Mybzz vs Polywork: life after the shutdown.

Polywork launched in 2021 with a beautiful thesis: people are more than one job title, and a professional network should show everything you do — building, advising, writing, investing — and help you find collaborators for all of it. Backed by over $40M from investors including Stripe's Collison brothers, it still couldn't crack LinkedIn's network effect and shut down on January 31, 2025. The thesis was right; the model wasn't. Mybzz carries the useful half forward: a network where what you're building matters more than your title — powered by matching instead of a feed.

Polywork let you build a timeline of everything you do professionally — side projects, advising, speaking, open source — tagged with colorful badges, and opt into collaboration requests: podcast guesting, angel investing, co-founding. At its peak it was the most-hyped LinkedIn challenger of its generation, raising over $40M.

Growth stalled, a 2023 pivot into personal-website building didn't stick, and in January 2025 the company announced it was shutting down and returning remaining capital to investors. The lesson its founder drew publicly: breaking a professional network's network effect is brutally hard — especially with a feed-based product that needs critical mass everywhere at once.

Matching sidesteps that problem. Mybzz doesn't need your whole industry on board to be useful — it needs enough relevant entrepreneurs, and the AI does the discovery. Your profile says what you're building and what collaborators you need; matches arrive daily; conversations start on mutual interest. It's the Polywork promise, delivered through a mechanic that works at any scale.