MIT has more than 70 campus clubs. BU claims 450+. Harvard lists over 490. Whatever you're into, there's a group you can geek out with.
Every semester, these groups participate in an informal market with companies. In exchange for sponsorship dollars and high-profile speakers, brands and recruiters get access to their members. A Boston-area startup wants to be the LinkedIn for that market, connecting students by their interests to recruiters who want to hire them.
"The first 60 clubs that preregistered for our platform raised over $1M last year collectively and it’s all done offline," Door of Clubs founder Pranam Lipinski told me.
Lipinski grew up in Western Mass. and went to Endicott College. He was a real estate developer before starting Door of Clubs last year.
In the beginning, he and co-founders Oscar-Wyett Moore and Adam Rosen visited 15 campus clubs, talking to students about how to succeed in college. "We realized we don't want to be motivational speakers," he told me. The team went in search of more tangible opportunities they could offer students.
"The first 60 clubs that preregistered for our platform raised over $1M last year collectively and it’s all done offline."
The next stage was manually hosting events with clubs at Babson, Harvard and MIT. They brought in speakers from companies like HourlyNerd, iRobot and HubSpot.
Then they built the platform. It's an engagement device, not a social network, he said--though some clubs are finding opportunities to network with like-minded organizations at other universities. There are 300 campus clubs registered on it, he said, and about 50 companies that use it to look for opportunities to connect with clubs whose interests align with their hiring priorities.
"These students are some of the most driven and passionate in their field," Lipinski said. "They also tend to work well in teams. ... So the companies don’t necessarily need to go to a career fair, where you’ve got students with all interests and in two minutes you’ve got to learn their background and what they’re interested in."
Lipinski said 25% of clubs are focused on a specific cultural group or are groups specifically for women. Harvard's Black Pre-Law Association, for example, or MIT Sloan's Women in Management. That helps tech companies pushing to improve diversity make a personal connection. "(Students) see they've got this bullseye on their back," Lipinski said. "These companies need to get their numbers up, but what these students want is they want to be fully seen and heard."
Door of Clubs just closed a modest seed round, raising $250,000 at a $1 million valuation. Russ Campanello, iRobot's head of HR, is an investor--as is longtime Berkshires money manager Don Dion. Brian Truong, who helped found the Harvard Ventures club and paid his way through college working at startups, is an advisor.
Revenue is on a freemium model, with companies signing up at no charge, but paying increasing subscription fees for tiers of access.
"The vision that has kept me going and will keep me going is I always think of this girl at a no-name school in the middle of nowhere a few years from now who’s got a philosophy major,…by knowing there’s Door of Clubs on campus, she can connect with companies that specifically want to network with philosophy majors," Lipinski told me. "She can end up choosing at the end the company that in person felt best to her. If we can do that it’ll be mission accomplished."
