LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner says buffer time is invaluable

MOST people who want a break from work can take one easily enough. It's called lunch. But not for LinkedIn boss Jeff Weiner.

MOST people who want a break from work can take one easily enough. It's called a lunch hour. Jeff Weiner, the boss of LinkedIn, does things differently. He sets aside two hours a day for strolling round the office and thinking, and even has a name for it - buffer time.

"I find it invaluable. When I don't have that time, I think I am a lot less effective," he says. It is the sort of hippy-dippy idea that could only be dreamed up in the cosseted, sun-baked surroundings of Silicon Valley.

But as chief executive of the internet company that allows members to post their CVs online and connect with each other, Weiner has earned such privileges. Unlike the three tech titans that gave Wall Street a bloody nose - Facebook, Groupon, Zynga - LinkedIn has been an unqualified hit with investors. In the two years since going public, shares in the social network for professionals have soared from their $US45 debut price to dollars $US199.9 on Friday.

Revenues will hit almost $US1.5bn this year, compared with $79m before Weiner became boss in 2009. He has also presided over a surge in member numbers from 33m to 225m and counting - it is estimated that two sign up every second.

It is enough to draw high praise from Sir Michael Moritz, the investor who backed Google, YouTube and PayPal and sits on LinkedIn's board.

"What Jeff has been able to achieve probably deserves to be placed among the greater leadership achievements in Silicon Valley over the past 25 years."

This has led to a problem that most chief executives would be happy to have - how to justify the company's vertigo-inducing valuation. LinkedIn is worth some $US20bn, or roughly 1000 times its net income last year of $22m.

Weiner, eschewing the Silicon Valley uniform of chinos and polo shirt for a navy blue suit during a visit to the London office, sees nothing to worry about.

"I sleep pretty well. The things I am most focused on in maintaining our growth are very similar to when I first joined. One of my favourite expressions in business is that managing a hyper-growth company is like putting a rocket into space: if you are off by inches at launch, you will be off by miles in orbit."

It is one of the more straightforward pieces of business philosophy offered by Weiner, 43, whose conversation is peppered with management speak. Despite giving up consultancy for the media, some habits die hard.

And like any self-respecting tech-head, he cites Steve Jobs, Apple's late boss, as an important influence.When Jobs returned for his second stint at the company, Weiner explains, the Apple founder decreed that it was too sprawling and it should focus on one thing - the iMac. That decision paved the way for all the best-selling gadgets that followed.

"I was struck by how a company with those resources would be that focused," says Weiner. "When I got to LinkedIn, I asked the question, 'If we could do one thing, what would it be?'"

Weiner has a not-so-snappy phrase to sum up what the company is all about: "Connecting talent with opportunity on a massive scale." He insists this does not mean the site is just for people who are looking for a new job. That is an outdated view, he says.

"The vast majority of activity taking place on LinkedIn is orientated around people wanting to be better at the job they are already in. Only a small percentage pertains to job seeking."

That said, a big proportion of income comes from companies paying to recruit staff via the site. But LinkedIn is evolving. It has taken to publishing material it thinks will be helpful to members in their professional lives, whether or not they are job hunting. Weiner says the site has become a "personalised trade magazine" where users can choose to receive news relevant to their job or industry.

There are also about 1.5m websites with a "Share on LinkedIn" button so members can recommend pages to people in their networks.

Weiner is proudest of the Influencers section of the site, where the likes of David Cameron, Barack Obama and Bill Gates can post clips of themselves telling stories and providing advice and insights. The person with the most followers is Sir Richard Branson.

"He's the most popular influencer on LinkedIn. He's fast approaching 2m followers," says Weiner enthusiastically.

This is all well and good, but don't people who are not signed up to LinkedIn get a little peeved when they are bombarded with emails from people they have never heard of asking them to connect? And does joining up mean more spam?

"I don't think you would get more [spam] necessarily. If you did, it would be marginal. And just because you are receiving invitations from people, does not mean you have to accept them. You develop your own model. For me, if I've never met the person, I won't accept the invitation. And if I'm not going to be working with them going forward, I wouldn't accept."

All this hooking up online invites inevitable comparisons with Facebook which, with more than 1bn members, is still much larger than LinkedIn. Weiner does not accept this.

"Eighty per cent of our members want to keep their professional lives separate from their personal lives," he says.

When asked why LinkedIn's shares have performed so much better than some of the company's tech peers, he is as diplomatic as a candidate in a job interview.

"It's hard to draw comparisons, every company is in a different situation. But one thing to bear in mind is timing. Looking at the value created since these companies' inception provides a different perspective. Some of them have performed admirably."

Weiner has always had a thing about analysing numbers. The son of a CBS broadcasting executive, he used to scour his father's copy of Variety, the entertainment industry bible, for weekly box office takings and television viewing figures.

"I was fascinated by the data. Dad and I would watch television together and as well as watching shows like a normal audience, we'd talk about the commercials and how it all worked," says Weiner.

After graduating in economics from Wharton business school, he spent two years at a consulting firm. His lucky break came when an office pal was called by a headhunter, who was seeking an analyst to join the corporate development team at Warner Brothers. The colleague had accepted a place at Harvard Business School, so he recommended Weiner for the job with the film and music conglomerate.

It was 1994, the Stone Age in terms of the development of the internet, and Warner Bros was looking at creating an interactive division. Sensing an opportunity, Weiner volunteered to help draw up the business plan. He ended up staying for six years before moving to Yahoo. There, Weiner became responsible for the search function, which continuously came off second best to Google.

With no small amount of understatement, he says it was a battle that he felt "pretty keenly". He joined LinkedIn after being introduced to its co-founder, Reid Hoffman, at a technology conference in 2008.

It must be nice to run a business where there are no direct competitors of any scale.

"The ability to play your own game rather than playing the game of a competitor is exactly where you want to be as a company," Weiner agrees.

It is not all plain sailing. After the quarterly results in May, the share price dropped because the company reined in sales and profit forecasts for the second quarter. The reason was that advertising sales are expected to show only moderate growth after big one-off deals a year ago.

The boss is unfazed: "We're not going to be overly focused on any individual quarter's performance. We're much more focused on the long term and that's been the case since we went public."

There is plenty to go for. For example, LinkedIn is one of the few western websites that is allowed to operate freely in China, even though it has no base there. It has more than 3m members in the country, which is one of its fastest-growing markets. Intriguingly, so too is Germany.

Weiner is nothing if not ambitious. The long-term aim is to have every company in the world profiled on LinkedIn and the planet's 3bn workers represented there. The immediate goal is to sign up all the 600m "knowledge workers" in the world.

"If you start with that immediately addressable audience, we are already north of one in three."

Little wonder he needs a break.