Since its founding in 2015, the career exploration platform MajorClarity has become one of the most recognized household names in the Richmond startup ecosystem.
Richmonders might recall the edtech company’s founder and CEO Joe Belsterling as a mentor at Startup Virginia, a top graduate of the accelerator Lighthouse Labs, or most recently, featured in Richmond Inno’s own 25 Under 25 list.
The 25-year-old entrepreneur has raised $500,000 in angel funding, opened an office in Shockoe Bottom and hired 14 full-time and a couple contracted employees — all aimed at solving one of the most fundamental misconceptions in the U.S. educational system.
“We’ve over-glorified the four-year degree,” Belsterling said. “Today there is over $1 trillion in student debt and 50 percent of students at public universities will not have a degree within six years, yet still have thousands of dollars in debt.”
Young adults often don’t know exactly what they want to do as they graduate high school or enter college, and so they jump around testing out different majors and schools, all the while accumulating debt.
MajorClarity partners with school districts to set up a system of low-cost career exploration for students and creates academic pathways that help kids receive clarity for their future, whether it’s continued academic education or a professional job.
Belsterling wishes more students knew about high-paying vocational trade jobs, such as plumbing technicians or oil rig operators, that don’t require hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans for a paper diploma.
“College acceptance should not be a success metric in our education system,” he said. “Our society forgot the lesson that adding economic value to society is what counts, not whether you get into college. Half our kids can get into college, fine, but when they don’t graduate, they don’t have a valuable career they love, and still take on debt.”
Belsterling’s own schooling background brought him face-to-face with the inefficiencies of selecting a career. Then, after turning down a private equity internship with Carlisle Group in D.C., he was selected by 4.0 Schools in New Orleans to lead experiments on lowering the cost of career exploration for students.
He observed how students desired “quick bites” of professions as opposed to two-week courses, and brought in journalists, doctors and attorneys to give 30-minute talks paired with a student activity.
“This could scale,” he remembers thinking as the seeds of MajorClarity planted.
Approaching graduation in 2015, Belsterling had $30,000 in student debt. He still wanted to pursue his vision of giving students career exposure before paying for college, so he launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter under the brand VersedU.
The campaign was mildly successful, barely reaching its goal of $9,000. But it was enough to build a rudimentary video software platform that let students sample eight career paths.
The summer after graduation, Belsterling leveraged VersedU to beat out other edtech companies with hundreds of thousands of users and win an RFP for a pilot program with the New York City school district.
“I’m not trying to build a billion-dollar company, I’m trying to shift the oldest institution in America."
To gear up for the pilot program, VersedU entered an acceleration program at Lighthouse Labs and re-emerged as an “academic planning platform” rebranded to MajorClarity. Lighthouse Labs injected $20,000 into MajorClarity, which went on to win an additional $5,000 as the top graduate of its cohort.
The pilot program led to MajorClarity winning a big contract with the Virginia Beach school district. Belsterling raised $225,000 from angel investors, put the money towards a sales staff, and seven months later 20 more districts fell into his lap. By August 2017, MajorClarity hit $100,000 in revenue. The company received another $300,000 in a part-two tranche of the same angel round.
“Today, we’ve grown revenue 600 percent and we’re in 10 states,” Belsterling said. “MajorClarity is approaching 2 percent of all students in the U.S.”
While it’s typical for 10-15 percent of students to use the MajorClarity platform in a school, a whopping 85 percent of students in one Southwest Virginia county school district used the product. As a result, the rural county received substantial statewide funding to launch a cybersecurity program and a pharmaceutical technician training program for its high school students.
“I’m not trying to build a billion-dollar company, I’m trying to shift the oldest institution in America," Belsterling said.
Every month, he attends a CEO therapy group with three other startup CEOs in Richmond. They spend two hours together at a coffee shop sharing wins, struggles, and discussing a topic to improve themselves.
“This is why I’m in Richmond,” he said. “The relationship ecosystem is hard to get into but once you get in, it’s high touch. It’s quickly growing but not mature like a New York or San Francisco. If we succeed, we could help Richmond grow as it helps us grow.”
