Overview/Goal

A new group of start-up founders have just received more funding but don’t know where to start. To add-on, they’re all in different countries + funding stages and different industries all together, where do they get resources from and who do they begin to talk to?

Vast collection of past cohort data are spread across Notion Docs, Google Drive, rest in WhatsApp Group convos.

Sequoia’s online network “SURGE” is meant to compete with Y-Com’s Bookface and in order to achieve that the initial problems must be assessed, and in this case: the important and critical information are spread across different platforms + storehouses and it needs to be located in a single place that’s easy-to-use.

“Providing value to the user is a key metric in order to innovate further”

Bits of information from the past can be extremely relevant and useful to a founder now, but can be seemingly inaccessible to the user because of the information being spread out.

Approach: How to Drive Initial Value for Growth From the existing Data

To drive value, what needs to be determined is who is this platform intended for and what do they need. Using Community Canvas as a framework (which helps people and organizations build stronger communities) and aligning that with basic product design principles can help address these problems.

The Identified Purposes:

• Gather with Community: The platform exists to help founders get unstuck and company building does not have to happen alone.
• Find Answers: Each business is different and there are ways to help founders find answers to specific questions/needs.
• Special Resources: It’s meant to make it easier for the founder to get access to special resources to help the cohort get to market quickly

Does SURGE presently address those purposes effectively?

What it attempts to do now:

• Create value for members through Video Academy
• Create value for members through various Resources & Perks
• Community using various Channels to Communicate (Connect, Message and Feed)

Tackling the largest problem was to unify all the data across the different channels into one succinct location.

The idea was to train an AI model with all the data and resources (including the WhatsApp group archives) and take a Question-Answering Over Documents approach via LLM to learn the different ways to successfully answer the founder, some options were Question-Document based Retrieval for accuracy.

The most important aspect to this was making sure to include a recursive feedback loop which concluded whether the search itself was actually helpful or not. (Using deep learning techniques and not actually knowing whether they’re helpful or not can tend to be more frustrating than actually helpful to the user.) Positioned in the same location as a news feed post, since that’s where the heatmaps were indicating where users where heading to most on the home page.

Video Recap

Looking at the analytics for the platform, Video Academy was the most used feature on the platform. Users repeatedly returned to the platform to watch new videos or resume ones they’ve already started. The homepage was redesigned to include that module up top with additional features built-in to enhance the experience: such as delivering content personalization through Machine Learning.

People Module

Connect/Messages was not reported useful and there was low integrity on message responses. A solution was to create a smart People module organizing Founders from previous Cohorts and delivering them to the user based on their specific business/industries.

It also showcases at what level do they wish to engage with the new community, parsed through by the in-house community manager who determines which founders were willing to engage.

Final Design