Why is there strong competition for every other social media site? This seems to come down to a few market dynamics: 1. The major influencers who adopt it and bring their followers 2. New networks bring new leaderboards which attract the next generation that has zero equity on the existing sites 3. Regular engagement is critical, otherwise every network faces a death spiral 4. Engagement required to drive ad revenue

LinkedIn is notable for not being affected by these: 1. There are no major influencers (though they tried.) The most influential person on LinkedIn is very close in value to the median software engineer 2. There are no significant leaderboards (though they tried.) Few people care how many followers others have 3. Regular engagement doesn't matter, because it is still the Schelling point for irregular life events (ie needing a job.) 4. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions for recruiters, so the lower engagement is not an existential crisis.

LinkedIn is an always-on jobs expo pretending to be social media. Even the executives think they are social media. They are actually something else.

Some angles to compete: 1. Build better data for an underserved segment. Obvious choice is SWE, but MSFT owns Github as a firewall here. Another candidate is the top 1% of executives: they might be the major influencers that haven't been activated yet. 2. Build an identity layer that mitigates risk of fake job seekers. LinkedIn has halfheartedly tried this but their inertia might be an opportunity. 3. Build the Github for other segments: the verifiable portfolios that show real work. 4. Build a frontrunner to the hiring pipeline. If every star candidate can be identified three months before they start looking on LinkedIn, the recruiting system there will fall apart. 5. Build the workplace social media network that users actually want to use daily. LinkedIn failed at this, and their effort indicates they see the risk of disruption coming from here.

Some existing companies that are on the right track: 1. Slack. Already owns DAU for work, well-funded, competes with MSFT in many domains. 30% confident they've considered moving into this space, but Benioff getting AI-pilled will slow it down. 2. Behance. Owned the market for designers, sold to Adobe, game over. 2. Glassdoor. Useful data that LinkedIn doesn't own, but they seem to have embraced the Yelp business model instead. 3. Fishbowl. Daily engagement solved but they've backed into a local maxima. 4. Upwork. Stuck with low-end brand that will prevent them from winning this market. 5. X. Has all the pieces except for a leader who cares about a jobs board. Would need a certain kind of leader for their jobs product to get it to win. 6. Every other talent startup: fighting for the right revenue, but they almost always approach it from the transactional staffing model or the ATS subscription model. Would need someone to buy all of them up and launch a network with 100M profiles on day one.