The Ghost Profiles of Linkedin
The hidden indicators of genius, madmen and frauds — and how to take ourselves less seriously on the world’s largest phone book
Elon Musk doesn’t have a Linkedin profile. His PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, barely has one (not updated since he left Facebook), and Bill Gates only got his in 2016 when Microsoft bought the platform. Presumably the network wasn’t built for these people, but what about the people they talk to everyday? The ones launching their rockets, filling our streets with self-driving cars or simply just cutting the checks. Are they listed in the white pages of Linkedin or are they lost amongst the yellow pages most of us toggle through looking for money, talent and opportunity? And what’s the right amount of us to share with the rest of the world?
Meet the Ghosts of Linkedin
Recently I was shown a profile of a longtime SpaceX engineer. No photo, no title, his school was listed, then a few early jobs, but the only audible signal in his brief profile was the seven years listed as a “propulsion engineer”. Fluid and propulsion engineers are the one percent of talent in this sector, so it was a fair assumption this person was substantive. But there was no indication of rank or proximity.
“This guy talks to Elon every week,” one of my associates at 8VC told me. “There’s nothing in his profile that would indicate this”. He had 217 connections.
Show me another one I said.
“Here’s a guy that invests $25 million dollars a month out of his barn in Whitefish, Montana” my colleague went on. No picture, two years at a state university. Ashton Kutcher, who went to the University of Iowa from 1997–1998, has a longer profile. “Anyone who needs to put something into low orbit for under $10 million has to first talk to this guy. He also funds the largest two-wheel ride sharing systems in Asia and Africa”.
His profile simply says “Rancher, etc”.
If you’re starting to think that there’s an inverse relationship between the length of someone’s profile and their believability, you’re not wrong. In the words of my grandfather: “You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that order”.
Not All Ghosts Are Real
Thiel and Musk famously wallpapered an office bathroom in cease and desist letters from state regulators when they forged ahead with their new online currency. As a virtual nod to this, we have a wall of shame on the third floor of our offices at 8VC with all the inflated profiles and outreach we receive. Among them, a German DJ who claims to have co-founded one of our most successful fintech investments, but also lists as one of their achievements “raising chemical free children”. Another profile claims to be Commander and Chief of a private army. And one person, who applied to a drone investment of ours, said his role at the Pentagon was so classified that it wasn’t even known to exist (yet not so much that he listed it on his Linkedin page).
“If you don’t believe me,” his email went, “you can give the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a call”.
Run Towards Substance
Joe Lonsdale, my boss, recently posted internally, “The world is not the same place it was when we started the firm, and what worked in the 2010’s is not what will work in the 2020's”. He was referring to AI. “Software is on the margin easier, but operating leverage is harder”. In this, more specifically, he was referring to talent. “The most differentiating factor for us as a firm is cultivating our talent network”.
This is why we spend so much time hosting compelling dinners, long-play recruiting like advisory boards, and figuring out who are the top talents in our portfolio.
As a practice, we insist on recruiting in-network and focus on operators whose accomplishments we have direct experience with or simply just speak for themselves. This is fine, but what about the next generation of founders, builders and thinkers that haven’t yet been discovered? What do we look for, or equally importantly, what do we chose to share about ourselves on the open market?
In words of my grandfather, what’s absolutely necessary?
Hand Stuck in the Soda Machine
In general, he would say, less is more. Some profiles aren’t that outlandish, but the accomplishments they list are truly cringeworthy. I appreciated the guy who said he was a member of The National Association of Collegiate Scholars for Excellence, which is funny because it doesn’t exist, but also because he did become famous for a video that went viral when he got his hand stuck in a soda machine.
Then there’s the person who claimed to have briefed three US presidents and landed planes on aircraft carriers, unfortunately cast in doubt by his listed high school graduation date of 2003. I did interview (and hire) the Chief of Staff who said his mother was in charge of the seating arrangement at Davos, as well as the Stanford grad who said she perfected circular breathing. Some attractors, it appears, work.
Artificial Profiles vs Artificial Intelligence
With all the hubbub around AI, humans aren’t too popular right now. Why even have a Linkedin profile you might ask. In an investment world where SaaS has mostly played out (it’s a race to the bottom on pricing) and social networks have, more or less, reached feature parity (making it a race to the top with noise), AI offers the most promising area for return.
Yet the focus on artificial intelligence makes real humans all the more rare and valuable.
Just as key to deeply understanding how industries work and what’s newly possible now, we must find valuable people that are willing to work hard, align with longer term outcomes and — here’s the catch — surprise us. This is the definition of information, and in some ways the antithesis of AI: something that catches us by surprise. To put it bluntly, we learn something. And each person I meet and interview I go into the conversation with a singular goal. Surprise me. Help me learn something new. Linkedin has used AI for a long time in the form of “Show More Profiles Like This”, and every time it fails to surprise. Hence the focus on people in-network and perhaps the limits of AI. How to predict greatness in a thin profile? Or greatness before it has even had a chance to be great.
