Anonymous Work Talk for Silicon Valley
FEATURED IMAGE | Source: Teamblind Inc.
Users spend 41 mins on Blind, every day.
Uber, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Apple, Pinterest, Yelp, Glassdoor, Twitter, Lyft, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, Salesforce, Snapchat, Netflix, Splunk, Postmates, Fitbit… etc.
Tens of thousands of employees from these companies spend an average of 41 minutes a day on Blind; talking about work with like-minded professionals across their field. (Don’t know what Blind is? Go here, then come back.)
Up until now, we purposely kept Blind very exclusive: making it only available to current employees at the top 100 tech companies in the US. Starting today, everyone in tech is welcome to join our new channel, Topics.
Why? For one, our users asked for it. Also, contrary to popular belief, anonymous professionals ≠ horrible content. And why professionals only? Because workplace “tools” are really only great for companies, not the employees.
Our users asked for it.
The following summarizes a great majority of user feedback for Blind.
I’m a designer at Apple, can I chat with another designer at Facebook on Blind?
I’m a Sr. PM at Amazon and would love to connect with other PM’s, especially at early stage startups. Is that possible on Blind?
You can tag and mention companies or specific professions (like engineering, design, product management) to draw the right audience to your posts.
Our hope is Blind will address the greater need for a larger group of professionals to connect and start conversations that are both deeply relevant and authentic.
Anonymous Professionals ≠ Horrible Content
At least for us.
What’s undeniably true is that anonymous anything is inherently difficult.
At the height of their reign, YikYak had an impressive 5 million users and 2 million daily active users, the biggest anonymous craze we’ve witnessed to date. They scored $70 million and change from the likes of Sequoia, only to see their growth come to a screeching halt, shutting down earlier this year. Their reason? It’s widely accepted that trolling and bullying in that space lead to their downfall.
And who can forget Secret? Their team swiftly took over the Bay Area with their “friends of friends” formula and just as quickly returned their money to the VC’s. This was mid-2015. Their reason? “Secret does not represent the…vision when starting the company.” Basically, anonymity makes people mean.
At Blind, we expanded our app one company at a time. Which sounds ludicrous for a social app burning through capital. But when something is truly anonymous, it takes time to foster the right voice, identity, and community. We believe our users today have figured out how to keep the community relevant and vibrant.
Blind is user-regulated and less than 0.05% of our content is flagged out by the community.
Not the employees.
We spend a third of our entire lives working. Yet most people in the workplace today have no place to just talk about work.
The communication “tools” at our disposal are pretty much just used to measure things like “productivity” and “performance,” for the employer.
So really, they were designed with the company in mind. Not the employees.
Three years ago, TeamBlind set out to change this with the idea that an environment that is safe, authentic, and neutral to company interest is what the corporate world needed.
Your professional identities matter, which is why it’s so hard to speak up in the workplace. If we can all just communicate honestly without the corporate facade, this idea of a flat-organization, transparency, open-door-policy (that’s a good one) would actually be real.
Blind brings professionals together based on ideas, conversations, and interests. It’s truly anonymous, even from us. The app and its contents are not managed by your company, but by the members that frequent our community: the users.
Our community has more than doubled so far this year. With Topics, we’re hoping to expand our audience to include everyone who works in tech. Startups, Venture Capitalists, Founders, Web Developers at Starbucks, who knows?
Please help by spreading the word. The app was updated today and available both in the App Store and Google Play.
Written by: Alex Shin, Head of Operations at TeamBlind
TeamBlind is venture-backed by DCM and a slew of other awesome investors. Our team of three recently became nine and we’re based in San Francisco.
Please reach out to blindapp@teamblind.com with any questions or inquiries.