LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner To Become Its Chairman, Resigns As CEO

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced that he is leaving his position on June 1 to become the executive chairman for the professional networking site.

His role will be filled by current Vice President of Product Ryan Roslansky, according to a post on LinkedIn. Roslansky will report to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and serve as a member of the senior leadership team, Weiner said.

Weiner has been the CEO since 2008. In his post, he said the last 11 years have been “the greatest professional experience” of his life, and that he felt LinkedIn was only getting started despite its success so far.

He added that there were “several factors” in deciding it was time for his career change. Among them was his opinion that the company has been doing well as of late, with a strong culture and a clear future. He said his ambitions had begun to expand beyond those of the CEO’s day-to-day role, and that decades of working with Roslansky had convinced him that Roslansky was the right choice for the job moving forward.

Weiner said the shift to chairman would give him the chance to spend more time on LinkedIn’s broader goal of creating “economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce and closing the Network Gap,” as well as work on the Compassion Project, which aims to make sure compassion is taught in schools across America. He wants to do more investing and coaching as well to breed the next generation of business leaders.

He also wrote that Roslansky had selected Tomer Cohen — who currently works with LinkedIn on market solutions — to be the new vice president of product.

LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. The site has more than 675 million members, and Microsoft reported $11.8 billion in revenue for the second quarter, including a 24 percent growth for LinkedIn revenues.