Motley Fool Money - New CEOs, New IPOs, and a Conversation with LinkedIn

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

Baidu announces IPO plans for its video service. Under Armour jumps higher. Boston Beer and Chipotle name new CEOs. And Alibaba’s Chairman hits the big screen. Our analysts discuss those stories and share some stocks on their radar. Plus, Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner talks with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner about the Microsoft marriage, the power of diversity, and the power of predictive analytics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money Radio Show. I'm Chris Ellen, joining me in studio this week from Million Dollar portfolio, Jason Moser, and from Hidden Gems Canada, David Kretzman. Thanks for being here, guys. Hey, Chris. We've got the latest earnings from Wall Street. We've got a conversation with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. And as always, we're giving an inside look at the stocks on our radar. But, guys, before we get to the companies making headlines, I just wanted to mention that the Dow was up a thousand points this week. And I can understand if you missed that because there were no primetime specials. Where were the big headlines? When the Dow went down a thousand points, we had primetime specials.

I think now, I mean, it's much bigger now, so the percentage change is much smaller. You know, that argument goes. I mean, geez, you know, we're sort of walking the fence on this one because we always say, listen, don't worry about these things. But by the same token, people want to know more. And that's kind of our job. And so it's, I like at least being able to kind of get out there and talk about it and sort of relate that to why ultimately our style of investing works in how you can sort of see these big swings

and not have to worry about them so much. You know, you can say a lot for what David Gardner, Motley Fool co-founder, will say that when the media says, we're in a correction when stocks are dropping. No, actually, stocks over time go up. So the correction is that stocks go up. So I think we actually had a market correction this week. All right. Let's get to some company news, and we'll start with the Google of China.

Baidu's fourth quarter revenue came in nearly 30 percent higher than a year ago. Baidu also announced an IPO coming up later this year. IPO of its streaming video business. David, you like this move? I think so. investors are hungry for content as Netflix continues to throw out incredible quarters of growth, Disney launching its own streaming platform this year with ESPN and then its standalone offering next year with things like Disney Animation and Pixar. So I think there's clearly a lot of market interest here,

and Bidey will still retain majority control of this platform, which is pronounced I-Chi, I believe, but this is probably a little bit closer to the YouTube business model where it's largely free and ad-supported. They have about 500 million monthly active users, roughly 50 million paying members. They don't release numbers every quarter. But a dominant platform in China, obviously with the regulations that you have in China, it's tough to get exposure to that market. So I think a lot of investors will rightfully so flock to ICHE once you have that option on the public markets. Well, and Jason, for anyone who questions the cost of creating content,

I mean, Baidu was pretty clear that part of the reason they're doing this, spin-off IPO is because they need the money for content. Yeah, I mean, that is the one thing you need in this line of work. I mean, how do you get the talent? Well, you just write big checks, and we've seen Netflix has been doing it for quite some time. And I think that's one of the things we look at something like Roku, for example, is an interesting business, how they're going to monetize beyond the devices. They're talking about content and stuff like that, but we know that cost a lot of money to do.

And I think it also goes, it's worth noting, too, in regard to Baidu, Alibaba recently striking a deal to license a lot of Disney content for their streaming platform. So obviously, a growing competitive space in China. Yeah, I think with Baidu, you have to increasingly pay attention to that competitive landscape within China. They're not the only player in this game. They're going up against Tencent and Alibaba, both of which are about half a trillion-dollar companies right now. Bydu, comparatively, much smaller at $85 billion. market cap. Bydew is also trading for price-to-sales ratio of about seven compared to 18 for Tencent and 14 for Alibaba. But Baidu, they are finally accelerating revenue growth again. They

kind of had a rough stretch toward the end of 2016 and early 2017, but they're back on track. They're growing. And I think you're seeing investor sentiment change as the company is growing that top line again. And with IGE and some of these other segments like autonomous driving and AI, reasons to be optimistic going forward. Shares of Under Armour up more than 25% this week after fourth quarter results. Jason, international growth was really the story of the fourth quarter for Under Armour. Are you surprised that the stock popped this much? I mean, this was a good quarter.

