
Why Anonymity at Work
My email response to a journalist.
Because everyone has a boss, a coworker and a career goal at a company, from Intern -> CEO.
Last week, a journalist working on a story about anonymous apps and their impact to the workplace reached out to me. After failing at carving out time for a call (my fault), we decided to just go with email.
I admit. I went a little crazy with the answers. (it was the coffee) but please, do go on.
Hi Alex,
Sounds good! Below are a few questions; feel free to send along answers at your convenience.
Thanks for being flexible!
1. Can you say a little about the impetus behind Blind? Why was the app created? What sort of motivations and purpose did the founding team have for Blind?
Blind is a community app for the workplace. There are so many “tools” for work, but they are pretty much geared for the employer. There is more to work than employee surveys and team productivity.
We spend a third of our lives working, yet there is no place for professionals to just go and mingle with other professionals. We wanted to be a tool that helps you be honest and navigate your career.
Blind flattens hierarchy. It’s so anonymous, even we can’t ever ID our members. We believe what is said is more important than who had said it. Whether you are an intern, or a VP, you can have candid conversations and really understand how everyone is feeling.
2. It seems like many companies are turning to Blind to get a pulse on how employees are feeling about new developments, events, the culture, etc. Did you foresee this? Do you think this is a good way to use the platform?
Yes we did. We purposely left very little onboarding and never directly communicated with our users about what Blind was about. Professionals can find their own need. They can also moderate themselves. We’re not about censorship. We like to think that the tone within Blind is very authentic. If a company is doing great, you’ll feel it immediately. If there are layoffs hitting your company, you’ll feel that too.
Blind is a place for information, for compassion, for connection that isn’t based on titles and tenure.
3. Speaking of corporate usage of Blind: There’s also been talk about people using the app for recruiting and hiring purposes. Is this something you foresaw? Do you think Blind can be useful in this way?
Haha, we knew it would happen eventually. I mean, when you amass a user base of people from top tier tech companies, cross-pollination is just bound to happen.
People want to benchmark their careers, their savings, their everything with other people who are similar to them. We see AMA’s (ask me anything’s) by engineering managers and recruiters, to entire threads about Yahoo layoffs and users from Uber, Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Lyft all chiming in to hire people, in the thread, anonymously! (we support 1-to-1 private messages) It’s a beautiful thing to see the community create value for our users organically.
4. Why do you think Blind has been able to thrive when so many other anonymous discussion apps have not been embraced as readily?
Anonymous is inherently difficult. If our team knows one thing, it’s how anonymous communities work.
When things are anonymous, you have to focus on voice. Users have no photos, no context, nothing that would help them decide what to say or how to behave. But if the content they first see is relevant, interesting and sounds like someone you might know because they work on your floor, or the company next door, it creates identity. We focus on building identity, in an anonymous environment.
Also our idea of growth hacking is completely backwards with zero scalability. We started small, launching Blind at one company at a time. In fact, on launch day, we got 38 users. For a social app, you can round that down to 0. But that’s the difference. Having 100 users who can relate with each other is so much better than having 10,000 users who have nothing in common.
5. Additional comments: Is there anything you’d like to discuss regarding Blind that hasn’t come up in the previous questions?
I think it’s important to address that anonymous doesn’t always mean bad. With the right voice, right community and the right tools (flagging, polls, etc) it can be powerful.
When ideas are polarizing (anonymity in the work place? Why? Companies will hate it! — this is what everyone told me in the beginning), they mean something. I mean it used to be crazy to think that you can just get a ride from a stranger (uber) or fly to some foreign country, and sleep in a stranger’s bedroom (airbnb). Why should honest talk at work be any different?
Employees are an employer’s biggest asset, yet we as employees fear repercussion or judgement from our managers maybe saying the wrong things at the wrong time.
We forget that managers are employees too. HR people are also people and so are executives. Everyone has a boss, a coworker, a career goal. This notion that you are bound to your manager or your company leadership is backwards and outdated (look at how frequent tech employees move around).
Blind is aiming to change that paradigm. Employees (everyone in a company) are bound to each other by a common mission and vision. Transparency makes good companies better and helps struggling companies identify areas of improvement… from their employees. Because who in their right mind doesn’t want their company to do well? Right?
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