LinkedIn

LinkedIn in LEGO: Q&A

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Ever since I began showing the LinkedIn in LEGO sculpture, I’ve been shocked with how many questions people have about it.  There is definitely something about seeing a LEGO sculpture of this size in person that makes people want to know more.

So while this blog post is the official description of how and why I built the LinkedIn in LEGO sculpture, I thought a 20 questions format would be fun and useful.

Let’s Play Twenty Questions

  1. What gave you the idea to build the LinkedIn in LEGO sculpture?
    I was driving to work in May, and as usual I drove by the Google building that houses the Android team.  They have a tradition of putting a sculpture of each of their releases out based on the codename (“honeycomb”, “ice cream”, etc).  I love these sculptures, but they always bothered me because Google is techie, and there is nothing techie about playground sculptures.I immediately thought how much cooler they would be if they were made of LEGO bricks, and thought that LinkedIn actually had nothing “cool” in its lobby.  So the idea was hatched to build a LinkedIn LEGO sculpture for our lobby on the next InDay.

  2. How big is the sculpture in real life?
    It’s four feet tall, four feet wide, and one foot deep (approximately). 4′ x 4′ x 1′.

  3. Why did you pick that size?
    I tried to pick a size that was big enough to be visually impressive, and a good size for people to stand next to for photographs.  There was also some cost sensitivity, as the number of bricks required effectively goes up as a cubic function.

  4. How big is a LEGO brick anyway?
    There is suprising complexity to this question, but the most interesting aspect of designing with LEGO bricks instead of pixels is that they are not perfectly cubic. A LEGO “stud” is 8.0mm wide and 8.0mm deep, but is 9.6mm tall, giving you an effective 6/5 ratio to work with in your model design.

  5. How many LEGO bricks are in it?
    Unfortunately, I don’t have an exact figure.  I ordered 8,000 bricks from LEGO.com, but also purchased a large number from local LEGO stores.  It’s definitely over 10,000 bricks, but likely less than 12,000.

  6. Are they real LEGO bricks?
    I don’t know why everyone asks that question, but yes, these are regular lego bricks, mostly 2×8.  They are not Duplo bricks or any other no-name brand.

  7. How much does it weigh?
    I don’t have the exact weight, but the shipping weight of the LEGO bricks alone was over 170 pounds, and I purchased at least another 50 pounds of bricks from the LEGO stores.  Including the heavy stand, the sculpture is well over 200 pounds.

  8. Where did you buy them?
    I purchased the bulk of the bricks directly from LEGO.  We had to call and fax the order in because the online form won’t let you order more than 999 of any one brick.  Due to changes in the design made during construction, I ended up buying another several thousand bricks from the LEGO stores in Valley Fair and Hillsborough.

  9. How much did it cost to make?
    Total cost was fairly close to $5,000.  That includes the cost of the bricks, the supplies to build the stand, and other related expenses.

  10. How did you build the stand for it?
    Home Depot to the rescue.  The base is custom cut 3/4 inch plywood, framed by 2×4 lumber, with 6 200-lb furniture moving locking wheels underneath.  Once assembled, I spray painted matte black and screwed the 32×32 blue lego base tiles in a grid on to it.

  11. How did you come up with the design for the [in]?
    This was a bit tricky given the non-square dimensions of the bricks.  Based on 8.0mm width, I quickly determined the logo would be 160 studs wide.  Using the 5/6 ratio, this meant 133 bricks tall.  I took the official LinkedIn logo and reduced it down to a 160×160 bitmap.  I then resided to 160×133, and manually fixed symmetry errors that were introduced by applying the ratio.

  12. How did you build the four rounded corners?
    This was one of the more complicated parts of the construction, as the corners actually support most of the weight of the side walls.  As a result, they are built more broadly internally to ensure significant cross-dimensional support.  The top corners were also particularly fragile at first because of the lack of internal support.  For both the top & the bottom, I had to rebuild them three times to find the strongest pattern of bricks.

  13. Is the white [in] actually inset by one brick?
    Yes.  One of the trickiest aspects of the [in] was insetting it by one brick for effect, and then ensure that there was ample strength between the blue and white bricks.  I ended up building a hidden “3rd layer” behind the seam where the white & blue bricks meet to join the two layers every 10 rows.  I also used 2×3 bricks in several locations to lock in support for the hidden third row.

  14. How did you make the curves smooth?
    The rendering of the curves follows the 160×133 logo exactly.  It’s not perfectly smooth, but I think that’s part of the charm of a LEGO sculpture.  In this industry, we all love pixels at some level.

  15. What’s holding it up?
    The internal substructure is one of the things I failed to model in advance, and had to improvise on during construction.  I ended up making the internal support structure from LEGO bricks as well, which added over 2,000 bricks to the design.  Approximately every 32 studs, there is a “T-shaped” 8 stud clumn that is perpendicular to the walls of the sculpture.  The bricks for the walls of the sculpture are interleaved with these columns every other row, to provide corner-like strength to the entire span.  Every 40 rows, a horizontal beam four bricks tall is added between the columns, to ensure that the large, square walls don’t bend in on each other.  Lastly, there are “joints” internally that bind together the white and blue sections of the design every ten rows.  (see my original blog post for pictures).

  16. What was the hardest part about the design?
    There were a number of difficult challenges, but the most difficult aspect of the design was balancing unexpected stability and design issues with the inventory of bricks that I had available.  Then again, constraints are part of what makes any problem fun to solve.

  17. How long did it take to build it?
    It took about 90 minutes to build ten rows, so the total sculpture took just about 20 hours of effort, typically 1-2 hours per weekend and an evening here and there.  Since I spent about 3-4 hours modelling the design ahead of time in Photoshop and Excel (I needed to learn some niche spreadsheet skills and this Excel article really did the trick), and another 10-12 hours making trips to local LEGO stores, the grand total time is probably 40 hours.

  18. When did you get it done?
    The modelling was all done in my favorite work time, between 11pm & 2am.  I built the base on Father’s Day.  Most assembly was done at LinkedIn on weekends and the odd evening.

  19. How did you learn to do this?
    There was a surprising amount of useful information on blogs from consultants who build LEGO sculptures for a living.  LEGO, as you might guess, is pretty well covered on the web.  I also asked a question on Quora which provided a few useful tips.

  20. Where can I see it?
    It’s not on public display yet, but later this fall it will debut in the new lobby of 2029 Stierlin Court, LinkedIn’s main building.

