Jeff, thank you very much for your time today.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> [CROSSTALK] have you here.

>> Yeah, it's great to be here.

>> Let me start off by saying that we usually ease in to those conversations

with lighter topics, however,

there is a very special topic in everyone's mind this week.

And that is recent immigration policies.

So, we are 40% international and it's affected us quite deeply.

So as a CEO representing your company to the public,

how did you think about reacting to last weekend's executive order?

>> Yeah, first of all, it's great to be here, thank you so much for having me.

>> Thank you.

>> So there's different ways to go about addressing an issue like that,

and you have to think about, your audience, your constituencies and

who you're trying to reach and what your objectives are.

The first thing to keep in mind in a situation like that, at least for

us at LinkedIn, is the well being and the safety of our employees.

We, like the student body here, have a number of immigrants at the company.

We have a number of people who have yet

to become citizens who are here on working visas and green cards.

And we want to make sure that we could identify anyone

who was a citizen from one of the named seven countries.

And that they were here and present and accounted for and safe.

And we want to also do that for their immediate family.

So that was the very first consideration.

The next thing we wanted to do was make sure that we were making

clear how people could get involved if they wanted to help and make a difference.

As a company, our vision is to create economic opportunity for

every member of the global workforce, all of them.

That is irrespective of country of origin, ethnicity, religious belief.

And we have had some ongoing programmes to help

refugees find work that started in Sweden and we had some success there.

So [INAUDIBLE] success we extended that programme to Canada.

And with the executive order that was announced here last Friday, we accelerated

the launch of, what we call the welcome talent program here in the United States.

We also wanted to make sure that employees who wanted to get involved,

understood that through our employee-based foundation, they could contribute and

we could allocate those funds to efforts that are making a difference.

Then there was the third kind of dimension of this which is making clear,

at least from my perspective, where I stood on this and it's important, I don't

feel the need to comment on everything, to be able to comment on anything.

And from time to time there are going to be issues that I feel are important for

me to address, and they're important to our employees.

And this is one of those times.

And in a situation like this, least to my experience,

one of the things that I've learned is that you have to strike

a very delicate balance when you're expressing personal belief vs

expressing belief as a CEO, because you're representing your employees, your company.

And in this particular instance, I felt the need to express my own views on this.

And that was that this country, the United States, was founded

on our first principle and belief that all people

should have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And America- >> [APPLAUSE]

>> That America has truly been a land of

opportunity.

It is a country and an economy that was largely built on the tireless efforts

of immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life for themselves and

their families, that ultimately created a spirit of entrepreneurship.

And were able to innovate and introduced products and services and

build companies that employed many, many people and

made a difference in a lives of so many in this country and beyond.

And I shared through social media the statistic that some people maybe less

familiar with but that 40% of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or

the children of immigrants just as one empirical point to support this idea.

And then again coming back to our vision as a company where this becomes

aligned is our position, our purpose to create economic opportunity for

every member of the global workforce.

And so I was expressing that position and at the same time, and

you asked the question, how is the CEO do I address this, it's very important for

any of you that go on to start your own company, join companies,

become senior leadership or become a CEO yourself, that you recognize that not

every employee within your organization may agree with you or

may agree with the people they work next to day in and day out.

And this was a very valuable lesson

that many of us learned during this election cycle.

Because a lot of folks in California vote a certain way, in Silicon Valley

vote a certain way, within a specific company, may vote a certain way.

And so, as I was expressing these thoughts, I wanted to make sure that our

team understood that mine was one opinion, that other people within the organization

may disagree, and that we should be respectful of those disagreements.

We want to create an environment where people feel like they belong

as long as that's consistent with our culture and values.

And again, that is an organization and an environment where all people,

irrespective of their country of origin, their political leanings or affiliations,

their creeds, their orientation, it is independent of all those things.

We're going to treat one another with compassion and we're going to take care of

one another, we're going to be respectful of one another.

>> Thank you very much for that.

We've been having a very rich debate over the past few days internally between both

classes and

drawing the line between our personal reactions to what as an institution

we need to represent, has been a tricky, I'll say at least, discussion.

So thank you very much for this perspective, it's great.

And before we go into the specifics of LinkedIn, I wanted to get your take on

another topic that could potentially have very high impact on the workforce.

So a couple of months ago you addressed the LinkedIn employees and

you told them about what some people refer to as the fourth industrial revolution.

So can you tell us a bit more about that concept and how you think it's actually

going to shift the dynamics of the workforce and the economy as well?

>> Yeah, absolutely, so this was a theory that

I first became familiar with through the World Economic Forum,

they were talking about the fourth industrial revolution.

