Sebastian DeLuca ’14 started PromoteU last year with a single Facebook post, asking Dartmouth students if they wanted to contribute to a project that would help students find internships and jobs. The company has since raised $60,000 in angel funding and its team has grown to six people.
PromoteU opened registration to students interested in the service on Oct. 31. The company, which will help connect students with employment opportunities at startup companies, hopes to officially launch its online program next year.
DeLuca said over 3,000 students have registered for the service so far. Chairman of PromoteU’s board and Tuck School of Business adjunct professor Gregory Slayton said he was very pleased with the initial reception.
PromoteU is currently run by a team based in New Hampshire and California. Slayton Capital, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley that Slayton founded, has invested in the company and recently began a second round of fundraising.
Head of product Joshua Kaplan ’14 said the company encourages startups to hire students for on-campus work consisting of marketing or strategy development, which may eventually lead to a future internship.
Kaplan emphasized that PromoteU is not trying to compete with companies like Glassdoor, a site where employees talk anonymously about their jobs.
“We’re not a job board or anything,” he said. “We’re trying to connect students to these startups in a real meaningful way.”
Despite the shared optimism of its members, PromoteU will face the challenges of increasing the volume of student users and startup subscribers.
“No student wants to use this if there’s no businesses using it, and no business wants to use it if no students are using it,” Kaplan said.
DeLuca and Kaplan, who both interned with the Facebook-focused marketing startup Wildfire, said they chose to target startups over other businesses due to the lack of resources to help students find jobs at smaller businesses.
“It’s not like an exclusive world, but it’s not one that’s necessarily easy to get involved in even at a place like Dartmouth, where we’re one of the best schools in the country,” Kaplan said. “They don’t have a lot of good information or good ways to get to know startups, to connect with them and interact with them.”
During its alpha phase, PromoteU targeted local businesses to help students find internships close to their homes. But due to the lack of interest from local businesses, DeLuca and his team transitioned their focus to startups.
“Starting a startup is an extremely humbling experience because you start to learn to deal with things like failure on a daily basis where you have to make a lot of bets and a lot of them aren’t going to pay off,” DeLuca said.
Both DeLuca and Kaplan plan to continue working on PromoteU following graduation.
“It’s not about PromoteU or bust,” DeLuca said. “It’s about just doing it.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: Nov. 12, 2013
The original version of this article incorrectly stated the size of PromoteU's team. The company has six employees, not eight.
