Homeroom with Sal & Dan Roth - Wednesday, November 11

Hi everyone! Welcome to the homeroom live stream. Sal here from Khan Academy. I'm excited about our conversation today with Dan Roth, editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. A lot to talk about on both the future of work and a lot on just the future of media too. I think it will be a really interesting conversation, so start thinking of your questions and putting them in the message boards wherever you happen to be seeing this. We're going to surface as many of the questions as possible to Dan.

But before we do that, I will make my standard announcements. First of all, a reminder that we are not for profit. We can only exist with your philanthropic donations. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate.

I also want to make a special shoutout to several organizations that stepped up during COVID. Especially, many of them were supporting us even before COVID. But when we saw that our costs had gone up and a lot more folks were dependent on Khan Academy and continued to be, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and the many other funders and supporters of Khan Academy pre and during COVID, and hopefully post-COVID as well. We need your help. We continue to need your help. We have a gap for 2021.

Also, a quick reminder that you can get a version of this live stream, Homeroom with Sal, the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

So with that, I’m excited to introduce Dan Roth. Dan, good to see you!

Dan: Great to see you! Thanks for having me on.

Sal: Maybe the first thing, just to get everyone acquainted, I think most people know about LinkedIn. Most folks, you know, at the high level, it's kind of the social network for business. They view it as a place where you can look for jobs, find jobs, find interesting things that are going on in the business world. Why does LinkedIn have an editor-in-chief? What is it? What do you do?

Dan: It's a great question, and I ask myself that all the time! So I've been at LinkedIn for almost 10 years now—nine and a half years. I joined LinkedIn when it was moving from being a place to connect professionals with each other to being a way for people to connect to economic opportunity. Before joining LinkedIn, I was a long-time writer and editor at Fortune, Wired, Forbes. I helped start a magazine called Condé Nast Portfolio, which was a business magazine started by Condé Nast and had always been a business journalist just trying to explain to the world how and to professionals how business worked.

At the time, Jeff Weiner, who was the CEO of LinkedIn, was thinking about the next evolution of LinkedIn. His thinking was that if we are going to serve the mission of LinkedIn, which is not just to connect people but to help make them better at what they do or what they want to do, we do that by helping them stay informed and helping make sure that they are building their own voice. The way that you do that is by getting them the right news at the right time and then getting them to talk about it. To do that well, you need an editor, so he hired me.

I built up a team; we have about 75 editors around the world who curate content, cultivate new voices—so trying to find people who are uniquely qualified to talk about certain things and bring them on LinkedIn. Then we curate the best of what we see. So, curate, cultivate, create—these are mostly business journalists like myself. We're just trying to make sure that we are serving up high-quality information to people so that when you come to LinkedIn, your time is spent— it is a valuable use of your time. No matter what you do for a living when you come to LinkedIn, you should find some news that's interesting to you that helps you get smarter at what you're doing or helps you make a connection or connect dots from around the world. To do that well, you need editors and algorithms.

We work really closely with our relevance engineers. We make sure that we are giving people what they want in their world but also helping them filter bubbles and make sure they are seeing what is going on in the world around them. That's what I do.

Sal: It's fascinating because it's a very different take than some of the other social media platforms. Obviously, they aren't quite as business-focused. But if you take Twitter or if you take Facebook, you know, in theory, the news is all user-generated. They have increasingly felt the scrutiny of, “Hey, what if someone posts something that is inciting violence or is just inaccurate?” So they're having to do a little bit more policing function, but they're definitely not creating their own content. What do you think has been the pros and cons of LinkedIn going down this path?

Dan: Sure! It is important to us that when people come to LinkedIn, they know this is a place where they can trust what they see. LinkedIn, if you look at the Business Insider, does a survey every year of trust in social media. For I don't know, four years running—three, four years running—LinkedIn is the number one most trusted social media site. The way that we do that and the way that we maintain it is by one, making sure we have real identities. When you come to LinkedIn, you are coming with your professional identity. You are saying who you work for, who you have worked for in the past, and then we are connecting you with your colleagues who can vouch for your talk about what you're good at.

