years.

Dan Roth 

It was a great job. It was the best job in the world, until my current one, which is even better, but in a very different way. But, I would do four, five major stories a year, and I would travel anywhere to do those stories. One great one that comes to mind is the founders of Skype. Skype was this new company, it was just starting up, this idea of P2P communications was like this really kind of weird idea, new idea. But the guys that started it, had created Kazaa, which was essentially a music stealing service, it was like another version of Napster. And they were on the run from the US authorities. So, they were building Skype, I convinced them to let me go and follow them as they built Skype. But I had to agree to not reveal where they were, because they were so worried about being served with papers, because they were being sued by all of the music labels. It was real cloak and dagger, which doesn't usually happen in business journalism. And I traveled with them all through Europe and I’m watching them building this company, and I was in Estonia dealing with these incredible programmers, and just seeing like a very early examples of what the post web-one-O world looked like, where talent was distributed, and people were really creating new things and not worrying about how to monetize it yet. It was just how to get big quickly, how to scale, how to do things in this very distributed way. And that was awesome. It's such a great job, where you come in as a total idiot and you get to ask the dumbest questions. And, people, they just start teaching you, and you have license to call anyone and to ask anything you want. And over time, you start getting smarter and smarter about these areas until eventually you have to put the phone down and start writing. There's nothing I love better than starting a story and being at that stage where you’re like I know nothing right now.

Russell Sherman 

I'm curious about that cross-country trip with Trump. What did you see during that trip that you saw that looked very familiar dozens of years later? Or was it a different person?

Dan Roth 

No, it was exactly the same person, and it's shocking to me, where he ended up. So, I was assigned the story. The Apprentice was doing really well. My editors, Rik Kirkland in particular, said, “Let's do the story on whether Donald Trump is actually a good businessperson or not. We see him on TV, he's being presented to the world as being this great businessperson. Is he? Is he a good businessperson? Find out.” That was what I was told. So, I got on the phone, the first thing you do as a reporter is, you call up, and you pick up the phone and you try to call the person you need to do a story on, and you try to get through to them knowing that the first thing that's going to happen is the PR person is gonna…

Russell Sherman 

a very friendly person like me will return the call.

Dan Roth 

Exactly, that's exactly what. So, you make the call and then you get the Russell. That is typically the way it works. This did not work this way. I called up, I got his assistant, I said I'm Dan Roth from Fortune, I would love to speak to Donald Trump, I’m working on a story, she said “Hold on one second”, Donald Trump picks up. I'm not prepared at all, like this is the very first call I made on the story. “Hey, Dan, this is Donald, what's going on?” And, I said, I'm doing this story on you, and we want to talk to you about your business and what's happening when the TV's off, and he said, “Dan, I am going to sue you for libel.” And I was like, I haven't even written one word yet, how are you going to sue me for libel? He said, “I know what this is, you're out to get me, and your publisher is out to get me,” and I was like I’m not even sure who our publisher is, I'm just a reporter, I have no idea what you're talking about. And he had all these conspiracy theories at the first conversation was echoing back to me. And I said to him, look, I'm sorry, you feel this way, I'm doing the story anyways. And he said, “I'm not going to talk to you, I'm gonna sue you.” And I said, alright, that's fine, I'm doing a story anyways, I hope that at the very least you'll talk to me during the fact checking process. And, just so you know, this is gonna be a cover story. He goes, “Oh, a cover story. You know, I'm traveling to California tomorrow. Why don't you fly with me out there?” And that was it. The next morning, I got picked up in his limo with Melania in the back, they were just dating at that point. He was on the Today Show or something. I watched him do that. And then we drove off to LaGuardia, we got onto his plane, along with Paris Hilton's parents for some reason, and we flew to California together, and he just told me how great he was the entire flight over. It was like no story I've ever done before in my life, and then we went shopping together to look for moldings from Mar-a-Lago. At that point I had no idea what it was, I was like, what’s Mar a Lago? Now it's in the news all the time, so it is wild to me.

Russell Sherman 

Was that the last story you did on him? Did you ever interview him?

