Why LinkedIn Is Failing Gen Z ft. Krishna Dosapati | Clockout App

LinkedIn promised networking. What we got instead were cold DMs, spam, and fake connections In this episode of Funds & Founders, I sit down with Krishna Dosapati, Founder & CEO of Clockout—the fastest-growing networking platform for Gen Z. Clockout crossed 350,000+ downloads, hit #19 on the App Store, and is on track to reach $1M ARR in under 10 months, all by rethinking what real networking should look like. We break down: - Why LinkedIn doesn't work for Gen Z - Why cold DMs fail at building real relationships - What authentic networking actually means - How Clockout blends communities, events, and AI-driven intros - The founder's journey from side project to venture-backed startup - What product-market fit really looks like (and why most founders get it wrong) - The biggest mistakes founders make chasing growth and virality This is a conversation about building relationships, not connections—and why the future of networking looks very different from LinkedIn. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔗 Connect with Krishna Dosapati LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krishna-dosapati-39319986/ Clockout: https://clockoutapp.com/ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ About the Host I'm Abhinav Sinha, host of Funds & Founders—a podcast for Austin entrepreneurs navigating early-stage startups. I explore the highs, lows, and breakthrough moments of local founders through candid conversations, and sit down with VCs to uncover how they evaluate early-stage companies. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinavbsinha/ Newsletter: https://newsletter.fundsandfounder.com/ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 – Trailer 01:10 – Intro 02:36 – What Is Networking? 03:37 – Better Networking Than Cold DMs 06:55 – Building Non-Transactional Relationships 09:40 – Founder Journey Begins 13:40 – Team vs Contractors 18:32 – Going Live & Raising the First Round 21:24 – Why Raise $1.3M If You're Profitable? 22:39 – Solo Founder Team Structure 24:33 – Early Startup Challenges 35:44 – Why iOS First? 36:49 – Approval-Only App Strategy 39:01 – Onboarding Friction vs Activation 40:40 – Referral vs Approval User Engagement 55:10 – Biggest Mistake in Going Viral 56:57 – Biggest Lie About Product-Market Fit 1:02:57 – Outro ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #GenZ #Networking #Startup #Entrepreneurship #ProductMarketFit #AppGrowth #FounderJourney #AustinStartups #FundsAndFounders #ConsumerApp.