I don't know that it was 25% good. Look at Chris here, Hayden on Underarmour. He saw that. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the clock. Wait a minute. I'm a shareholder. I'm happy with the pop.

I'm just surprised. It was this much. Me too. And I think it is noteworthy. I think the market's reaction, notwithstanding, you're right, it wasn't that great of a quarter, but I think based on the call, I think we may have finally seen the last of the kitchen sink quarters because it seems like we've gotten a lot of those consecutively here from Under Armour. As you noted, challenges remain in North America wholesale, but internationally, the company is growing by leaps and bounds,

and the direct-to-consumer business, which really is going to help shore up some of the loss from that wholesale channel, now represented 42 percent of total revenue for the quarter, so that's important. I think most importantly, though, is that Kevin Plank may fully realize the benefits of having this executive team and C.O. Patrick Frisk and CFO David Bergman. They're the ones who are going to be instrumental in helping him take this business forward. The call, they played a much more prevalent role. I'm really encouraged about where they're going. And I think perhaps maybe the market is due. Do you think that Plank is a little bit more humble? Is he going to keep a lower profile?

Because we may you can't tell after just one quarter, but a couple more like this last one. Well, you know, Plank loves those sort of platitudes, and I think humble but hungry is something he had posted all over the headquarters or somewhere. I can neither confirm or deny, but I hear it that actually someone changed it to even a little bit more humble in Hungary. Now, whether that's a sign of things to come, I can't say, but we'll have to wait and see. Meet the new boss completely different from the old boss.

Chipotle founder, Steve Ells, has stepped away from the CEO job. His replacement was announced this week. It's Brian Nicol, whose most recent job was as CEO of Taco Bell. David, how do you think Steve Ells took the news that the search company came up with the guy from Taco Bell? Well, after decades of throwing shade at Taco Bell, this is another humbling experience, I think, for Steve Ells, similar to what we've seen Under Armour, where you have a founder's CEO who for a long time has had incredible success and rightfully deserves a lot of credit for

where they've brought the business, in this case, Chipotle, now still a $7 billion business. So a lot of success. But now acknowledging that they need some outside help. So Under Armour, you're seeing something similar with Kevin Plank, and I think we're seeing something similar here with Chipotle. And, you know, I actually kind of like this move, the more I step back and look at it. Brian Nicol did a lot of great things at Taco Bell. He's focused on digital communications. I think low-hanging fruit at Chipotle to solve some of these issues, improving the digital

and mobile ordering experience, rolling out a loyalty program, menu innovations like breakfast, just some ways to get people back into the stores and keep them locked in through some sort of loyalty program. I think that's a no-brainer move, and it sounds like that's the direction Nicol wants to take it. What do you think should be number one in his list, Jason? I feel like you're going to break it down to 1A, 1B, and 1C, because these are all really big priorities. And let's be clear, man, this really could not have been easy for Steve L. I mean, talk about putting your foot in your mouth. I mean, it's coming out the other. now. I think they need to take advantage of the breakfast market. They need to develop a breakfast

menu yesterday. You've basically got five hours the day where you're telling customers you don't want their business. They need to expand their menu. They need to innovate. They need to come up with some new offerings, perhaps some smaller portions, just things that are going to bring people into the stores over and over again. And then I think that really the big opportunity here is that we're going to see them be able to market the Chipotle brand and really get it more out there for everyone to see and to begin to trust again, as well as bringing a whole new generation of customers in that have never been before. I'd say the two biggest question marks that I have here are, number one, can Steve Bells

take a backseat and let Nicol fully do his thing? Then also, Nickel has a lot of experience with franchise restaurants, whether it was with Pizza Hut or Taco Bell. And Chipotle, as we know, is completely company-owned restaurants. So how does that translate with his new role here at Chipotle. But in general, I think a lot of Chipotle's issues today are solvable, and they do have flexibility. They have over half a billion dollars in cash. They're still producing about a quarter billion dollars in free cash flow every year. So if they can get people back into the stores, retain those customers, then I don't think it takes too much to get the business back to where it was before the E. coli crisis.

