I spent the last two years driving a large, multi-year moonshot at LinkedIn—360Brew [paper, talk]. It aimed to revolutionize ranking and recommendations across the company and give LinkedIn an edge. (In a separate post, I’ll write about the challenges of running a moonshot.)
As the initiative grew from exploration to a company-wide top priority, my responsibilities expanded: many teams, frequent reviews with executives, and—inevitably—lots of trade-offs. As the DRI, I made calls that pushed some work to the top, removed some from the roadmap entirely, made tough hiring decisions, and allocated resources. That’s the job: prioritize, say no, and manage resources.
This, of course, made some people unhappy. As a leader I follow three principles:
- Put people first. Take care of people by connecting them with the right opportunities.
- Enter discussions without a fixed opinion. Seek the best outcome for the project, the people, and the company.
- Be transparent. Make sure everyone understands the reasons behind each decision—even if they don’t agree.
For a while, the discussion stayed where it belonged—inside docs, reviews, and rooms. But as the project grew into a top company initiative, the dynamics changed. One day someone showed me a Blind thread about 360Brew, full of disinformation. It was strange to see the conversation move to Blind and distort reality. Over time, the focus shifted from the project to me and other leads. The tone sharpened. Anonymous handles stated rumors as facts. The project’s rough edges became “proof” of bad faith.
At first, the personal attacks stung. I had asked people to raise concerns in meetings or 1:1s, so seeing them turn to Blind felt odd. What hurt most was how little it matched real life. People shipped. People learned new skills. Some earned promotions and bonuses. A few took what they built with us and landed great roles elsewhere.
Assymery and negative attention
Reading Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call helped me name what was happening. He describes Asymmetry in attention and negative attention in modern life—and it has two sides:
- For attention givers: For most of history, attention was symmetric and one-to-one within a small community of family and friends. In a project that directly involves ~50 people and indirectly touches 200–300, I can’t attend to everyone and every detail as much as others can focus on me and my decisions. This asymmetry of attention can push some people to use other channels to project their attention onto me and other leads.
- For attention takers: For most of history, our “audience” was a few dozen people. Our social wiring hasn’t caught up to the reality that, online, the audience is everyone. So when anonymous posters—dunk on you, your brain still reads it as if your friends and family are turning on you.
That asymmetry explains the mismatch between what’s true on the ground and what trends in a thread. It was the root cause of what I felt so acutely—and of why others sought other outlets.
What I learned (and keep learning)
Leadership doesn’t grant immunity from being misunderstood. It guarantees it. The decisions that create focus—choosing a path, saying no, changing a plan—also create friction. Most of that friction is healthy: debate, pushback, better designs. Some of it spills into places that often lack a constructive goal.
A few practical shifts helped me regain my footing:
- Culture of transparency and open discussion. I doubled down on transparency and made sure anyone who wanted to understand had a venue to do so. We kept documents open access with clear explanations of actions taken and planned—the “why” was already documented.
- Kindness with boundaries. When a criticism was fair, I absorbed it. When it was false, I named it and moved on.
- Thick skin ≠ a hard heart. The goal isn’t to stop feeling; it’s to feel the signal (what’s useful) without letting the noise (what’s performative) steer the ship.