If you have additional questions, feel free to post in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.  Be forewarned – I have no qualms about deleting inappropriate comments / questions.

Building LinkedIn in LEGO

/ Adam Nash / 6 Comments

I’m pleased to announce that a fairly large side project that I’ve been working on for the past two months is now complete.  The “LinkedIn in LEGO” sculpture is now ready for display in the LinkedIn corporate lobby.  Made up of over 10,000 LEGO bricks, the sculpture stands over four feet tall, and is fairly close to a pixel perfect rendition of the official LinkedIn logo.

Since building a LEGO sculpture of this size was a fairly large undertaking, I thought I’d capture the details of the project on this blog.

Concept: LinkedIn in LEGO

The idea for the project, to be honest, likely has more to do with a lifelong affection for LEGO bricks.  But this particular idea came to me in May, as I was driving to work.  Every day, I tend to pass the Google building that houses the Android team.  They have a fun tradition, which is to build a sculpture of the code name of each release of Android out in front of their building to celebrate shipping.  (Examples: Gingerbread, Honeycomb, etc).  While I love the public celebration of big releases, I thought how out of place the “kiddie” sculptures looked.  After all, Google is a tech company, the statues should be made of something geeky like LEGO bricks.

At the same time, I thought about how LinkedIn didn’t have any sort of large sign or sculpture in its entrance.  The idea for doing the LinkedIn logo in LEGO bricks was born.  I thought I’d be able to get it done in a single InDay – the one day per month LinkedIn has set aside for innovative projects & efforts.  That proved to be a wildly optimistic assessment of the level of effort involved.

Modeling the Sculpture

After some research online, I discovered the basic measurements of LEGO bricks.  They turn out to not be the same in all dimensions: LEGO bricks are 8.0 mm wide “per stud” and 8.0 mm deep, but are actually 9.6 mm tall.  As a result, to build a square you need to model in a 5/6 ratio of height in rows to studs in width.

I decided on a 4′ x 4′ x 1′ rough size, based on evaluating the stable size of our lobby desk, and estimating a good size for people to take a photo next to.  After all, this was intended to be a fun showpiece for guests of LinkedIn.

Given the above, the rough sizing came to:

  • 160 studs wide (~4 feet)
  • 40 studs deep (~1 foot)
  • 133 rows high (~4 feet)

I wasted a couple of hours trying to use the LEGO provided modeling software which they offer on their website.  Let’s just say, not only was the user interface beyond frustrating, but it really wasn’t designed for a project of this scale.  I had to abandon it and find a different way to model the structure.

Adam Nash, the Human 3D Printer

Initially, I created the base design for the “in” logo by taking the standard logo, and rendering it to a 160×133 bitmap in Photoshop.  I then hand-corrected the image to adjust for symmetry errors introduced by the 5/6 ratio in the resizing.  I then had a clean plan for 133 rows in two colors, blue & white.

To create the plan for the actual model, I decided to emulate a 3D printer, laying down each of the 133 layers individually, in order, from bottom to top.  Initially, I did this by hand on paper to handle the tricky first 8 rows which form the bottom “curve” of the logo.  I then moved all the numbers to my favorite modeling tool, Microsoft Excel, where I completed the rest of my modeling.

Each layer is simply a rectangle, two studs thick.  To model the curve, I had to think carefully about how to support the larger rectangle above it, using larger bricks to provide full support.

Once I completed the first 10 rows, I realized that I had made my first error: ignoring interlocking.  I quickly revised my plans to ensure that I alternated the brick pattern at the corners to ensure that the bricks alternated to provide strength and avoid seams.  This actually proved relatively easy (for example, for the regular blue rings, an odd row would be two rows of 160 bridged by two rows of 36, the next ring would be two rows of 156 bridged by two rows of 40.

As a human 3D printer, I was able to model each layer as a row in the spreadsheet.  For each layer, I would model all four sides.  Three of the sides were trivial, since they are all blue.  It was a simple breakdown of the number of bricks into some “standard” pieces: 2×2, 2×3, 2×4, 2×6 and 2×8. Each brick type got it’s own column.

For the face that contained the “in”, the modeling was more in depth.  Like the GIF format, I just modeled “runs” of each color broken down in the standard bricks.  Each “run” was broken into columns for the brick type (example: 22 blue would become two 2×8 bricks and 1 2×6). I then introduced the “jitter” of 2 studs on each side from the alternating corners.

In the end, I had a giant spreadsheet where totaling every column gave me an inventory of bricks that I would need to order.  I then tallied up each brick and rounded up generously to cover the typical 10-15% materials overage that I’ve experience on home improvement projects.  The adjusted total came to almost exactly 8,000 bricks.

Ordering the Bricks

It turns out ordering 8,000 bricks (including over 5,500 2×8 blue bricks) is not a trivial exercise.  LEGO.com blocks you at 999 bricks per type, and chokes over a certain dollar amount.  Instead, after calling LEGO, it turns out that you can place an order via fax, which is what we did.  In case you are wondering, the Danish don’t seem to have a concept of a “volume discount” or “corporate discount”.  Either that, or they knew I’d pay for the bricks.

Unfortunately, fulfillment was ridiculously slow, with no way to accelerate.  They promised 10-15 days, but the reality was some bricks arrived in 2 weeks, some didn’t arrive for 6 weeks.  It was incredibly frustrating, and they didn’t seem to be set up to provide UPS tracking numbers, although we did get a couple through persistent calling.

Building the Base

On June 19th, I kicked off the project with a trip to Home Depot.  I knew that the final sculpture would be heavy, and that it would have to be movable.  So I got a custom cut piece of 3/4 plywood and 2×4 lumber to frame it.  I also got heavy-weight furniture dolly wheels (six).  Framing was fairly simple, and then I spray painted it matte black so it would be relatively invisible.

Once the base was dry, I carefully measured out ten 32×32 blue LEGO plates, and glued them down to the base.  Once the glue was dry, I screwed them down to the base to ensure no issues.  I used the first few rows of bricks to ensure that I had the plates properly spaced, since there is an interesting but necessary 0.2 mm spacing that you have to account for with LEGO bricks.

Assembly

Once LEGO shipped the first few boxes of bricks, I tried to get started with what I had.  I initially built the structure layer-by-layer, but quickly realized it was much quicker to build a small number of rows at the same time.  It made the “staggering” of the bricks much easier.

