INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
LinkedIn has cornered the market when it comes to putting your own professional profile online and using it to network for jobs, industry
connections and professional development
But when it comes to looking at a chart of the people, and specifically the leadership teams, who make up organizations more holistically,
the Microsoft-owned network comes up a little short: you can search by company names, but chances are that you get a list of people based on
their connectivity to you, and otherwise in no particular order (including people who may no longer even be at the company)
And pointedly, there is little in the way of verification to prove that someone who claims to be working for a company really is.Now, a
startup called The Org is hoping to take on LinkedIn and address that gap with an ambitious idea: to build a database (currently free to
use) of organizational charts for every leading company, and potentially any company in the world, and then add features after that, such as
$11 million in funding: a Series A of $8.5 million, and a previously unannounced seed round of $2.5 million.Led by Founders Fund, the Series
A also includes participation from Sequoia and Balderton, along with a number of angels
set out to build a bigger business based on the concept.For now, The Org is aimed at two distinct markets: those outside the company who
who are using the data to model their own organizational charts, or salespeople; and those inside the company (or again, outside) who are
simply interested in seeing who does what.The Org is aiming to have 100,000 org charts on its platform by the end of the year, with the
longer-term goal being to cover 1 million
For now, the focus is on adding companies in the US before expanding to other markets.But while the idea of building org charts for many
at Balderton Capital, in a statement
taking to building these profiles so far has been a collaborative one
While The Org itself might establish some company names and seed and update them with information from publicly available sources, that
approach leaves a lot of gaps.This is where a crowdsourced, wiki-style approach comes in
As with other company-based networking services such as Slack, users from a particular company can use their work email addresses to sign
of companies, I can see some challenges, too, that it might encounter as it grows.Platforms that provide insights into a company landscape,
such as LinkedIn or Glassdoor, are ultimately banked more around individuals and their own representations
That means that by their nature these platforms may not ever provide complete pictures of businesses themselves, just slices of it
The Org, on the other hand, starts from the point of view of presenting the company itself, which means that the resulting gaps that arise
might be more apparent if they never get filled in, making The Org potentially less useful as a tool.Similarly, if these charts are truly
companies attempting to build org structures based on what their more successful competitors are doing), I could see how some companies
have been okay with what The Org is building
Why block it? The world is changing and if the only way to keep your talent is by hiding your org chart you have other problems at your
And some companies email us about changes
Indeed, that could mean mapping out 1 million people at Walmart, for example
