Why I'm building Kinship.

I've had eight employers in twenty-six years.

That averages out to a little more than three years at each job — eight times I packed up a desk, eight times my corporate inbox went dark, eight times the system that held everything I knew about the people I worked with rolled over to someone else. By the time I noticed the pattern, half a career had gone by.

Here's the part I'm less proud of: I have never been good at maintaining relationships. Not because I don't want to. I genuinely like the people I work with. It's that I have always prioritized getting things done over the small, discrete tasks of keeping in touch — the follow-up email, the “hey, just thinking of you,” the lunch I said I'd schedule six months ago. Those tasks always seem to lose to whatever is on fire that week. And every time I changed companies, the small amount of context I had managed to accumulate — the notes, the threads, the quiet history of who said what about which project — went with the laptop I handed back.

I tried to solve this for years. I tried company CRMs, and they helped in the moment, but every relationship and every activity in them belonged to the employer. When I left, the context did too. I tried to keep my personal life on my personal phone and email and my professional life on the corporate stack, but the boundary blurred constantly — and important details slipped through both. I leaned on LinkedIn, which once felt like the answer. It's not anymore. It's become a social media platform, and the value of its underlying network — the part I actually cared about — has been steadily eroded by everything around it.

At some point I had to admit the obvious: nothing I was using was built for me. Every tool was built for the company that paid for it, or the platform that needed me to keep scrolling. The relationships were mine. The system was always someone else's. And the half-life of a system that isn't yours is, in my case, about three years.

So I decided to build something different. Kinship is a relationship system I own — and that the people who use it will own too. It travels with you between jobs. It is never sold to advertisers. It is not visible to your employer. It is designed so that when you walk out of one job and into the next, the most valuable thing you've built — your network and the context behind it — walks out with you.

This is for people who've watched their professional history evaporate one too many times. People who know they're not great at staying in touch and want a system that helps them be better — without surrendering their data to do it. If that sounds like you, I'd like to meet you. Leave your email, and I'll follow up personally.