Building something new often comes with more questions than answers. 

Clarity and conviction on what product to build, for whom, and in what markets is the result of deep experience in an industry and high signal market research. 

Office Hours helps companies find and access these crucial perspectives. 

One of our customers, Heidi Yang, a product designer at YC-backed logistics startup, Qualli, used Office Hours to conduct user interviews. 

“Our target users are specialists with a demanding work schedule. Office Hours made it 100x easier to connect to those users, and the insights we've gained were extremely formative to our strategy” 

Office Hours helps teams conduct impactful primary research, giving leaders a way to prove or disprove their assumptions, and uncover additional insight to help inform their paths forward. 

Founders, product teams, and other key decision makers can leverage Office Hours to: 

Validate new opportunities: Whether it’s expansion into a new product, customer segment, or geography, Office Hours gives users the ability to find stakeholders who can provide valuable perspective to inform critical decisions.

Capture objective market feedback: Search the Office Hours network for specific titles, companies, and geographies and build a target list of perspectives to get objective feedback.

Refine product positioning. A stellar product doesn’t necessitate users. Making sure you communicate the right message to the right audience and through the right channels is an essential component. Book Office Hours with target buyers to make sure your messaging resonates.

Extend the bounds of your network: Asking for an intro? No need to exhaust your social capital or spend time and energy on cold outbound. Booking an Office Hours is clear and direct.

Save valuable time: Our startup customers have saved months, and in some cases, years of effort. Turn your speed to insights into an information advantage.   

For more information, check out our blog "Finding your compass" and sign up for Office Hours today. 

How startups can get access to expert and key decision maker insights to go-to-market faster.

Startup Looking For Expertise? 5 Benefits Of Using Office Hours

Is the rebound in travel and entertainment (T&E) spend here to stay or have we entered a fundamentally new era of corporate spending? Will traditional financial institutions commit to crypto for the long term or are they dabbling to appease their wealthiest clients? How is the shifting future of work impacting expectations for employee benefits? 

How a founder or a VC answers any one of these questions drastically changes the course of their actions in business building and company picking. 

At the same time, it's never been more difficult to find the signal in the noise to answer these crucial questions.  

Well-informed, fact-based conclusions are paramount to founders and investors as they serve as a compass for driving successful product roadmaps and picking venture-scale investments. 

But if you were to answer some of these hairy questions, how would you go about it today?

You might say, secondary research, which is certainly an essential part of this diligence and conviction-building process. 

But in many ways, secondary research has become the status quo, not because it yields better results, but because it's the easiest way to get to some baseline understanding.  

Primary research, despite being one of the most elusive and time-intensive, oftentimes drives some of the most meaningful learnings and leads to the discovery of nuance if done right. 

Despite the value it can lead to, the process for primary research today is cumbersome. 

Likely, it resembles a lengthy process of reaching out to people in your network, on Linkedin, asking for intros, and pleading strangers to meet with you, or exorbitant amounts of money to have someone do it on your behalf. 

We’ve curated a network of nearly 5,000 advisors, all of whom have opted into holding Office Hours because they want to leverage their hard-earned expertise to help you answer your questions.

The Office Hours platform offers users an easy way to search for knowledge, find experts with relevant experience, and organize findings to help gain perspective and build conviction.

Our experts have deep expertise and knowledge in a broad range of industries from software, fintech, web3 to digital health, oncology, market access, and more. 

Investigating the corporate card market? Book an advisor like Gerardo Diaz, Head of Finance/CFO at Billpocket, who has on-the-job experience vetting these solutions, or Jess Toy, Head of Product Management at AngelList Venture to understand how to build seamless KYC journeys while incorporating stablecoin payments into your offering. 

Or maybe you're interested in understanding how the changing world of work is impacting employees' expectations of benefits? If so, set up time with advisors like Larissa Chirolli, Compensation & Benefits Coordinator at Gympass. 

The best part is that it’s free to sign up and browse our network, and entirely pay-as-you-go. Come sign up here, and happy knowledge sharing!

It's never been more difficult to find the signal in the noise.

Finding Your Compass: How Office Hours Can Help You Validate Your Market Thesis

We are in the first innings of unlocking the true value of human knowledge.

Human knowledge is the world’s most valuable asset. It’s what built cities, developed vaccines, and created the modern world as we know it. In the 21st century, the underlying value of any organization is rooted less in its factories and hardware than in “know-how” – human insights that are stitched together to unlock new innovations.

And yet even in this interconnected age, collective human knowledge has yet to be fully realized. The vast majority of human knowledge remains sequestered in individual minds, unrecognized, unshared, and underutilized. Even when knowledge is drawn out into the economy, its value too often disproportionately accrues to employers and shareholders rather than the individuals who have originated it.

