Jeff Weiner is stepping down as CEO of LinkedIn, the most popular professional social media networking platform at 675 million members worldwide. LinkedIn employs 16,000 people and brings in $7.5 billion in revenue.
Weiner became CEO in June 2009 and will officially leave the post June 2020, after 11 years, to settle into the role of executive chairman.
Before LinkedIn, Weiner was at Yahoo!, whose parent company has been Verizon
Ryan Roslansky, coming from leading the product team, will become LinkedIn's new CEO. The new product lead will be Tomer Cohen, who's been vice president of products.
LinkedIn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, an acquisition that appears to be doing quite well. At the time, the Board of Directors of LinkedIn and Microsoft all unanimously supported and approved of the transaction. Now, nearly 6% of Microsoft's total revenue is generated from LinkedIn.
Weiner made the announcement in a recent LinkedIn post, in which he discussed the company's leadership transition from him to Roslansky. He also made sure to reference how impactful Microsoft's acquisition has been over the past few years. In doing so, Weiner specifically called attention to Satya Nadella, who's been Microsoft's CEO since 2014.
"Since the acquisition, Satya's commitment to our shared vision for the integration and his unconditional support have been instrumental in our success," Weiner said in the post. "The opportunity for me to continue to work with Satya and the Microsoft leadership team in pursuit of helping billions of people gain access to economic opportunity adds an extremely exciting dimension to my next play."
By next play, Weiner is referring to the next step in his career. The phrase has become popular among LinkedIn employees over the years and, according to Weiner, is an homage to Duke University's Blue Devils basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.
- https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-ceo-jeff-weiner-is-stepping-down-after-11-years-2020-2
- https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/05/jeff-weiner-will-step-down-as-ceo-of-linkedin-june-1-product-head-ryan-roslansky-steps-up/
- https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/jeff-weiner-to-step-down-as-linkedin-ceo-and-become-executive-chairman.html
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-time-my-next-play-linkedins-new-ceo-jeff-weiner/
- https://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-linkedin/