This is the Digital Strategy Call with host Brent Lollis and special guest Joff Redfern who has served as VP of Product for Fidelity Investments, Yahoo, and most recently at LinkedIn where he oversaw the company's transition from a desktop first to a mobile first company. He owns multiple patents for mobile technologies and is a frequent keynote speaker at technology conferences.
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Announcer:
This is the Digital Strategy Call, with your host, Brent Lawless, an award-winning digital strategist to Fortune 500 CEOs and superstars like Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift, and American Idol mentor and Big Machine Records Founder Scott Borchetta. Our mission is simple, to help you navigate the warp speed changes in the digital world and make you the undeniable leader in your industry.
Today's guest is Joff Redfern who has served as VP of Product for Fidelity Investments, Yahoo, and most recently at LinkedIn where he oversaw the company's transition from a desktop first to a mobile first company. He owns multiple patents for mobile technologies and is a frequent keynote speaker at technology conferences. The Digital Strategy Call is made possible by Creative State, helping you conquer your competition with world class response website, video production, branding, search engine optimization, and social media. Go to creativestate.com or call 866-658-7423.
Brent:
Joff Redfern, welcome to the Digital Strategy Call.
Joff:
Thank you Brent, thank you for having me.
Brent:
So, tell me when you were first exposed to computers and technology.
Joff:
Well, my dad was a serial entrepreneur and he had started four different technology companies. His first job out of college was a software engineer for the then nascent IBM mainframe. So, he was working on the system 360. And then he left IBM to go ahead and go on his own and he just went through these series of companies. Some successful and some not successful but at a very early age I got exposed to watching an entrepreneurial father and talking about technology with him ad nauseum.
Brent:
So, when did you realize, did it come out of that, like, we all look up to our dads. Did it come out of that that you decided you wanted to have a career in technology?
Joff:
I think so but it was a little bit slow going. When I was younger the first IBM PCXT came out and we had that and for a while I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do with it but then over time I started to learn that I could download different games and I could go to bulletin boards. One of the things that I very distinctly remember is I wanted to start up my own company when I was 16 and at the point we were living on Cape Cod so I had a number of friends who their fathers were commercial fishermen and they were starting to buy boats and they would go commercial fishing early in the morning or on the weekend. So, I remember using the IBM PCXT and I called up Lotus One, Two, Three which was the spreadsheet software at the time. And, I remember creating this very simple break even model of what my little commercial fishing business was going to look like. And, I needed that because I had gone down to the bank earlier in the week and I asked them if I could have a loan. You know, imagine some 16 year old kid who doesn't know any better and walks in Cape Cod Savings Bank. He's like, hey I wanna loan for $3,000 to go buy this boat 'cause I'm gonna start a company. And, they said, well, go talk to your dad because we're gonna need someone to cosign it. And, I remember going home and my dad's like, well, how do I know it's a good business? Why don't you prove to me that this would be a good investment for me? And if you can, then I'll go ahead and cosign that loan. So, I used that Lotus One, Two, Three program to create this little spreadsheet to show him how much money I was gonna make and that I was gonna be able to afford the $109.32 monthly payment on my boat. So, it was one of the early memories I have of, wow, technology is so powerful and it's helping me be able to start something.
Brent:
So, how did the commercial fishing business go?
Joff:
It was great. I loved it. Growing up on the Cape, one of my wealthiest friends, because it winds up to be a really great little business. All you need is a pair of shorts and a little skiff and a clam rake and you can do really well. Better than working at a McDonald's or an ice cream shop. So, I wound up doing that all through high school and then when I came home in the summer from college I would go ahead and work during the summer on fishing boats as well.
Brent:
Wow, that's interesting.
Joff:
I had a great tan.
Brent:
Yeah, that's very cool. So, ultimately, you ended up getting an MBA from Cornell. How did that path and that decision to study at Cornell impact your future career path?
Joff:
Yeah, I decided to go and get an MBA when I got out of college, I co-founded a technology company and it failed and I felt like I could've done a lot better. And I felt like there were a number of lessons that I needed to learn and I wasn't sure who I was supposed to learn those from. So, I applied to Cornell and I got into Cornell, went to Cornell. When I was there, I had some basic things that I still use today. Like, I learned a lot about statistics and finance and marketing and that coursework was all great. But really, the number one thing by far that I took out of Cornell was my wife, Margot MacDonald. So, I met my wife there at Cornell. And, when you think about the kinds of things that my wife and I have been able to do in life, like a lot of it is just this, it's almost like you got this partner in life, this co-founder in life, and we've been able to start a family and have four kids and we've built six different houses. When we were living in Tahoe, she started a school, so we started a school. We co-founded a company together. So, literally every single day I feel like I'm getting this wonderful gift back from Cornell which was my wife. So, I feel like theof Cornell was like really, really great investment.
