Everyone should have a chance to sit across the table from Allen Blue.  Allen is a co-founder of LinkedIn.  And if you haven’t noticed it, LinkedIn is growing faster than the weeds in your garden.  About 200,000 people per week.

Allen has an erudite style.  Hard to believe he is an entrepreneur because he sounds more like a professor.  He waxed philosophical about the value of iteration – trying something new and then tweaking it as you go along.  In effect, new ideas get perfected by the community of the many instead of the management ‘few’. 

I love his point, “We make it up as we go along.  If you ask consumers about your ideas, they will say, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’  It’s better to build something light-weight and see if we can innovate effectively and then iterate.”

It’s this brave innovation that contributes to LinkedIn’s success.  The ability to be willing to endure continual feedback, even if it’s negative, is a sign of strength and one of the web values of intimacy with your consumers.  Better to have your consumers co-create with you than launch something with your initials and ego all over it.