Now, real quickly here, I still own my Chipotle shares. David, I think you own some too, right? I do. Now, Chris, you were very emotional at some point here at the end of 2017. You sold out. And you sold your shares. Now, I think you owned my shares. Now, looking back on that, are you still happy with that decision? Or do you feel like that maybe this is an opportunity for this business to recover and to kind of get back to the... I'm still happy with that decision, but Chipotle is absolutely on my watch list now as an investor.

Because I think that David tapped, for me, what is the key question, which is how does he deal with the fact that this is not a franchise model? I think if Brian Nicol, I want to hear from Brian Nicol. I'm happy to interview Brian Nicol because I have a lot of questions. But I think that they got some great challenges, but I think they also have some great opportunities. By the way, Chipotle, not the only company getting a new CEO this week. Boston Beer Company got a new CEO. That stock is up 10 percent hitting a new high.

Who did they tap? So they tapped a gentleman by the name of Brunswick. He is best known for serving as a CEO, I believe, for Pete's coffee. And so I think you put it very bluntly and very eloquently when you said, hey, listen, This guy's got experience selling one addictive drink. He can come over here and just do the same thing with another one. I can sell beverages. There's probably something to that.

I think this is great to see they finally got the CEO in there, particularly someone with an industry experience. And I really do feel like the biggest problem that Boston Beer has been suffering from other than a very competitive market. It's just the fact that Jim Cook, the founder and chairman of the business, seems to have been developing his offerings, the company's offerings, based on his own personal tastes, as opposed to what consumers. really want. And so, for beer nerds out there, I mean, I'll just take IPA as an example. Like, Cook doesn't like them. But there are a lot of people out there that do. And that's a very big offering in virtually every store you step into today. And so they relate to the game on that. And this time of year, beer lovers like myself, we'll see hop slam. You know, Bell's got hopslam out there. You've got Troog's Brewing Nugget, Nectar. These are nice seasonal offerings,

but they create a lot of buzz, no pun intended. I feel like Boston Beer needs to do something like that. Get out there and market this business a little bit better. Develop some more offerings that really create some sort of buzz in the industry, some word of mouth. And I think this is going to be great example. Brunswick has a lot of experience with the company. He's been on the board since 2005. Excited about the prospects. Yeah, one positive is that he has been a director since 2005.

It is interesting, though, that they spent over a year searching for the CEO, and then they end up circling back to someone who's been with a company for over a decade. So you kind of wonder how much innovation will he, or fresh blood, will he? he bring to the company. But I agree with Jason. Probably a reason to be optimistic here. This weekend, Black Panther is expected to take in more than $160 million at the box office, but we've got our eyes on another action movie. This one's starring a business icon. Details coming up. This is Motley Full Money. Thanks again to Wonder Capital, the easiest way to invest in large-scale solar energy projects across the U.S. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that

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Wonder Capital, where impact investing meets capitalism. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you're here. Welcome back to Motley Full Money, Chris Hill here in studio with Jason Moser and David Kretzman. Shares of Marriott up this week after a fourth quarter report featuring increased booking volume at higher prices. I think you've got to like that, Jason. If you're in there, not only are we doing more business, we're charging a higher price for

it. Sounds good to me. In an Airbnb world and the sharing economy, I think it's very easy to look at a company like Marriott in hotels and think this is just not the direction in which the world is headed. But I think that's a bit short-sighted, and I think it dismisses the fact that travel and lodging is such a big market. We know that Marriott just recently acquired Starwood, so that is the biggest company now in the business.

And to your point about the financials, revenue per available room, what we call RevPAR, was up 3.1 percent. That's basically like a restaurant's comps, while adding over 76,000 rooms. So demand is there. And I think, more importantly, the company continues to invest in their own tech infrastructure, which is giving them the opportunity to really leverage this huge loyalty program that they have and minimize the dependence on the OTAs, like price line and whatnot. So all in all, I mean, this is a good business.