Unfortunately, despite all of my modeling, I quickly realized that I had to make some significant modifications.  As result, every layer became a realtime adjustment of the model to accomodate what became three crucial issues that I hadn’t accounted for.  They all revolved around the stability & structure of the sculpture as it grew upward.

Design Modifications: Interior Support

I knew that I had cut corners by making the sculpture only 2 studs thick.  Most sources I had found online recommended making the walls 4 studs thick, and even potentially building an interior structure out of wood or PVC pipe.  Unfortunately, I was trying to keep the budget for the sculpture down, and decided to risk a 2 stud approach.  Once I had the bricks, I quickly realized I needed to course correct.

My first modification was to add “columns”.  Every 32 studs or so, I added an 8-stud interior column to form a regular “T shape” with the wall.  The intention was for this to provide some direct support to the walls from falling inward.  While this modification was successful, 8 columns * 133 rows = 1064 additional bricks, and it introduced 8 new junction points that had to be interleaved between odd & even rows for strength.  This modification alone made my original LEGO order insufficient in terms of both size and quantity of bricks.

My second modification were “beams”.  The columns were workable until about 30 rows high, when I noticed that the walls were starting to bend inward a bit.  Knowing that I had over 100 rows left, I had to find a more robust way to square the walls on an ongoing basis.  As a result, I decided to build horizontal beams out of 2×8 LEGO bricks, four bricks deep.  These beams were introduced between the columns, and really reinforced the strength of the structure when pushed from the outside.  I decided to add beams across the columns every 40 layers for strength.

The third modification were “joints” between the blue and white bricks.  When I had modeled the structure, I didn’t consider the obvious fact that because the blue & white were by definition separate bricks, there would be a huge vertical seam, measuring 60+ rows in some cases, where the two colors met.  This was a major weakness, and would lead the letters to buckle inward.  As a result, I designed a “joint” that involved using a hidden “3rd stud” of depth to connect the blue & white bricks with 1×10 bricks, and locking them above & below with 2×3 blue bricks.  By placing these joints every 10 rows, in every location where white met blue, I was able to provide enormous strength to the integrity of the letters.  (I had several office mates “test” this strength, much to my chagrine.)

Inventory Issues: LEGO Stores

All of these modifications, however, led me to need a significant number of new bricks, and in some cases, different sizes than I had ordered.  Given the slow shipping from LEGO, I was worried about ever finishing when I discovered that two large LEGO stores (Valley Fair & Hillsborough) were near by.

There I discovered a few unfortunate facts:

  • They don’t stock most bricks by color and size
  • They don’t have any way to predict which bricks they get week to week (they get supplied on Mondays)
  • They only sell bricks by the cup ($15) or the box ($70)

Needless to say, I made a lot of trips to the stores, and modified my design to accommodate whatever sizes I could get.   Despite the churn, the truth is modifying the design to these new constraints was actually part of the fun.  In the process, I was fortunate enough to find appropriate tiles to smooth out some of the exposed studs, and I was able to figure out a good solution for the “roof” of the sculpture.

Company Event: Time Capsule

As the sculpture came together, I was a bit surprised at how many of my co-workers mentioned to me that it would make a great time capsule.  Because it’s hollow, people seemed to naturally want to put messages in it before it was sealed.

For fun, on August 26th we invited everyone in the company to fill in a card with their prediction for LinkedIn in 2021.  Over 400 cards were filled out and placed in the sculpture.

Final Touches: Dedication & Protection

Once the sculpture was completed, it felt natural to want to dedicate the sculpture in some way.  After circulating some ideas, we had a plaque made that made the sculpture a gift from the employees of 2011, which fit the original concept and theme of the project.  We also decided that it was just too tempting for people to lean on, or worse, climb on the sculpture.  Since that wouldn’t last long, we ordered a large plexiglass box for the sculpture, to keep it protected in the lobby.

Final Thoughts

The final sculpture measures pretty true to design: 4′ x 4′ x 1′.  More impressively, it does successfully move, even though it weighs well over 200 pounds.

I’d say I spent about 20 hours in assembly time (nights / weekends), and about the same in overhead (modeling / travel / overhead).  I’m including in the modeling time the periodic “refactoring” where I would tear down pieces and reassemble as I figured out better solutions for certain sections.

There’s something deceptive about looking at photos of it.  I think there is, deep within most techies, a fascination with objects that are made of a very large number of small objects.  Call it pixel-lust.  But there is clearly something really fascinating about seeing a sculpture like this in real life.  People run their fingers over it, watch the light play off the seams.

Over all, it came out better than expected for a first attempt, especially given that I hadn’t attempted anything like this before.  Of course, like any engineer, I’m convinced that now that I have the system, I could do a much better job the second time…

Step by Step Photos

These are some photos that were taken during construction.  They include:

  • Detailed photos of the base stand itself, and the attachment of the lego baseplates
  • Step-by-step photos of the construction, taken approximately every 10 rows
  • Interior shots of the sub-structure, including the columns, beams, and joints to attach the blue/white bricks internally
  • Some fun shots of people posing with the statue, or putting their “time capsule” predictions inside
  • The final sealed version from a few angles



Designers: Getting the Most Out of Your Product Manager

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

I gave a lighthearted talk yesterday at the LinkedIn User Experience team’s all hands meeting. I called it “Getting the Most Out of Your Product Manager”, and it was intended to talk from the perspective of someone who has lived in both of the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) & PM (Product Management) worlds.  The goal of the deck was simple – by explaining to designers and user experience professionals what makes a great product manager and how they are held accountable, it more obvious why occassionally PMs & Designers can clash.

There are some inside jokes so it might not be as funny to everyone, but it was popular enough that I thought I’d share it here.

As a side note, it was truly amazing to see such a large and amazingly talented group of designers and web developers arranged together.  Incredible validation of a simple truth – that if you want great user experience, you need to foster a culture and process that not only attracts the best talent, but also lets them do their best work.

It’s hard to believe that it was only in 2007 that we started down the path of having a formal UED team at LinkedIn.  When you see products like the recent LinkedIn mobile products, it’s worth remembering that great designs come from great teams.

 

LinkedIn as a Platform

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

From the first conversations that I had with Reid Hoffman about LinkedIn, what was striking was the amazing clarity about how value is created by social web properties.  Those conversations turned into one of my favorite talks, where I walk through the basic understanding of LinkedIn as a Platform business for students and new hires.