Keywords and Key Attributes
Less a wall and more a little black book, I keep a list of words I’ve found in the most reliable profiles. Personal qualities that list sportsmanship, curiosity and tenacity are often accompanied by the keywords “varsity”or “athlete”. Type in “author” or “pilot”, along with “founder” and you get 25-year-old computer science major Jessica B who both started her own company as well a side hustle as pilot and head baker of a sourdough-as-a-service bread business.
Dropping the obvious things like top schools can produce people that have instead fought their way to being the very best from the very bottom. Along these lines, I focus more on the first thing someone did rather than the last. Decisions taken at the time that weren’t popular but turned out right, or suggest they think for themselves, are the ones often that will see something through to the end while the rest leave.
A recent study showed that collective words like “us” and “we” have fallen off a cliff of modern usage, while the singular–”I” and “my” — have surged, underscoring the era (crisis?) of individuality we live in. Looking for people that have served missions bigger than themselves, who identify less as a founder and more as an agent, are hard to parse on Linkedin, but the clues are there.
In other posts I’ve mentioned the surprise connections made linking words like “chess” and “patent”, or even further afield, “Arabic and ballet”. (But relegated to the trash bin, you’re on your own with “cooking, wine and reading”.)
If you have to look outside your network, look beyond the comforting symbols of achievement. This is the time to bet on somebody. If you think an MBA will kill your company culture, look for someone that didn’t finish, or did, and maybe also lists making their own laundry detergent as a hobby. If they stared down a 10 year partnership track at McKinsey only to instead ride their bike across the country, wouldn’t you rather chance an hour Zoom with them?
“Do whatever you like, but by the time you’re 30, just make sure you’re good at something,” my grandfather said.
Titles that have Emojis
Our virtual wall of shame has several laws. For example, anyone with a pipe symbol in their title, unless you also list “Fiance” as your current job (or anyone that lists Father, Son, Husband as a job title) is automatically put into secondary screening. Double pronouns are a favorite flex but the guy who emailed us to support his golf tournament was not given an interview because his gender pronoun simply said “Weapon”.
Sadly but more common, are the people that use the title “Entrepreneur” together with a lifetime employment at Google. Sigh.
Most confusing was the gentleman who claimed to be CEO of several companies at once but was also currently a Collections Analyst. Which is probably better than the person that invited the entire alumni group of Palantir to connect, claiming he was an early investor — but actually turned out only bought stock after the company’s IPO.
And if I may, one last one from Gramps: “Birds of a feather, flock together”. Not always in good ways.
The Unfair Advantage of Talent over AI
Going forward, the brightest minds are going to dedicate their time solving real-world problems (at least I hope), and to Joe’s point these will combine superior operational cultures and tech. I think the former is lost on a lot of founders today that don’t have experience as operators and believe that tech by itself can scale. Operational excellence is really hard. “I can attest first hand,” a connection on Linkedin recently wrote to me, “that it [talent] helps create a moat.”
I love the emphasis on talent as a means of creating unfair advantages. 8VC’s Build program — what some think of as an accelerator but with dozens of actual pilots underway — already has some great traction with a fantastic network of operators / tech talent that deeply understand the space. I recently received some outreach to discuss a CEO need at a company being developed at a different incubator, but the challenge was that there’s no way they will have the same network of talent to draw from to help build and scale the company.
Our most recent Build company, Terminal, has a policy of no Linkedin profiles. “Don’t show me any. If you think I should talk with them, I want to meet them for who they are” the founder says. He’s also my favorite founder because he only takes people that have been promoted within the tenure of their company. “People that get promoted only at job changes are getting rewarded for what they promise to do versus what they have proven they can do already”. This is a gray area for AI, which is great at predicting patterns but it’s terrible at predicting promise.
Age and Treachery will Beat Youth and Skill
Recently a founder sent me a schematic he drew on the back of a napkin. This is how he evaluates talent:
If young → work hard?
→ fast learner?
else → pass.
If old → relevant experience?
→ get hands dirty?
else → pass.
Having just celebrated my 50th birthday, I’ll admit to taking this over-simplification of grit and age as off-putting. “When it comes to building things that save lives — or even just building technology that makes our lives safer and more enjoyable — it’s better that we don’t pretend about work life balance” he seemed to justify. When I told him my age, he shrugged, “Well, at least you’re not as old as my parents.”
The youngest and the oldest two profiles in my network had a commonality. Unsurprisingly they were both brief. This suggests we go through a stage of professional development equivalent to adolescence (extending through our thirties and even forties) when evidently we have a lot to say. But on either side of this curve, we are lighter and seem to take ourselves less seriously. Like the 19-year-old who dropped out of MIT to reinvent gun powder or the octogenarian that lives on a houseboat in Sausalito–an active seed investor who started one of the world’s largest wineries. “Surprise me,” he invites people, “I stopped working for myself a long time ago.”
It makes the title “Rancher, etc” ahead of its time.
Right before my grandfather passed, I asked if he had any regrets. “At this point in my life, I’m trying to see how much of myself is absolutely necessary.”
May these be the ghosts that haunt us.
