MyCBS vs Alma

MyCBS is an online community platform designed for the needs of Columbia Business School alumni. MyCBS is a one-stop-shop for alumni who want to stay involved with the school, further their careers, or simply connect with an old classmate.

Alma is a private concierge for your community — the people you already share a room with every week, finally connected by something calmer than a group chat. Close-knit groups already have what a network needs: trust, proximity, and a reason to stay in touch. What they don't have is one place to keep any of it. Alma is that place — who's hosting, who's free, who's sitting next to you, and what everyone will remember afterward. Start a community for your graduate cohort, your team, your alumni chapter, or any circle that meets often enough to matter. WHAT ALMA DOES • The Table — standing dinners, morning runs, and one-off gatherings hosted by your members. See exactly who's going and take a seat in one tap. Hosts fill a table without a forty-message thread, and everyone confirmed gets a quiet reminder the day before. • Ask Alma — your concierge. Ask the way you'd ask a person: "who's free for lunch Thursday?" or "who should I meet before the fintech intensive?" Alma checks schedules, proposes a plan, and makes the introduction — always showing you exactly what she is about to do, and acting only after you say yes. • Class — your enrolled courses and which members are in the room with you this term, so you meet your section before the first session instead of after the last one. • Network — your whole community in one searchable directory, with direct messages and visibility you control. A constellation view maps who shares classes with whom, so an introduction has somewhere to start. • Album — the shared photo record of dinners, milestones, and everything in between. What the group chat loses, the Album keeps. WHY IT'S DIFFERENT Alma works inside a bounded, high-trust community rather than the open internet. Every suggestion is grounded in who is actually in the room with you, not a stranger who matched on keywords. And she never acts behind your back. Anything Alma does on your behalf — a dinner, an introduction, an invitation — is shown to you first, done only with your say-so, and reversible for a few minutes afterward. No feed to perform for. No streaks, no badges, no notification pressure. Alma is quiet on purpose. Anyone can create an account and start or join a community. What's posted inside a community stays inside it — never on the open web.