It's probably a better opportunity when we have a little bit of a pullback in the economy. The stock has certainly done very well, so I'd probably keep it on the watch list for now. I was going to say, this stock was up more than 60 percent last year, so I'm assuming from a valuation perspective, it's a little on the price he's side right now. It is. And when you're making the case for the stock, it is dependent on share repurchases and dividends. And management historically has done that. But whenever that's part of the case, it makes it a little bit riskier. Coca-Cola's fourth quarter profits and revenue came in higher than expected.

Coke also did something they've been doing for a long time, David. They raised their dividend. Yeah, I think what is it? Fifty-five consecutive years. So they're definitely in that dividend aristocrat category. But one yellow flag here is that their payout ratio now is 135%. So what that means is on an annual basis right now, they're paying out more in dividends than they're generating in free cash flow, and they're making up that difference by raising debt. So you have to question, how sustainable is the dividend? At some point, you want the company to be paying for the dividend out of its own free cash flow. But in general,

this is a strong business model, even though revenue hasn't really grown for a few years in case unit volumes were flat. The company is still churning out solid results, about $6 billion in free cash flow on an annual basis. So a solid business model, but last year they launched something, a new initiative called the consumer-centric portfolio. And that's really all the healthier stuff. So waters, juices, coffees, low-sugar drinks. But that leads to my question, if you need a consumer-centric portfolio, what does that

mean about the rest of your business? That just seems like some sort of a mismatch there. So I don't know from a strategic standpoint, I think Coke maybe still has some things to figure out. Like Amazon, China's e-commerce giant, Alex. Bhaba has many different business units. This week, Alibaba's movie division announced the worldwide release of a new martial arts film. What makes the movie noteworthy is that the star of this action movie is Alibaba's executive chairman, Jack Ma. He plays a martial arts

master called, wait for it, Master Ma. I cannot see this movie quickly enough. I feel like it's something we're going to have to make happen here at HQ. Is there any way this becomes a trend? Is there any way Jeff Bezos goes to Amazon studios and says, look, Jack Maas got his action movie? I want an action movie. Well, hey, Jeff Bezos starred in that Super Bowl ad, which apparently won the Super Bowl, so that's a start.

Spotlight can be addictive out here. I'm just going with Reed Hastings, I think a period drama starring Reed Hastings and Netflix with their studio. Read him and Weep. I think that can be... I love the title. Now, I'm not going to go with a title here. have an idea. Everybody loves a film about double identity being two places at once.

And Ms. Doubtfire was a good movie. What have we had something like where, you know, Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Square and Twitter and now, like, you know, investors suing. And they say, you got to pick one or the other. And so then he, like, goes into interview for the CEO role of the other company, but he's in disguise as like, you know, a woman perhaps. It's really, let's add some comedic undertones to the movie. So now he's trying to be in two places at once. And he's the CEO of Twitter and the CEO of Square, but they think he's two different People. And it's in San Francisco. I mean, you just, it still works. Absolutely. Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter, but his sister, Jackie Dorsey, is the CEO of Square.

There you go. I think we're on to something. Email us your CEO, Movie Ideas, Radio at Fool.com. All right, a couple of minutes left. Let's get to the stocks on our radar this week. David Kretsman, what are you looking at this week? I'm looking at T-M-M-U-S. I think everyone's familiar with John Ledger, the customer centric CEO who pushes the wireless industry constantly quarter in and quarter out, fighting against Dumb and Dumber, who he affectionately refers to as AT&T and Verizon. So, Team Mobile is still a distant third compared to Dumb and Dumber. They have 72 million subscribers, but their turn rate is dropping.

They continue to grow that wireless business. They're growing free cash flow at a really impressive rate in trading for about 22 times trailing earnings, which strikes me as cheap for what seems to be a really quality business. I don't own shares of Team Oval, but just as someone who follows the financial world, I appreciate that he's out there. Oh, yeah. Ledger is one of the more entertaining executives to follow. Absolutely.