Brent:
That's great. And then you ultimately, or you eventually ended up serving as the VP of Product for Yahoo. I think you started back there in '03. Kind of tell us a little bit about some of the products and projects that you're most proud of that you worked on at Yahoo.
I felt like there was still an amazing brand there and that the Internet was still the playing field that technology was taking place on. So, I joined to help build a company inside of LinkedIn.
Joff:
Yeah, back in, Yahoo's in the news so much and this was a long time ago. I've been out of Yahoo for seven years but in this time period of 2003, it was a really exciting time to join Yahoo again because Yahoo was still at the center of this giant wave which was the Internet. And, they had gone through and really spiked up and then the dot.com bubble came and the company didn't do as well but when I joined, I felt like there was still an amazing brand there and that the Internet was still the playing field that technology was taking place on. So, I joined to help build a company inside of LinkedIn. We started the broadband group and that group was responsible for the partnerships that existed between a lot of these large Tel-Co companies like SBC, later on called AT&T, British Tel-Com, and the list went on. So, I was building products that were trying to optimize for what it meant to be in a broadband world. And that was a ton of fun. The people at Yahoo, talk to any Yahoo, that would be the first thing that they get nostalgic about were the people that were there, the relationships that were forged, the learnings that were had, just the culture of friendship equability was really special at Yahoo at that time.
Brent:
Well, and as you mentioned, Yahoo has been in the news a lot lately being acquired by Verizon. What's your perspective and what do you think about that acquisition?
There's a large number of really successful entrepreneurs and executives out there that came from Yahoo. In particular, there's a great set of people over at LinkedIn that really came from that Yahoo bloodline.
Joff:
Great question. Again, because I've been out of Yahoo for so long, I'm somewhat unemotional from it. I think of Yahoo as the company and then I think of Yahoo as the people that I once worked with. So, Yahoo as a company, I feel like, and you know, I'm partly culpable, we really missed out on some of the big macro waves that carried technology forward. So, here we are, back in 1995 it capitalizes on the emergence of a commercial web but then we sat on the sidelines as a search emerged to be the dominant model of Google. And then later on, social emerges with Facebook being the central player. And then moving over to mobile where Apple and Google have really been able to capitalize well. So, from a corporate perspective, I always have this very Darwinian view on companies that's, you evolve or you recede. And in the case of Yahoo, it's still a healthy business. It's receiving, it's not really where the ball is. But I think from Verizon's perspective, I think it's a good business for what it is but I don't think of it as that's where the future comes out of. So, we'll see there. And then from a people perspective, those relationships, they never disappear. And the magic of Silicon Valley is this recombination of people that once worked together. I saw that when I was at LinkedIn and Reid would talk about the Paypal mafia and what his friends were doing. There's a large number of really successful entrepreneurs and executives out there that came from Yahoo. In particular, there's a great set of people over at LinkedIn that really came from that Yahoo bloodline. So, Jeff Weiner, when he joined to become the president of LinkedIn, Jeff is a very charismatic, very strong leader. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go over to LinkedIn and lots of ex-Yahoo people over there like Emily Choi and Ryan Roslansky and other friends of mine.
Brent:
So, in your opinion, is there anything, final question on Yahoo but, in your opinion is there anything Marissa Mayer or any of the other leadership at Yahoo could have done differently to ensure that Yahoo could have remained an independent company?
Joff:
There's always the second guessing that goes on. People will generally, that I talk to, will either come from the view point of hey, it was a melting ice berg and there's nothing that Marissa could have done and others will come out of a point of view of like, ya know, there was three billion that was spent on acquisitions that didn't flourish and there wasn't clarity around what the vision is. So, I don't really take sides. I will say that one of the things that I experienced at the end of my tenure there, and I think still plagues the company today is that it's so important culturally to be very, very crisp around what's your vision, mission and strategy. And, without those as your north stars, when it comes time to navigate through some pretty hairy waters, especially on these big macro trends that hit us, you become rudderless in some way. And, I feel like Yahoo, really from probably 2006 or seven forward hasn't been around as crisp around exactly what that vision statement should be. It really still was trying to be patchwork on the vision statement that existed when the company first started as the first dominant Internet company. That was something that I didn't realize just how important that was until I joined LinkedIn and Jeff Weiner as CEO, that's just so important to him to get right. So, the vision, and the mission, and the strategies of that company were always, always clear to the employees of the company as I saw it grow from hundreds of people to 10,000 people and to the investors of the company and to people that were writing about the company.
