From Entrepreneur to Intrapreneur with Jake Hirsch-Allen
Episode 7
We’re shaking things up this episode! Jake Hirsch-Allen isn’t building a defined community like most of our guests, but he’s a connector in every sense of the word.
In his role at LinkedIn, Jake connects people and ideas to create social and economic impact. He’s passionate about building public and private partnerships to fight inequality and has done so through international criminal law and intellectual property law, global health, software development, entrepreneurship and education.
If you’re an entrepreneur joining a company as an intrapreneur, this episode is for you. Jake and Marsha chat about making that transition, creating meaningful partnerships, and Jake’s fascinating professional and personal journey.
“That regular disruption of my life, that regular creation of a new community forced me to learn how to build community really quickly. It allowed me to explore intercultural observations and experiences in ways that many don't have the opportunity to until later in their life, if ever.”
- Jake Hirsch-Allen
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A huge thank you to Origins Media Haus for producing this podcast. You can find them at:
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Episode Transcript
Marsha Druker 1:23
Jake, thank you so much for joining me on the Create Community podcast. I'm super excited for our conversation.
So you're a little bit of a different guest for this podcast because you're not exactly building a community that's similar to what other guests have done. But when I think of a community builder, you're somebody that instantly jumps to mind. You're truly a connector, you're an intrapreneur, you've been an entrepreneur, you've done so many exciting things in your career.
So I'm really excited to get your take on community and see how you perceive it.
But before we get into that, I really want to understand how you actually got to where you are today. So let's take it back right to the beginning. What was your upbringing and childhood like?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 2:06
I was raised overseas so I had quite an unusual childhood. My dad was a diplomat and I bounced around between Mexico and New Delhi, Washington and Israel always with Ottawa in between. And I think that regular disruption of my life, that regular creation of a new community forced me to learn how to build community really quickly, allowed me to explore intercultural observations and experiences in ways that many don't have the opportunity to till later in their life if ever. This created a really strong curiosity in me a desire to constantly learn more about other people and other communities and other cultures.
Marsha Druker 2:46
That's such an interesting upbringing and such a unique experience that you've had. When it came to deciding what to study in university, how did you go about making that decision and what did you end up studying?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 2:56
It was hard. I decided on University of Toronto After exploring many, many different post secondaries across North America, I was living in Washington DC for high school. And it was a pretty competitive environment to choose what school to go to. But I really wanted to come back to Canada. I saw it as home and was deciding between Mount Allison and University of Toronto - basically opposites on the spectrum of post secondary. A tiny little school in the middle of nowhere and a massive institution in our largest city. And I hadn't really begun to explore myself and cities and urban life in the way that I'd hoped. And so U of T was a relatively easy decision. But even once I got to U of T, deciding what I was going to study became challenging. And the approach I took I think, at that point was standard to begin with, which is to say I opened the thousand page U of T course book and started just flipping through to see what I was interested in. And I ended up with hundreds of little sticky notes, more courses than I could possibly ever take in a lifetime.
I think that was again evidence of the curiosity that has really driven a lot of my work since then. But in particular, I knitted together a bunch of courses that I thought were sort of foundational underlay the narratives are currently actually underlie the narratives and stories that are the basis for human society. And what popped up as a result of that was an interest in what I came to call archetypal mythology.
I had put together five courses in each semester that weren't really linked as part of any program and University of Toronto is large enough that they really liked people being streamlined. And so instead of following one course, at the end of that year, I was told I wouldn't be able to graduate in four years, because the content didn't really tie together, as I said, into one program, but I was lucky enough to find a mentor, the Dean of New College, and with her, I ended up building a self design major, I think there was three in my year at U of T. And we wove together this idea that you could study the fundamental narratives, again, that underlie our society, our culture. And the result was four really inspirational years that spanned classes on the Bible and the Quran to children's literature from classical mythology to the philosophy of science. And the result was a really fulfilling undergraduate education.
Marsha Druker 5:17
That's so incredible. I mean, you don't hear that a lot. I think most students especially like at the end of high school, they're thinking about what to specialize in what to study. And you think you have to fit into this box, you look at what's designed for you. And I think 99% of the time, people just kind of jump into it, and then maybe change majors if they're not really feeling it. You've kind of designed that from day one for yourself. I think that's so fascinating. And I think that's something where that could really inspire some students listening to this to look at their education in a different light and kind of take it into their own hands and design their own experience. So out of that incredible education that you received, how did you end up starting your career?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 5:58
Great question again. I definitely didn't start my career at any finite point. My goal in finishing undergrad was to keep as many doors open. And that's in part why I applied to law and international studies or international affairs programs right across not just North America, but also Europe. I think something like 17 programs in total, and often looking at the intersection of the two, in part because again, I wanted to understand the basis for society from either a legal perspective or internationally from a political perspective.