While technology has catapulted us into the knowledge economy, we are still in the first innings on our collective quest to unlock people’s true potential. In our rapidly shifting knowledge economy, we see three fundamental shifts that are changing the way that human knowledge is valued today:

The digital economy is shifting power from institutions to individuals. Technology is empowering people to fully realize their unique skills and expertise, without institutional oversight.

All organizations are becoming knowledge organizations. The most valuable firms increasingly provide value not through physical assets but by deploying scalable human knowledge; we see this even among incumbents, as in the Fortune 500’s increasing use of freelance experts.

Remote work is empowering individuals to find new ways of creating value from their unique knowledge and know-how. Adapting to our rethinking of the corporation, workers are taking up new opportunities to share knowledge and create value beyond the narrow application for one employer.


Office Hours’ mission is to help everyone realize the value of what they know

To do this, we are tackling a few distinct challenges:

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as experts because we work in local silos. By operating our day-to-day in our contained ecosystems we often do not see the value that our particular know-how can provide when applied beyond our immediate environment and at scale.

As the internet continues to flatten the world, barriers between productive enterprises are more permeable than ever and an individual’s value becomes increasingly decoupled from any one institution or employer.

After retiring, my mother -- a special education instructor for 20 years in NYC -- was surprised to learn that her specific knowledge in dyslexic reading pedagogy was invaluable to school boards in Kansas and Florida hoping to better help their learning-disabled students. One of our investors, Lenny Rachitsky, had a similar realization: the wisdom he developed at Airbnb is invaluable to the thousands of product managers around the world also facing similar challenges in their own respect

To start, we have aggregated demand for knowledge in the form of startups, investment firms, and nonprofits eager to learn from our network of thousands of advisors. Office Hours makes everyone’s knowledge accessible to a global maxima, increasing its reach, and thus impact. 

The advent of the knowledge economy has spurred the largest creation of wealth in human history. Unlike past eras, the basis of this wealth is not physical, but human capital. Wealth comes from people developing knowledge and skills on their own time and applying them creatively. And yet, while this knowledge-driven wealth has been created by people, the vast majority of this wealth accrues to owners and institutions. As economist Nordhaus estimates, only 2.2% of the value of any given innovation is captured by the innovator themselves. 

Office Hours builds tools that support individuals to own and benefit from their knowledge. Through Office Hours:

An Epidemiologist in Brazil can lend her perspective on novel treatments of Colitis to an upstart therapeutics company

An avid baseball card collector can explain to investors the benefits of rare asset insurance

A Danish molecular biologist can advise a Japanese vegan-meat laboratory 

Professionals can themselves finally capitalize directly on sharing their particular know-how, without having value siphoned. Empowering individuals in this way unlocks new kinds of growth: The economy at large benefits enormously from the new productivities and innovations that emerge when knowledge is widely shared across verticals and at scale.

The biggest challenge in helping individuals share what they know is to match them with the right audience. Organizing human knowledge is crucial to making it truly accessible.  Just as LinkedIn has built the graph of what people do, Office Hours is building the graph of what people know. 

We consider “human knowledge” itself as our unit of focus, what Kevin Kwok would call our “atomic unit.” The challenge then is to organize and map our atomic unit -- from highly structured and rule-driven to unstructured and intuitive; from specific and prescriptive to broad and suggestive.

Ultimately, our vision is to make human knowledge easily accessibly and infinitely scalable.

We believe that everyone has valuable knowledge to share with the world. Office Hours is building tools that empower the individual to realize the true value of what they know. By doing so, we hope that scientists can accelerate their research, founders can learn from seasoned executives, and society can learn from its collective mistakes to ultimately make better decisions.

While we begin as a tool for professionals to host consultations, we believe that to truly democratize access to knowledge, we must unlock the ability to transfer that knowledge across multiple modalities (written, audio, video, and beyond) and across geographies, cultures, languages, and other perceived barriers. By using the internet to match professionals with organizations that are eager to learn, we are taking the first steps towards realizing the true value of human knowledge.

If these sound like challenges you're interested in solving, we are hiring across all functions. View our open roles here, or reach out to me personally at any time - joe@officehours.com. Happy knowledge sharing!

The True Value of What We Know

Our mission is to empower individuals to realize the value of their unique experiences.

‍As part of this, we’ve made it easy for our users to double their impact by sharing their knowledge and contributing to causes they care about most. 

Office Hours is excited to launch our donations feature with ShoppingGives, the leading social impact ecommerce platform. Now our users have the opportunity to raise money for the cause most meaningful to them with every consultation. Simply create your account and select the charity option in your payment settings: choose from over 1.5 million nonprofit organizations and set the contribution amount in your profile.

We are excited to see our shared impact grow as our knowledge-sharing community develops. 

Charity Spotlight: TEACH, Providing STEM Education for Hospitalized Children

Our featured charity this month is TEACH which provides STEM education to hospitalized children. TEACH's mission is to create an outlet for hospitalized children to passionately engage with science through fun, hands-on experiments. 