Brent:
So, you mentioned LinkedIn a couple of times. You moved there in 2009 and from what I've read, your commute was 219 miles each way and you made the decision to be apart from your family during the week and kind of tell us a little bit about how you made that decision along with your wife and how it impacted the family and also, kind of tell us that story about you ended up carrying a pebble in your pocket everyday.
Joff:
Yeah, that was a pretty crazy time. I left Yahoo in 2009 and my wife and I decided we wanted to build a lifestyle business, that we wanted to start our own company. We didn't want to take any venture capital. We wanted to hire and fire the people and set the strategy and all the rest. So, we started a company, a personalized children's book company called Flattenme and immediately it started to do really well. It was on Oprah and Good Morning America, The Today Show, The View, and we grew to profitability very fast. So, we had started this company at a point which was really poor from an economic viewpoint. There was the recession that started to set in really well in 2009. And, you know, even lingering in 2010. And, our core customer, which was mothers in middle America, they were spending less and less on discretionary goods so we started to feel a little bit of that pinch. And, what I decided to do was I was gonna go do some consulting for a company in our off season. And I wrote Jeff who I knew from LinkedIn, the CEO, I'm sorry, I knew from Yahoo. He was then the CEO of LinkedIn and I said, hey, I'm gonna do some consulting. He said, oh, you should come work for one of the founders on this project and I started working at LinkedIn and pretty quickly fell in love with it and wound up joining the company. But what that meant was that I had moved up to Tahoe and LinkedIn is sitting in Silicon Valley, in Mountain View, so I had this 219 mile commute, which was pretty crazy. So, I'd get up Monday morning and drive in and I'd stay down here for four nights and then I would drive back up to Tahoe. And, one of the things that I did during that time was I carried this rock in my pocket because when my wife and I decided I would go ahead and take this job at LinkedIn, we're having dinner and at a dinner table there was a bunch of, like, it was really fancy and they have these little black pebbles that were on the napkins and I took one of these pebbles. And I said, okay, I'm gonna keep this with me whenever I'm away from you. And, sure enough, for five years I carried this rock around in my pocket to remind me of my wife and family when I was away.
Brent:
That's great. You also, while you were at LinkedIn, you essentially oversaw their transition from a desktop first to a mobile first company. Talk a little bit about that and how much of the company's traffic and revenue were generated by mobile when you got there and how much when you left and just kind of talk about that transition.
Joff:
So, to be able to be part of a company that's a test desktop first company and then to transform it into a mobile first company was amazing.
Yeah, that was super fun. So, when I started leading up the mobile product team, about eight percent of our members were coming on a weekly basis on a mobile device. Then fast forward many, many years later, now today it's surpassing 55% of LinkedIn members are coming on a mobile device. So, to be able to be part of a company that's a test desktop first company and then to transform it into a mobile first company was amazing. During that process, I also was able to work really closely with the monetization team at LinkedIn which was amazing. And, we took a business that had zero revenue and we came up with the business models and the services to start to monetize on mobile. Last year, we did about 300 plus million in sponsored updates revenues. So, the sponsored updates was the fastest growing advertising in the history of the company. So, it was great to be able to effectively monetize on mobile when in the beginning there was this question mark of like, just how well will it work. We have a fun story. When we launched that product, one of the product managers who was core to leading that initiative took a dollar bill and framed it and we all signed around it. So, you know that first dollar that you earn that you see at bars that you go to and they have it hanging up behind the register and, this is the first dollar we ever made. So, we have that framed, that first dollar framed, somewhere over at LinkedIn with all our signatures on it who worked on that project.
Brent:
Nice. So, obviously the transition ultimately ended up going very well. What were some of the big challenges that you faced while you were in the midst of that transition?
Joff:
Yeah, it's, that's not straight forward right? Like, a company exists for seven or eight years at that point as a desktop company and then you want to start transitioning it over to a mobile company. And, at first I would say there was some, in the early days we only had a team of 12, so in general, I would say people thought of mobile as maybe more of a novelty, a venture bet. They had been hearing mobile's gonna be big for a decade prior to that. So, there probably wasn't a lot of attention paid to it. But as we started to make a lot of in roads into mobile, it became more clear that we needed to go through the transition. And that's when, probably around 2013, and then really headstrong in 2014, we were making this deliberate effort to mobilize the company. We started a project called, literally, mobilize, and we said every, we have to change the people, the product, and the process of our company and it's gonna impact everything mobile. It's no longer just something that's done by a centralized team. All of us are gonna do it. So, that was probably the biggest and the hardest change that took place was blowing up this centralized mobile team that we had built. So myself, along with my wonderful engineering counterpart, the VP of Engineering over there Karen Persad, we led this charge to take what was about a hundred person mobile team and say look, we're gonna disperse us all into the organization. We're gonna now take on a different role inside of the company and we're gonna start leading the flagship product, which is the core product on both desktop and mobile. So, that transition of changing the centralized mobile team to dispersing it into the company where 70% of those people had new jobs and those were some of the most talented people in the organization. That was tricky and super happy to say it worked out like, really well. Like, much better than I thought it was gonna work out. I thought there would have been a lot more riff and collateral damage that came of it. But, we worked our way through that and I was really excited about it.