Dan Roth 

He used to call me, maybe like every day, every other day. And I remember I just had a baby, and I would get these morning calls from Donald Trump and my wife would be like, “It's Donald again” and hand me the phone and he would just be like “Oh Dan, did you see I was in the newspaper today? There’s a journal story today about condo sales. And you know, I'm the largest condo owner in the world, and so, this is really about me,” which was never true. He was not the largest condo owner in the world, and it wasn't about him. And then as soon as the story came out, I never heard from him again. But I saw him at a wrap party for The Apprentice. And I said hi to him and he said, “Oh, yeah, I thought that story was somewhat fair,” that was the last conversation we had.

Russell Sherman 

I also saw in your bio, a piece on Pat Robertson's business empire earned you a letter from Robertson suggesting that you're bound for hell.

Dan Roth 

It's so funny, I haven't been at my desk in two years and LinkedIn just packaged up everything and sent it home. In the box was that letter. So, this was a story about Pat Robertson's business empire. He had sold CBN’s channel to ABC, who became the Family channel. And he made a lot of money, I don’t remember the numbers anymore, but he made a lot of money from that, and my story was about what he had done with the money since then. And he'd invested in three things: a gold mine in Liberia, an oil refinery in California, and I can't remember the third, but all of them were disasters, human rights disasters, business disasters, nothing was working. And the story was pretty negative about what he had done with all this money. I would spend all this time with him at CBN, including working out with him, which was pretty funny. And then afterwards, he sent me this letter saying that I was going to hell, and he gave me the utmost kindness and that I repeat that kindness with meanness, and the Bible says, if you do that, you're going to hell. But, when I'm ready to accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, he's there to help me out, so I thought that was nice.

Russell Sherman 

So, you have that going for you.

Dan Roth

Exactly. I got that going for me.

Russell Sherman

So, after Fortune, you make a couple of different moves. You go and help start Condé Nast Portfolio, first writer hired there, think that goes belly up, maybe after a couple of years, right? Then on to Wired Magazine, where you serve as a senior writer covering tech and business and all sorts of interesting profiles, then you go back to Fortune, where you eventually serve as the managing editor for their digital arm, and then 2011, LinkedIn comes calling. They want to transform their platform, or at least create an editorial aspect to their platform. What did you think? Who approached you? What was their sales pitch? You've got a lot of established jobs at this point, going to a technology company to see if they can do news probably was a little daunting.

Dan Roth 

There were a couple steps that had softened me up for this. One was, when I was at Wired, my editor at Wired, the editor I worked most closely with, Bob Cohn, he was the number two at Wired, he left to go to become the editor of theatlantic.com. And at the time, those of us who worked for Bob, like Nick Thompson is an example of that, we were all like, “What? You're going to a dot com?” I mean, we couldn't believe it. And this is funny to think about now, but at the time it was, print was very much the center of everything, and dot com was like a nice to have; they operated differently, and it was two very different worlds. It was very like Downton Abbey. And so, we couldn't believe it, and I talked to Bob and Bob said, “We all know the world's going digital, we all know this is where everything is headed, I am going to get in now at a leadership position before the door closes, because there are gonna be enough digital natives to fill these top jobs very shortly, and they're not gonna want print people doing it anymore. So, I'm going before that door closes.” And I was like, oh my God, 100%, it was like another one of these moments where someone had just absolutely taken the blinders from my eyes and showed me how the world actually operated. And from that point on, I was like, I have to leave print. Fortune, at the time, was rebuilding their website. They had shut down their website during the financial crisis and they had rented out space on CNN Money, essentially, they wanted to rebuild their digital presence and so, Andy Serwer hired me again. A print guy coming in, I told him what I thought how things should work, but I really didn't know what I was talking about, but he took a gamble on me, which I will always be grateful for. That got me into digital. And then as soon as I was there, I realized that we were in trouble on the dot com side also, because I would go into meetings, actually, one meeting in particular, I remember I sat down with the sales team had pulled me into some meeting and whoever they were pitching was like, “Why would I buy fortune.com? I want to reach men 24 to 34, and you're telling me you can, but Google is telling me I can reach way more and they'll give me data back showing me that I've done it. So why would I ever buy with you when I could do it at Google?” And that was another one of these meetings where I was like I have no, I don't know how you answer that question.

