Let's let LinkedIn have this one
The Astronomer CEO drama is the platform's first viral discourse...ever?
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
There hasn’t been this much drama on LinkedIn since an adviser in my college’s career office emailed me unsolicited to tell me he thought my profile picture was inappropriate.—Kate
New on ICYMI: “Dream guest on my podcast?” New York Times reporter Madison Malone Kircher came home to ICYMI to help break down the internet history of Jojo Siwa.
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Maybe you saw the video on TikTok, or the memes about it on Twitter, or possibly you were even one of the lucky few people in the crowd at the Coldplay concert in Massachusetts who witnessed first hand the loved-up couple on the Jumbotron—for, at least, the brief moment before he dove off to the side and she turned her back to the camera.
They’re either “having an affair or they're just very shy,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin remarked from the stage a moment later. Reader, were they ever. It didn’t take long for the man in the couple to be identified as the CEO of software development company Astronomer, Andy Byron, and Astronomer’s “chief people officer” (read: HR) Kristin Cabot. At least one of them is married—but not to the other.
Congratulations are in order: to Coldplay for a moment of monocultural saturation they haven’t seen in 20 years; to the Times of India, who are producing a quantity of articles about the video that suggest they’ve already met their traffic goals for July; and finally, to LinkedIn which, for the first time, has become a destination for viral discourse.
LinkedIn’s original purpose was, of course, to connect job-seekers with open positions best suited to their experience. But that purpose doesn’t drive an ever-scaling arc of growth and engagement, so naturally, LinkedIn has since tried to transform itself into a social network and news site. We all know the result: “Here’s what [proposing to my girlfriend] taught me about B2B enterprise sales.”
For LinkedIn, however, this discourse has everything: A CEO. A head of HR. A workplace ethics debate. A company PR problem. Normally, just one of these would be enough material for users to contort it into a post. But the result hasn’t just been a bunch of labored lessons about B2B sales: The drama has continued to unfold on the platform itself.
