Introducing Nextio: Professional Messaging that Invites Opportunity
Eighteen months ago, Aravind Bala and I left Microsoft to start our own company. For me, it meant saying goodbye to eighteen years of leading incubations on established teams, building new businesses, and building some amazing teams where people came together to challenge the status quo. At the time, we didn’t know that our next adventure would be called Nextio, or even what it would empower people to do. But we both had hard-earned battle scars from trying to find the right people to help us incubate a new product on a reasonably new team, and we both knew that there had to be a better way to find and recruit those people.
The better way
That experience, painful and frustrating as it was, was the seed that grew into Nextio. We wanted an easy way to search LinkedIn for qualified candidates without paying LinkedIn thousands of dollars as “recruiters,” and without having LinkedIn hide candidate profiles behind paywalls. And we wanted to be able to message those candidates directly without LinkedIn acting as an intermediary that made us pay them money that the candidates would never see.
Our there’s got to be a better way soon morphed into a set of inspiring what ifs. What if everyone was visible to everyone else? What if you could message someone directly instead of being forced to go through a middleman? What if we could add just enough friction to avoid spam? What if there was a way for a sender to express their sincerity for a recipient’s time and attention? What if that friction and that form of expression were a virtual stamp that you had to buy to reach someone you didn’t know? What if the money that a sender paid for that stamp went to the recipient? And what if the recipient could decide on who and what didn’t require a stamp, and which charity could benefit from money earned by replying to stamped messages?
The rest is Nextio history.
Please join Nextio
Today we’re launching Nextio. We’ve built a new business and assembled a team of people who are passionate about clearing the way for potentially life-changing opportunities to come directly to you. And while social and professional networks are an amazing way to include people, sometimes they’re a formidable way to exclude people. We believe that the networks you belong to should never work against you. That’s why our mission is to provide professionals with visibility and access to people and opportunities beyond their existing networks.
We hope you’ll join us on our journey. We look forward to welcoming you into a safe and spam-free messaging environment where you can have meaningful conversations with trustworthy people, earn money for your time and attention, and learn about opportunities that could change your career and your life. Please sign up for Nextio. And if you have a question or suggestion, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to me. I’m anoop@nextio.com.
p.s.
Building a thriving network takes time, but we didn’t want to ask you to wait alongside us before you could benefit from joining Nextio. So we built a powerful, free tool called Career Insights that you can start using as soon as you sign up. Career Insights shows you the full landscape of career moves available to you, the background and skills of the people in any job you’re interested in, and the qualifications you can acquire and add to your résumé to increase your chances of landing your dream job. We believe it’s worth signing up for on its own.
Anoop Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Nextio, a new professional messaging platform that pays professionals for their time and attention, while opening up new career opportunities. Anoop was formerly a professor at Stanford and his first startup VXtreme was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. While at Microsoft, Anoop was Technology Assistant to Bill Gates from 2001–2003; the founding VP for Unified Communications group (now a multi-billion-dollar business) and he has been responsible for numerous other business incubations and innovations at Microsoft. Find him at nextio.com/anoop or on Twitter @nextio.
