Reforge Raises $60M to Power The Expertise Economy

We are excited to announce that we raised $60M Series B led by Insight Partners and with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, True Ventures, NextView Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, TCV, and 170+ leading VP and C-level executives.

When Andrew Chen and I created the first Reforge Program, Growth Series, it was an embarrassing MVP (minimum viable product).

But seeing the impact the MVP has had on people’s lives inspired me to pursue Reforge full time. I’m proud to spend every day figuring out what actually helps professionals in their careers. Along the way, these are the counterintuitive things that I’ve come to believe.

  1. Most knowledge is trapped in the heads of a few.

    The quantity of information on the internet creates a feeling that anything is a Google search away. Unfortunately, as the internet has grown as a tool for search and discovery, it’s become increasingly difficult to find the gemstones amid a deluge of information.

    Instead, most modern business knowledge is trapped in the heads of a small group of frontier leaders working on the fastest-growing companies. They go from operating role to operating role, not being able to take the time to pause and synthesize what they know to pass it on. Unless you’re one of the few lucky people to work closely with these frontier leaders, that knowledge tends to remain trapped as a result.

  2. We are surrounded by false promises.

    The professional world as a whole has evolved to overemphasize false markers of success. Whether it’s chasing credentials or reaching 500+ connections on LinkedIn, the “instagramification” of careers has led to a filtered view of what professional growth looks and feels like. We pay for one-off courses, certifications, or even entire graduate programs because they’re the easiest options available for feeling like we’re making progress.

    Instead, they distract us, and take valuable time away from focusing on the growth levers that actually move us forward: taking on new projects, nurturing our weaknesses, and developing our own areas of expertise.

  3. Professional lives have changed. Professional development products haven’t.

    There are three things we need to power our career: knowledge, relationships, and opportunities. Those things have been true for ages.

    Historically, we’ve relied on acquiring those things from traditional education institutions or our companies. Where we went to school or the company we worked for was important because that’s how we acquired our knowledge, network, and opportunities. This led to a focus on general knowledge, tenured professors, credentials, linear career ladders, and static networks.

But our professional world has changed. To thrive in the new world it is more about your expertise vs where you worked or went to school. To grow in the world, we need access to specialized knowledge — from industry experts, when the problem is in front of us, and from an evolving network around you that’s experiencing those same problems.

These things leave most professionals lost, unsatisfied, and overall stifled in their professional development. We are taking a different approach.

Your Career Timeline

We spend a lot of time at Reforge discussing careers, with our members, partners, and employees. Naturally, we couldn’t write a fundraising announcement without, in true Reforge fashion, sharing a meaningful exercise to do with your team — the Career Timeline exercise.

  1. Draw: Give everyone a sheet of paper and have them draw a line through the middle (the timeline). Pro tip from seeing our team do this: The line is easier to draw if you fold the paper in half. 🙂

  2. Reflect: Have everyone take 10-15 minutes to answer the question: What are the experiences that shaped you into the professional you are today? It’s important to allow these experiences to be inclusive of personal and professional ones. Often events from our non-work lives influence who we are at work.

  3. Share: Have them add these experiences to their timeline and present them to the group.

The end result looks something like this:

It’s a powerful exercise to get to know someone, the context of where they came from, and who they are today. But what you find is that most timelines follow a rhythm.

  1. Inflection Point - What stands out most on career timelines are the inflection points. These are the moments in time where there was a spark or catalyst to something new.

  2. Building In the Trenches - In between the inflection points, there can be a lot of time spent in the trenches. It isn’t that nothing is happening in this time period. Instead, it’s when people are applying what they’ve learned from the inflection points. Building new muscle, taking on different projects, pushing through day-to-day challenges.

  3. Opportunity Creation - As people build new expertise, it opens new doors in their career. We begin to see how new opportunities and pathways come as a result of that time in the trenches.

  4. Repeat - Those new opportunities lead to new inflection points and the cycle repeats.

We are building Reforge to power your career timeline. Here is how.

