UPDATE4: Thanks everybody! It’s 7/27 5:05 PM PST, and I’m going stop for today and come back when I can for a few more days. No more updates! It was great talking to all of you. I've received a ton of valuable feedback and I will take it back to my team. Thank you again for being part of the community! ----- I’m Kyum Kim, and I’m one of the co-founders of Blind. I came to the US from Korea in 2014 to launch Blind in the US. If you worked at Amazon or Microsoft from 2014 to 2015, you might’ve met me. We threw parties in Seattle to meet people and introduce Blind. I personally signed up the first 100 users at Amazon. And if you saw Mini Microsoft 2.0 posters in the Microsoft Commons elevators, that was me! The cofounders of Blind started Blind because we had all worked at big companies and seen firsthand how important it was to have a platform independent from companies so that companies couldn’t shut it down if they didn’t like what they saw. Personally, I like to watch comedy clips and play soccer as a hobby (Hi if you saw me get roasted last week at the tech roadshow.) Personally, I am a father of a 2 yo daughter and live in the Bay Area. AMA about Blind, being a startup founder, or immigrant to the US. TC 200K + options UPDATE: I am answering everyone's questions from the beginning. I will try to get to everyone! UPDATE2: I’m seeing some of the same questions, so here’s a FAQ: Is Blind really anonymous? - We don’t have any personal information. We also don’t store emails, and there’s no way to link user activity to email addresses. Blind is truly anonymous, but we recommend you don’t share personal information for extra privacy. Does Blind sell my information? - We don’t sell personal information. We don’t have any personal info and don’t store email addresses. What is Blind’s business model? - We have paid products that help companies recruit and listen to the conversations on Blind. We recently launched a job board, and we have recruiters that help users get jobs (free for job seekers!) at some leading companies. We also have an insights product to help companies learn about what’s being said about them on Blind. There are ads and b money that you can buy in the app. Why do you censor information? - We don’t censor any topics or discussions. We have community guidelines that make sure discussions are respectful and helpful for everyone. If you have questions about a ban, you can reach out to our team at blindapp@teamblind.com. https://www.teamblind.com/community-guidelines Why did I get banned? - We ban users if they violate our community guidelines. We send notifications and the reason for the ban when it happens, but if you have any questions, reach out to our team at blindapp@teamblind.com. What’s on the roadmap? What’s coming next on Blind? - One of the most common topics discussed on Blind is jobs - interviews, offers, TC, company culture, RTO. We are going to build more products to help you find your next job. We’ve already launched a job board as a first step. On the engagement side, we are working on diversifying discussions and personalization. We plan to bring out more structured data to make the product more informative to the users. What do you think about TC or GTFO/Blind tax? - The Blind tax came organically because people were posting questions like how to increase their pay, buy a home, or investing, and adding TC adds more relevance for people to give useful advice. Now I think it’s great to promote better pay transparency. I love reading stories about how Blind helped people get a raise or know their worth. Are you hiring? - We're hiring and adding new roles all the time. Check out the latest roles here: https://careers.teamblind.com/ UPDATE 3: It's 9:16 PM PST and I have enjoyed answering your questions and will continue for a few more minutes. I will come back tomorrow and try to answer most of the questions. Thank you for being part of the community!
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The Blind Founder is finally here. Welcome. What would you do if Elon wanted to buy Blind?
I would take the meeting and take a photo with him for Instagram. I also would ask if he wants to rebrand us a Z.
What happened to Y?
How do you plan to make money out of it? Can you please add another section for “offer evaluations only”
First - Companies can’t pay us to take down posts or remove content they don’t like. Blind is a community for anonymous and honest discussion and will stay that way. But there are different ways that we make money as a company. There are ads and b money that you can buy in the app. We have paid products that help companies recruit and listen to the conversations on Blind. We recently launched a job board, and we have recruiters that help users get jobs (free for candidates looking for jobs!) at some leading companies. We also have an insights product to help companies learn about what’s being said about them on Blind. Re: "offer evaluations only" We launched offer evaluation posts recently and are very excited about it, thanks for the idea. Our product team will see this for sure :)
Can you give an example of what data is shown in the insights product? Many of us come here since it’s outside of company oversight and makes retaliation difficult
What qualifies a new company (startup) to not be banned and allowed on blind platform?
I used to run a startup and I want my employees to have a pure anonymous internal chat room so that I get to know the issues. But our domain were converted to read only mode. What’s the criteria? I’m definitely working on next startup and I see blind is one way to attract talent
Please answer this. This is very important for us. 🙏 🙏 🙏
are blind employees among us on blind?
Yes! We also have a very active company channel, but because we’re a small startup, our employees show up as New to protect their privacy. I religiously read our own channel and “are you Kyum?” is a meme on our channel where most of the time it is not me.
If I send you 1 Bitcoin, will you send me 2 ?
Send me 1 first and you'll find out.
2 what? eth?
Are you available to mentor for new startup founders?
Send me a message on LinkedIn!
this is the moment you get doxxed cheetah
I once had few suggestions and ideas to scale blind and become competitor to LinkedIn. Are you still hiring? What positions?
We have open roles on our careers page. Let's connect on LinkedIn and I'd love to hear ideas :) https://careers.teamblind.com/
Your top career mistakes as an employee
I became a manager very early in my career. It took me a while to understand the impact of my words on my team and the people that report to me, because I have never been on the other side. I had to learn that as I go. It’s still something that I’m working through.
Your top 5 mistakes while founding blind
I’ll give you the top 1 - There are people that are better fits at a certain stage of a startup. In hindsight, I hired some people too early for the stage that we were at or hired people who had a bad impact on our culture.
How do you ensure it doesn’t happen again?
Yo Kyum. What was the most challenging about starting Blind?
We launched in Korea and then the US. In both markets, we had a cold start problem. The difference was that the founders had many friends in Korea who work in tech companies but almost none in the US. Close connections? 0 I think the most challenging part was starting a user base in the US. We had to find a way to make friends who would trust us to sign up on an app with a work email. At first, we made people ambassadors and asked them to sign up their coworkers, but it didn’t work. They never actually told their coworkers, so we knew we had to do something different. Since I was a fob, I looked for the Korean & Korean American community at Amazon so it was easier to make friends because we had our culture/something in common. We had a lot of kbbq and soju parties. I got their advice about how to connect with other people. We also did a lot of guerilla marketing such as posting flyers on lamp posts, parking lots, elevators etc.
Can you elaborate on the guerilla marketing?