We are excited to announce that we are raising $21M from Andrew Chen and Anish Acharya at Andreessen Horowitz along with a group of leaders to help us build the place where top tech comes to scale.
Traditional education institutions have tried copying and pasting their university online for professionals and it hasn't worked. For the past 4 years, Reforge has been rebuilding education for professionals from the ground up based on what is important and relevant today. Our participants have grown into executive leaders at companies like Roblox, Plaid, Github, Adobe, Dropbox, Shopify, Credit Karma, Google, and more. We're excited to help more professionals scale themselves and their companies across a few initiatives:
New programs and topics including deeper dives in product management, engineering leadership, data, design, and Founders/CEO's.
New community initiatives to help you build meaningful relationships with others solving similar problems.
More Reforge Partners including Executives-In-Residence and Operators-In-Residence to help provide more access and insights.
Here is our story on how we built the place where top tech comes to scale - and where we're going next.
A Bootstrapped Beginning
The story of Reforge began with a surprise.
In 2015, I was working at HubSpot as the VP of Growth. Every week, a member of my team would ask me about professional development. What can I do to up-level faster? How can I get better at identifying problems in our growth strategy? Where can I look for tools to better my thinking around monetization? With limited time and resources, I wanted to find a professional development program that would help my team scale.
After hours of research and conversations with friends and colleagues, I found myself hitting dead ends. In the end, I couldn't find anything relevant to the questions my team was asking.
This was surprising. HubSpot had a generous professional development reimbursement, but within my team, only a small fraction of it was used. People were looking for ways to advance their career but couldn't find anything they were interested in. I quickly found a similar story across other teams internal and external to HubSpot.
This led me to want to create a course of my own. As I was talking to a friend of mine, Noah Kagan, he recommended I reconnect with Andrew Chen, who was experimenting with something similar called SVBR (Silicon Valley Business Review). A short convo later, Andrew and I partnered up to do the v1 of Reforge, originally named the SVBR Growth Series.
Since then, Reforge has grown into something I never expected. What started as a simple solution to a problem me and my colleagues faced has now turned into a global community of thousands of Members, 10 programs across growth, product, marketing, and engineering, and an alumni base of top operators from almost every leading tech company. Most importantly, we've watched our participants grow into executive leaders at companies like Roblox, Plaid, Github, Adobe, Dropbox, Shopify, Credit Karma, and many more.
The rate at which top tech talent has joined Reforge has shown three things:
Navigating "The Messy Middle" of our career is critical but chaotic.
MBA's, Corporate Training, Conferences, etc are fundamentally broken.
Unlocking the earned insights of industry leaders creates impact for individuals, companies and our ecosystem.
The "Messy Middle" of Careers
Scott Belsky, CPO at Adobe, wrote a great book about building new products called "The Messy Middle." In it, he said:
“We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. We don’t talk about the middle because we’re not proud of the turbulence of our own making and the actions we took out of despair...Creating something from nothing is a volatile journey...The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go...No extraordinary journey is linear. In reality, the middle is extraordinarily volatile — a continuous sequence of ups and downs, flush with uncertainty and struggle.”
Scott's framework doesn’t just apply to products. It also defines a core problem that tech professionals face in their careers today. We start our career when we get our first jobs in engineering, marketing, product, etc. From there, we try to grow to the VP / C-level suite. But what happens in the middle?
The part of the journey from individual contributor to senior manager is almost never a straight path.
We spend most of our careers in the middle. This is where careers are made or broken.
Everything is always changing. New roles and functions are always emerging, the underlying knowledge for tech is accelerating, nothing is a linear path.
As a result, navigating this part of the journey is chaotic and volatile.
The Failure of MBAs, Corporate Training, and Conferences
Part of the challenge in navigating the Messy Middle is that old solutions are fundamentally broken.
Masters Degrees Are Broken At Their Foundation
The traditional path to level-up mid-career used to be to get a Master’s degree. Massive tuition and opportunity costs and a growing gap between what is taught and what is valuable means a master’s degree is no longer a viable or smart option for many. The curriculum and community is extremely broad but navigating the messy middle requires deep, actionable, and relevant knowledge and peers as you're doing the work, not while you're taking a 2 year hiatus.
Corporate Training Has an Enterprise Software Problem
The failure of graduate education has created demand from employees and put immense pressure on companies to be the ones to create professional development support. Over $70B is spent on corporate training in the US alone.
But the corporate training space is dominated by enterprise players - companies who sell solutions at the top to the C-level, that are then forced down onto employees. This leads companies to build for the buyer (an executive), but not the end user. Corporate training solutions aren't must-haves like payroll or benefits and as a result they go barely used by their employee base. This ultimately fails the company and the individual.
Professionals Are Left To Fend For Themselves
The failure of corporate training has left most professionals to try and cobble together fragmented information on their own. Soundbites from conferences, podcasts, or other sources create a high volume of fragmented information, but leave someone to separate the signal from the noise. The soundbites can be great sources of inspiration but they almost never create the environment to go deep enough in a structured way that enables real growth.
