Creating connecting and collaborating

Deep Nishar, Linkedin’s vice president of Product Development, in an interesting conversation with Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News discussed the company’s business plans in India, behavioral patterns of Indian users, trends and insight of networking portal business and much more. Excerpts:

From Linkedin perspective, what are your India plans?

We are seeing tremendous growth in this market. India is the fastest growing market in the world.

As a company, we are growing at 180 per cent year on year (Y-o-Y) and so we are here to understand what our users are doing; to understand how we can serve better the advertisers and corporates.

So that’s the plan and we are very bullish about India market and we have invested extremely here. Moreover, we are getting good revenues from advertisements from here.

We are looking to have a team of our own on the ground. I and the company have a firm commitment to hire the brightest talent in the world. We will start with a country manager here and are looking at people who have passion for our business and what we do.

How different are Indian users from the users of other countries in terms of behavioral patterns and using the networking sites?

I believe in three key things that networking sites are doing – ‘Creating, Connecting and Collaborating.’ I find Indian users to be very good in the first two – creating and connecting; however, when it comes to collaboration we don’t find necessarily that the professionals here are taking full advantages of all the tools on site unlike their overseas partners. We need to educate the users here on the need of collaboration.

In recent times, there’s this new emerging trend of networking portal business and do you think it’s more of a rat race, which is similar to the dotcom boom and the bubble burst in mid and late 90s?

I don’t think that is the case here. Linkedin started in 2003 and at that time there were a lot of other companies in both social and professional networking space. Many of them haven’t been that much successful and so networking is not just about saying that I have networking site and so come and join the site. It is about how you provide real value and understanding as to what will bring the users to the site and why. Providing real values sounds easier than doing it in real, which is why there are different players standing today than five years ago.

Most major tech and software companies have established research and development (R&D) centers utilizing the local talents in various ways. Is Linkedin planning to do such activities in India?

Yes. We are a company of about 400 people, and right now all our developments happen in Mountain View. But we are keeping our options open in terms of future. I am believer in outsourcing talents anywhere in the world. In the past, when I was managing the Asia Pacific for Google, we had presence in 10 places across Asia including Bangalore, Hyderabad in India along with Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei and a host of other places.

Which are the revenue streams for Linkedin?

We have fairly diverse revenue streams right now that compliment our business. Among the revenue streams are advertising - corporates pay us in order to source high-end talents; and then subscriptions of software solutions where we sell special solutions to corporates as software-as-a-service (SaaS) package to enable them to not just post their job vacancies but also to source fairly high-end candidates because about 46 per cent of Linkedin users are decision makers.

Subscriptions are for individuals but it’s not necessarily just emails but we find lots of sales persons, business development people, hedge fund mangers, venture capitalists and many others. These people look for partners – they use it in order to find right people and reach out to them.

All the three streams are very robust businesses and neither one is so dominant that the other two get overshadowed by it.

Diversity of business revenues is very important when you consider an Internet company. Most of the Internet companies have advertising as the only means of revenues and when you get your growth in markets other than the US or Western Europe then you run into trouble because your cost structure doesn’t change; in fact it goes off. So revenue diversity is very important.

What are your views about social networking sites and its localizations as per the users’ culture and geographies?

Definitely, understanding the needs and what the local market wants is very important for any one to be successful. Look and feel is just a part of catering to local users’ needs. And more importantly, I believe in building features for them, understanding what they want in using products and services and how I can make them frictionless for them.

The good and bad news about online businesses is that the users can come easily to you, but they can leave you even faster! So unless you don’t have real value you will not be able to keep the users for long time.

What will be the next big thing for networking portals?

One of the things in social networking portals is that you find the explosion of data because people are constantly doing something or the other on the network. So social networks can make use of that data in order to provide additional value to users and secondly make that data available to users so that they become smarter too.

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