Also, when you come to your feed, you should have a feeling that just like you're seeing real people, you are seeing real news and information on there. We have always believed that it is important to have an editorial voice and an editorial perspective on LinkedIn. So, for instance, with the latest election, if you go and open your app right now and you go to your notifications tab, you’ll see something at the top that says, "The 2020 election latest." If you click there—this is if you're in the U.S., I should say—if you click there, you'll end up on a page that is created and curated by editors that says, "Here is exactly what is going on with the election." This is trusted information from trusted sources. We ran this all the way through the entire election process, and it's still up there today. It is important that if you are—no matter what you do—if you come to LinkedIn that you have that one place to go to get that information and say, "Here's what's going on in the world. I can trust what I'm seeing here."

You asked about user-generated content. User-generated content is the heart and soul of LinkedIn. What we create as editors is a drop in the bucket versus what our members create every single day through their articles and their posts, videos, and images that they're putting up on LinkedIn. They are talking to their world about what's going on around them and what they see. We as editors are trying to get more and more of that content from them, so we will reach out every day to people who might be in the news, whether they know it or not.

So let's say, for instance, that there's a big merger going on. We could reach out to people who are in that industry saying, "Can you explain what you know? Spotify is buying Megaphone. Can you talk about what this means for the future of podcasting?" People who are in the podcasting business would get this alert, and they might say, "Oh, yeah, I have something that I am qualified to talk about that I want to share." There's something that's in the back of my head that I've talked to my colleagues about, and if I can share with the world, maybe something—an even better conversation happens.

So we get them to share that on LinkedIn. I think the last point is that—you asked about how this is different—the big difference is that we're a professional social media site. What you write here is seen by your boss and your colleagues and your future colleagues and people who you might want to work for one day when you start your own business. All of that increases the—I think for a lot of us, sharing on social is always worrisome. But when you come to LinkedIn, you know there's that extra concern. What is my boss going to say when they see what I've written? What are my employees going to say?

So we as editors can help guide people to say, "This is a topic that is worth weighing in on. People are hungry to hear from you on this thing that's going on in the news, and this is a safe thing to talk about." So, I think unlike some other social media where you might fire it up and talk about whatever you feel like talking about, there’s an extra level of concern and seriousness that takes place on LinkedIn because of the professional profile.

Sal: I’m curious, and I definitely want to talk about the future of work, which I know is another area that you have a lot of expertise. But, you know, this whole notion of social media and misinformation is such a hot topic. It does seem like LinkedIn has threaded the needle quite well of having a lot of user-generated content, also having some editorially curated content, and just by the nature of it being real identities, etc. Everything you mentioned seems like you're doing a good job. What do you think is the future of some of the other social media platforms? I mean, I actually thought a lot about this issue. I don't have a simple solution for how to balance people being able to put ideas out there while some ideas are from Russian bots or just people who are trying to put out misinformation. Where do you think this is going to go?

Dan: I don’t know; I wish I knew! I think that there is— I can tell you that my own beliefs about what's important for us to figure out in the social media landscape is how do we make sure that there are real identities behind everything. I think that there is—one of the key drivers to LinkedIn's success has been this idea that you have to stand for what you are saying. There are some people who don't mind saying crazy things and knowing that it's under their real identity; that is always going to happen. But it definitely raises the bar, and it adds a lot of— it should make you think twice about what it is that you're saying. So I think that's really important.

I think that what the other social media sites are doing in terms of labeling content is really important. I think the role of fact-checkers is important, and I hope that social media sites keep investing in those areas. Then I guess the last thing I would say is that I watch how my kids use social, and it's very different than I think older generations use social. They go into it with a certain understanding of what it's for and what it's not for. I want to take it seriously and when not to take it seriously. Also, I think they know when to hop off.