Impact Fuels Our Careers
Bangaly Kaba, Reforge EIR, former VP Product Growth at Instacart and former Head of Growth at Instagram, recently wrote a blog post on making career decisions - Impact = Environment x Skills. In it, he said:
"When thinking through these situations, people often solve for the wrong things. Most often, people think about career advancement as increases in compensation. Compensation and career advancement are correlated, but not the same. Your compensation increases because you are creating a lot of impact. Compensation is the output, impact is the input. I like to think about Impact as the thing that powers your career progression. It is what you are solving for when you are trying to make career progression decisions."
This explains the foundation of Reforge. It's not about memorizing concepts or plastering a certificate on your LinkedIn profile. How do we help our members create an impact for themselves and their company? If we do that, the rest takes care of itself. Our philosophy has had three components:
Unlock the earned insights of frontier leaders.
Help you acquire those earned insights in a meaningful way through cohort-based programs.
Help you execute on those earned insights to help you create impact that leads to growth for you and your company.
Unlocking The Earned Insights Of Frontier Leaders
A few years ago Ben Horowitz coined the term "Earned Secrets." In an a16z podcast, he explains an earned secret as:
"You did something in your past to solve a hard problem and learned something about the world that not a lot of other people know."
Earned Secrets are being created all the time. Internally, we've reframed them as an Earned Insight. The common belief is that you can find any information on the internet. I used to believe the same thing. After working on Reforge for 4 years, I now know that nothing is further from the truth.
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. As a result, unless you are one of the few lucky people to work closely with these frontier leaders, that knowledge tends to remain trapped.
With every program we build, we spend 50 to 100 hours with frontier leaders, digging, collecting, and synthesizing their raw experience and knowledge. We've been lucky to work with some amazing Reforge Partners like Casey Winters (CPO at Eventbrite), Shaun Clowes (SVP Product at Mulesoft), Elena Verna (Miro, Netlify, SurveyMonkey), Ravi Mehta (ex-CPO at Tinder, FB, Tripadvisor), and many more.
The Rise of Cohort-Based Programs
Unlocking earned insights isn't useful unless we can help others acquire those insights. The first wave of professional education came in the form of MOOCs and libraries of self-serve videos. While they increased the accessibility of education, they suffer from poor engagement and lack of community.
Since the start of Reforge, we've run a cohort-based model. The cohort-based models create increased accountability, engagement, peer interaction, and more that is difficult in the MOOC model. It is why we've seen industry-defining engagement rates, NPS, and most importantly, impact on our participants' careers.
A Membership To Help Scale Yourself and Your Company
While cohort-based programs drive accountability, engagement, and learning, the ultimate outcome for professional development is executing on what you learn to scale yourself and your company. This is why we don't stop with cohort-based programs.
Your journey with Reforge doesn't end with a program — it just begins. Our Membership platform provides the resources and community you need to execute on what you learn in a program.
Building An Ecosystem To Help You Build Careers, Products, and Companies
We believe the future of professional development isn't a library of videos, but an ever-evolving ecosystem. Navigating the messy middle of your career is a constant loop of acquiring new insights, executing on what you learn, and solving new problems.
We want to help you build careers, products, and companies. Today, we're excited to announce that we have raised $21 million in a round of financing led by Andrew Chen and Anish Acharya at Andreessen Horowitz.
When it came time to raise capital, we felt that a16z would be an amazing partner. I've worked closely with Andrew since the beginning of Reforge, a16z has built amazing network of builders themselves, and Marc and Ben have clearly been passionate about the development of professional education. We are excited to have them as part of Reforge.
In addition, joining the round are a community of CEOs, VPs, and C-level individuals who will help us define the future of their functions. These are leaders of companies like HubSpot, Calm, Airtable, Segment, Gainsight, Yelp, Pinterest, Facebook, Lyft, Amplitude, and many more who have successfully navigated the messy middle, and helped build amazing companies along the way.
Join Reforge as a Member, Partner, or Teammate
If you are interested in helping build Reforge, we'd love for you to join us:
Become A Reforge Member - If you are currently experiencing The Messy Middle of your career, join us a Member. Our upcoming cohort begins March 22nd. We are temporarily accepting more applications for the Spring cohort until Feb 24th.
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.
Join The Reforge Team - If you are passionate about professional development, join us on the team. We are looking for roles in almost every function, including engineers, designers, program directors, people ops, finance and more.
Lastly, thank you...
There have been many supporters along our journey, but I wanted to call out a special few:
Casey Winters and Shaun Clowes, for being the first two to take a leap and help create our first program beyond the Growth Series: the Retention + Engagement Deep Dive.
Elena Verna, Darius Contractor, Brittany Bingham, Fareed Mosavat, and Adam Fishman for being super early supporters, amazing cheerleaders, and perennial top-rated featured guests.
The entire Reforge team, but especially Buford Taylor, Christopher Ming, and Dan Wolchonok, who were part of the early team and have stuck with me through many twists and turns.
Matt Greenberg, who has been not just a CTO, but a true partner.