Polywork

» see polywork.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Polywork started from a reasonable complaint about LinkedIn. A job title is a bad summary of a person, and you might be a backend engineer who also advises two startups and writes a newsletter nobody at work knows about. Polywork gave you a profile built out of those activities rather than a career ladder, with badges for the roles you were open to and a timeline of what you had actually been doing lately.

Peter Johnston, from Northern Ireland by way of GitHub, founded the company in 2018 and opened the site to everyone in June 2021. The timing looked excellent. It arrived during the remote-work reshuffle, when plenty of people really were doing four things at once, and the design was good enough that a Polywork page was something you were happy to put behind a bio link.

Then it stopped growing. In 2023 the product turned toward building personal websites, and by the end the homepage was pitching a LinkedIn import. On 30 December 2024 Johnston posted that he had made the call to shut Polywork down and return the remaining capital to the investors, and the service closed on 31 January 2025.

~ the record ~

~ the forty-four million ~

The reported total is $44.5 million and the curve is the interesting part. Andreessen Horowitz led $13 million in June 2021, the month the site opened to everyone, and a $28 million round followed with Patrick and John Collison among the backers. The underlying thesis was never a silly one. Professional identity really has fragmented, and LinkedIn really does flatten it into a single line of job title and company. What Polywork never found was a reason to open the thing twice in the same week.

~ what the title tag admitted ~

By the end the title tag on polywork.com read "Polywork | Convert Your LinkedIn Profile into a Beautiful Personal Website." That is the whole arc of the company in one line of markup. A product launched to replace LinkedIn had ended up as a tool for converting LinkedIn.

I never opened one. Edge AI and drone computer vision does not read well as a badge wall, and the people who needed to find me were already indexed somewhere else. Every LinkedIn challenger hits that before it hits anything to do with its own product. Polywork's natural constituency was people whose output is legible on the English-speaking internet, the maintainers and the newsletter writers. That audience is real and it is small.

~ the homepage that never heard ~

The marketing site never acknowledged the shutdown at all. The Internet Archive holds polywork.com on 26 December 2024, four days before the announcement, and again on 26 January 2025, five days before the close. There is a third capture from 20 February 2025, three weeks after it was all over. All three serve the same Webflow page under the same LinkedIn-conversion headline with the same Bugsnag key wired in, and not one of them says the service is ending or has ended. The site kept selling until it started returning 502s on 17 March 2025.

~ the correct diagnosis ~

The part worth keeping is the observation rather than the company. Nobody has one job anymore in the way the resume format assumes, and the professional networks have not caught up, because the one that won did so by becoming the default rather than by being right. Polywork was correct about the problem and could not get paid for being correct.

It was not killed by a competitor, it was killed by indifference. The money and the years produced a product people liked enough to sign up for and never needed twice. Johnston's own line is the cleanest version of it: they could not sustain the growth and no longer saw a viable path to Polywork becoming a gigantic business, and a gigantic business was what they had signed up for.

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