And I saw a balance perhaps between international affairs Master's at Johns Hopkin, and a law degree at McGill, which is what I ended up settling on, as a way to really craft that balance and keep as many of those doors open as possible.
And I think that's one of the key pieces of advice I often have for other students looking to decide what direction they're going to go in, which is to say, keeping doors open, being as open to new possibilities and the winding paths of life as possible is amongst the healthiest approaches to a career. And particularly in a day where whether it's technology changing our lives faster than we expect, or looking back on history, the fact that we can never really predict the paths that most people follow, no matter how linear they might have been, you know, a few generations ago in terms of say medicine or law, you inevitably would have mass disruptions like world wars and migration patterns that would change people's lives. And so I think that resilience and flexibility is really the fundamental recommendation that I have for most people starting out.
Marsha Druker 7:34
So you ended up doing so many different things before you landed in your current role. You've had a career in law, you've been in medicine, and you've had some entrepreneurial ventures as well. Can you take us through that journey a little bit?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 7:48
It's been winding for sure. In part, it was the result of the doors that I ended up opening. So for instance, by the time I finished law school, I decided not to go forward with the Masters in part because I had many jobs literally waiting for me. And even when I was in law school, I was really torn between the different interests that I had and how I could create social impact. Part of the inspiration for going to law itself was having watched films and undergrad about Rwanda, having followed my father through his work through the International Criminal Court and my mother through her work on gender mainstreaming and other aspects of human rights.
I really wanted to see if that was a way to create impact. And so when I was in law, I studied international criminal law, we had a clinic for the special court for Sierra Leone, which we turned into an International Criminal Law Clinic more generally supporting tribunals really right around the world. And then I also at the same time, studied intellectual property law, I loved tech. I loved the creative industries. And so copyright in that area was also of interest. And I was beginning to learn that the area and sustainable development and international development that had been most successful was access to medicines. And so on the side I started to explore that aspect of a potential career as well.
And those two tracks...one international criminal and human rights law and the second intellectual property law really determined the next few stages for me. So I started out at tribunals in The Hague and Cambodia. I was interning on defense teams defending war criminals at the former Tribunal for Yugoslavia at the court up in Cambodia, which is called the ECC, which is the extraordinary chambers of the courts of Cambodia, I believe. And in both cases, I was really frustrated, I was really disillusioned because the system was either not being welcomed in by the country and as a result was, I think, in many cases aggravating the challenging process of reconciliation rather than supporting it.
And in other cases, international politics, the realities of the history of for instance, the war in the former Yugoslavia meant that that tribunal really was struggling to prosecute in the ways that I would have hoped would set a precedent to decrease the potential for future tragedies, and so on. Quite quickly, I shifted gears, I had the opportunity in part because of my civil and common law background at McGill, French and English to clerk at the Supreme Court of Israel. And I think that was probably the most seminal moment in my legal career in beginning to understand the important role of ethics and values, not just in the world at large, but specifically in one's own career choices.
And so there for instance, I looked at specifically what the government of Israel should be doing with wiretap legislation, wiretap legislation in many countries is the most recent attempt to regulate privacy around technological surveillance. And as we know, that is a huge issue for us now a huge issue for LinkedIn, the company that I currently work at and for many of the other companies that I've worked with, and so some of these themes have really woven their way throughout my career and started there. I had an amazing mentor who counseled me before joining the Supreme Court professor at U of T and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel named Aharon Barak. And he taught me this principle that dignity, the sort of fundamental German, right, which in some ways underpins its entire legal system. And you could argue whenever there's a dispute between other values, it's fundamentally decided based on human dignity, that that should be what influences my career as a whole. And I hope to some extent that it has and will continue to so each of those were seminal moments. And now we're just at sort of, say a third of the way through the career on the way to LinkedIn.
