Think back to the last networking event you went to. The name tags. The lukewarm wine. The way you clutched your drink like a prop while scanning the room for someone, anyone, who might be useful to talk to. You probably had a handful of conversations that went nowhere, exchanged a stack of business cards you'd never look at again, and left wondering if you'd just wasted an entire evening you could've spent doing literally anything else.
^Gemini created a pretty accurate representation, right?
Needless to say, we've all been there. And here's the maddening part: as much as we hate it, we can't opt out of it.
Professor Scott Galloway has been saying for years that hiring, despite all our talk of meritocracy and algorithms and applicant tracking systems, is still deeply, stubbornly relational. He points to a number that should stop you in your tracks: roughly 70% of job offers go to candidates who had an internal advocate or a strong connection at the company (Fortune). Not the best resume. Not the highest test score. A person on the inside who said, "hey, you should talk to this one."
That statistic is easy to nod along to in the abstract. It's harder to sit with once you ask real people how it actually feels to live inside it. So we did. We sat down with 100 people at NYU Wagner and asked them, point blank, how they felt about networking. The answer, over and over, was some version of: "I know how important this is, that I'm supposed to do this. I hate how it currently works." Nobody disputed that connections matter. Everybody dreaded the process of making them, and many pointed out that their networking, even when they pushed through the discomfort, wasn't exactly impactful in its current format.
So we started digging into why. And the answer, it turns out, isn't that people are bad at networking. It's that networking as it exists today sucks.
There's a well-known idea in sociology called the strength of loose or 'weak' ties. The gist of it is almost counterintuitive: the people most likely to change your career trajectory aren't your best friends, your family, or your closest colleagues. It's the people you barely know. The book Defining Decade by Dr. Meg Jay dedicates an entire chapter to this concept. Your inner circle tends to know the same things you know, move in the same circles, read the same headlines. A weak tie, by contrast, sits just outside your world, close enough to be reachable, far enough to have information you've never encountered. That's where the job leads come from. That's where the introductions come from. That's where the "oh, funny you mention that, my old coworker is looking for someone exactly like you" moments come from.
The problem is that nobody has ever handed us a reliable way to find these people. It's always been left to chance. You get invited to the right dinner, or you don't. You end up seated next to the right stranger at a conference, or you don't. Meanwhile, the tools we do have make things worse, not better. LinkedIn, for all its scale, behaves less like an expansion pack for your network and more like a hall of mirrors: it keeps reflecting the same industries, the same job titles, the same people you already know back at you, because that's what the algorithm thinks you want. It's an echo chamber dressed up as a professional network.
And then there's the other extreme. Maybe you get lucky and stumble into some hyper-specific group chat, "freelance CPG social entrepreneurs in LA" or whatever your niche happens to be, and for a second it feels like you've found gold. But then reality sets in. Either the chat is firing off a thousand messages a day and you can't find a single useful thread in the noise, or it's a ghost town where nobody has said anything since March. Neither version actually helps you meet anyone.
This is the gap we built oyster to close.
Our founder had an 80% hit rate reaching out to strangers for candid conversations. Not to ask for a job. Not to angle for a referral. Just to talk with someone whose path intrigued her, someone she usually shared some sliver of common ground with: a hometown, an alma mater, a side venture, a role she'd once held herself. That's a startlingly high success rate for outreach that, on paper, looked cold. But it wasn't luck. It was a specific instinct: find the people you have real synergy with, where the conversation is worth having for both of you, not just for you. We took that instinct and built a system around it, so you don't need her particular knack for it to get the same results.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Instead of the cold DM, the awkward LinkedIn message you draft four times and never send, oyster does the matching for you. We look at your experiences and career needs, and the experiences and needs of everyone else on the platform, and surface the people most worth talking to on your Discover page. The key word there is mutual. You're not being pointed toward someone who has nothing to gain from talking to you. You're being paired with people where the value runs in both directions, which is exactly what makes a weak tie worth cultivating in the first place.
Then, instead of "networking" that secretly feels like a job interview, we encourage you to have what we call candid curiosity conversations: focused, twenty-minute chats built around genuine interest in getting to know about someone and their trajectory rather than an agenda. We give you a discussion guide and a few icebreakers, things like "what book are you reading right now", so the conversation has somewhere easy to start and never turns into a stiff, transactional exchange. It's the kind of conversation you'd actually want to have.
And rather than dumping you into another infinite scroll of a feed, we built pods: small, supportive micro-communities of people navigating similar career terrain. Not a broadcast channel. Not a thousand-message roar. Not a forced networking event. A handful of people who get it, who share your niche and your lived experience, and who you can actually turn to for honest advice and knowledge.
Here's the thing about careers that nobody says out loud enough: it's not just about who you know. Everyone already accepts that part. The real unlock is who you don't know yet, the people sitting one or two degrees outside your world who are holding the exact information, introduction, or opportunity you need. You just haven't met them.
That's what oyster is for.
We're built for people whose careers don't move in a straight line, the multi-hyphenates, the career-changers, the ones who've never quite fit into a single box. If that sounds like you, we'd love for you to be one of the first ones in.
