Have you ever joined a new team, and wondered — too late — what you were walking into?

While online platforms like Glassdoor and Blind offer great insights on firm-wide culture, it is usually the individuals whom we work with day to day that dictate workplace experience the most. Is my future boss a kind, honest person? Does he care? Will he support my growth? To many, these matter just as much as the office's overall morale and pay scale.

The information that would have helped you is out there. It lives in the heads of people who have worked with your new manager, and perhaps circulates offline when close friends spill the tea. But it never reaches you. Workplace power asymmetry poisons honesty. When a worker speaks publicly about his boss, they speak anything but the truth. Reflecting on the unnervingly performative nature of LinkedIn, we feel that a new social platform that encourages truthfulness is a moral antidote that the professional world needs.

Echo was born in that light. Its sole purpose is to ensure that honest, person-centered workplace insights reach those in need without threatening the speaker's future. Instead of a place for public reviews, we structured Echo as a professional intelligence marketplace. People trade snippets of knowledge – we call it Echoes – about people they know at work. Users can discover and unlock those intels, subject to the author's approval, so that your opinion never reaches the wrong audience. It's a place where you can have a private coffee chat with millions online, without having a coffee chat.

We run Echo independently, unaffiliated with any corporation. We built this upon a simple conviction — that in a world exhausted by sophistication and ambivalence, kindness and integrity shall prevail. We hope you find it helpful on your journey.