Can Rohan Doctor’s Louisa Compete Against LinkedIn
May 24, 2023
U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs recently spun off Louisa as a separate company. New York based Louisa offers a networking platform, used by more than 40,000 users at Goldman and other companies each month, to connect with the expertise and relationships of everyone within their company.
“Think of Louisa as an A.I.-powered LinkedIn on steroids,” Rohan Doctor, 42-years-old, founder of Louisa told CNBC.
Knowledge, expertise, and relationships of an organization’s people, teams, jobs, universities, alumni, communities, and clients stay largely unknown to others in the organization. Combining user-provided profiles, system-driven data, and reading millions of articles a week from 250 providers, Louisa connects people within an organization based on possible business leads they can pursue.
While it is impossible for any human to know tens of thousands of people, a computer system can. Louisa analyzes data from human resources records, customer lists, transaction history, divisional descriptions, reporting lines and communications to figure out who knows who.
Louisa has a team of data scientists, engineers, product and design staff in New York, Warsaw and Bengaluru. It is miniscule compared to LinkedIn.
In 2016, LinkedIn was bought by Microsoft for $26 billion. LinkedIn has more than 930 million professionals on its network in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. It describes its mission as connecting “the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”
But LinkedIn is now largely a social media outlet for professionals, who mostly post about their achievements and personal stories. Also, it has turned into a platform for job-seekers and service providers, with advertising fees from them accounting for most of LinkedIn’s $13 billion irevenues in 2022.
So, Louisa will likely attract users with its focus on providing information and connections. More importantly, the platform will appeal to big companies and other large institutions as a competitive tool since the information shared is private, visible only to other users within an organization. Even if it attracts only 5% of the number of subscribers which LinkedIn has, Louisa can charge higher fees and be very profitable.
Rohan Doctor and son, with Zubin Mehta, right. Photo: Rohan Doctor’s LinkedIn post.
In 2018, while working in Goldman’s Hong Kong office, Doctor realized the need for a platform like Louisa after securing a major deal between a bank and an insurance company. The deal, he told CNBC was the result of “dumb luck that me and another guy got thirsty at the same time, go to a [bar]…and start exchanging information.”
In 2019, Doctor moved to New York to set up Louisa, funded and incubated in Goldman Sachs’ business accelerator. It was originally named after Louisa Goldman Sachs, daughter of Marcus Goldman and the wife of Samuel Sachs – Goldman and Sachs were the founders of Goldman Sachs. Since separating from Goldman, Doctor says Louisa now refers to a renowned warrior.
Prior to founding Louisa, from 2009 to 2019, Doctor was head of Goldman’s bank solutions in Hong Kong, working with 150 banks in Asia. Earlier, in London, he worked in Macro Structuring & Systematic Trading Strategies; Dutch & Finnish Bank, Insurance & Pensions Sales; and Investment Banking Division, Financing Group. He joined Goldman Sachs in 2006, after working three years as a Credit Strategist at Citi, London. He served as an intern at Lazard, London, during the summer of 2000.
Doctor earned a Master’s in Finance & Mathematics from Imperial College, London, 2002-2003. Earlier, he earned a BS in physics from Oxford University, 1999-2002, where he was the captain of the field hockey team at St. Anne’s College. He attended St. Paul’s School, London, on a scholarship, 1997-1999, and earlier, from 1985 to 1991, studied at The British School Al Khubairat, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
On his LinkedIn profile, Doctor says he speaks Gujarati and Hindi. He adds that he is passionate about “the environment (plants, oceans and animals need the collective strength of humans to help rebuild what we have destroyed for them); community, as a board member of former New York Philharmonic conductor Zubin Mehta’s classical music philanthropy in India; and since, 2019, teaching, as soccer coach for children’s teams;
Besides Goldman, Louisa’s clients include a commercial bank and a venture capital fund with nearly $100 billion in assets. While initially focused on five or six professional services clients, Doctor plans to expand access to Louisa to other professions.
Two factors have boosted Louisa’s usage: generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has made it easier for people to describe themselves and their ideas in seconds; and remote and hybrid work, working some days from home and other days at the office.
Before the pandemic lockdown, “if you had a question, you’d lean back on a crowded trading floor and ask around,” he told CNBC. “Hybrid is here to stay, even at places that don’t want it, and asking around no longer works.”
Users of Louisa can build their personal brand as subject matter experts, expand their reach, and stay up-to-date on colleagues and clients.
In a statement on Goldman’s site, before Louisa was spun-off, Doctor stated that global organizations “are competing to get the best return on their largest investment: their people. Louisa helps them maximize that return by unleashing an even greater strength: the collective intelligence of their entire workforce.”
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