I was in the midst of relocating from Seattle to the Bay Area to spend the summer and start business school in the fall at Berkeley. After six years of programming and leading a large engineering team building RealPlayer, I wanted to become a product manager.
The internet and startups seemed dead at the time and I thought business school would be a great way for me to learn and understand “business,” the skills to be a product manager vs an engineer, and to get reconnected to things happening in Silicon Valley
We were a few years already into the dot bust and everything seemed bleak. Public company stock prices had fallen hard, except Google there were almost no interesting startups on the rise, Microsoft was stuck in antitrust goo.
The big jobs companies were Monster.com, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs. Monster advertised at Super Bowls. If you wanted a new job you had to make a resume, upload it to these sites, search and apply for jobs. Or get lucky emailing it around to ask your friends for help.
And there was another hot app at the time called Plaxo that would upload your entire address book and spam everyone to create a virtual contact with up to date information. It was hard not to accidentally spam everyone you had ever emailed. Many thought these were the same co
Anyway, by that fall I was starting business school and thought maybe social networking could be interesting. We were MBA students so spent a lot of time trying to debate and figure out the future.
One of my best friends and I even wrote a point counterpoint on the future of social networking for our **printed** business school newspaper
I thought it would be really cool to go work on social networking and see if this could be the future. I saw an email on a college symbolic systems mailing list looking for engineers to join LinkedIn - particularly a windows engineer to build things for Outlook
While I didn’t want to go back to engineering, I emailed the LinkedIn CTO to see if I could help part time while in business school. I thought I could use my coding skills to get a foot in the door.
We met and he asked why I was in business school. I said I wanted to be a product manager. He said he needed a full time engineer, not part time. But, well maybe you should come here and product manage. My jaw dropped.
He then had me meet another cofounder and head of product and we got along great. They were just starting to look for their first product manager too. They had me meet Reid Hoffman which was the biggest meeting of my life at that point and an intense conversation.
Anyway more conversations ensued and I got an actual offer! To join a sub 15 person company as their first PM!! Problem was I would have to drop out of business school after only one semester.
I flip flopped a ton. Some friends told me to go for it, others thought I was crazy and this would fail. The Dean told me every single person who left for startups in the dot com boom had returned, hat in hand, to finish their MBA, except one.
So ultimately I decided to take the plunge. And I became a product manager. And got to help LinkedIn grow and build products including launching LinkedIn Jobs and many other things.
It was my first step into product management and startups. And it changed my life.
Happy 20th birthday LinkedIn! Thank you to everyone who has built the product and company. It changed my life, and the lives of so many many other users who found new opportunities and connections
