In an exclusive interview, LinkedIn’s founder talks about the merger and how he will be working with Satya on strategy and, maybe, chatbots.

Now that Microsoft has announced plans to pay $26.2 billion for LinkedIn, it’d be a reasonable time for Reid Hoffman to step aside. After all, he’s a partner at the venture firm Greylock, and advises numerous startups and nonprofits including Airbnb and Mozilla. He’s written two best-selling business books, and is working on a third. Though he’s chairman of LinkedIn’s board, he hasn’t had a job at the company since he appointed Jeff Weiner CEO seven years ago. But that hasn’t stopped Hoffman, who still owns 11% of LinkedIn’s shares, from showing up to work there almost every day. Hoffman anticipates that once the Microsoft deal is done, his role at Microsoft will expand. He plans to double down on his efforts to transform LinkedIn from the jobseekers’ front door that it has long been into the perfect path to future economic prosperity for all workers, especially the beleaguered middle class. In the process, he’ll work with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on tech’s future path, and its impact on Microsoft’s strategy more broadly. Though no one has talked about official titles and roles yet, Hoffman plans to stay very involved in LinkedIn and could likely join the board next year. (He won’t confirm.)

That’s great news for Microsoft. Satya Nadella has been attempting to broker relationships in Silicon Valley since he was named CEO of the tech giant more than two years ago, but the valley’s insider culture is hard to crack. What’s more, as skilled as Microsoft has proven itself to be at developing technology, it hasn’t yet grokked social networking. Hoffman is the insider’s insider, an affable and beloved entrepreneur who has been in early at too many tech companies to count (including Facebook and Airbnb)— and he basically invented social networking. (Literally, he did; he helped launch Socialnet in 1997.) In our exclusive interview, he says, with classic understatement, his work is about to get more interesting.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

[Jessi Hempel] What’s significant about a Microsoft-LinkedIn pairing?

[Reid Hoffman] The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission — enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people. That’s always been our true north. In the piece I wrote for LinkedIn, I said there are many founding moments — some of these are inflection points through which you can accomplish something much greater.

Combined with Microsoft, we can do so much more. We do a lot with companies and we enable companies and individuals to connect because it’s very valuable to both of them. But we start with the individual professional. Microsoft starts with the company — with helping the organization be productive. Putting those two things together amplifies both sides. It is somewhat of the classic peanut butter and chocolate combination, which is that it works really well together.

How well do you know Satya?

We met a few months after he was appointed CEO. Until 18 months ago, most of our conversations were about technology. We talked about the way the Internet and AI and blockchain were evolving and what we could do about that. He was tapping me as the Silicon Valley expert, and I was tapping him as the leader of this massive technology company that had a huge amount of impact on how corporations and organizations worked. Plus, Microsoft has an amazing stack of technology. The conversation started turning to what we could do together. Our combination was something that came up as a topic very early. But it was a very long conversation on both sides to get to a point where you’re like, ‘okay, we think this could really work.”

Does Satya understand social?

I think he understands it well enough that he values bringing our companies together, because it could be really important across a suite of different Microsoft products and initiatives. In addition to LinkedIn being valuable in its own right, the combination can amplify a number of their strategies.

When I profiled Satya very early in his tenure, he promised to change Microsoft’s culture. Do you have confidence that culture change is real?

This event is definitely a very strong positive expression of my view of Satya’s Microsoft culture. If there wasn’t a strong cultural alignment, there’s no chance that we would be having this conversation. And not just the culture. Satya and Jeff are both driven by mission. They share a similar kind of leadership style. Part of making that work is preserving what is great about each of the companies independently. We will still operate as a network company and they will still operate as a corporate productivity company.

Why is now the right time for this acquisition?

There’s nothing particularly magic about this particular month versus three months ago or three months hence. We kicked around whether we could do a business development deal. To really help people doing work inside corporations, the level of integration has to be so deep that this just made more sense than anything else. It’s funny, one of the thing things that I remember my cofounders and I talking about literally the first month after we launched in ’03 was, ‘what is the thing we’d most like to have happen to accomplish our mission?’ It was integration in Outlook.

I wrote my first story about LinkedIn in 2005 or so. Back then, there were many emerging social networks, and to my youthful reporter eyes, LinkedIn was the boring one. Why do you think LinkedIn was one of the two significant social networks of that group to massively succeed?

