People often ask me why I care so much about resumes, opportunity, and professional identity.
The answer has very little to do with technology.
It has everything to do with people.
The resume is not just outdated.
It is unfair.
Years ago, I watched my daughter enter the job market. Like millions of young people, she was expected to compress her life, potential, personality, curiosity, and ambition into a document that barely reflected who she was.
The system expected her to compete using a resume.
The problem was simple: the resume could not see her.
A resume is not a human. It is a compression artifact.
It could not see her determination, her willingness to learn, or the hundreds of small experiences that made her who she was.
It only saw what happened to fit inside a few pages.
That bothered me.
Because I knew she was not alone.
Students, career changers, freelancers, parents returning to work, self-taught professionals, creators, builders, and people with non-linear lives are judged through systems that only see fragments.
The more I looked at the problem, the more I realized it was not only a resume problem.
It was an identity problem.
The world changed. Professional identity did not.
We learn online. We build online. We collaborate online. We publish work, join communities, collect proof, develop taste, change direction, and leave behind a trail of progress across dozens of places.
Yet when opportunity arrives, people are still asked to summarize themselves from scratch.
People do not need another way to perform a smaller version of themselves.
I do not believe the next generation should spend their lives rewriting themselves to fit somebody else's template.
I believe technology should adapt to people.
Not the other way around.
That is why I am building Progny.