Russell Sherman

You’re like, that's a good point.

Dan Roth

Yeah, that's a good point. And I also saw we were desperately trying to get eyeballs to our site. And the platforms, at that time it was Yahoo, really controlled our traffic, we were really dependent on Yahoo to feature us. So, at the time, I was already like, this is not going to be sustainable for me. And the third point was, everyone I knew was getting laid off. And I felt like a polar bear on an ice floe where the ice floes were getting smaller and smaller. And I was like, at some point, I'm going to get pushed off this ice floe, and I don't know where I'm going to go. Everyone I knew was being laid off, and I'm like, we're gonna all just be calling each other saying, “Do you have a job for me? Do you have a job for me?” I mean, this was, things have gotten a lot better since then, but at the time, it was really dark. I knew I wanted to expand my network, it was really important. So, all that was kind of going on in the back of my mind. When I was at Fortune, I had come up with this idea of launching an app called the Fortune 500 Plus, which was designed to give salespeople all the data and news they needed to know about the companies they were selling to. But we needed API's to be able to do it. We really needed LinkedIn’s API's. We wanted to be able to give a sense of who you were talking to. So, I flew out to LinkedIn, I had a meeting with the head of the API team, along with a Product Manager from Time Inc., and we made this request to use the API's. And then afterwards, because I was a reporter, Jeff Wiener, who was the CEO at the time, came by to come talk to me. And, Jeff and I didn't know each other, but we sat down and we started talking, and we had a great conversation. And then I don't know, I think maybe it was like a week later, two weeks later, I got a call from Jeff, or an email, I can't remember any more, saying, “Hey, we're gonna start moving into content, why don't you come join us?” And I just remember thinking, that makes no sense. What does that mean to have content on this networking site? And then the more I thought about it, I was like, I see, I see exactly what he's doing. All day at Fortune I'm trying to get professional eyeballs to come to Fortune. Jeff has the professional eyeballs. So, the bet was, can LinkedIn build up a media arm faster than Time Inc. can build up a tech arm? And I felt like that was probably the right bet to make. And I figured I'll stay for two years, and that was 10 and a half years ago. I'm making it sound easy. It was really hard. It felt like a real gloss of I wanted to be a journalist since I was in high school. I really believed in and still believe in the importance of the press, and the role of journalism. And journalism is a very insular world. And, I told Jeff at the time, that I was really hemming and hawing about going, and Jeff was like, “Look, you got to make a decision. What's going on here?” Being a reporter, it's like being in the priesthood, once you leave, you can't come back. And Jeff said, “Are you sure about that?” And I was like, I'm not sure about it, now that I say that and you question me on it, I'm not sure about it. You know, that's a good point, I've always believed it, but I'm not sure that I'm right anymore. And Jeff was like, “I don't think you are right.” He was like, “You're telling me you can't come to LinkedIn, and you'll learn all this stuff, and then if you don't like it, you can't go back and do something with that knowledge?” And I was like, I think you're probably 100% right. That gave me the freedom to feel like I could make this move.

Russell Sherman 

I was talking to Adam Bryant, who knows you well, former New York Times reporter, wrote the corner office column, now a prominent writer on LinkedIn, on your platform, writing about all things leadership, management, executive development. And he was marveling at your willingness to take a chance, whether it was Condé Nast Portfolio or LinkedIn. And he was contrasting that to people who never leave the priesthood. You know, as you said, who are reporters at the New York Times who stay forever. In fact, he joked, you know, when you join the times, you actually get a new last name, because you'll forever be known as Joe Smith, New York Times. Where do you think that willingness to jump to the unknown comes from? And I know you laid it out that you needed a bit of convincing to do it, but you have shown in your career, a willingness to take those chances. Is that part of just your makeup, your upbringing?

