LinkedIn Names Dan Shapero as New CEO, Succeeding Ryan Roslansky

Microsoft has appointed Dan Shapero as chief executive of LinkedIn, replacing Ryan Roslansky effective immediately. The announcement came Wednesday via posts from both executives on the platform itself, a gesture that underscored the continuity Microsoft wants to project at the professional network.

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Who Is Dan Shapero

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Shapero has spent 18 years at LinkedIn, making him one of the longest-serving senior figures at the company. He joined in 2008 as a general manager after working on consulting projects at Bain & Co., and has held leadership roles across product, sales, and marketing throughout his tenure. For the past five years he served as chief operating officer, the role from which he now steps up.

In a post announcing his appointment, Shapero tied his priorities directly to the AI transition reshaping the labor market. He wrote that the promise of economic opportunity through LinkedIn has never mattered more than it does now, as professionals everywhere face pressure to adapt to a workforce being reorganized around AI tools and automation.

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Ryan Roslansky: Six Years Leading LinkedIn

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Roslansky joined LinkedIn in 2009 from Glam Media to serve as product chief, and took over as CEO in 2020 when Jeff Weiner stepped aside. Over his six years running the company, membership roughly doubled, growing from around 700 million to 1.3 billion.

In his announcement post, Roslansky described Shapero as someone who knows the company's members and customers and carries the mission in a way he called genuinely rare. He will not be leaving Microsoft. Roslansky retains his position as executive vice president and continues to oversee the Office productivity group, with Shapero and other LinkedIn executives now reporting to Nadella directly.

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LinkedIn's Financial Position

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LinkedIn's revenue grew 11% year over year in the fourth quarter, as the company added members and worked to increase revenue per user. The number is respectable in isolation, but the gap with peers is wide.

For context:

• Meta reported nearly 24% revenue growth in the same quarter.
• Meta generates more than ten times LinkedIn's revenue on an annual basis.
• LinkedIn's growth rate has declined steadily since Microsoft acquired the company for $27 billion in 2016.

Microsoft has been integrating AI features into LinkedIn alongside its broader Office product suite, and has committed significant spending to data center infrastructure to support AI computing demand from cloud clients. Whether that investment translates into accelerated revenue growth at LinkedIn is a question Shapero now owns.

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Engineering Leadership Restructured

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The CEO transition comes with a set of moves in the engineering organization:

• Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn's senior vice president of engineering, will move to Microsoft as president of platform and digital work, reporting to Roslansky.
• Erran Berger and Raghu Hiremagalur, both LinkedIn vice presidents, will take over engineering leadership within LinkedIn.

The restructuring separates LinkedIn's engineering output from its platform-level Microsoft responsibilities, concentrating product-facing engineering under the two vice presidents while Shroff takes on a broader cross-company role.

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A Pattern of Leadership Change at Microsoft

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The LinkedIn transition is the latest in a sequence of senior departures and reassignments at Microsoft over recent months:

• Phil Spencer, who led the gaming division, left the company in February after 38 years.
• Charlie Bell, responsible for cybersecurity products, transitioned to an individual contributor role.
• Rajesh Jha, the senior executive running Office, announced plans to retire in March after 35 years at the company.

Jha had been working with Nadella on succession planning before his departure, and Roslansky was among the executives who absorbed broader responsibilities as part of that transition. Shapero's appointment as LinkedIn CEO now completes the realignment of that layer of Microsoft's leadership structure.