He set out to sell HR analytics. He accidentally built a brain for the people who run people - and kept the accident.
Joseph Quan. The guy who answered his own emails for the first fifty members - on the phone, for thirty minutes each.
In March 2020, with his startup running on fumes, Joseph Quan did the un-startup thing. He stopped building software and started a group chat. Twenty-five Chief People Officers, all of them suddenly responsible for sending whole companies home, all of them improvising. He gave them a place to compare notes. That place is now called CPOHQ, it has more than 2,000 members, and the software eventually followed the conversation instead of the other way around.
Today Quan runs Knoetic, a company with two halves that talk to each other. One half is the analytics product - pull 60-plus HR systems into a single dashboard and watch attrition, hiring and headcount move in real time. The other half is the community, where the smartest people-leaders in tech trade playbooks, benchmarks and the kind of advice you cannot Google. Quan calls the combination a "Second Brain" for Chief People Officers. He did not plan it. He noticed it.
"We started thinking we'd build analytics and data tools," he has said, "and now we've stumbled onto building a second brain for Chief People Officers instead. And that's so much more valuable." It is the rare founder line that admits the original plan was wrong and the wrongness was the point.
The right brain is the community. It's the coalescence of thousands of ideas from the world's smartest Chief People Officers.
Before I built a community, I had a very narrow view as an entrepreneur.
Before Knoetic there was Twine Labs, a Y Combinator company (Winter 2018) that Quan co-founded and eventually wound down. Before that he was a founding member of a Nike innovation team and a guest lecturer at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He is a Wharton/Berkeley graduate who managed to study both econometrics and English literature - the spreadsheet and the sentence, in the same person.
The through-line across all of it is people: how they work, why they leave, what makes a team. Knoetic is the version of that question with the best distribution he has found yet, because the customers became the community and the community became the cap table.
He turned customers into a cap table. One hundred Chief People Officers didn't just use Knoetic - they funded it.
Quan has been unusually open about the mechanics of building CPOHQ. The short version: do things that obviously don't scale, then keep doing them long after everyone tells you to stop.
The first product was built in a single weekend and was, in his words, "really bad" - a static page of HR articles he curated by hand, every day.
His validation note to prospective members drew a ~40% response rate from C-level executives. That signal was strong enough to bet the company on.
He personally onboarded the first ~50 members on 30-minute calls, asking each one: what would take this from a 1 to a 10?
"From Day 1, this is going to be for one single People/HR leader in each company." Scarcity by design, not by accident.
He drafted the first posts for early power users to lower the friction of participating. Many of those believers later wrote checks.
Every community question gets answered within 24 hours. If no member replies, staff build you a playbook from the open internet.
Watch your burn multiple carefully, manage cash and cut until you have 15+ months of runway in the bank. It's all about survival.
You've got to have founder involvement in the early days of your community efforts.
We build intelligence that keeps humanity at its center.
In the near term, we're focused on our 'Act 1' - supporting CPOs and their teams. Then we'll pursue 'Act 2.'