I wonder if this generation that has grown up with social as being the primary way that they are not just getting information but building their voice has a better handle on what they're seeing there. Because they are also the ones putting up jokey content, they can recognize when someone is trolling because maybe they're trolling themselves also. So, I do think there will be a change in how people understand how damaging social can be or the downsides when people have much more information or intrinsically get what the weaknesses are with what they might be seeing on certain sites, where there is no anonymity, where anyone could post anything, and where people are saying stuff just to get a rise out of you.

Sal: Yeah, and I hope you're right! I hope the next generation... I mean, we've had guests on before talking about how this generation that's growing up on social media has all of the negatives that it might have, but they might also be building some skill sets.

So, you know, pivoting a little bit, we’re obviously in the midst of a COVID crisis. You know, it looks like you're working from home; I'm working from home. What’s your view? You know, what are you seeing? LinkedIn, what are you doing in reporting? What's your view of the future of work, you know, and COVID, especially how it might impact that?

Dan: I think that it's a big question, and I think there are a lot of different ways to look at it. There are certain industries that we have seen through our data that are just getting absolutely—in such serious pain—that I think it's hard to think about how they come back. And there are others that are doing extremely well.

Sal: What are the ones that you think might have trouble coming back?

Dan: I think leisure and hospitality are—it's going to be a long time before they come back. There could be a point where coming back is no longer an option because you have lost years of knowledge. You've had to cut to the bone; you have lost people's—what people—how people spend their money and what they do in their leisure time has changed. So I think it's going to be years before business travel comes back. Because I think we're all learning how to do these calls from home.

There was a—I think it was the CEO of Infosys, a massive Indian outsourcing IT firm, that said, “Look! I used to get on a plane and fly. I would fly to the U.S. for a five million dollar deal. Now we’re closing two billion dollar deals over these kind of calls!” You realize you have to do that. You don’t have to go pack a bag; you don’t have to get trapped in an airplane for eight hours; you don’t have to deal with jet lag going back. That’s really difficult.

I was talking to a— I do an interview series also on LinkedIn. I was talking to David Chang, the founder of Momofuku, yesterday, and he’s a giant restaurateur. He says, “Look, without business travel, restaurants don’t come back. We rely on that lunch traffic and that breakfast traffic to be able to pay for so much else of what goes on in the restaurant world. It's not just leisure dinners.”

And so you start seeing these downstream impacts where a lot of leisure and travel don't come back if business travel doesn't come back. Cruises—when do cruises come back? I think it's going to be a long time. So anything that involves us getting together in person, I think, will take a while to come back and will come back in a different form.

What we’ve seen on LinkedIn is that the people who are in those industries are very actively trying to get out of those industries. They realize that there is a need to find a path that takes you from this area into something else, and I think that's accelerating.

You know, I don't know if you've had Professor Galloway on your—Scott Galloway—on your show before, but he has this theory that what COVID is doing is just accelerating trends that were already in the works. So, virtual big tech getting bigger—and I would add to that this kind of skills-based workforce. This idea that what you do is really a collection of skills versus you being an expert in one particular job.

So, as an example of that, you could be a great travel—you might be a great, I don't know, person in travel. You might be able to travel anything in travel; you have to just think about what the atomized set of skills are that make up your job and then where else you could apply those skills.

I think my favorite example of this is I was talking to someone at an insurance company who said that when they look for insurance adjusters—people that can work with people around their accidents and try to understand what happened and who’s at fault and whatever else goes into being an insurance adjuster—this executive said, “We hire bartenders.” Because bartenders have this ability to get people to tell their stories, and I think if you're a bartender, you don't think of yourself as being a story aggregator, but that's a skill. It's a skill to get people to talk.

Once you start thinking of your work in terms of what are the skills that go into what I do versus I identify myself as a bartender, the world starts opening up to you, and I think that is accelerated by COVID. It is people realizing that they’ve built their careers on potentially shaky ground and that if they are going to continue to work, it is going to come from being able to hop from industry to industry and job to job. It's your skills that will enable you to do that.

Sal: And what do you think about the in-person workplace? What do you think about, you know, out here in Silicon Valley, some people say, “Oh, you know, commercial real estate's gonna die.” Other people say, “No, it might be bigger than ever because people need more space.” Where do you fall on that debate?

Dan: All right, so this is just a personal take, but I think that it is a mistake to write off personal interactions. I think the workplace might change and how we what we do in work. It’ll become a lot more flexible, but I don't think—I think that this need for human interaction and the kind of ideas that come through serendipity—through bumping into someone in the hallway or through the meeting that takes place after the meeting. Some of the best projects we’ve ever done, that I've been involved with have come because the meeting is over, and a few of us stay in the conference room. All of a sudden, someone gets up to a whiteboard and says, “You know, actually what if we do it this way?” And you're like, “Oh yeah, that's exactly the way we should do it.” And off you go.

When you are doing these kind of Teams or Zoom calls—one half hour, half hour, half hour—which is how a lot of us are working; it's how I'm working right now—you lose that spontaneity, and I think there is a real benefit for that. I think that we're really missing it. So this morning I got a chance to go on a walking meeting with someone who I haven't met before, and we were planning on getting together. It was the first time I've done it since March. We met in Prospect Park, and I'm based in New York. We met in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and we walked side by side, our masks on, and it was for 45 minutes. We just talked about questions that she had about how to do something in her job, and it was great. It was a free-flowing conversation in a way that I have not experienced in a long time.

I think that that is something that once we start getting that again, it's going to be hard to give it up. So I don't—I am not a believer in that everyone goes virtual. I just don't think it's sustainable.

Sal: Yeah, maybe some type of hybrid, more flexible. I do want to double-click on the air travel thing because those folks who've watched this in the past know that myself and planes have not had a good history together! If you know, even from my job, obviously, I have to travel a lot sometimes, speak, sometimes fundraise. And to your point, I actually find that I'm able to have more efficient and effective fundraising meetings with potential donors right now than before, with all of that overhead. It creates, you know, it's not good for the environment; it's not good for people's health, right? Etc. Can we start a movement to never travel again? I mean, we should travel to see our families and that type of thing—go on vacation, see the world—but you know, this business travel—let me go cross-country for a meeting and then, you know, slink back.

Dan: Yeah, it seems like you're working to do that. Let’s start a LinkedIn movement!

Sal: I'm with you! I'm part of that LinkedIn movement; there is no doubt. I think that, you know, going back to your last question, though, I do think that it's easier to have that kind of pledge right now when we're all acting, when we're all in this world. Once there is a big enough shift towards in-person, everything goes in person, so I do think there’s some kind of network effect that kind of happens when you just don’t want to feel left out.

Right now, there is no—you can't have FOMO today! There is no place where there is no room where it happens anymore. It is a series of these small rooms virtually connected. Once that room where it happens idea comes back, we're going to talk—we’re going to start getting back. It's the pull to get back on the plane that's going to start happening again.

Sal: But I’m with you; I got to say the one surprising upside of this is you know, there are—not to say that any of this is an upside. This is a horrible situation and a world we are living in right now because of COVID, but I’m spending way more time with my family, and it's really nice to not be on the plane every other week.

Dan: I’m not looking forward to going back to that!

Sal: No, and you know, we could say that that's a nice-to-have from just like your own personal contentment point of view, but I believe having that time with your family, having a better family life, connecting with your kids, with your partner, that's going to make you a better, more effective at work. And to your earlier point, you can do more in that same amount of time. It takes to go cross-country, do one meeting and come back; you could do 10 meetings, which will be far less completing.

Anyway, I’ll get off of—we'll go offline and think about how we can—and you know, I have deep sympathy for those industries. Hopefully, there are ways for them to pivot. But, you know, I've never—it has never made sense to me. It seems to make everyone—I'm talking to them—it’s like, “Yeah, my life is so much better now that I don't have to travel all the time!”

Dan: Right!

