Lessons From Building a $1.5 Billion Company
Interview with Lynda Weinman, co-founder of Lynda.com
There aren’t many founders who can say they sold their business for $1.5 BILLION. Let alone a woman... Let alone a woman in her sixties…
But that’s what Lynda Weinman did when she sold Lynda.com to LinkedIn in 2015. I had the honour of interviewing Lynda the following year for my book Female Innovators at Work and I wanted to share some of the lessons I learned from her.
Quick background — A pioneer of online education, Lynda Weinman co-founded Lynda.com, one of the first and leading online learning platforms, with her husband and business partner, Bruce Heavin, in 1995.
Following the success of her early best-selling web design books, which included the first-ever industry book, Designing Web Graphics (Pearson Indiana, 1996), Lynda set up a school with Bruce before identifying a gap in the market for classes being taught via online tutorials, which became Lynda.com. The subscription business has since grown to host more than 250,000 tutorials, reaching more than 4 million learners looking to improve their business, creative, and technology skills. In 2015, Lynda.com was acquired by LinkedIn for $1.5 billion.
