Tomer
Cohen

The Desert Kid Who Started Early

Beer Sheba is a city in the Negev desert of southern Israel - not the place most Silicon Valley executives call home. It's where Tomer Cohen grew up, the son of Tunisian immigrants who had survived the ma'abarot: Israel's transit camps, where new arrivals slept in corrugated iron huts and built lives from very little. His parents worked from an early age. So did he.

At 10, Cohen was already writing code. Not playing games - writing them. In BASIC, the same language that launched Bill Gates. The boy from the Negev wasn't waiting for permission to build things.

He earned a BSc in Communication System Engineering from Ben-Gurion University - the university that sits in his hometown - while working as a programmer on the side. Then came the IDF, an intelligence unit posting that sharpened his analytical instincts. Then, rather than sprinting toward graduate school, he took a detour that surprised everyone who expected a straight career line: a year backpacking through Latin America and Southeast Asia.

The Stanford Room That Changed Everything

In 2008, Cohen attended a Stanford lecture and found himself in the same room as Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman. He left that room with a specific conviction: professional networking was not yet what it could become. That conviction pointed him toward LinkedIn.

But first, he tried to build it himself. After his Stanford MBA, Cohen co-founded a startup in the personal CRM space - he was thinking about professional relationships as a product before most people even had a LinkedIn profile. When that chapter closed, he joined Greylock Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Then, in 2012, he joined LinkedIn.

He was hired to build the mobile platform. He ended up building something much larger.

The Feed Nobody Wanted (Until They Did)

When Cohen joined LinkedIn, the platform had a reputation problem. Professionals used it the way people used a filing cabinet: important, necessary, but you only opened it when you had to. The feed - if you could call it that - was a dead zone. A graveyard of job announcements and corporate press releases.

Cohen and his team changed that. They rebuilt the feed from scratch, experimenting at scale, running hundreds of A/B tests, learning what made professionals actually engage rather than just visit. The transformation took years. LinkedIn became something people checked voluntarily, scrolled on purpose, posted on regularly. A Stanford professor once told Cohen that after someone encouraged him to post on LinkedIn, he now receives speaking engagement offers directly from the platform - the kind of story Cohen used to illustrate the potential he had long believed in.

The feed work required constant calibration: not too noisy, not too quiet; professional but not stiff; engaging but not addictive for its own sake. Cohen's philosophy throughout was clarity over consensus. His most repeated principle inside LinkedIn became almost a mantra:

The distinction matters. Confused teams fragment. Teams with shared direction - even imperfect direction - move. Cohen bet on direction. LinkedIn's feed transformation suggests he bet correctly.

What GPT-4 Did to His Roadmap

When GPT-4 arrived, Cohen did something unusual for a CPO of a 1-billion-member platform: he rewrote the roadmap. Not tweaked it. Rewrote it. He recognized - faster than most in his position - that the underlying economics of product development had shifted.

His response was the Full Stack Builder program. The concept: using AI tools, a single person can now carry a product from idea to design to code to launch, collapsing a process that once required teams of five to ten specialists into something one determined builder can do. Cohen scrapped LinkedIn's traditional Associate Product Manager program and replaced it with an Associate Product Builder program that teaches coding, design, and product management together.

He also changed how LinkedIn hired. Final interviews for product builders now require candidates to build a working product end-to-end in real time. What separated great candidates from merely good ones, Cohen found, wasn't familiarity with tools. It was judgment.

His observation about AI adoption runs counter to common assumptions. People expected that AI tools would level the playing field - help weaker performers close the gap. Cohen found the opposite: top performers adopted AI tools the fastest, widening the gap. Tools don't replace judgment. They amplify it. The people with the best judgment get the most from the best tools.

The Podcast and the Pattern

Cohen's "Building One" podcast is not a vanity project. The name is a double entendre: building products, yes, but also building unity - one conversation with one accomplished person at a time. The guests span product leaders, founders, scientists, artists. The questions cut toward the same territory: how do you turn a conviction into something real?

The pattern is consistent. Cohen has always been drawn to people who build rather than manage building, who create rather than coordinate creation. His identity - even after leaving one of Silicon Valley's most senior product roles - is "Builder." Not "executive." Not "CPO." Builder.

Beer Sheba to the Bay

Cohen's parents left Tunisia for Israel with little and built their lives from less. That story is embedded in him. He started coding at 10 because he wanted to build things, not because someone told him to. He worked through university because the alternative was not working. He served in IDF intelligence because that was part of the compact. He traveled for a year before business school because he wanted to understand the world before building for it.

At Stanford, he didn't just attend classes. He moved across an ocean. He sat in rooms with Zuckerberg and Hoffman. He started a company. He joined another. He grew it - for 14 years - into something used by a billion people.

The question now is what he builds next. Cohen has said that the "full stack builder" model isn't just for LinkedIn. It's for anyone with an idea, access to AI tools, and the judgment to know what good looks like. He teaches this at Stanford. He discusses it on his podcast. He has invested in Israeli startups. The pattern suggests he is not done building. He is between builds.