Sal: Okay, let's sign a pact right now!

Dan: Right, that's never going to be—it’s bad; it’s bad for the environment, it really is.

Sal: I mean, yeah, it’s horrible.

Dan: So, a lot of questions that are coming in. So one question I’ll modify a little bit from SmartBear on YouTube: “How do you think LinkedIn has grown in the past five years, and what do you think it’s going to look like five years from now?”

Dan: The number one way I would say it’s grown is in terms of this explosion of a professional voice on LinkedIn. That the idea of sharing what you know or sharing what you don’t know and being open and vulnerable and saying “I have questions about how to do X” or “I don’t understand why this is happening.” That was very different—years ago! It was hard to convince people to write and share on LinkedIn. Under their professional identity, which we talked about, it’s not—it’s no longer hard. I think people still have to think about it, but it makes sense to them.

I think that a younger generation especially thinks of it as a given that their voice needs to be heard, that creating is part of who they are. I think that's a great thing—this idea of democratizing voice is something that I think is one of the best things to happen. So before, when I was a traditional journalist, and I worked for—when I was doing a story for Fortune, I would pick up the phone and I might make 100 phone calls for an article, and then I would quote two people. I would have benefited from those 98 other phone calls and learning how an industry works or what's going on behind the scenes, but my readers never got to see any of that. They would see it all filtered through my eyes but they never got the direct experience of those quotes from these experts.

What we’re seeing on LinkedIn now is this outpouring of people who are experts or want to develop an expertise who are sharing what they know, which helps all of us get smarter faster. So that's probably been the biggest change. I think it mirrors, if you look at the thing that Edelman—the PR firm—does something called the Edelman Trust Barometer every year where they measure the entities and institutions that people trust today.

It’s a great read; you should go check it out. The number one most trusted entity today is “my CEO.” People say “my” then subject matter experts, and there’s been this drop in trust in government and the media. But people believe in the people who are signing their paychecks, and they believe in people who have some skin in the game, and they want to hear more from them.

What we're seeing is that these executives, these subject matter experts, these people who are just coming up are sharing this information on LinkedIn. So, that’s the biggest impact. In terms of what I think we’ll see in the next five years, this kind of skills development that we touched on, I think, is going to be a massive part of what people use LinkedIn for. As you come to LinkedIn, you come to develop skills. You use LinkedIn Learning to get skilled up in how to do Facebook ads or how to learn R or anything—Plato learned Python!

You put on your profile that you have developed that skill, and for recruiters, being able to see that John Smith has a skill in this area that we need is an instant validator in a way that they haven't had before. So that kind of skill development—putting skills on your profile, showing off what you know and how you've learned it, and then continuing to build off this and how you think—this means like how the postings and articles that people are publishing. That, to me, creates this explosion of information on LinkedIn that enables people to change jobs or find better jobs or have the careers they want to have that are dependent on where they can guide it themselves. So, that's what I think is going to happen.

Sal: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And related to that, this question from Facebook. Maria Aguim asks, "What advice can I give my high schoolers graduating this year who are unsure about what major or field to look into given all the change that we're talking about?"

Dan: Great question! All right, so I would say number one is this has been true for years—that the most in-demand skill that we have heard from hiring managers is the ability to communicate. Communication skills are the number one thing that hiring managers are looking for, and especially in a world like this where we are all behind our computers or writing on Google Docs or however else we're communicating, this ability to communicate clearly and consistently is important.

So, tell your high schooler, number one, make sure that you are learning how to write, that you are very clear in that you’re taking English lessons, that you’re spending a lot of time learning how to communicate, and just be a great communicator. That’s number one.

Number two: If you want to look at the jobs of the future, we were just looking at—you know, I’m just pulling this up right now—we looked at—we did a look at what are some of the jobs where we know that there’s outsized demand and we expect that kind of outsized demand to continue: software developer, sales representative, project manager, IT administration, IT administrator, digital marketer, IT support help desk—basically anything. If you can be anything around how to make sure that—people know that technology is underpinning every single company today; every company is a tech company. You want to have those kinds of tech skills.