Definitely follow him on Twitter. He also has his slow cooker Sunday tutorials every Sunday. I think he's done it for a couple of years now, so you can get some cooking tips. He can rag on dumb and dumber. A lot of good stuff. All right, Jason, what about you? Sure. Well, talking about Twitter, I had spoken a couple of weeks ago, put Twitter on our radar, ticker

is TWTR, looking for earnings, so that we could take the stock off of hold in MDP. And lo and behold, Chris, we've got two good quarters in a row. Maybe it's the start of something good here. But revenue growth is resuming, thanks to a focus on daily engagement, double-digit growth there for the fifth consecutive quarter. A stock-based compensation, which was once a big drag, has really turned around. And that was one of Dorsey's primary objectives. So as a percentage of revenue, that's coming down, which is in turn,

helping profitability. First gap profitable quarter, projecting 2018 to be fully gap profitable. These are all encouraging signs. I think we've got something here. All right, Jason Moser, David Kruzman, guys. Thanks for being here. Coming up, a conversation with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Stay right here. This is Motley Full Money. I'm popping and up up and I sing in this song. I got the blues from my baby living by the San Francisco Bay. She's taking the ocean line and she's going so far away.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Last week in San Francisco, we held our Motley Fool One investment conference. And one of the featured guests was LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner. He's been with LinkedIn for the past decade, and he helped take the company public in 2011. Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner talked with Jeff in front of a live audience about a range of topics, including the process of LinkedIn being acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Why has the LinkedIn acquisition by Microsoft gone so well in a world where so few acquisitions, particularly of that size and scope do? I know one of the factors, certainly, that you'll talk about is that you've been given so much autonomy, which often the larger organization just starts to gobble up, just assimilates the business. And in your case, and in this situation, from the very beginning, Microsoft has said, we want this to be a standalone business inside.

So that and what other factors are causing this to go so well at this stage? I think it goes back to before we agreed to the deal, and Satya and I both thought it was going to be really important to ensure that we were aligned on at least two fronts. One was our sense of purpose, and the other was how we're going to structure this once the marriage were to happen, if it were to happen. On purpose, we essentially have the same sense of purpose.

Satya is extremely purpose-driven. When he got to Microsoft as CEO, he's been at Microsoft for the better part of 25 years, but when he became CEO several years ago, he sat down with a leadership team. They rewrote the mission statement to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more, which a lot of people don't realize. Prior to that, it was to ensure there was a computer on every desktop under Bill Gates. That was the original vision. Can you say that new vision, new mission again?

Empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more. So about productivity through their technology. And at LinkedIn, we're trying to connect the world to professionals to make them more productive and successful. So very similar sense of purpose, differently worded, but same sense of purpose. We go about it in different ways. We've built a professional network that connects people. And Microsoft has done it historically through software and now increasingly through the cloud. But we had good alignment in terms of what we're trying to accomplish.

true north for both organizations. So then it turned to structure, and I had no idea what to expect when we started talking about that. And he said he'd been given it a lot of thought, and he wanted to try something different for a Microsoft acquisition at scale. And he wanted LinkedIn to remain independent.

And I said, you had me at independence. You had an interesting comment on LinkedIn about Super Bowl advertisements, and what conclusion you drew from that about inclusion, diversity, and what the the national conversation is and you viewed it optimistically. So maybe explain that and then just a little bit more from you about inclusion and diversity at LinkedIn and certainly there's been a lot like companies releasing their data on different demographics, ethnicity, gender,

leadership statistics, a lot more data on companies. So maybe talk about the Super Bowl and how you think about inclusion and diversity, particularly at any of the organizations you're involved in now. So with regard to the Super Bowl, the diversity angle was one of the things that I thought really came through if you were focusing on the advertising and the themes, the most consistent or common themes. But just generally speaking, one person's opinion, just my anecdotal observations, I can't recall a Super Bowl where the commercials were this inspiring. And regardless of whether or not you were actually inspired, it was clear that the intention of the advertiser was to inspire, was to focus on things that would bring people together. There was a lot less of the kind of humor

