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No matter how many chapters Wailun Chan\u2019s finance career ultimately spans, the decade that he spent at LinkedIn will always stand out.

It perhaps goes without saying that as a finance career investment, a 10-year resume stint is increasingly rare today, and it\u2019s not uncommon for a \u201cdecade investor\u201d looking back on his or her lengthy tenure to launch one or two \u201cIf onlys,\u201d as in \u201cIf only I had left 3 years sooner.\u201d        

Such is not the case for Wailun Chan, though, whose LinkedIn career spanned from 2010 to 2020 and overlapped a period during which the social media company\u2019s workforce grew from 400 to 16,000 employees as its annual revenues grew from roughly $100 million (pre-IPO) to nearly $10 billion.

Chan\u2019s investment of career years at LinkedIn arguably represents a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right outcome, which eventually resulted in a CFO job offer that led the seasoned FP&A leader to exit the social media company.

Still, what makes Chan\u2019s LinkedIn career chapter worthy of note to finance career builders is not necessarily its length or ultimate outcome but instead how he was unquestionably up to the challenges ahead even as he arrived at the firm.

In fact, the finance resume of LinkedIn\u2019s new FP&A hire was already a dozen years long and included stints at GE Capital and Kraft Foods as well as a recently added business degree. Consequently, there\u2019s little reason to doubt that the LinkedIn recruiters who first eyeballed Chan knew instantly that they found their future FP&A leader.

First of all, Chan tells us, he was tasked with helping the company to address a lopsided membership model that featured LinkedIn members outside of the U.S. accounting for 60 percent of the overall membership numbers while paying only about 30 percent of the worldwide membership fees.

To support the effort, Chan was deployed as the company\u2019s first sales finance executive, a position that allowed him from the very start of his LinkedIn career to serve as a primary connection between the company\u2019s FP&A and business operations teams.

\u201cWe looked at the data together and came up with a playbook outlining that if certain membership thresholds were hit, the inside sales team would get a signal to be led in, to be later followed by the enterprise sales team as other levels were reached,\u201d comments Chan, who credits the \u201cplaybook\u201d with influencing the decision-making that led the company to open 20-plus local offices within the next 2 years.   

Reports Chan: \u201cThis playbook became a primary driver of the speed at which we were able to scale, and this scale enabled the hypergrowth that LinkedIn experienced between 2010 and 2012.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney