Sociate.io Wants To Be The ‘Netflix Of Networking’ For MBAs – No Connection Request Required

Randip Mitra didn’t start out trying to build a networking platform. He started out trying to move from the technology side of business into marketing.

Mitra spent his early career in data analytics, including a stint at Audible.com – acquired by Amazon – working alongside business and marketing teams whose jobs he wanted. While working a later role at Turner Broadcasting, a mentor who was an NYU Stern School of Business alum encouraged him to apply to the school’s part-time MBA program. Columbia was out of the running, Mitra says, because it doesn’t offer a part-time option. 

He enrolled at Stern – and met a fellow part-time student, now his Sociate co-founder, on orientation day, when she returned to campus a year ahead of him to speak to incoming students.

“Even at NYU, not everyone is the same,” Mitra says. “I have friends with half the network I have – and that’s just within NYU, forget about nationally.”

THE FRICTION THAT STARTED IT ALL

Mitra had tried his hand at entrepreneurship pitching a home health care platform in an NYU startup competition, reaching the final round. The idea for Sociate came later, around 2017, after he’d finished his MBA, initially conceived as a way to connect business students across New York City schools.

The moment that crystallized the idea, he tells Poets&Quants, came while he was trying to reach a Cornell MBA alum at a Washington, D.C.-area health care company to explore a potential partnership. Mitra could connect easily with fellow NYU alumni or folks from his undergraduate program at the University of South Carolina – but reaching someone from a different MBA program in a different industry was another matter entirely.

“I would send a connection request, wait for it for two weeks, maybe they connect, maybe they don’t,” Mitra says. “It all depends. It was very frustrating.”

THE ‘NETFLIX OF NETWORKING’

That frustration shaped Sociate’s core design choice: members connect with each other the moment they join, with no request or approval step and unlimited messaging across the platform.

“Whether you went to a school ranked 50th or a school ranked number one – Booth, Kellogg – you’re connected,” Mitra says. “That’s the nature of the platform.”

He describes the platform’s ambition internally as aiming to become “the Netflix of networking” – a comparison that is more organizing principle than slogan.

“Netflix was known for being no ads, premium,” Mitra says. “Netflix is very particular about bringing a good experience – that’s what we’re going for.”

FIVE THOUSAND MEMBERS, TOP 30 TO 50 B-SCHOOLS

Sociate tested an early, NYC-focused version of the idea during the pandemic before officially launching nationally in the years that followed, Mitra says. Membership today draws primarily from roughly the top 30 MBA programs, with additional schools between 30 and 50 folded in over time. 

“Top 50 is really our scope for now,” he says, adding that the platform has more than 5,000 members, with a growing share posting resumes as new members join. He points to five new signups the day before this interview, three of whom uploaded resumes immediately.

“Even with 5,000 members, a lot of people in New York and New Jersey have never heard of Sociate,” Mitra says. “We don’t do any paid advertisements – it’s word of mouth.”

On the risk of the no-request model creating noise or unwanted recruiting pitches, Mitra says the platform – hosted on Amazon Web Services – tracks message volume without reading message content, and that data suggests roughly 80% of members who log in during a given month are messaging someone. “No one has complained so far,” he says.

AN AI MATCHING FEATURE IN THE WORKS

Mitra says Sociate is developing an AI-based matching tool that would connect members based on the sequence of their career moves – for instance, pairing an engineer-turned-MBA with another member who followed a similar path into a startup – rather than matching on job function or industry alone.

The platform’s first 4,500 members joined at no cost and remain free for life, Mitra says. Since March, new members have paid for access, while hiring managers and founders posting job opportunities get a year of free access, he says, to help seed both sides of the platform’s job-sharing function.

“They were only believers in it,” Mitra says of the platform’s earliest members.

CONTENT AND A YOUTUBE SERIES

Beyond networking, Sociate runs a monthly newsletter that promotes MBA-founded startups – including solo-founder companies – along with executive coaches and advisory practices, at no cost to those featured. The company also produces a YouTube Q&A series pairing Mitra and his co-founder with alumni executives; past guests include Abigail Buckwalter, the former Nestlé Health Science U.S. CEO who has since become president and CEO of Ocean Spray. An upcoming episode, planned for later this fall, is set to feature Ami Badani, a University of Chicago Booth MBA and chief marketing officer at Arm Holdings.

International expansion is on the radar, Mitra says; the platform already counts a handful of London Business School alumni, though he says outreach beyond U.S. programs has been limited so far. The company is also bringing on a part-time intern this fall.

“There are a lot of senior people on the platform – CEOs of smaller companies, some CMOs, a venture investor or two, a lot of founders,” Mitra says.

For a limited time, MBA students can use promo code SOCIATE-FALL26-SPECIAL when finishing registration for discounted access – $9.99 for a full year, which includes a 30-day free trial. Learn more at sociate.io.

DON’T MISS A GOOD BUSINESS SCHOOL IS A NETWORKED BUSINESS SCHOOL

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