Marsha Druker 11:43
Along that journey, you also founded Lighthouse Labs, which was such an amazing entrepreneurial venture. Lighthouse Labs actually ended up being my first long term partner for Fuckup Nights Toronto. What inspired you to start Lighthouse Labs and what was that experience like?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 12:03
Lighthouse was definitely not premeditated. When I was an intellectual property law and maybe to quickly go through that story. After leaving the Supreme Court of Israel actually had a job waiting for me in Canada I was lucky enough to have summered and then had the opportunity to article at a small firm called Gilbert's, which did intellectual property litigation and a fair bit of lobbying on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and intellectual property owners. So I both was learning the tech side and the access to medicines or pharma side of IP. And through that work, I confirmed one very important lesson. And this is something that I could have learned earlier, but I think I actually profited from learning late, which is that I'm a pretty terrible lawyer.
I am not detail oriented. I'm not adversarial. Many of the fundamental qualities that make a good practicing lawyer, certainly at a junior level. I think once you get more senior in the networking and business development and creative, connecting and ideas capacities become much more important as a lawyer, but I never got to that point, I left that law firm quite quickly, in order to pursue the two things that were most interesting while I was there, one was tech. And so I started working with a bunch of tech startups across Montreal and Toronto, and two was access to medicines. For almost a decade, I continued on that access to medicines front, so advising an organization called incentives for global health that had proposed a new model of paying for pharmaceuticals called the health impact fund. And that organization, I think, has had a massive influence as part of a larger movement to have countries pay for drugs for pharmaceuticals based on the performance of those drugs, the more health impact they have, the more they get paid. And I think that has done a great job in the Western and actually developing world in terms of increasing access to medicines.
And at the same time on the tech side, what I began to do was explore how I could best support these companies. As I said, law did not seem to be the right way. I thought originally that I could create referral relationships. So people would come to me asking me to solve a legal problem, and I'd pass them to the right lawyer. The legal system in Canada does not facilitate referrals. And so that quickly was removed as an option, but rather, the idea that I could refer people to tech, which was much more conducive and open to referral relationships to building a community and in the sense that we're talking about today became a reality. And more and more people came and said, Hey, can you build this website? Or can you build this app? And I didn't have those skills. I had sort of a vague idea of how you know, CSS and a basic HTML function, or what it should look like.
So instead, I had friends who I kept referring people to friends from, you know, Ultimate Frisbee at McGill, random other aspects of networking relatively constantly. And I think that networking is probably another thing that we can pick up as it's the basis really for most of my community, but that networking led to first the creation of functional imperative, a software development company. Because I kept referring people to the same couple developers who ended up suggesting that we form a company.
And then like so many other software development companies or even larger companies trying to hire developers, we couldn't find enough. And so we started guest lecturing. In fact, my colleagues started lecturing full time at Bit Maker, the first software boot camp in Canada. And relatively shortly thereafter, we started Lighthouse Labs out in BC. I think we wanted to create an institution based on a educational standard that was superior to any boot camp in Canada, really focused on hardcore software developers, not some of the peripheral skills that have come up since then.
And the result has been, you know, now, I think more software developers graduating from Lighthouse than anywhere other than Waterloo and an organization that's both educational results but also community, the group of people, not just who graduated from our programs, but also of companies that have hired from there and of individuals who have been involved in, you know, everything from the large free coding initiatives we've worked on to some of the social impact and community based organizations like Fuckup Nights that we've supported, has become one of probably the most proudest achievements of my career.
Marsha Druker 16:14
Absolutely. Lighthouse Labs is such a pillar. In Canada, in Toronto, it's so well known. And it's just seen as this incredible community organization that's making such a difference in education and how people are able to take their education into their own hands and really learn the skills that are needed to really make an impact in tech. So congratulations on building that.
Jake Hirsch-Allen 16:36
And to you for Fuckup Nights. I think one sort of feeds into the other and then compliments the other.
Marsha Druker 16:40
Thank you. Yeah, it's been such an amazing experience working with Lighthouse Labs, and I'm so proud of that partnership.
So shifting gears a little bit into your role at LinkedIn. You were the first Lynda employee in Canada after that acquisition, which is so incredibly cool. What were you tasked with at the start of that role? And how has that evolved over the last couple years?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 17:09
So my original job was to sell Lynda.com, now LinkedIn Learning, into colleges and universities across Canada. And one of the big challenges with selling any software as a service is that the more you sell, the less it costs, i.e. bigger organizations can pay less for the exact same licenses smaller organizations do because they're buying a larger volume. And that exacerbates some of the inequality that I think technology in particular, has been the cause of over the past few decades.