Brent:
So, a lot of businesses kind of experience digital improvement and some efficiencies that can come with digital but few really experience, what I'd call, a true digital transformation like LinkedIn did. Why do you think businesses struggle with that so much?
I think some companies probably waited too long on the mobile front because they were waiting for data to emerge instead of jumping out in front of it and embracing it.
Joff:
It's a good question. You know, there not always easy decisions to make. I think a lot of organizations tend to look really carefully at the data and some of the biggest trends that are emerging are trends where there's no historical evidence as to will it work or not work. And you have to make this leap of faith. I remember reading an article about the old CEO at Intel and he was talking about this decision, critical decision that he had to make. Steve Jobs came to him and said, we want you to make a new chip for our phone and you're gonna be the main provider of that chip. And the point, he had, the CEO of Intel had his team run all the numbers and do all the work. And they used data to make that decision and the historical data said this isn't gonna be a good investment. Yet, the intuition of the CEO was, geez, I should really do this. And they turned down Steve Jobs at making that chip and that's the historic move, right? Like, you can now look at Intel and Intel executives will tell you that not being a part of that major wave was problematic. So, I think in some ways, I think having people make decisions with pure data versus using a leap of faith framework on some of these crucial moments is in important. I think some companies probably waited too long on the mobile front because they were waiting for data to emerge instead of jumping out in front of it and embracing it. That would be one. I'm sure there's many, many more reasons.
Brent:
Sure. So, what advice, obviously you've been involved in a wide variety of businesses and a variety or roles, what advice would you give to a business, whether it's a start up, a large business, a small business, but any business who sets out to be the clear digital leader in their industry, what advice would you give them?
Joff:
Well, recently I've been doing a lot of reading and listening to different people speak about what are the defensible moves of any given business. And that's really top of line for me now. I think people tend to not fully think through the strategy of the business, of what will make that business truly defensible. In the case of LinkedIn, the thing that's truly defensible is that it has a network effect and that network effect is based upon the professional social graph that has been built. It took a decade to build that. There's over 450 million users. So I think certainly, as I'm out there advising different companies, especially start ups, around their digital business, it's a lot about thinking through, well, what would make it so that someone can't come and copy that tomorrow. What's gonna give you durability? And that would be something that I would certainly pay a lot of attention to.
Brent:
And final question, your LinkedIn profile right now says that you're currently working on a venture bet with LinkedIn's co-founder and executive chairman. Are there any details you can share about what you're currently working on?
Joff:
No, I really need to update that. Reid and I were working on it, a venture bet, inside of the company and obviously the company just got acquired by Microsoft so there was a, I mean that's really the focus of what the team there is working on now. So, in May after seven years of working at LinkedIn I left to start thinking about different start up ideas that I had in getting back to, really my entrepreneurial roots. So, I wound up leaving prior to Microsoft acquiring the company but that's where my focus now is to spend a little bit of time decompressing after seven years and thinking again about the future.
Brent:
So, do you have an idea as you look toward something more entrepreneurial. Do you have an idea of a direction you want to go with that or what's your thought on that?
Joff:
I do. I have a couple ideas. I won't share them but I will share something with you because I know that people that are listening to your podcast will have these moments in their career when they're going through a transition, thinking about their next play. And, one of the things that was really odd for me was, when I left LinkedIn, I had been really part of this fast moving organization and I was at the center of a lot of this energy and I'd been running a really big team and then all of a sudden it was like quiet. And I was like, oh wow, this is very, very different. So I wanted to have something to focus on so I devised what I call the hundred, hundred, hundred reboot plan. And, what I was trying to do was backpack a hundred miles, talk to a hundred people that I thought were really, really interesting, and then take a hundred days to really think through what it is that I want to do next. So, I've been working against that plan. I've already backpacked 170 miles through all different parts of California and some of the Dolomite mountains in Italy and I've met with 62 people and It's been really fun. It's been really refreshing.
Brent:
That's great and good luck on the rest of the reboot. We'll look forward to seeing what you come out with on the other side and I certainly appreciate your time being with us today. And, if our listeners want more information about you, where can they find it?
Joff:
LinkedIn.com, of course.
Brent:
Perfect. Joff Redfern, thank you for joining us on the Digital Strategy Call.
Joff:
Brent, thanks for having me.
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