Since it’s a such a popular framework, I thought I’d capture an outline of it here so that others can benefit from it.  There is nothing here that won’t be familiar to industry insiders and folks who focus on social software.  However, I’ve found that most people, especially technologists who have not had first hand experience with social platforms, seem to find this useful & interesting.

LinkedIn as a Platform

I started my career as a software engineer, and as a result, I’ve always had a very technical view of what defines a platform.  Across multiple decades, platforms tended to be defined by technical constructs: entities and services that are exposed to software developers.

What’s most interesting about the social web is that, for the first time, technology is necessary but insufficient to deliver a successful platform.  So while LinkedIn is a technology company and great technology is a prerequisite for a great platform, it’s important to understand that in this generation great technology alone won’t ensure success.

Why the Social Web is Different

The reason why technology alone isn’t sufficient is due to the simple fact that on the social web, the true value of the platform extends from the users themselves.

First and foremost, users interact with each other.  At LinkedIn, the very first type of interaction was the simple act of connecting.  If you look at Web 1.0 companies, they spend an inordinate amount of money on user acquisition.  On social properties, user acquisition is effectively free because users generate activity, and that activity brings in other users.  This activity can be an invitation, a message, a comment, a like – any way that one person can reach out and contact another user.  More importantly, as a metrics-oriented product manager I can tell you, the likelihood that a person will respond to another person is easily an order of magnitude (10x+) higher than the response rates of a person to a company.  (Just think about your inbox and you’ll see it’s obviously true.)

What’s interesting about all of this user activity is that, in fact, activity itself is a form of content.  When someone responds in a group, comments on a status update, votes on a poll, or answers a question, they don’t just interact with other users – they also create content.  That content, as it turns out, becomes a catalyst for other people to engage and interact.

In fact, one of the primary aspects of a social platform is that users generate content.  Once again, looking back at the Web 1.0 generation of websites, content creation was one of the most challenging things to economically scale.  On social websites, users generate the bulk of the content.  What’s more, that content itself drives additional users to the site.  For example, the very first type of content that users created at LinkedIn was their professional profile.  Users discover this content via search engines, applications, and social distribution, and they join LinkedIn to engage with that content.

When developers want to connect with the LinkedIn platform, whether they are giant companies like Microsoft and SAP or tiny startups, the technology is just the means.  What they really want to connect to is this incredible engine of professionals, content, and activity.  It’s this vibrant, circulating, and growing engine of content that developers want to connect to.  This entire engine is really the LinkedIn platform.

Businesses Built Over the Platform

LinkedIn has had an open developer platform since late 2009, but it was in very early days that the company realized that it was fundamentally a platform business.

Despite it’s popular reputation as a site that has always made money, for the first few years LinkedIn did not focus on monetization at all.  There was always a high degree of confidence that if you could aggregate the world’s professionals and understand their reputations and relationships, it would be a new and incredibly valuable ecosystem.  However, around 2005 and into 2006, LinkedIn began experimenting with a few different theories on what the best way to build a sustainable business over this platform.

One theory was that, when you pull together a huge number of professionals, there would be an opportunity for hiring managers and companies to find great talent.  This was the precursor to the “Hiring Solutions” family of products.

Another theory was that, when you pull together a huge number of professionals, there would be an opportunity for companies to reach professionals with their products and services.  This was the precursor to the “Marketing Solutions” family of products.

Yet another theory was that there would be a small percentage of power users who would be willing to pay money for additional search and communications capabilities.  This was the precursor to the “Subscriptions” family of products.

Now, all of this pre-dates my joining the company, but what is truly amazing about this story is that, very quickly, all of these businesses worked.  And by worked, I mean they started immediately generating interesting and growing revenue.  This is also why LinkedIn slammed to positive cash flow so early in its history, and why the first party I got to attend when I joined the company was the “In the Black” party where the company celebrated that milestone.  (It was a good party.)

I can’t tell you how unique it is to have a technology startup that finds not one, but three potentially huge revenue streams early in its history.  In fact, most venture capitalists tend to prefer that companies find a single business model to execute against.

But the truth is, this was the catalyst for realizing an important fundamental truth: the LinkedIn platform is an incredibly powerful and valuable ecosystem, and that multiple great businesses can (and will continue) be built over it.

Where LinkedIn Spends Most of Its Time

One of the great things about LinkedIn as a company is that there is incredible alignment across the company about how our ecosystem creates value.  The value comes from the vibrancy of the professional network itself.

This is why, across the company, you’ll see that the vast majority of energy is spent on figuring out how to leverage this platform of professional identity and insights to make LinkedIn more useful, more often to professionals globally.  It turns out that the more professionals, the more activity, the more content created, the more value is created for all of LinkedIn’s businesses.

This is why LinkedIn puts their members first.  Our job is to connect the world’s professionals, and make them more productive and successful.  The rest follows.

Extending LinkedIn Across the Web

As LinkedIn extends itself as a true professional operating system for the web, the incredible volume and velocity of professional identity and insights will provide value to a whole new generate of web, desktop, mobile and enterprise applications.

RIP Resume. Apply with LinkedIn is now Live.

/ Adam Nash

Just a quick blog post tonight, after a full day of meetings explaining the new Apply with LinkedIn plug-in that we launched today.

Jon Seitel put up a great blog post on LinkedIn about the feature. I’m not going to try to duplicate here, but for those of you curious about what we launched today, here’s the intro:

Our goal with Apply with LinkedIn is to help every professional put their best foot forward, anywhere across the web, when they take that leap to apply for a new position, a dream job.

We are going to make it easy for you to submit your profile for any job application on the web with one simple click.  Some of the first companies to debut “Apply with LinkedIn” button on their company websites (besides our own) include Netflix, TripIt, Photobucket and over a thousand other companies. In addition, we’re also working closely with the top Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to help them and their customers match the best candidates for the right jobs.

Instead, I just want to use this space on my personal blog to say thank you to the full team at LinkedIn for taking this concept from vision to reality. With all great products simplicity can be the most difficult goal to achieve. Apply with LinkedIn will permanently change the way millions of professionals find their next great opportunity, and the way companies will find their best talent.

Apply with LinkedIn is just an early example of what LinkedIn can achieve as it builds out it’s vision of a professional operating system for the web.

So a special thank you to the whole team in Mountain View.