And in particular, in higher education. In Canada, for instance, colleges do an amazing job, small community colleges or even larger polytechnics at getting people the skills they need to get jobs. And I think that's partly why in Canada and in actually much of the developed world, more people go from a university to a college like organization, then vice versa, ie they get the broad skills they need at the university. And then they get the specific skills they need for a job at a college. And this has become an increasingly important factor in how governments in the developed world train people for societies in which skills are changing very rapidly. And I think the government of Ontario realized that and so I started to work with provincial governments because I realized, in Canada, again, like much of the developed world post secondaries, are primarily paid for by the government.
And so when the government wants to change the system, or if somebody else wanted to change the system, working through governments was a key way to do so. And over a couple of years, I negotiated with the Government of Ontario and an organization that is in between called Ecampus Ontario whose numbers are all the post secondary is here to purchase a million licenses the largest number of licenses LinkedIn had ever sold of lynda.com, now LinkedIn Learning, in order to increase access to skills across Ontario's higher education system in order to facilitate everything from IT support to curriculum development, from Career Development to the way that faculty and staff themselves learned to flip a classroom and teach online etc.
And those skills were already being taught using lynda.com had been for 20 some years, particularly at the college level. And what happened was a community of practice was built over the past couple of years. And I honestly didn't think that the impact would be as great as I believe it has been. And there's been a number of studies that are ongoing into what that impact is, but as examples of how much it's changed post secondaries in Ontario, the biggest number is 350,000 people have watched over 4.7 million videos.
Marsha Druker 19:38
Wow, that's incredible.
Jake Hirsch-Allen 19:40
So I think like per dollar spent, I don't know this again for a fact but per dollar spent that's one of the largest amounts of skills development that's ever occurred. The other interesting thing and I think this is the harder part to measure is the intangible benefits of having a community of practice form, where the colleges are actually teaching the universities how to do some skills development, the universities are teaching In college is how to research the impact of that skills development. And one of the amazing things about LinkedIn that we haven't fully explored yet, and platforms like it, is we can now track the employment outcomes from that skills development. Somebody adds a skill to their LinkedIn profile, somebody has a job to their LinkedIn profile. And we can see the links between a given program at a post secondary, if it's on their profile, and their various career pathways.
Marsha Druker 20:22
I never thought to kind of look at it from that perspective. But yeah, it makes so much sense that you can gather that data and you can really understand how it's impacting people.
Jake Hirsch-Allen 20:31
Maybe the last thing I'll say about that Ontario project is the inspiration that it's been for others. So for instance, we recently signed an agreement with the government of Colombia, providing 500,000 people vocational training very much based on the Ontario model and one of the things we're learning is the use of these online learning tools is most impactful where people don't have access to prior education or other skills development. So what is generally called workforce development or employment services here in Ontario skills for people who are disadvantaged, and don't have access to them directly via post secondary, etc. That kind of skills development can be done very effectively and efficiently online.
And so Columbia really repeated the Ontario model where we had a public private partnership that government purchased on behalf of post secondary in collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce, you're seeing sort of the links between economic development and the focus on human capital that the World Bank and many others has made, very clear should be our primary focus, the average company these days, obviously focused on talent is similarly directed towards people in skills. And so I think this has really been wrapped up in the Zeitgeist of how LinkedIn works and how the world works.
Marsha Druker 21:40
It's becoming sort of like this great equalizer, almost anybody can get access to the internet now, and there's no reason why somebody who is disadvantaged can't start taking their education into their own hands and start moving themselves forward.
So that flows nicely into the next question that I was going to ask. So I know you're really passionate about supporting disadvantaged groups such as newcomers, refugees, indigenous populations, the formerly incarcerated, people with disabilities, and you name it, how have you created and leveraged the community around this goal?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 22:13
The key for me has been to figure out who it is that can in turn be a lever to support as large a number of people as possible. As much as I actually take a huge amount of pleasure and motivation and inspiration from working on the ground and teaching a class in person on how to learn online or how to learn basic skills. The vast majority of the work that I do is sort of system level or macro.
And one of the key ways to access I think the various groups you're describing, is to figure out who is having the greatest impact in those communities already, what are the people don't like the term best practices, but let's say leading practices in supporting indigenous populations in rural Canada by online learning, or in supporting people with disabilities through a combination of hybrid learning and other social supports.