So, I think that an engineering degree always makes sense. It might not be for everyone, but if that’s an area that you have any interest, learning how to be an engineer is a great thing to do. Otherwise, sales is always really great. There’s always going to be a need for someone—for doing sales. But if your teenager, high school graduate, doesn’t know what he or she wants to do, just make sure that they are learning how to communicate—that is the key.

And number two: Make sure that they are flexible. That they learn how to ride the waves because the kind of change we see in industries today is not going to slow down. Being able to adapt to the situations around you is going to be so important, and being able to take whatever you’ve learned and then adapt it and go somewhere else—you've got to know how to do that. That's probably more important than any major that you could have today in college is just understanding how to adapt and how to stay flexible. That's what I would say.

Sal: If you are 22 years old, maybe you have an engineering degree, maybe you have a lot of degrees—oh! Can you hear me now?

Dan: I can't hear you!

Sal: Oh, well, we're at the home stretch, anyway. It might be me; I don't know. We see what the—well, I think it's me. All right, can you hear me, Gotham? Oh, going on! Let me write you a note.

Well, I don’t know, Felipe, if you could tell Dan to just, you know, any parting thoughts for folks, if you can hear me. I can't hear anything, unfortunately, but this is part of this stay—adaptable. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to put my phone number into this private chat that we have. If you're watching this, I don’t think you can see this. I hope not! Otherwise, everyone’s getting my phone number! And if you want to call, maybe we can do it this way, or you can write out your questions, and I’ll answer them.

All right! Let's see the chat while we do this. Can I just say something? I'm gonna now just gonna monologue. I will say that we have that we keep a running list of jobs that are hiring on LinkedIn. There are places that are hiring right now. So this is not—it might feel like that no one is actually hiring—but there are companies that are doing—it targeting Amazon, UPS, FedEx, McDonald’s, Albertson's, Dollar General—there are big companies that are trying to hire that are continuing to hire even through this pandemic.

I did want to talk about a survey that we did recently that might be interesting, which is we looked at people who had lost their jobs and we talked to hiring managers about what they were looking for. A really interesting piece of data came out of this—two interesting pieces of data came out of this. One is that people who’ve lost their jobs are incredibly ashamed and embarrassed that they’ve lost their jobs. 46 percent said they have lied about being unemployed. When we talked to hiring managers, they said they don’t care whether someone is unemployed or not. It makes no difference to them in terms of hiring on whether someone is currently employed.

So there's this incredible mismatch in how people think about their work and what companies are looking for. If you don’t have a job, it’s okay not to have a job. What hiring managers just want to know is that you are continuing to stay busy, that you’re trying new things, you’re developing new skills, that you’re continuing to post and share and explaining who you are. But it’s not something to hide from.

For a long time, we have been led to believe that you can only get a job if you currently have a job or that you need to put on a fake front and make it seem like you’re still working. It’s just not true! The data says that. This is not true! You can—that having a job is not the most important thing to getting your next job. It is staying active, showing that you’re still involved—that you are doing things that are productive and that you are someone that a company can get meaningful work out of right as soon as they hire you.

Sal: All right! As soon as they hire you! And I’m assuming you can't hear me, no?

Dan: Well...

Sal: What I will say is I hope! Thank you for joining! Thank you!

Dan: Yeah!

Sal: And we will do this again. I’m trying to see how I can communicate with you. So I think we're all good. So I don’t know if all of you can hear me. My apologies for the technical difficulties near the end. But thanks, everyone, for joining! Great conversation with Dan.

I hope we can bring him on again because I had a ton more questions. Although we did get pretty close to running out of time—but thanks everyone for joining! Tomorrow we're going to have Marley Diaz, author and founder of Pound 1000 Black Girl Books, so we're looking forward to having her on. Any questions you might have, please bring those questions to us! But with that, thanks for joining today’s live stream! I will see you all soon!