TEACH’s 1,000+ medical student volunteers lead in-person and online modules for hospitalized children, such as making silly putty to learn about polymers and building boats with basic engineering.

Participants are challenged and empowered in ways that change how they view science, their hospital stays, and their lives. Most importantly, this social engagement improves children's well-being and helps them cope with their day-to-day.

Since its launch, TEACH has reached over 3,500 children in 30 hospitals nationwide.

Your donations will have a direct impact:

$200 will sponsor a module for 12 children

$750 will sponsor an entire hospital, which can serve up to 300 children annually

TEACH is enrolling new hospitals in its program. Click here to learn more and contact their team.

Host Office Hours and donate to a non-profit of your choice. It's the easiest way to share what you know and double your impact.

Announcing Charity Donations

Human knowledge is the world’s most valuable asset. It’s what built cities, developed vaccines, and created the modern world as we know it. But even in our interconnected era, most knowledge still remains stuck in our heads, and thus massively underutilized. We started Office Hours to unlock this value and build a future for the knowledge economy.

Office Hours is the easiest way for people to monetize their knowledge by hosting quick knowledge-sharing sessions with organizations that want their insights. By enabling individuals to realize the full value of their unique experiences--and getting the right expertise to the people and businesses who need it--we are introducing knowledge to the sharing economy. We seek to help the world succeed by enabling access to knowledge for all.

We are beyond thankful for our incredible team, early customers, and investors. Today, we are pleased to announce our seed round of $5 million led by Saar Gur at CRV. Susa Ventures, BoxGroup, Manresa Ventures, and Greenoaks Capital also participated, along with operators like Marco Zappacosta (Thumbtack), Lenny Rachitsky (Airbnb), Jack Chou and Jackson Gates (Affirm). And most importantly, we’ve built a growing network of thousands of incredible advisors who are getting paid to share what they know --ranging from frontline healthcare workers, to university professors, to the C-suite of the Fortune 500.

Lastly, we are hiring! If you are interested in building the next massive marketplace, please reach out - we'd love to hear from you.

Human knowledge is the world’s most valuable asset, and we've raised $5M to build the easiest, fastest, most trusted, and fun way to share it.

Announcing Our Seed Round

Chances are you already get messages and emails from people asking for your time. Turn those requests into opportunities by sharing your public booking link and allowing anyone to book your time at a rate of your choosing. 

Here are a few ideas to get you started hosting Office Hours:

🧠 Tired of managing pesky requests to "pick your brain" and consulting for free? Share your profile link to let anyone formally request and pay you for your time, at an hourly rate of your choosing. 

🔗 Include your profile link in your social media bios and share it with your audience - you never know who might be looking to learn from you. 

🎤 Speaking at a conference? Writing a newsletter? Include a link to your Office Hours profile in your content, so anyone can easily request a follow up conversation. 

Chances are you already get messages and emails from people asking for your time. Turn those requests into opportunities by sharing your public booking link.

How to Start Sharing Your Office Hours Profile

Companies all over the world are looking for your specialized expertise to make more informed product decisions, develop new technologies, and choose smarter investments. How can you increase the chances of getting matched with the right consulting opportunities?

You bio should provide a concise overview of your background, so viewers know exactly what to reach out to you for. Here are a few prompts to help get you started:

What problems have I solved in the past that others might face today? 

What unique experiences do I have to share?

Knowledge tags help to narrow your expertise and make your profile more easily searchable. Add 10-15 tags that highlight the tools, technologies, and specialties that you have experience with. This includes:

Industry specific topics (e.g. cryptocurrency, cloud security, machine learning)


Setting your profile to public increases your potential reach by allowing companies outside of Office Hours to view your profile and request your time. Share your profile link in your LinkedIn bio, social media platforms, and personal website to start driving views to your page. You never know who might be looking to learn from you!

Have questions about your profile? Email us at info@officehours.com and a member of our team can help you review.

Companies all over the world are looking for your specialized expertise. How can you increase the chances of getting matched with the right consulting opportunities?

How to Optimize Your Office Hours Profile

Setting a consulting rate for the first time can be confusing - how do you know if what you’re asking is in line with the industry? 

1. Decide what you can accept for your time

Calls through Office Hours generally don’t require any extensive prep work and scheduling is flexible. Ask yourself what amount would be acceptable to you for a 60 minute phone call.

Determine your baseline hourly rate by using your salary per hour as a starting point. Make adjustments as you see fit based on your area of expertise and experience level.

Starting with a lower hourly rate may help to start to drive opportunities as you build trust within the platform. Your rate can always be adjusted at any time.

Still not sure what rate to set? Email us at info@officehours.com and a member of our team can share a recommended range for your profile.

Not sure how to set your hourly consulting rate? Here's our guide on how to get started.

The Blog

News and views from the Office Hours team.

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