And so it's been working with those organizations, whether it's the Ontario Disability Employment Network here, the read program at Carleton for people with disabilities, or whether it's the First Nations Technology Council in British Columbia, the partners and the community of organizations doing inspirational and impactful work with each of those communities in skills and workforce development has been one of the primary, both end goals but also means to get to the impact that I've been trying to create.
And I think a lot of that was actually inspired by my mother when we lived in India, taking us to the shanty town next to our school to pick lice that have kids hair, or you know, the stories of her as a refugee from Poland, and instead of the challenging life that she lived with her family, and then the lives of the Laotian boat people that she and my father supported 30 years later and of the Syrian refugees that I and my family and friends have supported and sponsored since then.
Marsha Druker 23:58
I think it kind of goes with back to this theme that we've heard quite a bit on this podcast, you don't always have to build a community yourself or you know, start the initiative yourself, it really makes sense to go out there and see what already exists. And if there's already something happening, you can only support it as a part of that community as somebody who brings skills and resources to that specifically. So I love that you've done that yourself and through your work at LinkedIn.
What does the vision for the future of work and human connection to economic opportunities look like? And how does community fit into this and amplify this goal?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 24:34
That's a complicated question. My personal vision for the future of work is very different from I think the current outlook or trajectory.
Marsha Druker 24:45
I can see that you know, and you designed your own educational experience and your work trajectory as well.
Jake Hirsch-Allen 24:51
It does embody a lot of what people are talking about as an ideal future and state. So for instance, involving lifelong learning, involving much greater integration between the private and public sector between social supports, and, and even in equalizing various classes. And I think maybe it's worth dwelling for a minute on that last point because I continue to take inspiration from my family. And, for instance, my father is currently working with Transparency International and fighting offshore tax laundering is one of various means of decreasing inequality.
The way that I am, in essence, trying to fight inequality is via workforce development in higher education systems and LinkedIn data and content. But both are I think, trying to address the primary issue of our time, which is increasing inequality. And I shouldn't say the primary issue because climate change is certainly more urgent. It's just not the one that I'm personally focused on. But within that realm of fighting inequality, I think that skills development, that education all the way down to early childhood education, which will probably have the greatest impact per dollar spent, if again, it's not my area of focus is going to be a huge factor in the future.
And so my vision is more democratic access, greater equality in not just access to skills, and not just access to opportunity, but also the social support that is necessary in order to get people there. So for instance, when we were talking earlier about the fact that most people now have broadband access, that's to some extent true, I think rural Canada would probably be an exception to that.
And in fact, rural America is also a pretty strong exception to that. So ensuring the basics are there that everybody has not just physical health, but also mental health, that everybody has broadband and other social supports that we really divide resources in a very different manner or distribute them in a different manner so that the economy as a whole takes into consideration the various groups that you mentioned earlier that I'm interested in supporting, because they're actually often not even included in unemployment numbers, right.
They're either underemployed or they're just not counted at all. And ensuring that we really count everybody and support everybody is I think, my ideal future. Using technology to increase access to opportunity to education as opposed to increasing inequality, which it often has, thinking a lot more about that idea of human dignity and how that can be the key balancing factor between economic growth and increasing inequality are how do you redistribute that economic growth in a manner that's going to create much more sustainable and thriving societies and communities?
Yeah, and maybe that last point is really important, because at the ground level, I think we are losing touch with what makes a community thrive, from an interpersonal and an almost organic sense.
And I think Fuckup Nights is a great exception to that where you have people coming together, completely separate from their creed, and even to the extent possible, separate from their personal ambitions, in order to support a broader community with their stories of failure. And I think that's exactly what we need more in my vision for the future of work and learning.
Marsha Druker 28:03
I think it's all about kind of going back to that human aspect of it and not really looking at it as like this business objective or buzzword really like what is it that forms the community? And how can we bring humans together at the end of the day?
So I wanted to get some of your advice for listeners. You went from being an entrepreneur to becoming an intrapreneur. And that's a really unique journey. What advice do you have for people who are trying to go through this transition themselves? What have been some steps that you've taken? Or are some things that have kind of stuck with you to make that transition more seamless for yourself and go through it successfully?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 28:49
Good question. I'd say building a community, on theme, is perhaps the thing that has sustained me most through that transition. It really has been a challenging transition. Entrepreneurship is sort of lonely. And as I'm sure you know, loneliness can actually force one into meetups and tech events and startup events, etc. And I'm obviously speaking about the tech ecosystem here. But the same is true in any ecosystem is that loneliness pushes one to interact in a way that might not be as true when one is trying to create change from within a large organization.
