Read.cv

» see read.cv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

read.cv was a platform for designers and the slightly-online product crowd. that was not the corner of the internet i lived in. i am a computer engineer in ankara, and the people i follow on the open web were not the people who built moodboards in figma and posted about their portfolio updates. so this is mostly a reconstruction.

andy chung, a former product designer at facebook and mozilla, started read.cv in 2021. the first thing it did was the resume page, a clean text profile with your job history and your links. then it grew a posting layer, basically twitter for people who did not want to be on twitter anymore. the migration arrived around late 2022, when elon was the reason and read.cv was one of a few small networks designer twitter tried out. cohost was the other obvious one, mastodon was the big-tent default.

perplexity announced the acquisition on 17 january 2025. the platform got a four-month wind-down, with read-only mode through april and a data export tool. on 16 may the lights went out, and andy chung went on to perplexity to work on whatever was next.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

cohost died in october 2024. read.cv died in may 2025. the small-network alternatives that designer twitter built after the elon takeover did not last. they did the thing their founders wanted them to do, just not at venture-scale economics that would keep them alive on their own.

linkedin kept being linkedin. that part did not change. honestly, the read.cv resume pages were prettier, but pretty resumes are not why people are on linkedin in the first place.

~ the funny part ~

perplexity is an ai search company. the read.cv acquihire was for the people, not the platform. the founders were going to build something inside perplexity that had nothing to do with resume pages. the resume pages were the cost of admission for the talent.

this is the pattern for the 2024-2025 wave of small-platform acquihires. skiff went the same way under notion, omnivore the same way under elevenlabs. read.cv is the perplexity entry in that same playbook. ai-flush companies buy the team. the product dies on a four-month-or-so timeline, and the founders end up working on something completely different. the original product was the cv that got the team noticed.

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