that we've seen in years prior. There was certainly a lot less of the violence we've seen in years prior. It just felt elevated to me. And I've always felt my dad was in marketing and advertising for one of the broadcast networks for a couple of decades. So I grew up kind of not only watching TV and being entertained and consuming it, but also analyzing it. So it may spend a little bit more time on the commercials than most people. But I've always thought that when you're watching Super Bowl advertising, you get a sense for the zeitgeist, not only in the country, but within the business community. So I thought it was kind of cool to see so many different companies talking about the good that they're trying to do in the world. And even if you feel like

it's not done with the best of intentions, even if you felt like it's just marketing and they're not necessarily walking the walk, it still puts energy into the system that's positive. But I would actually make the argument that increasingly, I know companies are not being given credit for this, and for good reason, I understand the levels of distrust that exist right now for institutions on a global basis, whether they're governments or companies, I get it. but increasingly companies are purpose-driven. Increasingly companies are thinking about what they're trying to accomplish in the world, not only what they're trying to accomplish, but how they're trying to accomplish it.

And it's not just being done to gain more consumers or customers. It's being done because the people running these companies believe in what it is that they're trying to accomplish. So I thought it was kind of cool to see that reflected in some of the campaigns. Do you think LinkedIn has data that is predictive of the future success of particular industries, companies, public companies? In other words, watching the flow of talent and the networks around that talent from one industry to within an industry or toward an industry,

do you think that there are algorithms you can develop at LinkedIn that would crush the market's average because of what you're able to see from the flow of talent? We do have some really unique data. And would you be willing? to partner. To your premium. Could you commit in real time.

To your most important fool customers. Yes. Who all are on LinkedIn. They're all on LinkedIn. Not all. Not all. Not all. So I'm going to talk about the unique data and insights we're capable of generating and why in just the moment.

But I want to make sure I go back and answer you asked two parts to your previous question. One, observations about the Super Bowl and the second about specifically diversity and inclusion. It's so important. to make sure we cover it. So based on the vision for a former head of HR at LinkedIn, a woman named Pat Waters, wonderfully talented executive used to work with her at Yahoo. She's now in service now.

Pat came up with a concept, her and her team, the talent team at LinkedIn, that she was incredibly passionate about, that really went beyond the concept of diversity, that diversity for its own sake was not enough, focusing on diversity, focusing on the numbers, a good step in the right direction, but not enough. And she would constantly reinforce the importance of not only diversity and inclusion, which was the nature of your question, but also belonging.

And she used to refer to it as dibs. And how we've evolved this over time and the way I certainly think about this today, diversity, a focus on diversity can begin to ensure that you have the right representation amongst your employees that is a reflection of the people and the consumers and customers that you serve. So diversity is about making sure you have the right DNA within the company in terms of that broad cross-section of representation. Inclusion is making sure that once those people are at your company, once they're within the organization, they're being invited to the right meetings, that they're around the table.

Just because they're at the company doesn't necessarily mean they're making and informing some of the most important decisions, or they're being given access to the right information, and they have an opportunity to shape outcomes. So that's where inclusion becomes so important. And then belonging is ensuring that if they are sitting around the table, that when they look up, they see and they hear other people like them, and they feel like they belong there, so they can have some peace of mind, and they can do their best work. And so you really need all three of those things.