Now, Next Play.

‘Twas The Night Before Hackday

/ Adam Nash

A quick parody of a classic to celebrate the LinkedIn Hackday tomorrow (July 15th).  Apologies in advance for the inside jokes / names.  It may not make complete sense to those of you who are not LinkedIn employees.

Twas the night before Hackday, when all through LinkedIn
Not a person was stirring, not even Stegman.
The fridges were stocked with cans of Redbull
The cups were all stacked, the bins were all full.

The hackers were nestled with text editors,
The build was still stable, with normal errors.
iPhones were docked, and Droids were all sleeping,
And MacBooks were purring with power lights breathing.

All of a sudden the InGraphs start flashing,
The NOC is alerted; what is now crashing?
Henke & Kevin were quickly online,
What could be causing this kind of flatline?

Before the team could dive into root cause,
The problems had ended and everyone paused.
Elliot checked, and the metrics were fine
2011 would be over the line.

Suddenly a voice boomed from across the LinkedGym
There was no doubt: the Wizard of In!
He comes every month, for the same simple reason:
Hackday is coming, and it’s coding season

“Forget all your meetings, tell Outlook to shove it.
Hackday’s for coding, just try it, you’ll love it.
Inspire your colleagues, show what you wrote,
Win their applause, and count Twitter votes!”

The Wizard began to run even faster,
and shouting the names of past Hackday Masters,
“Go Crosa, go Ragade, go Efrat & Heuser. Go Gillick, go Jiong, go Blackburn & Brikman.
Go John, go Matthew, go Shoup & Grishaver. Go Peter, Go Sam, Go Shannon & Vikram.”

As he ran by the kitchen, he stopped for a second:
“I need a Coke Freestyle, this thing is just heaven.”
Quick as he came, he ran out the door,
“Happy Hackday to all, you are all h@x0rs”

How to Make a Great T-Shirt: Metrics

/ Adam Nash / 6 Comments

This is the third post in my series on “How to Make a Great Tech T-Shirt“.

Define Success to Achieve Success

On the consumer web, product managers succeed and fail based on their ability to define, measure and understand their product metrics.  When new Product Managers start at LinkedIn, one of the first tasks that I give them is to thoroughly reassess the metrics in the area they are taking over, and prepare a new set of metrics that they will use to measure success with their area on an ongoing basis.

As a result, it’s not completely surprising that I believe that if you want to make great t-shirts for a technology organization, you have to first define a clean, objective measure of success.  You then have to experiment, measure, learn and iterate to produce truly great t-shirts.

Key Metrics: T-Shirt Success

The key to a good metric is simple.  Objectivity.  The problem with t-shirts is that *everyone* has an opinion about what they want in a t-shirt.  Unfortunately, almost no one has ever tested out their pet theories in an objective way.  Thus, T-Shirt choices get made based on the personal opinions of the people making them, rather than what will be most successful for the organization.

Over my years of making t-shirts at LinkedIn, I’ve narrowed my success metrics to a simple measure:

  • What percent of people who received a t-shirt wear it after a 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, and 12 month time periods

That’s a lot to absorb, but it’s really quite simple.  Let’s say you made 100 t-shirts in October 2009:

  • How many people wore your t-shirt to work in November 2009?
  • How many people wore your t-shirt to work in January/April/October 2010?

Clearly, if the more people wearing your shirt on an ongoing basis, the more successful your shirt was at achieving its objectives.

If You Make A T-Shirt and No One Wears It…

  • Q: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?  (A: yes)
  • Q: If you make a t-shirt and no one wears it, was it worthwhile to make a shirt? (A: no)

In my blog post, Why T-Shirts Matter, I outlined over half a dozen reasons why t-shirts are important to technology organizations.  None of those justifications come true, however, if no one wears the t-shirt.  That’s why success is defined by how often people wear the t-shirt, and for how long.

If you’ve made t-shirts before, then you probably recognize the pattern of failure.  In the failure case, everyone takes a t-shirt, but somehow, you never see people wear them around the office.  Sure, maybe a couple people wore them the day after you handed them out.  But a few weeks later, it’s like they never existed.  When you ask about them, people tell you “Oh, I wear it on the weekend” or “I use it for the gym”.  Listen, let’s be honest.  A lot more people in technology talk about going to the gym than actually doing it.  These are the white lies people tell you to avoid telling you the truth: “I took a t-shirt because, for some uncontrollable reason, I have to take any t-shirt that is offered.  But I’m never going to wear it.”

Experiment With Your Shirts

You should be making at least one new t-shirt per quarter for your technology organization, so you have time to learn and experiment.  As we go through the upcoming blog posts on t-shirt quality and design, you’ll see that there are a variety of choices.  There is no one universal answer, but if you are attentive to what t-shirts “work” in your organization, you’re more likely to make new t-shirts that work.

For example:

  • Should you make women’s sizes?  The answer is simple – if it increases the number of people who will wear the shirts to the office and for longer, then yes, you should.  (At LinkedIn, this is absolutely true.)
  • Are certain colors more successful than others?  Absolutely.  (At LinkedIn, the best colors are black, navy, charcoal grey, and heather grey).
  • Should you spend more on higher quality t-shirt manufacturers and materials?  Absolutely.  T-Shirts that go bad quickly or shrink end up never getting worn.  Better to spend $12 for shirts you’ll see for the next two years than $5 on shirts you won’t see again.

I think the more you think about the simplicity of this metric, the more you’ll see that it will help you quickly spot at your workplace what are the shirts people love, and thus which shirts were worth the time & money.

 

Why LinkedIn Hackdays Work

/ Adam Nash / 13 Comments

Two weeks ago, we celebrated yet another great Hackday judging event at LinkedIn.  For the April 15th Hackday, over 50 employees submitted a combined total of 29 projects for the contest.  We saw incredible product concepts, developer tool innovations, internal corporate applications, and even a few ideas so good they’ll likely ship as products in the coming weeks.  At this point, it feels like every Hackday is better than the one before it.

Most of the engineers who work at LinkedIn have also worked at other great technology companies, and in the past year there has been an incredible swell of feedback from new and old employees alike that LinkedIn Hackdays have become something truly special.  Creating the LinkedIn Hackday has been an iterative, experimental process, so I thought it might be useful to capture some of the details on how LinkedIn Hackdays work, and more importantly, why we run them the way we do.

