Hundred people under you leading North America. LinkedIn learning is half a billion dollar business. Yeah, that half a billion wasn't all in North America.
Acquiring Minds
Buying 2 Rivals to Create a Dominant Leader
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That was kind of the global business. But when I started, it was like 8 million.
Right. So it's like, you know, to go to 8 to 500, like it was phenomenal trajectory. Now I can't take credit for just like a tiny sliver of that. Right. There's an enormous team and we had resources from Microsoft, et cetera.
But seeing that type of trajectory and seeing what it takes to build that type of business taught me all types of lessons. I think the biggest thing that I'm learning now is, look, merging two companies, right? Like, we had acquired Lynda and we had this whole culture that had been created there, and we were bringing them into LinkedIn.
And that's very similar to a lot of the things that I'm, you know, in engaging with now on a daily basis with two companies coming together, very different cultures. And for that whole run at LinkedIn, you were still in New York? I was, yeah. The entire time, except for, I would say, the last couple of months.
When Covid happened and my family fled New York City, we were having our fifth baby in July 2020, which is not a fun time to have a baby in New York City. So we ended up coming out to New York or to Utah to have a baby here in 2025. And we're still here.
So that's what you. So you had four kids, you and your wife packed into an apartment, as I recall, on the Upper west side? We did. You got it. Yeah. There was four kids, tiny little apartment. We're under a thousand square feet, and we loved it.
And you. And you'd lived that way for a while. I mean, this was.
That wasn't temporary. That had been the status quo for your. I mean, as you had, as you were building your family there, I mean, it was, I mean, very striking.
Most people living by themselves in New York eventually complain about space constraints and leave the city. But there you guys were.
My wife is the hero of this whole story. I mean, she's the one who was out there taking on adventures every day. And that was the great thing.
Like, you know, you didn't spend much of your time besides sleeping in the apartment. You got out and adventured. And that was the biggest challenge with COVID right Is all of a sudden you couldn't take the kids out.
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