Our Story

Mentoring, networking and informal talent development is where 85% of careers are found and 90% of learning happens, yet is left to serendipity and nepotism. It's the informal moments that happen through relationships with colleagues, mentors and leaders where we learn and grow the most. Building relationships leads to career development, new opportunities, breakthrough ideas and cultures where we feel like we belong. Relationships are how we get jobs, how we get things done and how we develop institutional knowledge.

So why do organizations spend most of their time and resources, on average $1,300/employee, on classroom and course-based learning and leave relationships up to serendipity?

The world changed in 2020 and 2021. COVID has accelerated the world’s move to hybrid working resulting in fully decentralized teams creating more silos and disconnects than ever before. Secondly, diversity and inclusion have moved from a “nice to have” to a board-level mandate - finally. This board-level diversity and inclusion mandate is being cascaded to every level of an organization, adding a new level of complexity to how organizations enable talent attraction, retention, engagement and learning. This has been amplified by the great resignation, the war for talent, and every organization’s pressure to prepare for the future of skills and work.

Despite these shifts, organizations do not have the tools or systems to institutionalize informal development experiences - whether it’s networking, mentoring, onboarding buddies, or cross-silo connections - to deliver on this new world of decentralized and DEI-focused future of work.

What a course is to formal, classroom training, a coffee is to informal learning. Knowing “10,000 hours of practice” is the most quantitative measure of “how to become an expert”, we initially called ourselves Ten Thousand Coffees to scale informal talent development - helping people learn from each other and become experts.

Since then, we’ve evolved to be much more than that. As we move from Ten Thousand Coffees to 10KC, we are building the world’s first technology to deliver the best mentoring, networking and informal development experiences. As the first experience platform for all informal development experiences, from networking to mentoring, 10KC offers tried and tested, ready-to-go solutions, while also helping clients evolve their current programs into 21st-century, on-scale offerings.

10KC will be the world’s undisputed leader in informal development technology helping people, organizations and industries share our vision to democratize opportunity.

Our Mission