Why now Is the right time to reinvent networking

We're at a rare moment. Everywhere we look, technology is dissolving old patterns.

If you believed half the posts on LinkedIn (no doubt half of them written by AI), you might hide in a cave and come up for air once everything's been sorted. From a professional perspective, the change is undeniably unsettling. Career paths that felt set in stone suddenly look a lot less certain. But amidst the doomsday predictions, there's also excitement about the scale of new opportunities opening up. Most of the discourse has focused on our working lives: what we do, what might be replaced, whether new systems scale or create technical debt. Important questions, all of them. But there's another shift getting less attention: how we connect with others, and what we value from those connections. We believe now is the time for a radical rethink of professional networking, and Flynt will be a key catalyst in making this happen. Three forces are converging that will fundamentally change how we network:

• The rise of the Collage Professional
• The growing premium on face-to-face connection
• Technology’s new ability to finally match on context at scale

The Collage Professional

How many hats are you wearing right now? In the last week alone, I've been a copywriter, a backend engineer (ironing out some Flynt bugs), an email marketer, a tech lead at a scaleup, a founder, and a growth forecaster. It’s a bewildering mix. Yet with the right tools, I’ve found myself up to the job, accessing depth of expertise in moments that once took hours trawling Stack Overflow or fumbling through the internet for answers. Increasingly, the skillset that matters most isn't just depth in one area (for me, that’s data science). It’s the ability to draw from ideas horizontally and combine approaches to create something new. This is what we mean by the collage professional: cutting and pasting ideas, being deliberate with execution, conducting a vast orchestra of knowledge with confidence. Collage professionals don’t fit in boxes. They build careers as ecosystems, not ladders. They find value in variety over niche depth. And here’s the thing: networking in this context is completely different. You're not meeting people to climb a notch on the ladder. You're meeting to expand your horizon and gain access to ideas at the edge. The value isn't in finding people like you, it's in finding people who think differently, who've solved adjacent problems, who can see patterns you've missed. Our first members have asked us to lean further into this idea. “I don’t just want to meet someone like me, I want to meet someone completely different,” is feedback we’ve heard often. And we’re building that directly into how we make matches.

One-to-One as the new premium

The value of meeting someone one-on-one is already at a premium, and that premium is about to spike. The core reason is authenticity. It’s now easy to create polished text, convincing bios, even realistic videos in seconds. Technology has permeated our lives with breathtaking speed. This will likely accelerate a trend already in motion.

Since 2014, the share of people using social media to keep in touch with friends has dropped by 40%, to meet new people by 30%, and to share opinions by 45%.

— John Burn-Murdoch, "Have we passed peak social media?," Financial Times, October 3, 2025. Data from GWI.

But here’s the twist: while this sounds bleak, it’s also having a rejuvenating effect on real-life connections. As screens become less trustworthy, in-person connection becomes vital, both for accessing new ideas and, simply, for being heard. Reading body language, sensing intent, vocal cues and tone—these can’t be faked. Long-term, this changes what matters in networking. Being matched with someone who truly resonates starts to feel rare and novel, an uncannily valuable gift. It’s how we’ll change the tide of ‘perfect’ posts and feel genuinely connected again. And our earliest members back this up. Nine out of ten Flynt Alpha members who’ve completed the match flow described how refreshing it is to speak with someone with no agenda. It’s not an interview or a transactional swap. It’s a chance to share ideas and hear a different perspective.

When the technology finally catches up

The final piece of the jigsaw is what new tools are unlocking: deep contextual matching. Modern systems can now tap into complex patterns to find truly novel matches, using technology for the right reasons. This dream doesn’t have a ceiling. I want to avoid this becoming yet another “our product runs on tech” post; those are two a penny. So here’s what progress really means for matchmaking. It means finding diamond-in-the-rough matches based on personality and motivation, not just job title. It means setting up each match with conversation starters to reduce friction. It means solving calendar bottlenecks with ease, and understanding what you want your next match to look like so your history becomes a conversation, not a production line. It means joining conversations to prompt topics if the chat lulls.

The new era of connection

We’re entering a moment when human connection is being redefined, not diminished, by technology. The same tools that threaten to flood us with noise can, if used intentionally, open doors to depth, serendipity, and shared understanding at scale. Networking no longer needs to feel like a transaction or a climb. It can be a creative act, a way to build genuine intellectual and emotional ecosystems. That’s what Flynt is here to enable: not to replicate old models, but to help us rediscover what makes them human. We’re incredibly passionate that right now is the moment to solve such a profound issue. And we’re excited to have you on the journey.