1. Creating Career Inflection Points

Reforge starts by creating a career inflection point for you through our cohort-based programs. We do this by:

  1. Unlocking the earned insights of frontier leaders.

    With every program we build, we spend 50 to 100 hours with frontier leaders (our partners and EIRs) — digging, collecting, and synthesizing their raw experience and knowledge. We've been lucky to work with some amazing partners, including Casey Winters (CPO at Eventbrite), Elena Verna (Miro, Netlify, SurveyMonkey), Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder, FB, Tripadvisor), Shaun Clowes (SVP Product at Mulesoft), and many more.

  2. Help you acquire those earned insights in short timeframe.

    Our programs are designed to help you see a problem like Product Strategy, Engineering Management, or Retention + Engagement through the eyes of someone who has solved that problem many times before.

    We do this in a very short period of time (4-6 weeks). These programs are not just created by experts, but led by our Executives In Residence (EIRs), inclusive of the partners we mentioned above. We bridge the gap between theory and application. They are done with a group of peers working on similar problems to you.

  3. Help you apply and execute on those earned insights.

    We are not focused on memorizing concepts or plastering a certificate on your resume. We help our members create an impact for themselves and their company. And when we do that, the rest takes care of itself.

Want to experience it in action for yourself? We have an upcoming Spring cohort that starts the week of March 21. Apply here. The programs offered are:

2. Building Expertise in the Trenches

Just as careers don’t operate in siloed moments of time, the Reforge experience doesn’t end (or even have to start) with our cohort programs. Our membership platform allows our community to:

  1. Have complete access to the best-in-class resources for tackling the endless project types that come your way. And the range is massive, from frameworks that help leaders map their careers to templates that help professionals scale a new channel.

  2. Be surrounded by a community working on the same set of challenges. The power of this cannot be underscored enough: Reforge members can lean on each other to brainstorm ideas, hear how someone else tackled the exact problem they’re now working on, or be connected to someone who can help you execute quickly. We’ve seen the value of this access and shared experience only grow in importance in a remote world.

  3. Jump into program materials on your own time. All the material across every program is available to members as they need it. Whether you have a dedicated four weeks to dig in live with us during a cohort, or just need to hop into one concept on the very Monday morning you’ve been assigned a new responsibility, the access is there when and how you want it.

The ultimate outcome for professional development is executing on what you learn, enabling you to scale yourself and your company. While the journey can begin with a cohort-based program, new muscle development requires multiple reps. Reforge is building that career gym, with a community of experts going through the reps alongside you.

3. Opportunities to Leverage Your Expertise

Through that time spent in the trenches, you build expertise that opens doors for new opportunities to leverage that expertise. We see that within our community already today through the opportunity to become a Reforge Partner. We help unlock their expertise for our members while simultaneously helping those experts increase their scope of influence.

In fact, we’ve been fortunate that many of our early Reforge Members such as Brittany Bingham (VP of Marketing at Guru), Vivek Kumar (VP of Product at PropertyGuru), and Phil Carter (Senior Director of Growth at Quizlet) have since gone on to help us create new Reforge resources from full blown programs to one-of-a-kind blog content.

In the near future we’ll offer many more ways for people to gain new opportunities around their expertise, based on what they are capable of, not who they know or where they went to school. Our members prove to us every day not only how possible this is, but how valuable it will be to their professional development.

Become A Reforge Member, Partner, or Teammate

If you are interested in helping build Reforge, we'd love for you to join us:

  1. Become A Reforge Member - If you are currently experiencing the messy middle of your career, join us as a member. Our upcoming cohort begins the week of March 21. If you’re wondering if there’s still time to join the Spring cohort, we’ve extended our application window. Apply today to join.

  2. Become A Reforge Partner - If you are an executive interested in defining the future of your function, join us as a Reforge Partner. Email us at hello@reforge.com and let us know about your background.

  3. Join The Reforge Team - If you are passionate about helping people do the best work of their career, join us on the team. We are looking for roles in almost every function, including engineers, designers, program directors, people ops, finance, and more.