Months after leaving Lenovo, a former executive has shifted his talents to entrepreneurship by launching a Morrisville company aimed at helping people build better careers.
John Gordon – a philosophy major turned technologist turned entrepreneur – returned to the Triangle two years ago to launch a new business for Lenovo, its Commercial Internet of Things Business Group.
Gordon arrived with a resume, having helped companies like Bose, General Electric (NYSE: GE) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) launch their digital transformations. And he had offers to do it again post-Lenovo, he said.
But while watching mentees “really struggle,” another idea started to develop – the basis for what would become the Whomi Career Planning platform.
“They just couldn’t figure out how they wanted to grow their career,” he said of people he was mentoring. “Much like a company when it starts to transition, it has to figure out what its goals are … people have to define goals.”
So instead of diving back into Big Tech, he took the chance on the idea that a lot of the same strategies he had been deploying to launch business transformations could be applied to workers looking for new opportunities.
He founded Whomi in Morrisville.
“When you look back through my career, the common thread has been trying to help major iconic companies reinvent themselves, figure out what their next chapter could be,” he said.
Why not use the same thought process to propel workers to their next chapters?
Whomi is a social network based around a career plan, he said.
“Imagine if Linkedin is where you showcase what you’ve done in your past, Whomi is where you plan what you will do in the future,” he said.
Users use it to help define their goals, as well as to get feedback from people they trust, he said. Unlike LinkedIn, where the network is vast and includes all of your professional contacts, communications on Whomi are really limited to a small group of trusted advisors, he said – a way to promote “authentic and vulnerable conversations.”
So far, the firm, at about 12 employees including contractors, is bootstrapped.
“I’d love to make this a big RTP success story,” Gordon said.
