clado used to be linkd, a natural language search engine over alumni databases for schools. we launched this consumer platform for students because we believed that current alumni systems are fundamentally broken, despite being the most powerful aspect of a university. we saw this at our respective alumni platforms at ucsd & upenn: > disconnected sites with outdated alumni profiles that people don't fill out > direct messages that are never answered due to inactivity why is so much potential locked behind an inactive system? when we first launched at upenn with just 2000 profiles and a simple vector database with semantic search, we were ecstatic to see what people would search for. > alumni working in investment banking, ai engineers at google, etc. we then scaled up with each launch at u of toronto, columbia, stanford, and berkeley. we saw more creative searches: > find me every angel investor at berkeley. > grad students at stanford working on ai/ml at nvidia (a student found the person sitting across from them at lunch). with each launch, we saw more and more requests to bring clado to more schools (and we loved the people building their own versions of clado at their schools!). we knew we couldn't scale one school at a time, and decided to work on releasing them all at once. we believe every student, regardless of where they're at school, should have access to the powerful group of alumni that came before them. we hope this achieves that. (IF YOUR SCHOOL ISN'T HERE, please message me and we'll add it for you). we're also serving hundreds of thousands of people profiles via search results to enterprises. please dm me if this is interesting as well. thank you for reading, i hope you enjoy clado!