And yet, I think it's equally lonely in a very different way to try to move the massive 15,000 person machine that is LinkedIn or the hundred plus thousand piece and machine that is our new parent company, Microsoft. And it's that strife, it's the tension of having my values not always aligned with the organization or even the team that I'm working with. That has been most challenging.
While I've been at LinkedIn, I've been supported by some amazing individuals and seeking out those individuals who even if they're Values aren't perfectly aligned with you. Even if their ambition isn't exactly aligned with yours, as long as they're willing to support yours, to put their neck out for you, and understand that you're willing to do the same, then I think you'll get a long way.
Another aspect that was recently recommended to me or clarified to me, was the idea that if one just adds value in any shape or form, to any conversation to any relationship, that is often enough, you don't have to be the one masterminding a new plan or doing all the work on a new project. Rather, particularly when one is distributed as thin as I am across a team of 40 individuals working on higher education and government for LinkedIn learning across North America and then in turn, working with hundreds others across Microsoft, LinkedIn and the many organizations we partner with.
The key in most of those conversations as I try to figure out what our workforce development strategy is, is just to add value to it. To leave every conversation having provided the other individual or the other organization with some advice, or some new project or some new tool, so that they leave it with a new value, and hopefully I do as well. So I think that's one key aspect.
Marsha Druker 31:14
I think that's a really good answer. I think it's, you know, like really realizing that you don't always have to have all the answers. And that's why you are part of a larger team. And that's the beauty of kind of being in a large organization that it's really not all on you and how can you like you said add value and, and really kind of learn from others around you as well to bring that mission to life.
Jake Hirsch-Allen 31:34
Maybe one more important point that's been very helpful is there are organizations that specifically support intrapreneurs. So for instance, I've been increasingly working with an organization called the League of Intrapreneurs and in the past and continue to work with another organization called the BMW Responsible Leaders Foundation.
There's been a variety of similar foundations and fellowships so one that I haven't worked with or a few even that I haven't worked with, but I think I've been incredible for others in similar situations are Action Fellows Canada, and in Toronto and specific civic actions, Diversity Fellows. All of those create a community that allows individuals to learn from others who are like minded while working on really hard problems within big organizations or on their own. And so I think there's actually a ton of parallels between both what's necessary to succeed as an intrepreneur and as an entrepreneur, and the types of people and community that will support that work.
Marsha Druker 32:29
That's amazing. I had no idea that those organizations existed. I think it's so important to seek out organizations like that. And then also people that are going through similar things as you. Other people who have successfully made that transition or even people that are sort of in the same part of their journey as you, that's really not to be undervalued, like connecting with people who are going through something similar and just sharing your challenges sharing your wins and learning from each other.
Jake Hirsch-Allen 32:54
Agreed. I mean, maybe two more that I'll just throw out there since we're Yeah, running through the list. One that I've really benefited from what's called the Governor General's Canadian Leadership Conference GG CLC. And it's a free initiative. Many of these are actually either highly subsidized or free. But in this case, they bring together 250 Canadians from right across the country and split between the private sector, public sector and labor unions.
And they send you off to a different province to sort of experience what it's like in that province and then come back and report to the larger group with the governor general and many other luminaries involved. But in my case, I was sent to the Northwest Territories and I learned so much about Canada about what it is to be indigenous in an extraordinarily rural place or what it is to be, you know, in Yellowknife and struggling with the results of the extractive industries of people having, you know, created two mines on either end of this town, both of which are now creating environmental challenges for the residents of that town.
And both from the other members of the group, the head of Indigenous Affairs for Parks Canada and for the RCMP, just happen to both be in our group. And so the relationship between our group which many indigenous groups that we were interacting with, particularly that of the first nation, saw us as representatives of the government creating a lot of tension. And so the lessons from those experiences were probably greater than any given class at U of T.
Marsha Druker 34:19
For sure, you can't learn this kind of stuff in a textbook that you really have to experience it in life and have those conversations that are so organic.