It's not just one at the exclusion of the others. In terms of the importance of this approach, we kind of talked about it just a moment ago, in terms of unintended consequences, unconscious biases, and if you want to maximize value, you have to have a diverse team. It goes without saying, you know, two of my favorite examples of this, certainly within the product development sphere. Have you guys seen the video that was making the rounds of a guy that was trying to dry his hands in a bathroom?

public bathroom and put his hands under the automatic dryer and it didn't trigger, didn't go on. He was black and the dark skin was not triggering the machine because it was more likely than not developed by someone who wasn't of dark skin. And I don't think there was anything intentional that went behind something like that, but it's a great example of unconscious bias and how it manifests in products. Another, I'm working with a woman at a nonprofit. She just became the CEO. She was so excited. She had been at the company prior, and she was texting back and forth with a friend talking about the fact she was just about to become a CEO, and she was about to use an emoji, a CEO emoji, to talk about how excited she was, but she couldn't find any CEO emojis that were

women. So this stuff matters, and it may sound like little things here and there, but it adds up. And if you want to best serve a diverse audience of people, your customers, it's so important that companies get this right. And with regard to how we're performing in the industry, in terms of looking at the data in tech, we have a long way to go. And it's not as easy as saying it's a pipelining issue because it's not, it's not just a pipelining issue. And there's incredible talent out there if you know where to look,

if you're making the effort. And we just have too many historical legacy practices that just need to be explicitly revisited, starting with the schools that these companies recruit from, and the qualifications that people look for, and where they set those bars, four-year degrees, eight years of experience, when people who don't necessarily have those degrees,

but have the aptitude, they may have never been given access to the degree, but they have the growth mindset, they have the resiliency and the perseverance. I think Google's data a few years ago, they released showed that in terms of success inside of Google's ecosystem as an employee, having a college degree was meaningless. And I don't know that I would agree.

And maybe overstated that by saying meaningless, but it wasn't a lead factor in terms of some of us. And this is societal. This is behavioral. This is a lot of us who've gone to these schools and they're fine schools and have gotten very good educations, then look for people like us. And we are precluding broad swaths of the population that are extraordinarily capable of doing some of these jobs. So we just need to revisit these practices. And I mentioned pipelining because that's where a lot of people start. They say we're not going to be able to find this kind of person.

There's not enough folks like this within the population of people that were recruiting. So that's where I started there. But it's also about the investment you're making and the people that are already within your companies in terms of development, in terms of promotions, in terms of mentorship. There's so much that can be done here. And very thankfully, I think we're seeing far heightened sense of urgency across the industry. And I think things will start to improve, but it's going to take some time. Coming up, Jeff Weiner talks about building a network, and he offers some advice for investors.

Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. When I see the connection, though I see I don't stay. Thanks again to TurboTax Live, which is new from TurboTax. Look, it's tax season, people. You've got to get this right. And now you can get a personal review of your tax return with a CPA or EA right on your screen. Quickly connect to a tax expert via one-way video as often as you need for answers and advice on your taxes. You can even have an expert review your return before you file and make any necessary changes. And it's all backed by a 100% accuracy guarantee. And when you're dealing with the IRS, you want to be accurate.

You can file with complete confidence. Connect with a TurboTax Live expert today at turbotaxlive.com slash fool. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to Tom Gardner's conversation with LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner. The next question was, do you have data that beats the market? So, we have access to some pretty valuable data. When you are looking at talent and you were just,

just talking about Google and looking for correlations and causality in terms of success, in terms of at the individual level and their value at within a company, if you want to look at another variable that is highly correlated with the success of a company, its talent inflows and outflows. Is the company hiring faster than they're losing people? Where are those trend lines? Is the startup starting to hire at a far faster rate? Is the company starting to bleed talent?

because those employees know better than any analyst or any fool how things are going at that company. So we do have access to this kind of. And how about that talent information of people who have approved you? I'm sorry that I'm forgetting the verb or language. Like you're great at leadership. I'm going to plus one you. Your skill approval. Like how much skill approval somebody has in this category moving from this company to that company in their network, et cetera.

Yeah. So we have that too. We haven't necessarily gone as deep as what you're describing, matching the skills and the inflows and outflows to the same extent. But we are now capable of seeing fastest growing skills within any organization. And we are capable of benchmarking your organization against your competition to understand where they're adding and where you may need to add faster than you're already adding. And these are just two examples, talent inflows and outflows and skills.