Origins

It’s funny to think about it now, but the original LinkedIn Hackday had an unlikely catalyst.  On December 14th, 2007 approximately 100+ LinkedIn employees moved into a brand new space on the first floor of 2029 Stierlin Court.  It was the first time that LinkedIn had designed a workspace from the ground-up, and it included a large number of LCD TV’s on the wall.  The goal was to immerse the product and engineering teams in real-time feedback and data from the LinkedIn community, and each of the TV’s was driven by small Mac Mini.

The “Pure Energy” contest kicked off right before Christmas, with a goal of using some of the seasonal downtime to produce cool, internal applications that we could effectively “hang on the wall”.  The prize?  Brand new iPhones for the winning team.  The only rules?  The application had to reflect real usage of LinkedIn, it had to run continuously (so it could be left up 24×7), it had to be designed for display on a 720P monitor (1366×768), and it had to run in either Safari or as a Mac OS X screensaver.

Five projects were submitted, and several became staples of our decoration in 2029 for all of 2008.  (Coincidentally, December 2007 was also the first time we pull the live Twitter search for “LinkedIn” up on the wall for everyone in Product & Engineering to see at all times through the day).  The winner of the “Pure Energy” contest, NewIn, still lives on in an upgraded form, in both the LinkedIn reception lobby as well as on LinkedIn Labs.

Key Ingredients

We’ve learned a lot in the past four years about how to make Hackdays successful at LinkedIn, but at a high level, there are ten key ingredients that make LinkedIn Hackdays work.

  1. For Engineers, By Engineers.  This may be obvious, but Hackdays are highly optimized events around engineering culture.  There may be a lot of opinions about what would be considered “fun” or “useful”, but for Hackdays, in the end, is designed for engineers.  This effects everything from the timing, the prizes, the venue and the communication around it.

  2. Spirit of Exploration.  Hackdays have an opinionated culture, and one of those opinions is that with software it is infinitely better to learn by actually doing, rather than reading / talking.  It’s part of why people go into engineering in the first place.  This is one of the reasons that we celebrate hacks that are purely to learn a new language, environment, algorithm, or architecture.  This is not just a fun thing to do – it’s an incredibly effective way to expose talented engineers to new technology, and more importantly, set a tone that we should always be learning.

  3. Independence.  Hackdays are a day of true self-determination.  At LinkedIn, we believe that small, cross-functional teams build the best software.  Teams do a great job looking at product metrics, customer requests, and innovative ideas from the team, and then prioritizing what to work on.  Hackdays are a day to break free, and work on whatever you personally find interesting.  If you have a great idea, this is the day to help make it a reality.

  4. Company-wide Event. Hackdays may be optimized for engineers, but everyone is invited and included.  Some of the best Hackday projects come from an engineer, web developer and product manager working together.  We’ve had entries from almost every function, and from multiple offices.  Most importantly, hackday projects are shared with the entire company on the intranet, and Hackday Judging is an event that everyone is encouraged to attend.  Winners are announced to the whole company.  It’s incredibly important to cement hackdays as a part of company culture, rather than something that lives within the engineering function.

  5. Executive Attention.  Believe it or not, it wasn’t until 2010 that we stumbled upon an obvious truth.  Executive attention matters.  Actions speak louder than words, and when executives make a point to attend, reference, and discuss hackday projects, it makes a huge difference to the entire organization.  At every LinkedIn Hackday Judging event, you’ll now find at least three of LinkedIn’s senior executives on the panel.

  6. It’s a Contest, but Loosely Enforced.  LinkedIn Hackdays are thrown on Fridays, with the submission date for projects due at 9am on the following Monday.  Teams are limited to five people, and projects have to be presented live for Hackday Judging to be considered for prizes.  Having rules for hackdays is a delicate balance – if you are too weak on enforcement, people lose faith in “the system”, and you’ll get discontent from the people who follow them.  However, too tight on the rules, and you break the independent spirit of the event.

  7. Hackday Judging, or Hackday Idol?  Hackday Judging has morphed over the years into an “American Idol” like event.  The hackdays themselves are relatively independent and quiet.  It’s the judging that is the main event.  Teams are given two minutes to demo their hacks.  The panel of celebrity judges is given a minute to asks questions, and then it’s on to the next project.  We serve lots of food & drink, and try to make it a fun event.  (Typically, I fill the role of Ryan Seacrest.  Yes, I know that my mom would be proud.)  There is a lot of laughing, a lot of cheering, and we try to make a good time for everyone.  Most people who attend leave the event incredibly inspired by what their co-workers come up with.  More importantly, once people attend, they tend to come back again (or better yet, enter their own projects.)  We now have everyone in the company help judge by tweeting out their favorite projects with the project name and a #inday hashtag.

  8. Lots of Prizes. We give prizes to every team that present a project at Hackday, typically a reasonably sized Apple gift card.  Winning teams get larger dollar amounts.  We have 5-6 regular categories, so there are always multiple winners.  Some times, we give additional prizes for stand out projects, but that’s up to the judges.  The reason for gift cards is logistics – giving out iPhones, iPods, Flip cameras, etc sounds like a great idea, but too often you get winners who already have one, or who don’t want one.  (The Apple bias bugs some people, but the truth is we’ve experimented with a wide variety of prizes, and people on average seem to really prefer these.  We did notice that our college interns preferred Amazon gift certificates, however…)

  9. Path to Production.  Some hackday projects are so impressive, there is a natural desire to shout “SHIP IT!”  In reality, however, hackday projects can vary significantly in their technical and product appropriateness for a large scale production environment.  At LinkedIn, we’ve now found multiple ways for people to share their hacks.  Some projects live on hosted on internal machines, and are used by employees.  Some of our best internal tools have come from previous hackdays.  Other projects are built over the LinkedIn Platform, and can be launched to end users on LinkedIn Labs.  Some projects are actually extensions of our production codebase, and actually become live site features.  (Example: The 2010 Year In Review email began as a Hackday Winner, as did the inline YouTube expansion in the LinkedIn feed.)

  10. Learn & Iterate.    We are big believers in continuous improvement, and I don’t think there has been a single hackday where we didn’t add some improvements.  We constantly try out new things, and stick with the ones that work, and shed the ones that don’t.  The pace of innovation has dramatically quickened as hackdays became more frequent, and as the company has grown larger.