So throughout your journey in previous roles and things that you've built and what you're doing now, partnerships are such a key part of what you do. You've worked with governments, you've worked with educational institutions and sort of everything in between. What have you found to be most effective for creating and nurturing partnerships?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 34:45
A challenging question, because I find you have to pick your battles. And so one thing is to choose who you're going to work with how and for how long, because while all of those decisions will evolve, you can't do everything all the time. And that's been one of my greatest challenges. I often spread myself too thin, and don't nurture the partnerships that I think I should be focusing on the most. I'm within a large sales organization, so they want me to focus on the partnerships that are gonna result in the most sales, the most return on the investment of my time, I often see the return on that investment in more social forums rather than financial forums. So there's a balance there.
But I think the partnerships to get back to the value exchange I described earlier where both parties are regularly seeing value, and that could be in the form of an actual license or the use of a physical space, but usually, it's in the form of ideas and in the form of collaboration and companionship.
Those are the kinds of partnership and I mean, from two individuals working on an individual project all the way up to the public private partnership that we formed with the Government of Ontario where in specific that in between organization, E-campus Ontario has been incredibly powerful as a go between for LinkedIn to interface with the 45 post secondaries here in Ontario, building that community of leading practice to understand how hybrid learning works to create a case book with all the different ways or many I should say the different ways that post secondaries are leveraging LinkedIn Learning in their teaching, and then branching off from there.
Marsha Druker 36:39
So shifting gears again, we've chatted a lot about your career and the work that you do at LinkedIn. I want to learn a little bit more about your personal community and how you approach that. What communities are you part of and why are they meaningful to you?
Jake Hirsch-Allen 36:55
I think my communities are balanced between my various interests. Professionally, and my history and social backgrounds. So as an example, I'm on the advisory board for the Hot Docs Cinema, the cinema that hosts the largest documentary festival in the world. And that organization has brought a huge amount of meaning to me not just in the form of the documentaries themselves, but again, really the community around it.
The events that they host often will have the director of speaking and then a reception before or after. And it is figuring out how to support what I believe to be both from a journalistic and a cultural perspective and incredibly valuable organization, but also one right at the heart of Toronto's arts community right at the heart of the annex. And so organizations like that, and communities like that have been really powerful for me.
Another example of one that I'm less formally tied to is Code for Canada, a civic tech organization trying to figure out how governments can connect to citizens better through technology, and there I've been an informal and semi formal advisor for many years. My partner is on the board there and various staff executives and other board members have been friends and, and colleagues for a long time. And so I've been, I think influencing and influenced by how technology and government have intersected and evolved since Code for Canada's founding and even before with the influence of Code for America and other organizations' work, and that's really built a community of like minded people in the world of civic tech, that's obviously very, very specific.
Maybe to get a little further from my professional life... A lot of my friends have been around for a long time and are really right around the world as a result because of sort of bouncing around as a kid. So I think in my case, the benefits of social media, allowing me to stay connected with folks right around the world have been massive. I always feel bad that I post as often as I do when I'm traveling, but it's really because it tells the people in the cities I'm traveling to that I'm coming there and it is incredible how frequently somebody reaches out and says, Hey, I saw you're in LA.
I mean, this happened last night, often after the fact of course, because I'm not there long enough, but You know, she said, this is a friend from high school who said, Hey, I saw you're in LA, let's hang out. And I said, you know, I'm not there now, but I'll be back soon. And that ability to stay connected. So for instance, I was thinking through the people that I've been hanging out with recently, here in Toronto, and they include a friend from middle school, a friend from high school, my co-founder at Lighthouse.
We're both from my ultimate frisbee team in law school, I still play frisbee with them, our team's called Low Expectations. And so there really is a community that's been right through my life, I think like so many other people's lives, and which I try to keep fresh too. I know that as we get older, it gets harder to sort of make and keep friends.
And so I have really consciously attempted to foster new friendships and keep old ones alive. Certainly not in a rational or systematic or strategic manner. Yeah, but at least at the back of my mind as something that I know is really, really important for my happiness and for the sustainability of my community as a whole.
Marsha Druker
That's amazing. Yeah, it sounds like you have communities in a whole bunch of different places all over the world. But really, with your home base here in Toronto. How do you choose your people? I know you said it's not really in a systematic way. But are there any qualities that kind of jumped to mind that you sort of look for that really, like create a strong friendship for you?
Jake Hirsch-Allen
Values are definitely the first thing I have to like the person and usually for me, liking the person is a combination of intellectual and emotional. Do we want the same things for other people. Are they similarly generous and socially motivated, I guess would be a way of describing it. But also, are they as interested in the community as they are themselves?