Is that a subscription that accompanies? that a company can pay to get that information or not? I mean, no, not the aggregate, but if you're benchmarking individual company. If you're a Talent Solutions customer of LinkedIn, you get access to that, and we just announced that our most recent, our biggest customer event of the year is called Talent Connect every October. And this last October, the big announcement was that we're going to be offering a broad talent intelligence portfolio of products that will not only now enable people to source

the right candidate on LinkedIn and develop that talent once they're in your organization, through our learning materials, but also to develop workforce planning through these sources of talent intelligence. And just to, I know we're wrapping up, you asked about two very specific kinds of data, but what we're ultimately gonna be capable of doing what we're increasingly doing today,

it's not even science fiction, is developing the world's first economic graph. And this is how we're gonna bring our vision to life. This is how we're gonna create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. That's the vision, that's the dream, which is distinctive from our mission, which I described earlier to connect the world's professionals.

So to map the global economy across this economic graph, that's what we mean when we talk about, develop the world's first economic graph. We're going to map the global economy digitally across six dimensions. So ultimately we're going to have a profile for every one of the 3 billion plus people in the global workforce. We're going to have a profile for every one of the 50 to 70 million companies in the world when you include small and medium-sized businesses. We're going to have a digital representation for every available job in the world. Some assume there's as many as 20 million digitally accessible jobs in the world. We're going to have a digital representation for every skill, exactly to your point, required

to obtain those jobs. There's tens of thousands of skills in our structured database. We're going to have a digital representation for every higher educational organization, vocational training facility or university that enables people to acquire the skills to get the jobs offered by those companies. And we have already built out a publishing platform that in success will enable every individual company and university in the world to share their professionally relevant knowledge if they're interested in doing so.

And as a result of that, we're going to allow intellectual capital, working capital, and human capital to flow to where it can best be leveraged and help lift and transform the global economy. So the kinds of questions that you are asking, those data sets, that exists. And what's really cool is this started as a vision. It was a dream years and years ago. And with each passing day, it becomes reality. And the only thing preventing us from realizing the full potential of this is time. rapid fire last set of questions where just one word or a couple word answers because I think

it's valuable for us to hear this. Jeff, just quickly, how do you use your network? Like, how do you build it? What's one line or two lines that we should all be thinking about when thinking about building our network? Well, when building the network versus using it, I would draw a distinction between those two things. And I think it's really important to focus explicitly on how you want to build your network before you start thinking about how you want to use it, because those two things are very much related. And for me, personally, it's different for every individual. For me, I'm looking for people that I've met in person

and that I have an opportunity to work with at some point in the future. Regardless of whether or not we actually will work together, if I think there's an opportunity to work together, that's the criteria that I use. We've known each other 24 years. I'm a LinkedIn influencer with about 110,000 followers. Wow. But you aren't one of them.

That's not sure, is it? Are we not connected? If we're connected, I'm following. No, if we're connected, I'm following. If we're connected, you're following, respect. There's no way. There's no. He's not getting away with that stuff, just for the humor angle.

And finally, what one line of investment advice do you have for us and one line of business advice? Just, you know, counsel for all the experiences you've had that you leave us with. In terms of investment advice? Be very clear with your objectives and to the best of your ability, stick to them and don't allow yourself to get distracted and don't allow yourself to take your eye off those longer-term objectives based on short-term volatility, and everyone's objectives are potentially different. And listen to Tom and Dave. Not in that order.

In terms of business advice, know what it is that your ultimate. trying to accomplish and try to optimize for both passion and skill, and not one at the exclusion of the other. You can check out past episodes of Motley Fool Money and all of our podcasts. Just go to Podcast.fool.com. While you're there, you can also test drive our flagship investing service, Motley Fool Stock Advisor. You get two new stock recommendations every month from David and Tom Gardner.

You also get Best Buys Now and so much more. go to our podcast center and scroll down to the bottom of the page. That's podcast.com. That's going to do it for this week's edition of Motley Fool Money. Our engineer is Rick Engdal. Our producer is Mack Greer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.