Dan Roth 

I think that it's almost a, I'm not sure of the answer. But I can tell you that I love what I do so much that I want to make sure I can do it for a really long time. I’d never want to be in a position where I can't do what I love doing. And I watched at Fortune, people who held on for too long, and then got pushed out. And I'd look around sometimes and be like, there's no one over 55 here anymore. And I was just trying to figure out why that is, I don't want to be done at 55. I want to keep doing this until I can't use the keyboard anymore. When I was at Portfolio, I was talking to another editor there. He said, “I'm pretty sure journalism is going to be done with me before I'm done with journalism.” And it's just like, I can't let that happen. This idea of future proofing my career and of constantly gaining new skills is something that I have made an absolute priority over everything else. And it's one of the reasons why I love LinkedIn so much, for a lot of reasons, but one is I'm constantly learning, I just always feel like I'm being pressed to learn something new. And I think that part of the jumps that I had made was that desire to be around people who I can learn from, or processes that I can learn from, or to increase the people that I'm around who can teach me what's going on. And so, that's driven a lot of it. The reason I left Fortune to go to Portfolio was because there was a new editor who was running Fortune and I didn't believe in his vision. And I was like, I'm going to stagnate here.

Russell Sherman 

It’s that metaphor you said earlier of this shrinking iceberg and you're the polar bear, and you've proven to be pretty good at seeing around corners too, sort of seeing what's down the road and figuring out okay, I need to make a move, and hopefully a smart one. Talk about some of the features you've created at LinkedIn, a little bit about the journey when you first get there, and then sort of, as you're trying to figure out, how do we build this into a really interesting content destination?

Dan Roth 

When I came, we had just launched something called LinkedIn today, which was an aggregator, it was still, such a great product, that looked at what articles people in particular industries were reading, and then used that as a way to recommend stories to other likeminded matches. So, an example of that would be, our algorithms are noticing they were reading five stories in particular, and at the time, we could only look at reading, there was no way to communicate on LinkedIn. So, it was just, “What are they clicking on?” Then, we could then recommend those stories to other people in commercial real estate. And Jeff said, “This is good. I love the idea of having an algorithm doable.” From the beginning, he wanted this to be editorial plus algorithmic. And his vision was, that I completely signed up for and still believe in, is that when you bring algorithms and people together, really cool things happen. The algorithms are great at making your world tighter and tighter. It can find out exactly what you're interested in and give you even more of that. What editors are great on is what he used to call the golden gut. And you hire editors for just making calls about things and not waiting for the data. And I was saying, like, this is an important story, everyone needs to hear about this. Sometimes you're wrong and sometimes you're right, but if you have the golden gut, you're right more times than you're wrong. From the beginning, it was this question of working with, at the time they were called relevance engineers, to find a way that we could marry both the algorithms and the editors. And it was really a not fun conversation at the beginning. It took a lot of years for us to find common ground, to the point where the algorithms would run their version of LinkedIn Today, and the editors would run our own version of LinkedIn Today recommending articles. And then we were measured against each other, and the algorithms would kill me, they were so much better than I was at picking, and it was a really, deeply unnerving to be like, I've been doing this for 20 years, the way I imagined John Henry felt, trying to build a railroad, and it's like, I can't do it as fast as the machine. And then you start learning what to give up to the machine and what you can do. I'm jumping way ahead, but now one of the people I work most closely with is this guy, Tim Eureka, who is the head of relevance AI, the artificial intelligence team for the feed and for messaging, and we just find great ways to work together where it's like, there are things that either he trains his classifiers what our team is doing, so you use your golden gut to train a machine, or he's like, we're not gonna be able to do this part well, you guys do this part well, you start splitting up the world or learning from each other. So, he gives us dashboards that we can use to make ourselves smarter. We make calls that make the algorithm smarter, and it's a really cool partnership. It goes back to the idea of learning, like I’m constantly learning from that team. It's awesome. So, we built LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn Today was great, but LinkedIn Today was an aggregator. So, you come to LinkedIn, and you're like, “Alright, great, I found an article” and now I just left LinkedIn. It was neat, but at one point a product manager pulled me aside and was like, “You realize you're driving less traffic to LinkedIn than the error page?” And I was like, alright that's probably not where I want to be.

Russell Sherman

I'm gonna assume that's not a compliment.

