Geekli.st – The next generation resume for developers and geeks [invites]

Today, I had the chance to sit down with the founders of Geekli.st, a service where developers can come, share and interact on their past achievements in technology.

The site itself is simple, you set up your account (right now you can only reserve your username, but we have 300 exclusive invites for The Next Web readers to jump right in, just use the code TNWGEEKS), but once you have full access, you are given the ability add “cards” which list out achievements of yours at previous companies or side projects. Someone can come to your profile, click through to see your card, and then “high-five” you for the achievement.

It appears that Geekli.st is a community for developers to showcase things in a way that hasn’t been done before. Currently, there are sites like LinkedIn, and of course the old school resume, which tell people where you’ve worked, and what you’ve done, and it’s up to you to fill that information in. Most people don’t like this process and find it boring. The company wants to make this process a fun one.

There is also an activity stream called “pings” which let you see what micro-achievements people have posted, who has joined, and who has “high-fived” someone for a card that is impressive.

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Below, you’ll see a few impressive cards, including Twitter’s first actor on the service Janina Gavankar from True Blood.

The founders of Geekli.st, Chris Sanz and Reuben Katz, are longtime friends, who met serendipitously at Katz’s wedding. Their wives were friends, and they built a relationship between positions at such companies as Disney, and Katz’s own spanish version of Amazon.com, which he went on to sell.

The idea was simple, Katz recalls:

On April 8th of 2011, I remember it clearly, Chris said, “I have a great idea for a business, and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now”

The rest is history.

Geekli.st has been live with it private beta for 5 days, as of this articles publishing. Since then, the system has had 23,000 “activities”, which are follows, new cards, and pings.

When asked “Why Geekli.st?”, Sanz responded:

No geeks have a way to put their trophies up” or a place to say “nice job, high five!”. There has been no place to have real discoverability of the things others have been doing and have done.

The company hopes that as Geekli.st grows after going fully live, developers will be able to find jobs through their Geekli.st network, as well as building a huge community of the webs best talent. The founders tell me that currently, 50% of their database is international, meaning the company is already seeing developers join from all over the world. The founders also mentioned seeing chatter on Twitter where developers are telling each other that their achievements should “be a card”, a direct reference to the Geekli.st feature.

The invite process has been mainly a two step one. The company lets anyone reserve a username, and then they handpick who gets full access. Geekli.st has had great success with this approach, and has learned a lot from the community thus far.

My main concern is that this would be something that only geeks and developers would understand and use, but the company assures me that people have asked them to cover other verticals and it’s something its definitely interested in doing. One other interesting thing to mention is that its slowly going to allow companies to join Geekli.st and share company achievements with their respective communities. This could be a solid business model for the company.

In a matter of days Geekli.st has grown to 7,000 users, most of which are just reserving their name, and only about 250 people have full access. Thanks to Geekli.st you could jump the line and get full access today. We have 300 exclusive invites, go get yours and use the code TNWGEEKS.

They have an impressive list of advisors and investors, one of which is Jeffrey Kalmikoff, a trusted veteran in silicon valley.

I personally would like to see Steve Wozniak on Geekli.st so he can share some of his biggest personal achievements.