Apply HN: Diversity Velocity – Grow Diversity in Your Organization

[timrpeterson]

Problem: Organizations want to increase their diversity. Currently, finding underrepresented people is a hunt-and-peck process fraught with legal risks. There is no way to efficiently reach large numbers of diverse individuals. Thus it takes significant cost and time for large organizations to do diversity initiatives such as hiring.

Solution: Student clubs self-identify by gender or ethnicity. Our solution leverages this fact allowing companies to promote opportunities to these groups. We developed a platform for student clubs that we aim to be their public profile (think in contrast with Facebook Groups). Having profile information enables companies to promote opportunities to specific groups or subsets of people within them matching the company’s interest.

Why we are applying: We have clubs at hundreds of schools on our platform from national organizations such as The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, Society of Women Engineers, and The National Society of Black Engineers, etc. We want all these organizations’ clubs and eventually all groups in the world to be part of our network. YC has considerable experience growing market share. We also have several well-known companies paying to use our solution. To increase the amount we can charge and to be more valuable to new customers, we need to have a bigger community. We believe YC is the best partner to help us grow our community.

About us: We are former student club leaders (marketing, rowing, design, bioengineering) who come from diverse backgrounds (Morocco/Paris, Nepal, Indiana, and NY/Boston). Our interests are pretty simple — writing code and talking to customers.

[brudgers]

The organizations mentioned don't appear to have missions to serve as marketing conduits to their members. What is the value proposition to those organizations as customers of your company?