Accompany, the LinkedIn for Professionals
Wait…. what?
Congratulations! You have just been pulled into a meeting with Apple CTO, Kevin Lynch in 10 minutes. The success of your startup hinges on this meeting and his impression of you. How do you find a conversation starter?
For most people the answer is a frantic dive into Google News or LinkedIn.
What if however, you have a call with 9 Intel executives — or all 24 members of Bloomberg’s board of directors? How do you get the most important information in the shortest amount of time? This is precisely the problem the California based startup, Accompany, is out to tackle.
The Technology
Describing itself as a relationship intelligence platform, Accompany aims to create detailed profiles of the world’s “decision makers”. This would include most corporate C-suite, executives, and high-level managers.
While LinkedIn could be described as a professional Facebook- where each person creates and updates their own profile, Accompany utilizes web-scraping and AI to construct detailed profiles of these high-profile individuals.
This database can then help financial and professional service providers to quickly obtain accurate and up-to-date information on clients. In small to midsize companies, Accompany aims to replace the role of chief of staff.
Accompany gathers data from unstructured sources (both online and from your personal notes) to create a dossier for your upcoming meeting or conversations. For example, if you have a upcoming meeting with an executive from Intel, Accompany will automatically pull information and news on both that executive and Intel as a whole.
Currently, Accompany is available as a iPhone app, web client and a Gmail plugin and boasts over 270 million professional profiles and 20 million company profiles.
My Perspective:
Unfortunately, I was unable to fully test Accompany on my computer because they current do not accept any new users (due to the recent acquisition by Cisco). Detailed review of the software itself would therefore have to come at a later date.
Strengths:
As far as the idea goes, there are many aspects I really like. For one, the integrated Gmail plug-in seems really handy for meeting heavy professionals to get a brief overview of potential clients and customers beforehand. The slower alternative here is copy and paste each name into LinkedIn.
Accompany also offers integration into Google Calendar and Outlook so I would expect this lookup process to be fairly seamless.
Using data-mining approaches, Accompany may be able to gather more accurate and timely data than LinkedIn. Personally, I only update LinkedIn with new information every 6 months or so.
I also like the visualization that Accompany provides into company structure and individual skills (See image above).
Challenges:
It is still not clear to me, however, what information I would be able to get on people that are not high-profile executives and directors. Your average manager Joe will likely not make that many news headlines and so this data-mining approach may not be too useful.
Competition with LinkedIn still seems like the biggest challenge. People generally don’t want to manage that many online profiles. Additionally, information on LinkedIn is currently out of reach for Accompany’s data miners. It remains unclear how well Accompany can function without this gold mine of professional data.
The Bottom Line:
I could see uses for Accompany for top level decision makers in professional or financial services. For the average job-seeker or student, LinkedIn will likely remain the primary networking platform for the time being.
