Last Friday was my last day at Impact. All I can say is, for an opportunity that came off of a Tweet from Bill Gurley, it was a great experience. I learned a lot, and my thanks goes out to Tyler Mitchell and team for taking a chance on me. I think that's going to be a good one.
Something I've always known about myself is I am a startup guy. I really thrive in the early stages - the messiness, fewer meetings, more hands on. I'd like to think of myself as an ace of jack of all trades: I've pretty much done it all at this point, and while there are amazing people that can always do one thing better than me, I can do it all better than most.
The next step for me is to be a founder. It means coming back full circle. In my twenties I started two business, one was bought by Hired. A few years back I started an RPO business with my ex-business partner, and that still lives today, but ultimately I left to seek leverage. Technology is where the opportunity is at. If I'm going to fulfill my life's mission of finding meaningful work for people, then technology is critical. It's the leverage and this is a problem that requires lots of leverage.
As of this week, I am starting a new company, Threaded. Threaded turns any professional community into a talent network in minutes. Solving the talent problem is my mission, but I have been captivated by the power of community.
Back when I joined Triplebyte, I needed help. We were a team of 80, and were about to undergo a major shift in strategy to what Triplebyte is today. I knew that to step up, I was going to have to lean on others. I joined the Operator's Guild and was able to add a dimension the company needed: the operational chops to transition the business from marketplace to SaaS. I got so much from the community that it left an impression.
Before I joined Triplebyte, the Talent space was pretty dead. All of the energy of the early Hired days had evaporated. As a talent operator, this made me think long and hard about the area of the industry I specialized in. Later, when my time at Triplebyte was ending, I realized that the market had shifted. Vertical Networks (or domain specific market networks) had taken off. Some founded by my old colleagues at Hired. Talent was back on the menu and it had blown up.
I had so many interesting conversations at the time, but only space for one job to take. So I turned all of those relationships into a community, Talent Market Makers. Today, TMM is over 80 professionals, representing dozens of different talent marketplaces and market networks. Companies have been founded there, known problems have been solved through community and new relationships were built.
It is my belief that Professional Communities are the core of the future of work. Impact showed me an industry that was organized completely differently than the tech sector. There, the company is not the central organizing node. It is the Unions. Unions provide jobs. They provide qualification. They even provide benefits, like healthcare.
There are a lot of ways that the future of work could look. Perhaps the future of work for skilled workers looks more like Hollywood than todays FTE paradigm. Perhaps not. Regardless, professional communities will be the durable node for which workers organize and rely upon for their career.
Threaded is here to take professional communities to their destiny. We are starting with a simple and timely mission: Helping them leverage relationships to get their members jobs, while creating a sustainable revenue stream for the community. It wont stop there, but resourcing communities will be necessary for them to be able to invest and grow to fill the needs of the new work paradigm.
I'm currently fundraising, and if you believe in the power of community and want to get in early, hit me up. If you want to be hands on, reach out. We'll be a crack team, lean as hell. It will be fun, and meaningful.
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