When you leave a job, what do you take with you?
Your laptop goes back. Your email stops working. Your Slack history — the thousands of decisions, arguments, and ideas you contributed — belongs to the company. Your commits live in their repos. Your campaigns, your dashboards, your customer relationships: all locked in SaaS accounts you no longer have access to.
You update your LinkedIn. You write a bullet point: "Led marketing team, grew revenue 3x." And that's supposed to represent two years of your life.
It doesn't. Not even close.
The work you can't prove
Think about what actually made you good at your last job. It wasn't a title. It was:
- The way you structured a campaign that outperformed everything before it
- The architectural decision that saved six months of refactoring
- The 47 PRs you reviewed where your comments made the code better
- The customer relationships you built through hundreds of small interactions
- The patterns you spotted in data that nobody else was looking at
All of that signal — the texture of your craft, the proof of your taste and judgment — stays behind. It's scattered across Jira, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and a dozen other tools that belong to your employer.
You don't get a highlight reel. You don't get a portfolio. You get a two-sentence summary on a profile page that looks like everyone else's.
LinkedIn is a résumé, not an identity
LinkedIn solved the wrong problem. It digitized the résumé — a list of companies, titles, and dates. But a résumé has never captured what makes someone good at what they do.
The best people aren't defined by where they worked. They're defined by how they worked. Their velocity. Their taste. The quality of their decisions. The way they elevated the people around them. None of that shows up on LinkedIn because none of that data is portable.
It's not portable because it lives in company-owned tools. And company-owned tools have no incentive to let you take your story with you.
The personal side matters too
Here's the thing people in tech forget: your professional identity isn't separate from the rest of you.
The person who maintains a meticulous garden is telling you something about their attention to detail. The person who cooks elaborate meals from scratch is telling you about their relationship with process and craft. The person who built their own finance tracking system is telling you how they think about systems.
Your personal projects, your hobbies, your side work — that's all signal. It's often better signal than your job title, because it's what you chose to do with your time when nobody was paying you.
But this signal is even more fragmented than your work data. It's in Apple Health, Goodreads, a notes app, a recipe folder, a spreadsheet. It's everywhere and nowhere.
What if your profile was yours?
Imagine a different model:
You have an account that's yours. Not your company's. Not tied to a job. Yours, like your phone number.
When you work, your contributions accrue to your profile. Not the raw company data — that stays with the org. But the shape of your work: your activity patterns, your output cadence, the breadth of your contributions. A contribution graph that shows you shipped, not just that you showed up.
When you leave, the org keeps its data. You keep your story. Your professional narrative doesn't reset to zero. It compounds. Every job, every project, every side hustle adds to a profile that gets richer over time.
Your personal life is part of the picture — if you want it to be. The things you build, maintain, learn, and explore outside of work aren't in a separate universe. They're facets of the same person. You control what's visible and what's private, but the option to present a complete picture of who you are is yours.
Why nobody's built this
Two reasons:
Incentive misalignment. The companies that own your work data have no reason to make it portable. Salesforce doesn't want your customer relationships to leave when you do. That's their lock-in. Every SaaS vendor benefits from your identity being fragmented because it keeps you dependent on their silo.
Cost. Building across enough domains to make a unified identity meaningful — work tools, personal tools, creative tools — required too many products, too many teams, too much money. No startup could afford to build a link shortener and a household app and an email platform and an uptime monitor. You had to pick one.
AI changed the second constraint. We ship a new product every week with two people. The cost barrier to building across domains is gone.
The first constraint — incentive misalignment — is the opportunity. We can build this because we're not an employer's tool. First Party is your tool. You bring it to work, not the other way around.
What we're building toward
We're not shipping a "portable identity product" tomorrow. But every product we build is a step in this direction:
One account across everything. Your First Party account follows you. Change jobs, start a business, shut one down — the account persists.
Separate data, connected identity. Your business tools and personal tools don't share data (your furnace repair schedule has nothing to do with your email campaigns). But they share an account, and over time, they build a picture of who you are and what you're capable of.
You own the export. Every product, full data export, useful formats, anytime. Not because GDPR made us. Because it's your data.
The profile compounds. The longer you use First Party products — across jobs, across life stages, across domains — the more valuable your profile becomes. Not to advertisers. To you.
The bet
We're betting that people want to own their identity the way they want to own their data. That "first-party" isn't just a data architecture — it's a statement about who controls the narrative of your professional and personal life.
Your profile should outlive your job. Your skills should be provable, not just claimable. And the work you do — all of it, not just the parts with a corporate logo — should compound into something that's unmistakably yours.
We're building toward that. One product at a time.
First Party is building tools for work and life on one shared account. See what we're shipping →