When the Brown University startup Pangea launched in 2017, it was focused on building a peer-to-peer marketplace that helped college students find side hustles in the form of project and contract work.
Now, the company is pivoting.
While it will still offer those services, particularly for early stage startups who need help finding talent, the company will also look to connect college students on a project or contract basis with larger companies as well.
“They (larger companies) are always looking to outsource projects and they are always looking for fresh perspectives. And they have only ever done that through an agency and right now it’s really hard to access college students on a project basis,” Adam Alpert, co-founder and CEO of Pangea, told Rhode Island Inno. “Yes, if you are a large corporation, you can develop a relationship with a school and post an internship or full-time job, but if you just need one little tiny thing done, it’s currently really inefficient to find a college student, and our system alleviates that.”
"You have what we believe is one of society’s greatest assets — that intellectual creative talent — not being utilized ... "
Alpert said he and the rest of the Pangea team were at first a little surprised to see interest from larger companies, but often is the case when an early stage company is trying to find product market fit.
He also thinks the upside could be huge for students, because some of the larger corporations Pangea has had discussions with could potentially be interested in doing hundreds of these smaller projects per month.
Additionally, Alpert said the company, which is currently participating in MassChallenge Rhode Island and will be one of the first tenants in the Cambridge Innovation Center space in the new Wexford Innovation Center, has started to expand its inventory of talent.
Up until now, the app has been focused on college students. But recently, Pangea formed a partnership with General Assembly, a boot camp that teaches tech skills to entrepreneurs and business professionals.
The idea is to recognize that students and even those a bit older learn on different trajectories, and that college is no longer the only avenue.
The other big news is that Pangea is interested in raising a round of funding.
While the company has benefitted from bootstrapping over the past two years, Alpert said that it is generally difficult to build up a marketplace without some funding. He also said there is now a really strong, clear direction at the company, which the team is ready to go all in on.
He said the team is going to focus on building the new model for the next few months, which should put it in a strong position to raise a pre-seed round starting in the fall.
Despite all the changes, Alpert added that the core mission of the company has not changed and is still focused on helping solve the talent crisis and skills gap that the country is currently experiencing.
According to Alpert, 47 percent of companies in America are unable to fill open positions. Four of every 10 recent college graduates are unable to find a job that either requires a college degree or aligns with their skills.
“You have what we believe is one of society’s greatest assets — that intellectual creative talent — not being utilized, and yet you still have this talent gap,” he said. “So we are really focused on understanding why that is, because it is going to cost our country more than $2 trillion in lost GDP over the next 10 years.”