Common Issues & Questions

It would be impossible to capture all the common questions about hackdays here, but I thought it was worthwhile to capture a few persistent questions that we’ve debated in our process of creating LinkedIn Hackdays.

  • I have a great hackday idea – how do I find engineers to build it?
    This is a really well meaning question, typically from non-technical employees, who are excited about the idea of hackday, but lack the means to implement it themselves.   The most reliable way that people solve this problem is by talking about their idea broadly, and effectively evangelizing the idea of forming a hackday team around it.  In the past, we’ve tried throwing pre-hackday mixers, usually around a technical topic, to help people find teams, but it’s had at best mixed success.

  • I want people to build features for XYZ – how do we get people to do it?
    This question typically comes from a product manager, executive, or business owner who sees hackdays as a massive amount of valuable potential engineering effort for their area.  In this case, the short answer is that hackdays are about independence – the more you try to get people to do what you want, the more energy (and innovation) you sap from the system.  That being said, we’ve seen quite a bit of success where teams sponsor “special prizes” for a specific category on a given hackday.  Example: an iPad 2 for the project voted best “developer tool”.  This approach seems to provide the best balance of independence and incentive to generate the desired result.

  • How do we get all hackday projects live to site?
    This question assumes that the goal of all hackday projects should be to go live to site.  However, given the education and innovation mandate of hackday, there are actually quite a few projects that are not intended to go live to site, and that’s not a bad thing.  The way that we’ve handled this question is by providing both a variety of mechanisms for projects to “go live”, as well as prize categories for projects that are not based on being a “shippable” feature.

  • How can we spare a day from our priorities for a Hackday?
    In some ways, this is the big leap of faith.  For anyone who has attended any of the recent LinkedIn Hackdays, it’s hard to imagine this being considered seriously at this point.  However, at small companies, there are always more things to do than time to do them.  The decision to have hackdays is largely based on the belief that giving people time to learn by doing and to pursue independent ideas will pay off in multiples, not just in the projects themselves, but in the attitude and energy it brings to the company overall.  In some ways, you can view it as an HR benefit that also has a measurable positive impact on culture, internal technology, and product innovation.

  • How do we get people to participate?
    The ten ingredients above reflect the system that we’ve devised, but the truth is it took time for hackdays to build into a culture fixture at LinkedIn.  In 2008, we threw two hackdays, and had about half a dozen teams enter each.  However, as the company celebrated each hackday winner, we saw demand pick up.  We had a major breakthrough in participation when we launched the “Hackday Idol” format for judging in early 2010, and since then we’ve seen incredible growth in the number of participants and projects.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a few new innovations ready to roll out for the May 20th hackday.  Not to spoil the surprise, but we’ll be rolling out for the first time a new “Hackday Masters” designation and category, for people who have won at least three hackdays.

Hopefully, the Wizard of In will smile down on us, and as always reward those who seek to bend code to their will.

Personal Finance for Engineers

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

Last Friday, LinkedIn had it’s monthly “InDay”, an event where the company encourages employees to pursue research, ideas & interests outside of their day-to-day responsibilities. (This is the same day that I run the regular LinkedIn Hackdays for the company.) This month, the theme was “personal finance” as a brief nod to the ominous due date for income taxes in the United States.

For fun, I volunteered to give a talk based on material that I’ve put together over the years called “Personal Finance for Engineers”

I cover the most obvious two questions up front:

  1. Why Personal Finance?  Personal finance is a bit of a passion of mine, and has been for almost twenty years.  It’s both amazing and shocking to me that you can attend some of the finest secondary schools and universities in this country, and still not get a basic grounding in personal finance.  More importantly, it happens to be an area with a huge signal-to-noise problem:  there is far more “bad” advice and content out there than good content.  And lastly, I believe that money matters are deeply important to the long term success and happiness of most people. The fact remains that when I’m experiencing a health complication and need money to expedite my EHIC application, money suddenly matters a lot! (Let’s face it, money happens to be one of the top three causes of marital problems)
  2. Why Engineers?  The talk isn’t purely for engineers, per se, so this reflects a personal bias (I just empathize more with engineers more than other people).  That being said, engineers tend to make higher incomes earlier in life than most people, and thus face some of these questions earlier.  They also tend to have stock options, a fairly advanced financial instrument, as part of their standard compensation.  Probably most troubling, engineers also consider themselves exceptionally rational, which makes them more prone to human weaknesses when it comes to money.

It was very hard to decide how to condense personal finance into a 60 minute talk (I leave 30 minutes for advanced topics).  I decided to focus on five topics:

  • You Are Not Rational (Behavioral Finance)
  • Liquidity is Undervalued (Emergency Fund)
  • Cash Flow Matters (Spend less than you Earn)
  • The Magic of Compounding (Investment Returns & Debt Disasters)
  • Good Investing is Boring (Asset Allocation)

The deck is not perfect by any stretch, and I have a number of ideas on how to improve it.  There are some great topics / examples I missed, and there are some points that I could emphasize more.  I spend literally half the time on behavioral finance, which may or may not be the right balance.

The talk went extremely well.  We had well over 100 people attend, and stay through the full 90 minutes.  Surprisingly, I got more thank yous and follow up questions from this talk than any other that I’ve given at LinkedIn.  I’m strongly considering giving it again, perhaps at other venues, depending on the level of interest.

Let me know what you think.

LinkedIn for Android: The T-Shirt

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

Today was a banner day for the LinkedIn Mobile team, with the big launch of LinkedIn for Android v1.0.  The application was built from the ground up to be the best mobile experience for LinkedIn on Android, and includes our fastest people search implementation on any mobile device. (It’s already climbing the Top 25 free social apps on the Google Marketplace)

Last year, I wrote a very popular blog post about the importance of T-Shirts at tech companies.  So it makes sense that to celebrate the launch, we made a new t-shirt.  No doubt that this will become the must-have item for  2011.

The front of this charcoal grey t-shirt will sport the following graphic, courtesy of rock star mobile designer Frank Yoo:

The back will feature the logo: LinkedIn for Android.  I love it – something about the little blue LinkedIn droid with a tie is just adorable.

Kudos to the team on a great app, a great launch, and most importantly, a great t-shirt.

Easter Egg: The LinkedIn Wizard Goes Web-Wide

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

For some reason, I *love* Easter Eggs.

