Now, on to what’s going on with Polywork, not to be confused with the other Poly story in today’s issue on Poly Network.

Do we have a LinkedIn killer on our hands?  a16z and a host of star-studded investors seem to think the answer to that question is yes, and they are putting their wallets where their mouths are.

Polywork is a business-oriented social network that lets users create profiles centered around what they do rather than simply their job title or role like LinkedIn.

The underlying philosophy.  Polywork seems to be trying to combine the best of LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as blend together personal and professional interests and aspirations, to help users create a more robust presentation of who they are.

App features.  The app lets you provide details like who you have collaborated with on various projects and career highlights and showcase a system of community-created badges reflecting both personal and professional traits.  The platform ostensibly seems to be geared towards the modern professional who may wear many hats and also have a main job as well as side hustles.

The core idea is that people are more than the labels society has placed upon them, such as job titles and the schools they went to, per the company’s messaging on its website.

$13M Series A.  The company completed the financing with a16z leading and a star-studded list of investors including Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Related:  We wrote a story about another up-and-coming competitor to LinkedIn called Upstream back in May which you can check out here:  Upstream Wants to Take on LinkedIn.

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