Reimagining professional networking for the portfolio-based era of work

My chat with Yogini Bende, Cofounder of Peerlist

Nov 25, 2022

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Hope you had a great Thanksgiving! I’m experimenting with a new format for Scatter Brain. My hope is this is more digestible and crunchier.

Work is changing. How we think about work is changing. Our relationship with work is changing. Especially for the kind of people who would read my blog. Work’s getting more creative and more portfolio-based. Interests and work have started to intersect. How we present our work on the internet hasn’t kept up with how we work and find new opportunities. That’s a thesis that an entire generation of founders is pursuing globally. They want to reimagine professional networking for those underserved by Linkedin.

Today’s chat is with India-based Peerlist’s cofounder, Yogini, who wants to create a new professional network.

Let’s get to it

Her personal story

“I grew up in a small town in Maharashtra. I did engineering in college. I was scared of moving out of my hometown. My only career option was teaching, so I became a lecturer and taught programming. While I was teaching, I did freelancing projects”, Yogini tells me.

She met Akash, her cofounder, through freelancing, became friends and got married a few years ago.

Being a married founding team: “We struggle with personal and professional boundaries, but we enjoy being married co-founders because we always know what the other person is doing and feeling. We know how the other person will make decisions and how to handle our conflicts.”

Pandemic baby

On discovering the problem: “We went with the flow during the first wave of COVID in 2020. Both of us were active online. The pandemic became the reason we got to spend a good time improving our skills, working on side projects, etc. Like us, many people were doing different things, and the issue was how to showcase all that. We ran a survey and talked to many people, and decided to solve the profile problem. What if we create a tool to help people create their portfolios?”

Step one is creating rich, comprehensive profiles. The logical next step is connecting them and creating a new network.

Problems with Linkedin

Here’s what she identified as the top problems :

Showcase work portfolio: “You can’t showcase what you could do. I am making open-source contributions as a developer and have my newsletter as a writer. I can have links on my Linkedin profile, but no visual presentation gives an overview of everything I’m up to.”

Verification: “We found out many developers put FAANG companies on their LinkedIn to get calls from recruiters. Once they get an interview, they remove it because they're adding the FAANG company to their profiles just to get into the top search results.”

Network quality: “I have more than 5000 connections on LinkedIn, but I barely know 100-200 people. If I visit someone’s profile, I might not recall why I added them to my network or any context about our connection. Also, I can get endorsed by some random people for some random skills, and we can’t rely on them anymore.”

Here’s the kicker:

“We recently learned from a close friend that one person showed up for interviews, and another joined the company. This was possible because of remote work. The company fired that guy. But the underlying problem of verification and authenticity remains”, she tells me.

On opportunity for Peerlist: “Linkedin was really good 5-10 years back. Since then, there has been a huge shift in the work culture. We think a new professional network is needed to rethink everything.”

Editor’s rant

LinkedIn's a mass-market product. It put resumes online and built a professional network with over 800 million users.

Most people have straightforward resumes with a checklist of items like school, college, internships, and jobs. I agree they don’t let you showcase a portfolio of projects. Players like Github and Behance fill those gaps for specific audiences.

I wish the product hadn’t stagnated, but it has been the most successful player in what it set out to do. How most people think about their careers is not how an average tech insider thinks about their careers.

I agree they haven't done much to maintain the accuracy of the information on profiles.

I don’t think it’s Linkedin’s design problem if people add random people as connections. The business model does unintentionally create an incentive for this behavior. I have connected with people I don’t know to expand my second-degree connections to be able to look up more people without paying for the paid tier!

Anyways, back to my chat with Yogini

Target Audience

She agreed with me regarding Linkedin”s target audience.

“We are building specifically for people in tech. We are targeting to solve problems for only some of them. I cannot relate to a banker's issues because I don't belong in that world”, she tells me.

Product principles and motivations

Here’s a breakdown of her thoughts about the three problems she highlighted above.

Showcasing: “I got my first job as a developer and started my journey in tech by showing off freelancing projects. Many companies do not ask for relevant degrees if you are good at your skills. So how can one see that you have the correct skills?”

She wants to introduce proof-of-work, a mainstream idea in crypto, to show people the work before getting hired.

Yogini said, “All your work is scattered over the internet. All the signals are scattered. It’s tough for me to understand a person’s professional life. Many founders run informative newsletters and podcasts, but how they will showcase it on their professional profile. Same case for designers, developers, product managers, and others. You might miss grabbing a life-changing opportunity because of that”.

When you go to top-tier colleges like IITs, everyone takes you seriously just because you went to an IIT. Helping people curate all their projects and interests in one place and presenting their stories can help level the playing field for talented people who don’t have the best credentials.

Verification: “Peerlist is built with one foundation, credibility over popularity.”

“In a professional setting, credibility plays a vital role. One wrong choice of person and you will face a bad hire, a bad investor, and vice versa. The foundation must be on verified and true profiles if we want to make a meaningful professional network. We're doing a few experiments now in this area and have seen some early success.”

Network: “A network that is interconnected by credibility.”

PeerList wants to productize the idea that what you work on matters more than what you post about.

“If I am searching for a job,” she says, “it should not matter how active I am on the platform or how frequently I post; if I possess the correct skill, I should get recommended anyway,” she says.

Role of resumes

I asked her what idea they were wrong about.

“We started with the notion that resumes are dead. But trust me, they are not going anywhere shortly. A resume is structured data. We learned that resumes are here to stay. Resumes may be insignificant for some domains, but that number will be very low.”

Agreed.

Strategic relationships with other platforms

PeerList is plugging into GitHub, Medium, Product Hunt, Substack, etc. Each platform has productized a specific type of work for a specific audience. They cater to a wide range of interests and career aspirations.

PeerList depends on all vertical platforms to let users curate their work.

I asked whether they would want people to come to Peerlist to create and host their work and cut dependencies.

She told me, “These platforms solve a specific problem, and Peerlist amplifies your work from those platforms. The motivation of the Peerlist profile is to bring everything across the internet on a single platform to enable people to showcase the work, not something where everyone needs to start from scratch. We enable people to write detailed case studies, but the core will always be showcasing rather than creating from the bottom-up.”

Employer experience

It is still early, but they have taken the first step towards building for employers by launching Peerlist Hire in September. They have 30+ companies posting their jobs and hiring with Peerlist now.

She sees users, companies, and jobs as the three crucial nodes of professional networking.

On employers: “The employer side will be important for us to complete the network we want to build. Once the companies are there, you know many details about them, like other employees, their culture, etc., before joining or applying.”

On job seekers’ behavior: “Many people share their Peerlist profile while applying for jobs in companies. Because of that, recruiters and hiring managers reached out to us, asking how they could leverage Peerlist and hire with it.”

Having an online presence and living in a big city

“It is more about change in the people I am surrounded by than the place. I am not the smartest person in the room anymore, which was the case while I was teaching. They motivate me to be a better version of myself.”

“The exposure to many new things and possibilities,” she tells me. “It was overwhelming for me initially, but people are kinder than you think, and you learn along the way. So far, I think the growth has been tremendous for me; now, I am more flexible and open to accepting differences.”

Aspirations about the future

“The biggest shift we would love to see is credibility getting more importance. If you want to see anyone’s professional history, Peerlist will be your go-to platform. If we play a tiny part in enabling people to get what they want in their careers, I think we built something.”