gradladdr ycombinator 2015
TRANSCRIPT
1. Company name:
a. GradLaddr
2. Company url, if any:
a. http://www.gradladdr.com
3. If you have an online demo, what's the url?
a. http://invis.io/DT2EU7J63
4. What is your company going to make?
a. GradLaddr is a softwareasaservice (SaaS) that deconstructs the “genome” of
employers and employees to create automatic filtered lists of qualified applicants
and suitable jobs. Using a filtering algorithm, GradLaddr populates an online
listing board wherein employers and jobseekers can find opportunities to fill
roles. The project was inspired by the Music Genome Project which supported the
Pandora Radio program.
b. Link to our Labor Genome Project summary
5. If this application is a response to a YC RFS, which one?
a. N/A
6. Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?
a. We (each of the three cofounders) live in different areas of the country. Seth
lives in Lafayette, Indiana. Charlie lives in Chicago, Illinois. Grant lives in New
Canaan, Connecticut. We would like to base the company out of a city like
Charlotte, North Carolina or Tampa, Florida (note: we are open to all locations,
depending on which makes the most sense for our team and service deployment
goals).
b. Our desire is to be in a college town, or an area with many surrounded by many
universities. Some we have considered are Charlotte, NC; Greenville, SC; Boston,
MA; and Tampa, FL
CONTACT
7. Email address we should contact you at:
a. Seth [email protected]
b. Charlie [email protected]
c. Grant [email protected]
8. Phone number(s):
a. Seth 8033816681
b. Charlie 8032373167
c. Grant 2038563863
FOUNDERS
9. Please provide an email address for each founder in the startup, including yourself.
a. Seth [email protected]
b. Charlie [email protected]
c. Grant [email protected]
10. Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the
founders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sseLWnramJg
11. Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or
more of you created together. Include urls if possible.
a. FAANatic
i. hlkjhkljhhhhhkjhkjhkhkhkhkhkh
ii. Objective:
1. Create a product that would help raise awareness of food allergies
to individuals who have recently developed a food allergy or to
those who are unfamiliar with how to deal with their food allergy.
iii. Strategy Execution Overview:
1. Develop an application for smart phones that allows people with
food allergies to make more informed decisions about where they
can dine and what they can order.
b. Project Spectra
i. Link to Drive Document
c. ‘Sup
i. Link to Drive Document
12. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the
founders not met in person?
a. Seth and Charlie have known each other since freshman year of high school (9
years). Seth and Grant have known each other since freshman year of college (5
years). Charlie and Grant met each other in the summer of 2014. Charlie and
Grant have not actually met in person, but we have (the three of us) maintained
regular remote contact via video conferencing. Grant once saw seth do edward
forty hands in six minutes and thirteen seconds.
PROGRESS
13. How far along are you?
a. In addition to developing a number of business documents, including
nondisclosure agreement, equity statements and vesting schedules, and initial
budgets and amortization forecasts, we have started creating user stories and a
prototype with the Invision application to show how this application will appear
for student users. We are in the process of devising the abstraction and
specification of our algorithm to serve up jobs to our initial userbase.
14. If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many
lines of code (if applicable) have you written?
a. We have been working part time on this idea for several months. Initially, we
explored GradLaddr thought experiment, then as something that could reasonably
be achieved. Backend development of the “genome” and associated algorithm
are in their infancies.
b. Lines of code?
i. No source code.
15. Which of the following best describes your progress?
a. Objective, Brainstorm, Research, User Stories/Card Sorting, Sketches,
Prototyping. Agile.
16. Do you have revenue?
a. No
17. If you've applied previously with the same idea, how much progress have you made since
the last time you applied?
a. N/A
18. If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator"
or "preaccelerator" program, please tell us about it.
a. We have not currently committed to participate in any incubator or
preaccelerator programs, but we have been researching opportunities to apply to
several programs.
IDEA
19. Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How
do you know people need what you're making?
a. We chose this sector to work on because there is so much space to carve out for
ourselves. Many sites and companies provide services in this area, but they do so
forgettably or without any ingenuity. We acknowledge that this sector is crowded,
but our service offers a competitive advantage over those who simply populate
boards ad nauseam. We have no prior expertise in this area, but we are each
intimately familiar with the pain and struggle of finding employment after
graduating from college. We know that people need our service because we
would have needed it ourselves. We have also done small surveys asking our
social media circles if they felt like they would use this type of service, and the
feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
20. What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it
doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
a. We attempt to deconstruct the basic characteristics that jobs require especially
entrylevel jobs and match those traits with the skills accumulated by a
jobseeker’s employment history and education achievements. Instead of
immediately seeing jobs for which they are qualified and reasonably interested in
on the splash screen of a website, current employment seekers are relegated to an
archaic method of keyword searches, searching outofdate records, and
channeling a whole lot of luck. While many are trying to provide the service
GradLaddr offers, none of them are taking advantage of the "labor genome" and a
truefit mentality.
21. Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
a. Our competitors are a mix of these companies that have been providing job search
tools for years Monster, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Indeed and the companies
that have been collecting data on college students forever basically any
corporation with FERPA agreements with universities. Of these, we fear LinkedIn
the most. They are the ones that are least set in their way, and would have a
tremendous capacity to implement our idea on a massive scale. We also fear
fading into the same obscurity as many other online employment marketplaces
have done. Our approach will provide us with a significant niche, partnerships
with companies and universities will help us maintain a growth trajectory, and the
critical mass of the sector will maintain demand for our service.
22. What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
a. Finding a job shouldn’t be about conjuring up the right keyword and having a
stroke of luck. Open jobs should be laid out based on qualifications the
requisite responsibilities and it becomes your prerogative to show them your
merit to land the job in interviews. We want to take the work out of finding a job.
23. How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
a. We do not currently make money. We have many different ideas about how we
could create revenue streams, however. Some include licensing our service to the
career centers at universities to help their soontobe or alreadygraduates find
employment, selling advertising space on the website (promoted jobs, real estate
companies when someone needs to relocate after being hired, etc.), or we could
provide each user the ability to pay an annual subscription fee for access to the
service. We envision enough utility from the site that individuals that have
already found jobs will continue to value its place in their life and not
immediately cancel subscriptions. We think that $1020 million in yearly
revenues is not beyond the realm of probability within the first 10 years of
operation. This estimation is based on a series of conservative and highgrowth
models we have constructed.
24. How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chickenandegg problem in
the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a
dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
a. We will market this SaaS to university career services departments. If we are able
to sell these departments on the utility of the service, we will have access to a
concise pool of students to market our product. We can also leverage the
relationships that the career services departments already have in order to gain
valuable employer profiles rather than relying on webcrawling for job postings.
EQUITY
25. Have you incorporated, or formed any legal entity (like an LLC) yet?
a. No
26. If you have not formed the company yet, describe the planned equity ownership
breakdown among the founders, employees and any other proposed stockholders. (This
question is as much for you as us.)
a. We are not already incorporated. We do have an equity agreement in place that
provides three majority partners with 60% of equity, and the remaining 40%
remains as a vehicle that can be used to retain contracted services or temporary
investments.
27. Please provide any other relevant information about the structure or formation of the
company.
a. We have intentions of incorporating before the end of spring 2015. Each of the
founders will hold 20% of the equity after it fully vests. Each additional small
contributor or contracted employee at this early stage can earn up to 5% of equity.
Currently, we have three founders (20+20+20) and one contracted employee (5)
for a total of 65% of our equity accounted. We also maintain the ability to buy out
minority stakes in the company.
LEGAL
28. Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that
overlap with your project? If so, please explain.
a. No.
29. Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If so,
describe how can you legally use it. (Open source is ok of course.)
a. Yes. The site is currently being built out by a contracted employee that has agreed
to be paid either in an equity offering no greater than 5% or a small sum of money
determined by market rate for his services.
30. Is there anything else we should know about your company?
a. One early employee had to step away from the project for health reasons. He has
been out of the picture for several months, did not contribute code or work into
the business documents, and has agreed to remain apart from GradLaddr at this
time. We may ask him to rejoin us as an equity partner at some point in the future.
OTHERS
31. Are any of the following true?
a. None of the following are true. 32. If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be
something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they
list here and not in the main application.
a. FAANatic
i. www.rcweston.com/faan
ii. Objective:
1. Create a product that would help raise awareness of food allergies
to individuals who have recently developed a food allergy or to
those who are unfamiliar with how to deal with their food allergy.
iii. Strategy Execution Overview:
1. Develop an application for smart phones that allows people with
food allergies to make more informed decisions about where they
can dine and what they can order.
b. Project Synapse
c. ‘Sup
i. Link to Drive Document
33. Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.
a. Coming up with ideas was not the hardest part. It is hilariously easy to think of
ways to improve the experience of users in this sector. It surprises us daily how
our “competitors” offer an inferior product but have no motivation to make their
services more useful. Further, there are so many opportunities to partner with
great companies like Campus Job, TakeTheInterview, MindSumo, and
Recruiterbox. Narrowing down our ideas to a minimum viable product that wasn’t
too daunting to tackle was the hardest aspect.
CURIOUS
34. What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator?
a. We made our decision to apply to Y Combinator because it is an incubator. We
have each watched many segments from the Stanford online lecture series “How
to Start a Startup,” and we came to the conclusion that Y Combinator is exactly
what we need. We realize that we have a lot of work left to do in order to make,
remake, fine tune, and launch our service. YC provides access to some of the top
minds in business, an excellent community whose goals are cultivating the best
organizations, and we feel like GradLaddr and Y Combinator have similar visions
about how to make services and products that enrich the world.
35. How did you hear about Y Combinator?
a. We heard about Y Combinator through Seth, who knew about some of the more
famous applicants to YC, like Dropbox. Additionally, we were encouraged to
learn more about YC because of Sam Altman’s involvement in the Stanford
lecture series noted above.