Starting Key to unlock your professional opportunities

Kushagra Shrivastava and I started Key to help unlock opportunities for talented professionals that are looking to advance their careers. This mission has become more important over the past few months where many are now looking for work for the first time in a decade. The existing resources, websites and solutions are not working to bring these professional communities together to help them find work, start companies and unlock opportunities.

I started Xoogler.co when I left Google in April 2015, but I've since realized we need to not only help current and former Google employees (ex-Googlers, i.e. Xooglers) but also everyone else. I hear how the Xoogler community help Xooglers find jobs, help companies find employees, connect co-founders and startups find investors on a daily basis. Just last Friday, the following was shared with me by Jeremy:

"I joined the Xoogler community soon after I was impacted by Q1 2023 layoffs at Google. I found tools like Slack and the Xoogler newsletter to be great ways to stay connected with folks and learn about events happening in my area. In fact, the newsletter clued me in on a fireside chat with a recruiter at a high-growth startup (founded by an ex-Googler) that I later watched on the Xoogler YouTube channel. I reached out to the recruiter after watching, which led to a few conversations, then a few rounds of interviews, then an offer I accepted earlier this year.  Thank you Chris and the Xoogler community."

While it's satisfying to know that the Xoogler community that I've devoted myself to building over the past 9 years to over 32,000+ members and 300+ events a year has turned into results for Jeremy and many other ex-Google employees, when I read messages on the Xoogler slack and speak to Xoogler.co members, I can't help but feel how there are thousands of others that could get assistance from their communities, but don't because there isn't a platform like Xoogler for their communities. After discussing the following message with Kushagra Shrivastava, we quickly created a job board for Xooglers and organized many sessions such as this to help tech professionals cope with being laid off, but that wasn't enough to handle the inbound and needs of thousands of tech professionals.

After the January 20, 2023 decision by Google, signups on Xoogler.co doubled from 14,000 to 28,000+ within 2 months. Our existing community management tools and other solutions were insufficient to manage and help tech professionals unlock opportunities. After speaking to dozens of product leaders and community members, Kushagra and I decided to build Key, a purpose-built professional networking and community engagement platform. We've started testing it with an initial set of community leaders including our design partners such as StartX, the Berkeley Club of Singapore, ex-Amazon's Day One Community and Cornell's Underground Entrepreneurs Community. You can join our waitlist here.

We are looking forward to helping all tech professionals and providing a turnkey solution so when folks reach out again in the future to start their community platforms such as when this product manager from Microsoft did, there's a seamless solution available for them to activate.

Building Key wouldn't be possible without our team but also our investors. Thank you to all the investors and supporters of Key. We look forward to fulfilling the vision we shared with your support!

Kushagra and I are thrilled that Aydin Senkut, the Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis who has been named to Forbes’ Midas Lists, 10 years in a row 2014-2023 decided to lead our first round of funding! He has been an early backer of companies like Adyen, Shopify, Pluralsight, Credit Karma, Fitbit, Rovio, Meraki, Guardant Health and Soundhound. We look forward to having Key join the list of iconic investments that he's made!

We are thrilled that Liquid 2 Ventures is also an early investor of Key, thank you Michael Ma, Nate Montana and Joe Montana for investing in us.

In addition, I'm thrilled that Key is backed by Alumni Ventures , Archangel Ventures, Cerigo Investments, Everywhere Ventures , Shibuya Startups KK, MVP Ventures & Xoogler Ventures. Angels including Bradley Horowitz , Caesar Sengupta, Asha Jadeja, Qasar Younis, Kevin Chou, Jonah Goodhart & Noah Goodhart, Avichal Garg, Prabhakar Reddy, Raghu Yarlagadda, Vibhu Mittal, Anthony Lacavera, Ali Moiz, Alap Bharadwaj, Tony Zameczkowski, Jeremy Au 区汉辉, Milan Reinartz and many alumni and current employees of Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Uber, Stripe, Palantir, Doordash, Waymo, Cruise and McKinsey also invested.

Don't hesitate to reach out if you're looking to start your communities on Key or hire from tech communities, we can connect you with the best talent coming from Google and the other communities that we work with.

Finally, a special thanks to all the supporters from the Xoogler community and beyond. We wouldn't be able to help even more tech professionals during these times without all your encouragement and help over the past 9 years. Onward 🚀!