We got certain parts of the hypothesis about what would really help people’s lives right, and we stayed really focused on them. If you think back to 2003, most of our competitors had one of two shapes. In professional networks, contacts were owned by the companies and not the individuals. Our perspective was: how do you enable individual professionals to make themselves more effective? Their networks were owned by them and not by their companies.

Other folks said all that matters is a social network. Social would be how everything played out, including business, and it was much more about entertainment and pictures and fun and games. That’s perfectly good, but it didn’t actually play to where we were going. We were — and are — about economic opportunity and work. We can try to make it as fun and easy as possible, but that’s usually much less entertaining than amusing cat pictures. That’s why most people had a reaction a little bit like yours — well, LinkedIn is the boring one.

So boring was just fine.

Being the boring one was totally fine. As a matter of fact, we used to say — and Jeff later repeated — that the difference in types of social is this: is your point to waste time or to gain time? [Entertainment-focused] social networks are about spending time, and what makes you spend time? Well it has to be entertaining. But we wanted to help people accomplish critical tasks in a shorter amount of time.

How would you describe your work for LinkedIn now? Not your title, but the type of work you are actually doing.

Usually, I am at Greylock on Mondays and here Tuesday through Friday, unless I’m traveling. But often I go to LinkedIn China, so a lot of travel is LinkedIn work, too. My work goes into three buckets. One bucket is working with Jeff and the executive team on our key strategies and what we see going on in the world around us. We predict the impact of various types of technology from blockchain to artificial intelligence, and decide how to chart that strategically.

Second, I spend a lot of time on certain key projects. One of the ones that has been picking up steam recently is Profinder. [Launched last fall, Profinder is a marketplace that connects freelancers with work.] I have had the view for a couple of years that the network is a platform that you can build applications on top of.

And then third, I think about culture. This is mostly in conversations with Jeff. We have a dinner every week. We discuss the alignment between our super strong company culture and our product culture. [We strive to make] the value we embed in the product also the way that we operate.

What does that mean?

In our corporate values, members come first. That’s our top value. Normally in a business, your customers are your top priority because they are the ones that are paying you money. Here, our members are the most important thing, even though only a small number are paying us money. That’s because we are building a lifelong relationship through which we are trying to help them change their career trajectories. We are trying to do it for every professional, which means LinkedIn has to be free. A culture that has that kind of mission orientation is important to us to preserve forever.

Will your role change at all?

I won’t be on the LinkedIn board anymore, since there isn’t going to be a board! But I haven’t been a LinkedIn employee for more than seven years. I don’t come here because of a paycheck. My default view is that very little from my role will change. There’ll be a few additions because I will probably be doing some work with Satya on some areas that interest both of us. Artificial intelligence. Quantum Computing.

I pay a lot more attention to the work done than to the official role. I think the work will proceed and I have no idea where official roles might turn out.

In the last couple of years, Silicon Valley companies have taken some criticism for always saying they want to make the world better. Shows like HBO’s “Silicon Valley” poke fun at them. You’ve created a strong business, but do you really feel LinkedIn has a social mission that is as critical as it was a decade ago?

Absolutely, and maybe even more so. Look, I really like the “Silicon Valley” show. It’s good to do a little rib-poking and not take yourself too seriously, so I think it’s awesome the show does that. But one of our biggest worries with technological advancement is: Does your workforce keep up? Does the middle class stay intact or grow? LinkedIn allows professionals, including the middle class, to invest in themselves in order to find the right jobs. That essentially can help make them prosperous.

If anything, now — 13+ years from when we launched LinkedIn — this is even more critical.

What’s LinkedIn going to look like a decade hence?

It’s very hard to see out that far. But, let’s just focus on artificial intelligence. What if we could offer every member a personal assistant for their career? Members could ask: what are the skills that are going to be really important to me in three to five years? What is the best way to develop those? Which courses both here and across the internet would be the right ones to do? Which would be the people in my network at one, two and three degrees that I should connect with? Which LinkedIn groups are the most valuable for doing that?

With Microsoft, that kind of future goes from “oh well maybe someday we’ll do that” to “maybe we can start deploying technology on that very soon.”