For decades, the social layer of work has existed… but only for some.

If you work at a desk, your career is visible. Your experience compounds. Your professional identity follows you from role to role.

If you clock in, it often doesn’t.

Despite powering essential industries — food & beverage, logistics, retail, hospitality, healthcare support, and manufacturing — hourly and frontline workers frequently leave jobs with little more than a final paycheck. Skills don’t travel cleanly. Experience is hard to signal. Career progress resets with every move.

A new category is emerging to change that dynamic.

Work Social: The Missing Layer of the Labor Economy

Work Social is a new category of infrastructure designed for the ones who clock in: workers whose labor powers the economy but whose professional identity has rarely been allowed to travel with them.

It sits at the intersection of work, reputation, and mobility. It is not hiring software. It is not workforce management. It is not a traditional professional network.

Instead, Work Social allows work itself to generate lasting social and economic value for the individual doing it.

GAGE (Techstars 2024) is building the world’s first Work Social platform specifically for hourly and frontline workers — giving them a persistent, portable identity that compounds across shifts, jobs, and industries.

Rather than relying on self-reported résumés or static credentials, Work Social reflects reality. It turns lived experience — skills earned, reliability demonstrated, growth over time — into a durable professional identity that builds instead of disappearing.

Why Work Social Matters Now

The structure of work has changed faster than the systems that support it.

Hourly careers are increasingly non-linear. Workers move between employers, roles, and industries at a pace traditional hiring tools were never designed to handle. At the same time, employers face unprecedented churn, understaffing, and difficulty distinguishing real signal from noise when hiring at scale.

Yet the tools used to represent professional identity still assume stability: one employer, one role, one résumé.

This mismatch creates friction on both sides of the labor market.

Workers struggle to show the full picture of who they are and what they can do. Employers struggle to see beyond proxies — brand names, incomplete histories, or arbitrary filters. Opportunity becomes unevenly distributed, and trust becomes situational rather than systemic.

Work Social introduces a shared language — one that allows work to be legible across contexts, enables continuity where fragmentation once existed, and creates a foundation for trust that does not depend on guesswork.

From Activity to Identity

At the heart of Work Social is a simple but powerful shift: work is not just something people do. It is something that shapes who they are professionally.

GAGE’s platform enables workers to accumulate a verified work identity over time. Skills stack. Experience compounds. Progress becomes visible.

That identity is portable and additive. It grows with each role rather than resetting between them.

For workers, this means every job contributes to something larger <> For employers, it means clearer, fairer signals of readiness and fit, especially in roles where performance matters more than pedigree.

Why “Clocking In” Matters

Clocking in is a different kind of professionalism.

Hourly work demands consistency, reliability, adaptability, and real-world performance under pressure. Yet historically, the systems that define professional identity have ignored these signals entirely.

By centering the experience of workers who clock in, Work Social reframes what counts as career capital. It recognizes that showing up, doing the work, and earning trust over time is just as social — and just as valuable — as any resume or network.

This is not about translating hourly work into white-collar terms. It is about building systems that respect it on its own terms.

The Future of Work Requires New Primitives

Much of the conversation about the future of work has focused on flexibility, automation, and efficiency. Far less attention has been paid to identity, and who work systems are actually designed to recognize and reward.

A future of work that only works for people who don’t clock in is not a future… It’s a continuation of the past.

As careers become more fragmented, the ability to carry a coherent professional identity becomes more important, not less. Without new infrastructure, fragmentation creates inequality: workers with access to professional networks and social capital continue to compound opportunity, while everyone else starts over.

Work Social represents a new primitive for the future of work.

It allows labor to generate cumulative value. It decouples opportunity from proximity and pedigree. And it gives workers a way to participate fully in modern labor markets without needing to conform to outdated professional norms.

In a future defined by movement, identity must move too.

The Techstars Journey

GAGE participated in the Techstars Economic Mobility Powered by Samvid Ventures accelerator in 2024, a program focused on expanding access, opportunity, and upward mobility through new models of work and ownership.

Inside the Techstars ecosystem, founders are pushed to answer a fundamental question: what changes if you win?

For GAGE, the answer was structural.

Through mentor feedback, peer learning, and repeated narrative pressure-testing, the team clarified that Work Social is not an enhancement to existing hiring systems. It is a new layer of infrastructure — designed from the ground up for workers who clock in and have historically been excluded from professional social graphs.

That clarity shaped everything from product decisions to category definition, reinforcing Techstars’ belief that enduring companies are built by founders willing to challenge assumptions about how markets are supposed to work.

Redefining What “Social” Means at Work

When people hear “social,” they often think of feeds, content, or engagement.

Work Social is different.

It is social in the sense that identity is shared, legible, and relational. It recognizes that careers are built not just on isolated achievements, but on accumulated trust over time.

For the ones who clock in, this shift is profound.

It means work creates momentum. It means progress is visible. It means opportunity is less dependent on who you know and more connected to what you’ve done.

Looking Ahead

Work Social is still early, but its implications are large.

As labor markets continue to fragment and careers become less linear, platforms that allow work to generate lasting identity will define the next era of economic mobility, especially for workers long left outside traditional professional systems.

GAGE is helping lay the foundation for Work Social, purpose-built for the ones who clock in.

And in doing so, they are redefining who gets to be seen, trusted, and recognized at work.

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