Dan Roth

No, that's not, it was not a compliment. But it was because there were no loops. You came and you saw an article and you left LinkedIn. This is before mobile was a big deal. Then, at the time, I got a new manager Ryan Roslansky, who is now the CEO. And, at the time, Ryan was really thinking through, he came from Yahoo, he came from Glam Media, and he just got media. He was like, “What else can we do here?” And he came up with the idea of starting to allow original content on LinkedIn, and that started it as a publishing platform, but he was like, “We can't just open this up to the world, because I don't know what we're gonna to get. What if we just do it with 200 people to start” And that became what we call the influencer program, which is a name that I wish we had come up with a better one at the time, but this is what we named it. And I remember Ryan came out of a meeting, he's like “Alright, we're going to do this, we're going to build a publishing platform, we're going to make people followable on LinkedIn,” which was a new thing, you could only connect at that point. He said, “We're going to build follow graph on LinkedIn, we're gonna start with just 200 people,” which at a tech company is a weird thing to say, because everything's about scale. And so, he's like, “200”, and I was like great, who are the 200? He was like, “That is your job.” And that was it. He was like, “Go and figure this out, and go get people on.” And I started picking up the phone and started trying to find people to come on and talk. And I remember at the time, this is when Obama and Romney were running against each other, I knew I wanted to try to get both of them publishing on LinkedIn, so I called Romney's team, I called Obama's team. Obama's team wanted nothing to do with us. Romney's team was like, “That sounds interesting. Maybe we'll do it.” And then I called up Obama’s team like Romney's in and they were like “We're in too!” So then once we had the two presidential candidates like everything suddenly got easier. Branson said yes. And then we started thinking through not just these mega stars, but also people who are really well known within their industry, so supply chain experts, accounting experts, legal experts, and we launched in 2012, the influencer program, suddenly content came on LinkedIn. And there were parts of the company that were really not sure how this was gonna work. I was 100% in belief, because I've done this my entire life, and I loved it so much, and Ryan was a believer, and then we launched this thing, and it was a huge success, in part because we had 200 people, and we, I don't remember how many members there were on LinkedIn at the time, but we told everyone on LinkedIn “Here are 200 people you can follow right now. And you can start reading about them.” And there was like Branson writing to you. The thing that we discovered from day one, from the first minute this thing launched, was that while the influencers were interesting, even better, were the comments. And I know, you know this, Russell, because you guys have done this better than anyone is, if you can get in the comments, it's real people, real professionals talking about real things going on. And we saw this from the beginning where like, Jamie Dimon would write an article, and people would come on, and they wouldn't talk to Jamie, they would talk to each other in the comments. They used him as a place to start because it can be scary, or you're never sure what to talk about. If someone like Jamie Dimon is opening the door for you, or like an Angela Ahrendts, she was always great, from the very start she was so open and authentic, and that gave members everywhere the ability to be open and authentic themselves. So, I came from Fortune where the comments were a disaster. You never wanted to look at your comments. And at LinkedIn, the comments were the best. Gold.

Russell Sherman

That was the currency.

Dan Roth

Yeah, once we saw that, it was like, oh, let's start leaning in here, let's start building out more products, get more people talking. And so, then we built it from there. So now everyone can publish. We launched something called the Daily Rundown. This is now the world's largest business publication. Every morning, editors around the globe publish the five things that you need to know in business that day. That was started as an internal newsletter, and our executives were like, we should show this to everyone. And so, we just started showing it everyone. Now we're doing an evening version of that in the US, and you'll see more versions of that coming out soon.

Russell Sherman

It's funny, I remember, probably 2011, maybe 2012, we had you come and speak to some of our clients. It was a small event, and you talked about the launch of the LinkedIn influencer program and working with Ray Dalio at the time and bringing it to him. And no one had ever heard of it, we didn't even know what it was. But we said, you know, this could be a good thing. And I remember we signed up, and I think we did only one post in the first six months, and your team called and said, “You know, I think we need a little more frequency here.” I laugh right, now, because fast forward eight years or so, and 2.3 million followers or something later, it's really used all the time, it's such an effective way to share your voice with a large audience. Where do you see the platform going? How do you think people will use it in the future? What's the hope?

