Finding the "next big thing" is hard. When scouring the Web for jobs, no site can adequately predict whether you've landed on the next WhatsApp, the messaging app Facebook jaw droppingly gobbled up for $19 billion this February. Six first-year students from Harvard Business School are convinced they know where the hottest startups are hiding, however, and are now willing to share their secrets.
When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg visited Harvard Business School in May 2012, she urged MBA candidates, "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat — just get on." With that advice in mind, SpotRocket launched, a website dedicated to helping students "spot the rocket ships."
"Career Services do a great job of connecting students with big names," noted Co-founder Payal Divakaran, but the team wondered if they "were able to somehow aggregate all the startups founded in the last 10 years and think about them the way investors do."
SpotRocket's proprietary algorithm combines quantitative and qualitative metrics, such as funding history, Web traffic and social media influence, into what the founders call a "FuelScore." The FuelScore represents a startup's potential, and helps students easily identify the "rocketship companies" in the process of taking off.
To create the algorithm, the team turned to the publicly available data found on sites like CrunchBase and AngelList. They first focused on 100 private companies they knew well and started distributing different weights to the various metrics that comprise the FuelScore until they settled on an equation they felt properly embodied the landscape.
SpotRocket has since grown to rank more than 10,000 companies. As students search the site, they're given access to each startup's website, job postings or preferred contact information. According to Divakaran, startups do find the portal, from a recruiting standpoint, "valuable." The positive response has led the team to believe that although free for now, they could start charging startups to post positions on SpotRocket, as well as students looking to gain access.
Yet, the team will need to keep building out the site's functionality first. Moving forward, SpotRocket wants to assist in actually connecting students studying in a specific industry, say marketing, with the startups hiring a marketing professional. If the match is a good fit, Divakaran said they would like students to be able to apply for the opening through SpotRocket.
Since launching on April 15, SpotRocket has grown to receive attention from students at more than 100 colleges nationwide, including Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Harvard and MIT.
"It shows that students are interested in entrepreneurship," Divakaran said.
Locally, that couldn't be more true. When asked which startups are the "hottest" around Boston, Divakaran rattled off two that tend to go under the radar: Veracode, a cloud-based application security startup in Burlington, and Attivio, an enterprise software company headquartered in Newton.
Although the SpotRocket team formed as part of Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Rose's first-year required FIELD course, the enterprising group is focused on keeping the startup alive after the semester ends.
"We have been reached out to by angel investors and a VC firm this week," Divakaran acknowledged. "There certainly seems to be avenues for working on this beyond the course."
And if the initial feedback is any indication, the startup has a promising future.
"We gotten that feedback that when students … go on this website, they are surprised by the startups they see," Divakaran said. "If they're discovering new startups, then that's a home run for us."
Images via SpotRocket