The first, mechanization, largely based on the steam engine.

And the second was mass production, and that was largely based on

the introduction of electricity, division of labor, assembly lines and factories.

The third was automation and that followed electronics, early stage computing and IT.

And this fourth industrial revolution based on robotization.

And the technologies and

the innovations underpinning this fourth industrial revolution includes robots.

AI, sensors, autonomous driving, etc.

And what's noteworthy about this Fourth Industrial Revolution is that,

in the first three cases, new innovations, new technologies gave rise to

companies that generated massive gains in productivity and new job opportunities.

And there is increasingly a belief that in this

latest Fourth Industrial Revolution that may not be the case.

That the new technologies may actually displace more workers and

jobs than they create.

And certainly,

that was the case in this body of research from the World Economic Forum, where

they predicted, well, 7 million gross jobs would be eliminated between now and 2020.

2 million would be added through the advent of new technologies,

so we would lose 5 million jobs.

And there are some that believe that is a highly conservative estimate.

That more people than that will be displaced as a result of new

technologies and innovation and you can see this now and start to feel it.

And sure enough, at this year's Davos event that's hosted by

the World Economic Forum, there was a general consensus that one of the key

points to come out of this one, the key learnings was this whole meme,

this whole idea, has been discussed now for years.

It's been predicted for years.

And if you talked to attendees this year, they felt like something had tipped.

And whether it was heads of state or CEOs, founders,

there was a general consensus that it was no longer a prognostication.

It was actually happening.

And all of you have probably seen this anecdotally, week in and

week out, if you're following business news.

It seems like literally every other week,

there's another story about a major factory that has decided to deploy

robot technology that will displace tens of thousands of people.

Or a major retailer and major warehousing infrastructure that has

grown the number of robots being deployed by tens of thousands.

Or autonomous driving which has the potential to happen far faster than anyone

could have anticipated.

And for those that don't know,

trucking, it's the number one profession in California.

A lot of people don't realize that.

And what happens to those folks?

I think it's absolutely essential that any time there are stories about

these new technologies, it's wonderful to be excited about innovation and

things that could potentially unlock tons of value on a global basis for people.

But I think it's also equally important, if not more important,

every time we see these articles to understand what's happening to the people

who are being impacted and potentially displaced.

What programs are we putting into place to reskill these employees?

Are they being certified in new skills for the jobs that are and

will be as opposed to the jobs that once were?

Where is the spirit of entrepreneurship and

the investment and the energy in vocational training and

innovation in how we train people to take on these new technologies and

the job opportunities created by these new technologies?

How are we leveraging infrastructure that we couldn't have even dreamed of

decades ago?

Take LinkedIn as an example, when you look at the data we have,

we're developing the world's first economic graph and

our understanding take any locality in the world.

And we're in a position now where we can understand the fastest growing jobs within

that locality, the skills required to obtain those jobs.

We can understand the skills of the aggregate workforce within that locality.

We can measure the gap and then we can provide this data to junior colleges,

vocational training facilities, even four year universities and

help them to create just in time curriculum.

This is the kind of thing, I think, increasingly as a society,

we need to be spending more time on understanding and solving for.

>> All right, so actually you've touched the point, I was about to ask you next,

which is educational reform is something that you're very passionate about.

So let me rephrase the question and ask are there any systems out there that you

think will provide the better match to the shifting economy and

the needs of the workforce moving forward?

>> Well, coming back to education reform because it goes well beyond how

we're going to reskill displaced workers, I think from a generational

perspective it starts with primary education and then K through 12.

And we need to make sure that increasingly, we are providing schools and

teachers the assets, the curriculum, the technology they need

to bring our students into the 21st century successfully.

Rote learning and the same things that were deployed to help people train for

the industrial revolutions that came prior, that we talked about.

For those who don't know, well, we'll do a little bit of pop quiz.

How many in the audience know why there is summer vacation in American schools?

>> So that kids could go harvest.

>> So the kids could go harvest the fields.

When was the last time any of you went out harvesting the fields?

>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, do you know why in part,

we sit in rows and why rote learning was such

an important part of primary school, anyone, yeah?

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah, assembly lines, so

we exist in a different world and

increasingly the world has become more digital more networked.

Things change much faster than they've ever changed.

That's not anecdotal, it's empirical.

And so, we need to teach critical reasoning.

We need to teach creative problem solving.

We need to teach collaboration.

We need to teach compassion.

We need to change the way in which we're training the future workforce.

I think there are now technologies that we could take advantage of,

that will help teachers and help administrators focus more and

more of their time on teaching these skills.