No, I don’t mean the candy colored eggs that people make and roll to celebrate the holiday.  Easter eggs are the playful name for hidden features, games, and funny content that software engineers embed in their products for fun.  This was extremely popular in the early days of consumer software in the 1980s (there is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to Microsoft’s early easter eggs.)

You still see easter eggs in websites from time to time.  Maybe a funny error page.  Maybe a game appears when you click the right spot on a web page.  But it’s not as common as it used to be.

The New LinkedIn Platform

Today was a huge launch for the LinkedIn Platform team.  After months of effort, the team launched an incredible new way for developers to bring powerful professional identity & insights into any web application. (If you haven’t checked out the new developer.linkedin.com, definitely go do it now.)

The LinkedIn Wizard

I am proud to reveal tonight, on my personal blog, that thanks to Jakob Heuser, there is an eighth “undocumented” professional plugin for the web.  If you want to see it, all you have to do is use the following script on your website:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js"></script>

<script type="IN/Wizard" size="large"></script>

 

The Wizard of In, patron of all LinkedIn Hackdays, has gone web-wide.

Playing “Where’s Waldo” with the LinkedIn 100 Million Photo

/ Adam Nash

Yesterday, LinkedIn celebrated reaching 100 million members… an amazing milestone.

As part of the celebration, the whole team in Mountain View gathered for a photo outside of the main building:

Now the fun part… can you play “Where’s Waldo?” and find me in the picture?

It was hard not to feel good about the scope of what LinkedIn has accomplished.  This photo was an amazing reminder of how many great people are working every day help LinkedIn change the world.  In some ways, this photo is a reminder that I’m a small part of that story.

Still early days.  So much more ahead of the team than behind it.

What I Would Do with the Coke Freestyle

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

One of the best features of the new building that LinkedIn opened up at 2051 Stierlin Court in Mountain View is the new Coca-Cola Freestyle. The Freestyle is a modern soda fountain wrapped in a vending machine. You can order any one of over 100 different varieties of soft drink, ranging from flavored Dasani water to my personal (and discontinued) favorite: Diet Vanilla Coke.

After playing with the machine for a few months, I’ve realized that Coca-Cola is sitting on a massive marketing opportunity with his machine, if they execute it aggressively. Obviously, coming from the social web, I have a particular angle on how I would leverage this new machine in the marketplace.

How It Works

The Coke Freestyle may look like a vending machine, but it’s internals look more like a giant inkjet printer. It seems to have two types of cartridges: large bulky core soft drink syrups (e.g. Coke, Sprite, Diet Coke, etc) and smaller flavor syrups (vanilla, lime, sugar-free vanilla, etc). It combines these with a water source and carbonation on demand based with varying portions of each.

Thus, a small number of core flavors and accent flavors can deliver a truly breathtaking variety of soft drinks. My six year old, for example, delights in flavors of Sprite he never imagined (including a distinctly fluorescent purple “Grape Sprite”).

Most exciting of all, the machine is equipped with a Verizon USB wireless modem, and is IP-capable. Nominally, this exists so that the machine can report daily on its supply levels, allowing service to know which cartridges need restocking.

While the software on the machine is extremely primitive, it’s this networked capability that has the potential to turn the Coke Freestyle into a game changing marketing machine.

Give Customers Choice

The first step in redesigning the software on the Coke Freestyle is to start crowd sourcing new flavors. With a few simple variables, Coke could take this machine from offering 100 different drinks to thousands.

Want a Barq’s Root beer with Cherry? You got it. Coke Zero with Lemon? Whatever floats your boat.

A very small set of options could really open up thousands of possibilities:

  • Pick any base syrup
  • Pick up to two accent syrups
  • Let them “double” a flavor (e.g. Extra Cherry)

Make Customization a Game

Now the fun begins. There are a number of game design principles we could apply here.

First, the machine could highlight the “top” custom flavors that have been recently ordered on the machine. This would serve as a mechanism to obtain “votes” for new flavors that expert users create.

To help mix up selection, the machine should also highlight recent choices or randomized choices to help ensure that a few custom drinks don’t runaway with the voting.

In a perfect world, this voting would be personalized. Maybe people can name their drinks and take credit for their creation. This could be done by making the machine accessible to nearby smart phones. (BTW This might be a great reason for people to have an account with cocacola.com, tied to their Facebook or Twitter accounts)

Very soon, machines would develop their own popular custom flavors. Machines near each other can pick up flavors from the same geography. Local variations in preferences and popularity can turn into realtime market research and crowd sourced product development. Who knows? Maybe root beer with cherry syrup is a winner in East Texas? The best flavors can then efficiently be produced and promoted in geographies pre-tested by the Coke Freestyle network.

In this world, rather than devoting R&D effort to new brand extensions, Coke can focus on new base and accent syrups.

Stoke Distribution

The Coke Freestyle, by virtue of being a networked device, can also promote drinks effectively and price dynamically. If there is a big push for Diet Coke Vanilla, it can be highlighted and discounted appropriately. More importantly, like Starbucks, members with accounts can get promotional discounts and rewards to keep them coming back to Coke.

Price Aggressively

Given the incredible market research and distribution benefits of the Coke Freestyle, pricing becomes a really interesting question. Compared to “dumb” vending machines, these networked devices might enable heavily subsidized pricing. Given the relatively lower marginal cost of goods for a fountain-based machine, Coke might be able to fundamentally alter the dynamics of vending distribution by deploying machines in shopping malls and high traffic locations and undercutting competitive machines.

Who is to say that they couldn’t offer drinks at 25 cents each? If the primary goal of the machines is to generate and test brand extensions, there is a powerful motive to generate a large a volume of frequent voting.

This is the real strategic question for Coke: are they willing to disrupt well known and established vending machine economics to build out a realtime market research platform? How much is this data potentially worth?

Does Coke Get It?

For the last few months, I’ve been trying to get network access to the Coke Freestyle to experiment with some of these concepts as a Hackday project. I was disappointed to find out that the machine currently has extremely limited services exposed over the network.

I hope Coke realizes what a winner they have on their hands with his machine.

Adam Nash is Metro Man

/ Adam Nash

I got this sent to me in email today.  It seems to have become a running joke among a few of my fellow LinkedIn employees.

Two thoughts immediately come to mind:

  1. Do I need to change my official superhero for 500 Startups? (currently: Optimus Prime)
  2. Am I missing something funny about this comparison?  This seems way too flattering…

I wills say one thing – I’m going to have to hit the gym a bit more to fit into that costume.