Opportunity in a Tweet:

A powerful endorsement for any company is when former employees go on to do great things elsewhere. Companies would pay for an alumni network that’s a cross between Discord, Linkedin and Slack. This multi-channel chat tool would support former colleagues in their future endeavors, elevate the company’s brand as a breeding ground for talent, and build trust with future employees.

Description of the Problem:

How many times have you received an email from a departing colleague that sounded something like this:

Dear Colleagues,

After 5 years at Big Plumbing doing soul sucking work, locked in a windowless room, making PowerPoint slides on the sanitation industry’s TAM, it’s with a tinge of both sadness and excitement that I’ve made the decision to pursue an opportunity elsewhere. It’s been real, it’s been fun, but not real fun. Below is my personal email, please keep in touch.

[Insert lyrics from Photograph by Nickleback]

jimmy.slides82@gmail.com

Jimmy

After receiving probably a hundred emails similar to the above, I’ve realized there’s a significant chunk of former colleagues I’ve never spoken to again. And it’s not because I don’t care what they’re working on now. And it’s not because I didn’t like them. It’s because emailing or texting them after they’ve left, if we didn’t share a Chipotle on a Tuesday beforehand, would feel disjointed.

But what about LinkedIn, you ask? Well, LinkedIn is great for infrequent career updates, resume display, and thinly-veiled virtue signaling. But it’s not built for multi-person, asynchronous chat or theme-focused discussions.

In fact, LinkedIn’s chat feature has become a wasteland for pre-canned, generic, clickable responses. It’s a dry, dustbowl of unenthusiastic “Congrats on the promotion!” messages and spray-and-pray recruiters shilling THE WORLD’S MOST QUALIFIED PAYROLL SPECIALIST!

What This Is:

• An alumni network for former colleagues

• A chat tool for single and multi person discussions

• A way to keep employees engaged and thankful for the relationships they built

• Invite only

• Multi-network - if you’ve worked at three places and all three of your former workplaces join, yippee you can join three networks

What This Isn’t:

• A network that crosspollinates both current and former employees - people can only join once they leave to safeguard against disgruntled employees polluting the current employee waters

• Not meant for bad leavers - companies sponsoring the network would be the gatekeepers of who gets access

• However, the company would not be able to censor chats thereafter

Thesis:

The best advertisement for a company is when it’s employees leave to go do something kick ass

• The legacy of great companies will not only be the businesses they build, but what their employees do afterwards using the experience they gained during their tenure

• Early Uber employees went on to start scooter businesses, cloud kitchen empires, furniture startups, marijuana businesses, payment infrastructure, and data infrastructure companies

The days of trading 30 years of service for a gold watch + a firm handshake are over

• Companies must eventually accept, in the words of Andrew Chen from A16Z:

It’s part of the Silicon Valley lifecycle that tiny, high energy startups eventually grow to be large and unwieldy. And the most entrepreneurial employees go on to spread their know how elsewhere.

-Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem

Communication is all about context

• Swapping career updates with fellow, former glue factory workers wouldn’t be out of place if it took place amongst a broader audience in topic specific forums. But it would be weird if your significant other caught you texting Jessica from accounting or swapping gmails with Toby from HR at midnight

Share Steal My Idea

Back of the Napkin Market Sizing

To Get the Ball Rolling, Sisyphus Says

• Focus on getting buy-in from a couple major corporations, as you’ll have to build an atomic network for each company. Starting with larger corporations gives you more potential fish to pull into the boat

• Ask employers to include network invites as part of their HR offboarding process

• Incentive early users to invite others by connecting other networks they belong to, like LinkedIn

• Seed the tool with pre-defined channels (e.g., “What are you working on”, “What do you remember about working at x”, “On this date you probably worked on y”)

Kinda Biased Competitive Landscape

How It Makes Money

Waves This Rides

• The rise of “Slack channels” outside of work

  • Discord, Telegram, Twitch

• Colleagues playing infinite, not finite, games

  • Unsubstantiated fact of the day: The PayPal mafia has a collective net worth eclipsing the GDP of Guatemala

Why This Might Fail

• Employees talkin shit

  • Might devolve into a Reddit crowd for those unshackled from their bad bosses

• Building multiple networks is hard

  • Similar to how an Uber driver in Santa Monica is irrelevant to a rider in Seattle, IBM employees aren’t joining to talk to former EMC employees

  • Each company needs it’s own network to succeed, which requires seeding the conversations and bringing enough people to the party so others stick around

• Amazon is the last remaining company in the world and we all accept our fates in either a dimly lit fulfillment center or heavily air conditioned data warehouse

  • Probably still on the table

Potentially Reliable Stuff I Read at 3 AM

• Average tenure and number of jobs for Americans

• Number of LinkedIn Users

• Active LinkedIn Users

• HR stats

• Number of jobs in a lifetime

Irrelevant Post Script No Reputable Business Publication Would Allow

Get Hyped

Get Loud

Get Wise

“Always think with your stick forward”

-Painted onto the side of Amelia Earhart’s cross-Atlantic plane