Dan Roth 

LinkedIn is a very mission driven company, which was another thing that I was not used to. Our goal was to connect the world’s professionals with economic opportunity, we want to make sure that people have the ability to be better at what they are doing, or what they want to do, and to find that economic opportunity, whatever that means to them. So, everything starts with that goal of economic opportunity. All of our products are then built to try to reach that goal. When I think about the content, I'm always trying to figure out how we can make sure that our content offerings are doing exactly the same thing. I think that where the world is going is that your voice is what opens up economic opportunity. The ability to talk about what you're learning, or what you know, or to connect other people and share ideas, is increasingly the way that people get jobs. And I remember talking to this guy who was writing on LinkedIn a few years ago, who was at Nike at the time, and he was publishing articles about the early days of the sneaker business. They were great articles, and he ended up getting hired to be the CMO of an active wear company. They told him when they hired him. They said, “We hired you because of your articles. We loved the way that you thought, and we hired you.” And he said, “Writing is the new resume.” You can go beyond, it’s not just writing anymore. It's videos, it's posts, it's pictures, it's audio. People want to work with people that they know about, that they want to work with. You have to go beyond the resume. You have to go beyond the profile. When I think about what I want to be achieving, what I want my team to be achieving is, constantly helping people develop their voice, and that can be Ray Dalio developing his voice, or it can be someone who's just out of college in India, and she is in her first job, and she's just figuring out how to build a career, and we should be empowering her to start talking as well. My team's mission is to build the voice of the professional world through news, ideas, and community, and we start every meeting talking about that, and everything that we launch tries to achieve that mission. And we have four ways that we do it: we can create content, we can curate content, we can cultivate voices, or we can circulate this information. So, we call it the four C's. And I've got a news team that just focuses on create, and curate, and circulate. These are people like Jessi Hempel and George Anders, and incredible journalists in Japan and São Paulo and Paris and Germany and all around the world, who are doing this every single day. They are doing incredible interviews, they are curating the conversations that are happening on LinkedIn, and they are then taking that and trying to get it to the right people. So, if someone's a job seeker, how do you make sure they see something that is interesting for their job search that will then get them talking? You always want to try to get people to add their voice. There's a new team under me also that has taken that cultivate, the fourth seed. And there's a team just built for that. This is what's called the community management team, under a guy named Andrei Santalo, who came from Instagram. And that team's just devoted to getting people to build their community. How do we help people build their community? Everyday people who were already successful on LinkedIn or people who would be successful on LinkedIn, how do we make them even more successful? Their approach is very much focused on this idea of training or giving people the tools they need to give back. A woman on my team named Callie Schweitzer came up with a great term called the platform of generosity. We talk about that constantly. You should be thinking about how you give back. Ray does this incredibly well. Ray is always giving back. He gives his point of view, but it's with the idea of helping people develop their own points of view or to see where the world is going. It's never just broadcasting or bragging. It's about trying to get other people to talk or opening the door to get them talking. Sometimes people need that invitation to be able to have their own voice. So, what does the future look like? I think the future looks like everyone feeling that freedom to be able to share their voice in the way that they're comfortable. Sometimes that's the likes, sometimes it's the comments, sometimes it's writing an article, sometimes it's recording a video, sometimes it's just sharing stuff privately. You build a group. Group organizers are folks that we're supporting. Always back to that idea of “How does that connect you to economic opportunity?” and is about ideas and connections and getting to know people and getting to work with people that amazing things happen? That's the goal.

Russell Sherman

Give us some tips. How are the most successful brands using the platform? How are the most successful individuals using the platform? Anything you can share that you've seen?

Dan Roth

Sure. So my three biggest tips are to be authentic. This is true for brands or for people. It has to be clear this is coming from you. These are like early conversations I would have with PR teams, this was always a really uncomfortable conversation, because you are, and you tell me if I'm wrong about this, but it's like your job is to make everything beautiful. You want your clients, your customers to look amazing. But members, when they're on here, they want to feel that they're actually hearing from the real person. One of the things that we found is that when people are taking their phones and I'm, you're listening this but I'm holding my phone up now like in a kind of a crazy angle, and they record a video of themselves where they're like falling out of the frame or the sound’s cutting in and out. That stuff tends to work better than people who have set up these home studios and they have the tripod set up and they've got the right lighting. That doesn't perform as well as the shaky video, because the shaky video tells someone, oh, this is a person talking directly to me. Odell Beckham, Jr. started on LinkedIn last week and he had a post yesterday where he spells crazy with a K. And it was like, that's perfect. This is so clear that he is doing this work himself. So that's part of it, is, be yourself. You got to get out there and be yourself. And being yourself as a company or being yourself as a person, figure out what that means to be yourself, but just don't overthink it. Get out there and reveal something about yourself too. So, you don't want to be so buttoned up, everything's perfect, I've really done this, done everything incredibly well, or here's the lesson I've learned. When you don't have a lesson, say it, like, I have no idea where this is going to lead, but here's what I did today. So that's one. Two is experiment and be consistent. LinkedIn is an investment, it is not a get rich quick place. So, you want to build your voice and you want to get to know people, and that means coming regularly. That means posting three times a week, five times a week, you got to keep at it. And you kinda can't worry so much about what works and what doesn't work. Some things will work and some things won't work, and you just have to focus on the long term. If you put in the time and try to figure out how to get better, the results will come, but it means putting in the time. So this is why we told you about like Ray, you can't just come every three months and post something, that's not gonna get you anywhere. Leave comments, like stuff, give back, just be a human. That's it. Try all kinds of crazy stuff: try video, try audio, try posts, get uncomfortable, try long stuff, try short stuff. You just got to try a ton of stuff and see what works, and what worked today might not work tomorrow, what worked three months ago might not work three months from now. The audience is always changing, the tastes are always changing, and if you are just being yourself, then things are gonna be great.

Russell Sherman

You have to be pretty proud of what it's become, I would think, looking back from 2011.

Dan Roth

I am so happy. I really like, love what I do. I love the company. I love the team. One thing we didn't talk about but brings me so much joy is that we do this globally. We started our first editorial effort in Africa this year, and we're now covering every country. And that's a great feeling. And I've learned so much from editors around the globe about what works and what doesn't work, like a good example is years ago, I had a rule there's like we don't talk politics. The Big Three you don't talk about: religion, sex, politics. Those are not business conversations. I remember my editor in France, Sandrine Chauvin, was like, “You're wrong about that. In France, Politics is what we talk about at work. She was like, no work lunch, and by the way, we always take a work lunch, no work lunch happens, where we're not talking politics, that is part of the business discussion.” And I was like, oh, you're right. I've been looking at this too narrowly. So, learning from my global team has been really so cool.

Russell Sherman

I like how your bio says, “The never understated Business Insider call him, quote, the most powerful business journalist on the internet.” I assume your kids think the job’s cool.

Dan Roth 

My kids love making fun of me, and they definitely do not think the job is cool. I think they have some pride, but their favorite thing to say is, “Why would anyone post on LinkedIn, Dad? It's just a job site.” I was like it's not a job! That was like 10 years ago, people thought that! No one thinks that anymore. Why are you saying that? Haha! Got you. But it is a constant in my house of “LinkedIn is just a job site”.

Russell Sherman

If our kids are not giving us a hard time, we're doing something wrong, probably.

Dan Roth

Exactly.

Russell Sherman

We'll finish off with some quick hits here. A few quick questions just to get your thoughts. We started off talking about Kentucky. I certainly need to ask, what's your favorite bourbon?

Dan Roth

I'm a real Woodford Reserve guy. I really am a huge fan of that. But it's Woodford Reserve a lot of the times, but then Baker's or Blanton, those are the ones that if I'm like having a really special night, those get pulled out. And then I've liked this new one out of New York called Pinhook. I feel like a real trader for saying that, but think it's a really good bourbon.

Russell Sherman 

Is there a dream job for you? In the future?

Dan Roth 

I'm in it. I'm in it. I love this job. This, it just keeps expanding. The job itself is so different than what it was, that, if you had asked me five years ago, what my dream job is, it would look something like the job I'm in now, but I never would have thought that it would have been at LinkedIn with this job. So, for competitive reasons, I should probably say something to make my bosses worry, but I really do love what I do.

Russell Sherman 

We won’t tell them you’d do it for free. Sports, music, literature, art: where are you spending your free time?

