Yahoo’s advanced products group, led by Scott Gatz, is launching a new service this evening called Kickstart. While immediate analogies will be drawn to Facebook, the service is actually much more like LinkedIn in that it connects students and alumni at specific colleges and universities and helps them connect on a professional level. Alumni can help students get jobs (or can find good students to fill spots at whatever company they work at), and students can reach out to others to help jumpstart their professional career. Doostang, an invitation-only job network which just raised $2.5 million, is also a point of comparison. New users sign up for the service and add basic college and work information (by choosing a college, they also choose a network). Users are automatically connected to others than went to, or are going to, the school. And they can make other friends in the network as well. Once the network gets started, Gatz says they’ll start to focus on events, message boards and other features. Eventually recruiters will be let in (Gatz promises not to let them spam users) as well. Kickstart is focusing on getting alumni to sign up first, and will be offering a $25,000 prize to whichever college/university gets the most alumni to sign up before December 31. What I liked about the service when I saw a demo last week was the possibility to find a deep database of individuals that went to the same schools that I did. And this clearly isn’t a place for pictures of partying and drinking – the whole point is to build up a professional network to help you move your career along. For young students just getting out of college this can be a very useful service. And they can keep having fun on Facebook…while pointing potential professional contacts to their Kickstart profiles. Yesterday we covered a number of startups that are trying to recreate the college-only magic of Facebook. Kickstart isn’t one of those services, but college students may be flocking to it nonetheless. You can see the whole team behind Kickstart here. CrunchBase Information Facebook LinkedIn Doostang Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We’ve heard that Shasta Ventures put $3.5 million into LinkedIn competitor Doostang, adding to the million or so that they raised previously in an angel round. The service, which we first covered over two years ago, is a job site and social network where new users have to be invited by someone currently on the site. That keeps growth small, but the site has been known for having very high end jobs and job candidates. So far, Doostang has no revenue model – everything is free. But that’s changing from what we hear. No details yet, but I’d expect users to be able to generate fees from recommending friends for jobs (an activity that is already encouraged on the site). Currently Doostang has just over 300,000 registered members and 4,633 jobs listed. Get your invitation to Doostang from InviteShare here. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Writing this from Luxembourg airport. Free and strong wifi. Awesome. Company: Doostang Location: Doostang, Inc. 160 Brannan St. Suite 306 San Francisco, CA 94107 E-mail: contact@doostang.com Launched: Recently What is it? Doostang is a trust network and employment service. Once you have joined, you can post a profile, upload a resume, post and search for jobs, write testimonials and invite other people. You can join by invitation only. If you would like an invitation, email us (see our about section) and we will be happy to send you one. In their own words, “Doostang is the trusted professional network. The network grows by invitation only which ensures that all contacts that enter the system are trusted by at least one or more members in the network. The value of the network grows with time as the number of contacts increases. The initial goal of Doostang is to fix the quality vs. quantity gap in online recruiting and job searching. Over 50% of recruiting today is done through the personal network of contacts and a large portion of which is done by email communication. Using your personal network is the most effective way to find the right candidate for a position and to find the perfect job. It eliminates the need to either post a job to an irrelevant audience or to search through the multitude of jobs available on the Internet or newspapers that would be of no interest to you. Doostang provides the infrastructure to connect personal networks together and to create a natural quality filter for recruiting and job searching. Doostang hails from two Farsi words, “doost” which means friend, and “tang” a word used to symbolize the trust between a close group of people. Farsi, one of the world’s oldest languages dating back to 600BC, was spoken from the borders of India in the far east and Russia and China in the north, to southern shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean in the west. The word Doostang fittingly describes our company’s long term goal to be the trusted professional network.” Link The site works in similar ways to LinkedIn, in that you choose your trust network (friends), can interact with them, post testimonials, etc. There are two important differences. The first difference is that you can only become a member via an invitation. That does create an atmosphere of exclusivity. The second difference → Read More
