The Unfinished Promise of Professional Networks

Anyone building a company around professional networks should spend time in the graveyard.

Talented teams have built compelling products around ideas that sounded obvious once someone explained them: help people meet, remember whom they know, and find the connection that changes what happens next.

The need has survived every wave of attempts.

In my first post, I described why we are building Narella around warm paths to opportunity. That ambition deserves a harder examination: what defeated earlier attempts, what has changed, and how we intend to build something people continue to use.

Sonar belonged to an early wave of mobile social discovery. Its founder, Brett Martin, published a candid postmortem in 2013, describing the distance between enthusiasm for a product and behavior that could sustain it. Requested features failed to produce the expected use. Side projects and competitive reactions consumed attention. The company failed despite substantial interest. Highlight disappeared in 2015; Pinterest acquired its developer’s team the following year.

Humin pursued a different part of the problem: remembering people through the context of how you knew them. Tinder acquired its technology and intellectual property in 2016, bringing its founders and many team members into the company. Contactually focused on maintaining relationships and staying in touch. After becoming part of Compass, the product closed in March 2022.

These are different outcomes. An acquisition can reward a team and preserve valuable technology; a discontinued product can have served its users well. The history deserves more care than a list of failures with a single explanation attached.

Today, established relationship tools and a new generation of AI introduction services continue to address parts of the problem. We are entering a competitive field with useful products already in it.

Across this category, the demands are considerable. A networking service needs enough relevant people to make participation worthwhile. The people most sought after may already have more requests than they can handle. A promising match still has to become a conversation that both people want.

Then there is the work of keeping up. People change roles, pursue new goals, and mention things that matter in passing. Some of that information appears in the outside world; some lives in your conversations with them. Understanding what a new development means often requires both. Bringing those pieces together takes time and attention that compete with everything else in a busy day.

At Teamable, we helped companies hire thousands of people through introductions. That gave us conviction that the mechanism could work—and direct experience with the barriers to making it work.

Trust, security, and privacy were among the biggest barriers. A network contains other people’s information as well as your own. Asking someone to make that information available raises reasonable questions about access, use, and control.

Those questions determine how much people are willing to participate and, in turn, whether the product has enough context to be useful.

Hiring also gives an introduction a clear purpose. Taking that experience into other parts of company building means understanding what someone is trying to achieve with the same clarity. It means caring for the relationships behind those opportunities, which develop through years of attention and mutual help.

As AI makes generating outreach easier, I expect the ability to recognize a worthwhile conversation to matter more. A trusted relationship and a specific reason to talk give people something to judge amid all those requests.

The same technology makes more of the necessary work practical. Language models can help interpret everyday communication, reducing the effort of turning conversations into useful records and keeping up as people’s lives change. Software can now work with more of the information that previously depended on someone remembering it or entering it by hand.

Increasingly capable models can also run on personal devices, making it practical to analyze private communications close to where they already live.

Most of Narella’s AI processing runs on our customers’ own machines, using hardware they already have. That local work carries no per-use inference charge from a hosted model provider, and reduces the need to send raw conversations to a remote service. Network discovery and features involving sharing or server processing have their own boundaries, described in our privacy policy.

Narella combines external information about people with context extracted locally from your own communications. A new role can take on a different meaning alongside what someone previously told you about their ambitions. Bringing those perspectives together helps explain why a development matters to your relationship. The insight is specific to the history you share with that person.

Your objectives give that understanding direction. They can come from company goals or OKRs, or from personal ambitions such as exploring a career change or developing expertise in a new field. What you are trying to achieve changes which people and conversations are relevant to you.

Imagine your company has made expansion into a new market a priority. Someone in your wider network may have faced the same challenge, or know a person whose experience would help. Narella helps connect that objective to relevant people and possible paths to them. A broad company priority becomes a conversation you can pursue, with a reason for having it.

The difficult part is deciding which possibilities deserve your attention now. A fact can be accurate and still give you no useful reason to act. A connection can look promising while offering little value to either person. Its significance depends on what you are working toward and what is possible in that particular relationship.

We have a specific view of the patterns that make a useful moment recognizable. Those distinctions shape Narella’s suggestions. They reflect years of working on the gap between seeing a connection and making it useful, and are central to how we think about the product.

That understanding works in both directions. It can reveal a path toward something you need, or a way you could help someone else. Recognizing that you have something valuable to offer is part of what keeps a network healthy. The person retains the judgment about what feels appropriate and whether to act.

This gives Narella a reason to remain useful as priorities change. A company’s next important conversation will depend on where it is trying to go. A person’s ambitions will evolve over a career. The relationships continue between those needs, and the care invested in them can make future opportunities possible. We believe a product that supports both progress and that ongoing care can become a lasting part of how people work.

It also gives us a place to begin. Narella can help someone make better use of the relationships they already have. Discovery across a wider network adds another opportunity as participation grows. Each has to provide value on its own terms.

Delivering on this requires care. A system can misunderstand a conversation. Old context can become misleading. An introduction can look sensible and be unwelcome to one of the people involved. Local processing still requires careful security and has to work within the device’s limits.

We have to earn trust through useful suggestions and clear user control, and earn continued use by helping people accomplish something worthwhile. Introduction counts alone would tell us very little about either.

I am confident in our approach because the experience and the technology now meet. We have made introductions work for an important outcome, learned where participation breaks down, and developed a view of the relationship patterns that matter. AI gives us a practical way to apply that understanding more broadly, with more context and less manual effort.

That is the promise we are building Narella to deliver: progress on the goals that matter to people, through relationships that grow stronger along the way.