This is Recode Media, Peter Kafka. That's me. It's powered by digital media. That is a real company with a funny name. And I'm here with Dan Roth, who's also a funny guy. A Rye guy. How are you? Good. How are you doing? Dan and I used to work together a long time ago, nearly 20 years ago.

That's right. Holy shit, we're old. And now you work at Microsoft. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's true.

Have you thought about that yet?

You know, it's been an interesting progression because the deal happened, what feels like, so long ago now, and we've all been living with it for a long time. I'm doing a terrible podcasting hosting job. I should explain what your actual job is. You work at LinkedIn running their content. you're the contents are at LinkedIn. I'm the executive editor of LinkedIn, so I oversee all of the original content on LinkedIn, the influencer program, which is these group of sort of celebrities of the business world.

You're the most powerful man in business journalism, I read when I was Googling you this morning.

That was written by your old boss, Henry Blach.

There was nothing better than a business insider headline. It's great. The superlatives are awesome, and they get repeated everywhere. The SEO value is, that will be on my tombstone, I think. So we'll talk about all that. What I was saying was, you now work for Microsoft because LinkedIn got bought by Microsoft, and I think the deal just went through like days or weeks ago. Probably a week. Probably the time you hear this a few weeks ago.

So how has life changed for you now that Microsoft is paying for your salary?

So far there have been no changes.

This is, I think it's been an incredibly smooth process where we started laying out month,

as soon as the deal happened, started thinking through what

could this be like if and when the merger goes through. And there are some pretty powerful

opportunities to create. If you've seen any of the, you know, Jeff Wiener, our CEO and

Sotia Nadella, Microsoft CEO, both wrote posts on LinkedIn about what this could look like. And one of the things they called out was creating the world's largest news desk, the world's largest business news desk. Right. So from the get-go, right, sometimes when a merger like this happens, they'll say, nothing's going to change. Completely autonomous. Everyone's going to go ahead and do their job. And obviously something's going to change down the line.

But from the get-go, your boss and CEO of Microsoft said, we're going to work together.

We're going to figure out ways to import LinkedIn in some capacity to Microsoft.

So that meant your job is going to change in some capacity.

The way that Jeff put it to us is, I think the phrasing was pretty cool, which is think about your,

and this is LinkedIn, so we tend to speak in very language about how great things could be,

is your dreams amplified. All the programs, everything that we're working on, how does Microsoft

help amplify what we're doing? And all of the discussions that we working on, how does Microsoft help amplify what we're doing?

And all of the discussions that we've had is how does Microsoft help grow LinkedIn?

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