So I think those are some fundamental traits. I also pick them I think, based on who's going to stick with me. Inevitably, we all have our quirks, or, you know, our pros and cons. I'm constantly late, I talk and think so fast that I often lose track of where I was and where I'm going. And I think it can be hard for friends, because I'm often not particularly present. Something that is obviously to rigor right now. But it's a really important concept, particularly with the degree of stimulation and opportunity to do different things that exist right now.
I will schedule four things in an evening and the friends that I'm encountering over the course of that evening won't really get to see me in a deep way that I think is usually associated with friendships. So those who stick with one through that craziness and chaos, I value it a ton.
And I hope to be there for them as well, when they're in trouble or when they're in need. I think that the idea that one can add value in a deeper way with friends, i.e. just be there for each other. Listening and supporting is perhaps the most powerful quality.
Marsha Druker
It really is. It's so incredibly important to have that support system and not sort of have it go back to any specific goal, but really just to be there for each other as friends. With your fiance as well. I'm sure that she's a huge part of your community and you've built community together. I love the story of how you met. Can you share that with us as well?
Jake Hirsch-Allen
Happy to. So my partner Elena and I met on LinkedIn, a long time ago, well before I joined LinkedIn. And one of the jokes about joining LinkedIn in the first place was everybody said that I was "JakeIn" they suggested that because I networked constantly because I was as all over the place but sort of very together online and had an online presence that was quite organized relative to my personal life, that I resembled this social network that I eventually ended up working at. Way back in the days of functional imperative.
And I was running a software development company and looking for potential partners and thinking about graphic design agencies as such partners. I was based here in Toronto, Elena was in Vancouver, and I think she was on my profile or I was on her profile, but it really was explicitly for an exclusively for business development purposes at that point. And sure enough, at some point, she was visiting Toronto for other work meetings, we went to dinner, and relatively quickly, that was the end of each of our respective relationships, long term relationships, and the beginning of a new one that has been on and off for almost eight years now.
Marsha Druker
I absolutely love that and you come from such different worlds, but you've been able to create this amazing partnership. How do you guys approach community together? Are a lot of your friends mutual or do you kind of keep it a little bit more separate? How does that work?
Jake Hirsch-Allen
I think if I had my druthers, it would just be one network and she had hers. It would be a much more intelligent and healthy space between our lives, I have a tendency to just throw people together in ways that I think often frustrate them when they either want one on one time or don't necessarily enjoy the company of six other people. And Elena is really good at both her own time and one on one.
So that is one of the many balances in terms of our temperaments. She's much more of an introvert, I'm much more of an extrovert that I think has been healthy for us. But our communities have increasingly overlapped as they do between partners. And our interests have interestingly also overlapped. So for instance, Elena is also on the board of Hot Docs, as I said, she's on the board of Code for Canada. And a lot even of our cultural and social interests have begun to converge, whether it's going you know, we're members of many art galleries around town and when we travel which we do regularly and we sort of weave our travel into our work which again, results in dizziness and tension and stress. But incredible experiences. Our communities around those travels have begun to overlap. So my friends in Amsterdam have become her friends, her friends in London, I'm making this up to become my friends, etc.
Marsha Druker
Such a cool way to build community and kind of expose yourself to people that you might have not necessarily met otherwise.
So my last question for you, and I ask this of each guest on the podcast, what does the word community mean to you?
Jake Hirsch-Allen
I thought about this before I came into the interview, and I think it's a very amorphous word intentionally. I don't think it should have a clear, prescribed or delineated definition because it's about people. And increasingly, as I think and talk more and more about now, trite topics like the future of work and learning, increasingly I dwell on that idea of humanity being about the interactions between people. It's why I love the idea if not the title of being a connector so much because it really is. But let's get back to the example of friendship, where you're just there for the other person. There isn't anything that you're going to get out of it, but rather, the benefit of the community is a benefit to you. And that's fundamental to the idea of society that's fundamental to the idea of friendship, even to partnership from a professional standpoint.
And yet, I think it's often overlooked, I think we see things as way too transactional. I think the fact that one can build an ecosystem of value flowing in different directions, which might eventually come around, you know, some people might call that karma. Others would call it the circular economy. I would call it community. And I think that community is fundamentally based on people with shared values trying to support each other.
Marsha Druker
I love that that's such a great definition and it's absolutely bang on it is all about people. And that's what I'm trying to do through those podcasts to really bring community back to that human perspective instead of looking at it as this business sort of buzzword. So thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much for joining me on my podcast. It was so great to speak to you.
