(Transcript Edited By Abhishek Kapoor)
We met up with Deep Nishar, Vice President of Products, LinkedIn at IIT Mumbai yesterday and queried him about Linkedin and its plans for India.
Deep Nishar, who recently took over as Vice President of Products, LinkedIn and was earlier with Google where he worked on products like Google Maps and Orkut.
Q 1) How can technology play an incremental role in building a corporate network? What are the benefits that can be derived from technology?
The technology cycle is already occupied at least from my vantage point over the last two decades. A lot of back office operation that used to happen on pieces of paper like the old Khatavahis that people used to have started moving to corporate packages. Initially they were built in an ad hoc manner for some of the large corporates and then the large enterprise software companies came into existence. Now, they are moving towards cloud computing, where you don’t need to own any software or hardware. All we do is look for the application that you want and you find them on the web. In that way, an interesting cycle for entrepreneurs as well because if i had to start my company today, It would cost a lot less money and lot less time to do it. A lot of things like data center, storage, processing power, etc are just available. I can go to companies like Amazon-easy service, give them my credit card details and I’m good to go. These technologies have become open source, they’re freely available while the engineers can start leveraging them which avoids reinventing them. So what its doing is, reducing the development cycle, reducing the cost, reducing the no. of resources it needs in order to accomplish things.
Q 2) LinkedIn is one of the largest professional networks in India. What are your plans from a product perspective and from a scale up perspective in India?
One of the reasons we are here in India is because we have seen tremendous growth in this market. India has grown faster than any other market for LinkedIn. We have seen over 180% Y-o-Y growth. We are here in India now to understand what users are looking forward from LinkedIn. We are here to better understand our advertisers and to talk to corporates about how we can better serve. So, to summarize we are very bullish in this market and we are committed to investing in it.
Q 3) How is the response to revenues from India? What percentage of global revenue comes from India?
Its very good. Not just the usage, even the statistics are very well. But, as a private company we cannot share the exact numbers. (Laughs)
Q 4) How different are Indian users from international users are there certain behavioral patterns in your opinion?
I earlier spoke about the 3 ‘C’s. Create. Connect and Collaborate. In my opinion, Indian users are very good at Creating and Connecting. But, when it comes to Collaboration we don’t find it necessary that professionals over here are taking advantage from their overseas networks. As a part of this education, we need to educate our users better. And as a part of the web, users are becoming savvier. People want to use the power of their network which will only get better with time.
Q 5) Your view on app economy. What are the various revenue streams that LinkedIn looks at going forward?
We are fairly diverse revenue streams right now. Advertising is just one of them. Corporates pay us for talent recruitment solutions for very high-end talent on a SaaS model. This is different from the job posting model that we had on LinkedIn and its more of a solution for corporates to search and hire talents. This works for us as 46% of linkedin’s user base falls in the high end talent category. So we have VCs looking for partners, corporates looking for top management via this model.
Q 6) Can you give us the break up between the various revenue models?
I can’t give you a break up but all three – Corporate solutions, advertising and subscriptions are failry robust revenue models for us. We believe that diversity in revenue streams is very important for consumer internet companies. This is because as a consumer internet company you rely on only one revenue stream and look to expand in newer markets, and then your cost structure goes up but revenue doesn’t scale at the same time. Hence sole reliance on advertising is not preferable.
Q 7) What kind of team would be hired in India? When?
There is no specific time line, but we are looking to hire the best people. The first person that we’re looking to hire is a Country Manager for LinkedIn in India.
Our Analysis
We believe Linkedin is making a smart move in not cluttering users with too many apps and building the only form of serious and credible business networking available online. They are also making sure they move ahead with company profiles and we here at WATBlog believe that Linkedin’s ultimate aim would be the most comprehensive search engine for people and companies in the business world and given the global world we are in India seems like an important market.
Any updates on who will be the new country head for LinkedIn? I have heard that everyone and their pop has thrown their hat in the ring to try and get the job. My money is on an ex-googler or ex-yahoo getting the job.
Thoughts?
We just announced the appointment of Hari V. Krishnan as country manager of India.