Daniel Shapero, CEO of LinkedIn and Ryan Roslansky, EVP of LinkedIn and Microsoft Office.
Courtesy: LinkedIn
Microsoft has tapped Dan Shapero to be the new CEO of its LinkedIn division, succeeding Ryan Roslansky, who has run the subsidiary since 2020 and last year took on additional responsibility in Microsoft’s Office productivity group. The change is effective immediately.
“Dan has led sales, marketing, and product across the most important parts of this business,” Roslansky wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday announcing the move. “He knows our members, our customers, and carries the mission in a way that’s genuinely rare.”
Roslansky, who came to LinkedIn from Glam Media in 2009 to be product chief and six years ago took over the group from Jeff Weiner, will retain his position as executive vice president at Microsoft. In his six years, membership has grown to 1.3 billion from about 700 million.
LinkedIn’s revenue increased 11% year over year in the fourth quarter, as the business social network has added members and sought to generate more money from each of them. Growth has slowed since Microsoft acquired the company for $27 billion in 2016. Meta is more than 10 times bigger than LinkedIn by revenue, and reported nearly 24% growth in the fourth quarter.
Microsoft has been busy adding artificial intelligence features across its Office products and in LinkedIn, while also spending heavily on data center infrastructure to provide AI computing power to cloud clients.
“The power of economic opportunity and the promise of LinkedIn has never been more important than it is today as the world is transformed by AI and professionals everywhere must transition along with it,” Shapero, who joined LinkedIn as a general manager in 2008 after running consulting projects at Bain & Co., wrote in a LinkedIn post.
The revamp comes weeks after Microsoft’s top-ranking Office leader, Rajesh Jha, announced plans to retire. Jha said he had been working with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on succession and was feeling good about the future, with Roslansky and other executives in the Office group reporting to Nadella.
Earlier this year gaming leader Phil Spencer left Microsoft after 38 years, and Charlie Bell, who was in charge of cybersecurity products, became an individual contributor.
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