The problem with how we grow our careers
There’s a gap in how most of us think about professional growth. And it’s been bugging me for years.
We default to climbing ladders, chasing titles, or completing the next certification course. The thinking goes: learn enough, prove enough, achieve enough, and you’ll grow. But that’s not how it actually works. At least not at the deepest level.
When I think about career progression, I believe it actually happens in rooms filled with the right people. People who ask hard questions, share hard-won lessons, and see angles you’re just not able to. But putting those rooms together is a feat of logistics and human understanding. It’s slow, expensive, and often a game of chance: who you happen to know, where you happen to work, or how much you can afford to pay.
Masterminds are the gold standard for this kind of growth. They work because they combine structure with trust. Small groups of peers, thoughtfully curated, meeting regularly to help each other level up. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but the execution is brutal. Most fail because they can’t sustain the momentum or they can’t curate the right mix of people. And at $10,000+ a year, they’ve always been limited to executives and people with deep pockets.
The question that’s driven me for years is: why?
Why should this kind of professional growth be so exclusive? Why does it take a dedicated facilitator and months of wrangling to make these groups work? If masterminds are so powerful, why hasn’t someone made them accessible, truly accessible, to anyone who’s serious about leveling up?
The problem is that masterminds have always been treated as a human problem. If you can just find the right facilitator, get people in a room, and create the right culture, it’ll work. And while that’s true in theory, it’s fragile in practice. Facilitators burn out. Groups stall. Momentum fades.
What clicked for me after running hundreds of these groups is that it’s not just a human problem, it’s a systems problem.
The magic of masterminds comes down to three things:
- Curating the right people for the room.
- Keeping the group aligned and moving forward.
- Capturing value so that each conversation builds on the last.
Every successful mastermind relies on those three pillars, and every failed one cracks under the weight of them. People quit when they’re in the wrong group, when the group feels aimless, or when they can’t see the value compounding over time.
As I mentioned before it’s a deceptively simple concept that fails at the execution part. Building groups that feel effortless, that deliver value every time, that sustain themselves without constant intervention is a really hard problem.
But it’s also a solvable one.
This is what I’m building. Not another tool, not a cheaper version of what already exists, but something fundamentally different. A way to take the core principles of masterminds like curation, alignment, momentum and make them scalable, repeatable, and accessible.
The idea is to make sure the magic of human connection isn’t lost to logistics while lowering the barrier so that more people can experience what it feels like to be in a room where everyone’s pulling you upward.
Why? Because most of us are stuck in silos. Or alone. I’ve heard this every single day from professionals for the last decade. So I don’t believe it’s an imaginary problem.
On top of that, we learn from the same few colleagues, get feedback from the same handful of managers, and wrestle with the same problems in isolation. The kind of peer-driven growth that masterminds create SHOULD be more accessible. And right now, it’s missing for most of the workforce.
When I think about what we’re building, I’m not excited about automating a process or saving people time. That’s just how we’ll get to something bigger: giving people access to a kind of growth they’ve never had before, and creating a system that makes it possible, but inevitable.
Or put another way, we’re using technology to solve a fundamentally human problem: how to help people navigate their careers, together.