Dan Roth 

I am not a sports guy, but my kids are super into sports, they're big Pittsburgh Steelers fans. My wife's from Pittsburgh. So, our dinner conversations are constantly about Pittsburgh, but for me, reading. I will read, I will spend any free moments I can reading. That is my favorite thing in the world, I mean, outside my family. I’m reading a great book on the history of the Middle Ages right now called Power and Thrones, which is just this epic telling of the entire Middle Ages. My oldest son is super into the Middle Ages, so I'm trying to catch up with his knowledge of it, and it's just an incredible era. It’s a super readable book.

Russell Sherman 

Any pets in the Roth home?

Dan Roth 

Yep, got a Bernedoodle named Luna, who, now that I am mostly working from home, I get to spend a lot more time with. She's great.

Russell Sherman 

What’s streaming these days in the Roth home?

Dan Roth 

I can't think of a streaming service that we're not paying for. So, just like to constantly give back to every single media company. My wife and I just started watching Afterparty on Apple TV. Very funny. Really good. I'm watching Fargo, which is, I know I'm like years behind on this, which is great. My oldest son and I are watching Dave together, which is a hilarious show. It's so uncomfortable, I'm not sure why I'm watching it with him. Streaming has taken over my life.

Russell Sherman

Favorite movie?

Dan Roth

Maybe Dr. Strangelove? I find myself thinking about that movie all the time, so it's got to be up there.

Russell Sherman 

Besides LinkedIn, where are you getting your news these days?

Dan Roth 

Love Techmeme. I read the Journal and the Times every day. I'm a huge FT fan. Business Insider. I really miss Nuzzel. Nuzzel was my favorite place to get news from, and then Twitter shut that down. But that was a great one. You know what I think who is doing a great job I think is the Daily Beast. And I think that since Noah Shachtman went over to Rolling Stone that it has gotten way better. It's another one that is now becoming part of my regular reading rotation.

Russell Sherman 

We talked a lot about the stories that you've written over the years. As you reflect back: most off the wall story that you’ve ever wrote, worked on?

Dan Roth 

There was this guy named Winter. That was his full name. And he was trying to visit, actually, he's still trying to visit, every single Starbucks in the world. This is for a tiny little story, and I flew out to Arizona and I traveled with him for a couple of days just watching him visit Starbucks. That was one; another time I went to a banjo camp, and I play the banjo very poorly, and I convinced my editors to send me to this banjo camp is right around the time of O Brother, Where Art Thou? so I insisted it was a trend story. I stayed with this guy, Dwight Diller, in West Virginia, and that was a really weird experience. There's so many of them. I can't even list them all. It's one of the great things about the job is you just meet so many people and so many like, crazy experiences with people.

Russell Sherman 

Any of those stories while you were at LinkedIn or are those all previous life?

Dan Roth 

A lot of my job now is, I do interviews with people, which is super interesting, but they're like 30 minutes, we sit down and we talk an hour, we sit down and talk, and a lot of internal meetings, or management meetings. That's where I am at this point in my journalistic career, which is all good. But before then, my life was getting on a plane and going and having some wild thing happen. I did this story on a hog farmer in North Carolina, got to learn all about hog farming and spent all this time with him and seeing how that all works. Got a million of them.

Russell Sherman 

Alright. And finally, the textbook question every reporter finishes every interview with: what should I have asked you that I forgot to ask?

Dan Roth

I don't know you've done a great job, Russell. This has been by far the best interview I've ever been part of, so thank you. What haven't you asked? Let's see. I think I feel like we covered everything.

Russell Sherman

Alright, we can leave it at that. I won't push you.

Dan Roth

I don't know. I can't think of anything. I think we got it.

Russell Sherman

Awesome. We'll leave it at that. Dan, that was a great conversation, so appreciate you joining us on Press Profiles.

Dan Roth

It was really terrific. Thank you for inviting me here. I had a really great time. I can't wait to listen to this when it comes out. Congrats on all of your great work. Anytime you call me and ask me to do something. I'm like, I got to do it. This is it.

Russell Sherman

Awesome. Thank you, Dan.

Dan Roth

Thanks.

Russell Sherman

That was Dan Roth, editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. Remember, you can access all of our episodes at pressprofilespodcast.com, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.