Fearless+ highlights interests and hobbies over work experience to help students

Its co-founders describe the jobs platform as LinkedIn meets TikTok meets MasterClass

The upstart: Fearless+

In her decades working as an executive recruiter and leadership coach, Deepali Vyas was struck by how terrible most young folks are when it came to soft skills such as communication, business etiquette, personal branding and leadership. Tech executive Mike Grushin spotted the same problem in the IT world. When the two paired to address the issue with an online education platform, they tried to gure out a way to make the content scalable and appealing to students.

e resulting platform, Fearless+, launched last summer. e founders describe it as LinkedIn meets TikTok meets MasterClass.

High school and college students can search for jobs and internships, create professional pro les featuring their own videos and attend the platform’s webinars on topics such as the art of choosing a career path. e service is free.

So far several hundred students have joined the platform.

vider for the sports industry, says he likes how the Fearless+ pro les display students’ passions and interests in a well-rounded way.

Clark recently hired a Fearless+ user for an internship.

“His pro le jumped out to us, as his video gave us such great perspective about his interest and experience in the industry,” Clark says. “We felt that we knew all about [him] before even meeting him.” e Midtown-based company employs a fulltime sta of three and contracts with a team of developers. Its recent preseed round raised $1 million. e company plans to charge employers for job and internship listings and host ads for services such as youth coding boot camps. It also plans to charge users who want upgraded proles.

The reigning Goliath: LinkedIn describes as “your narrative to the world.” e platform is tailored to address the students’ lifestyles. Users can search for jobs that o er after-school hours. Pro le pages focus on interests and hobbies rather than work experience.

When the platform rst launched, the co-founders were surprised to nd that less than 10% of users were creating video elevator pitches on the website. Why? In interviews, the students acknowledged, “We’re shy! We don’t know what to say!” When Fearless+ launched a module with prompts to help students create a script, the number of videos tripled.

“You are able to read your answer so you’re not fumbling and bumbling. You are con dent, you’re succinct, and we package that up for you,” Vyas says.

ANNE KADET

Luca Spadinger, a freshman who is studying humanities at SUNY Purchase and has a job at e Gap, says he would love to land an internship in nance or media. To that end, he created a Fearless+ pro le in which he describes himself as “intellectual, outgoing and hardworking.” His page also displays his Myers-Briggs personality type (ENTP—the debater) and includes a clip of him reading his poetry at an open mike. ere is also a charming video in which he describes how, against all odds, he took rst place in the 400-meter hurdles at a track meet: “I’ll never run again because I will never, ever top that moment!”

Spadinger says he’s not on LinkedIn because it’s too accomplishment-based, “which is good for some aspects of things, but I don’t think people get to see who you actually are—your interests and your passions.”

Employers appreciate the colorful pro les as well.

Michael Clark, director of strategy and analytics at Next League, a Brooklyn-based digital technology solutions pro-

LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, has more than 875 million members around the world, including 194 million in the U.S. and roughly 9% of the nation’s high school students. It lists 58 million companies and 129,000 schools. Its 2021 revenue topped $10 billion.

How to slay the giant

Early on the co-founders focused on content creation. But speaking with students, they realized that their company’s primary focus—career readiness education and coaching— wasn’t so exciting for young people.

“Teenagers will not do things unless there is incentive for them,” Grushin says, “and the incentives are things like internships or a part-time job.”

Potential investors, meanwhile, said they’d be more interested in a scalable platform than funding another content business.

To lure students, the pair decided to focus on building a platform that would allow young people to create what Vyas

Some students balked at the prospect of writing a personal statement. To save users from the drudgery of writing actual sentences, Fearless+ has them select from a menu of adjectives such as “generous,” “resourceful” and “innovative.” An AI-bot uses the words to generate a statement for the pro le.

Soon to come: pro le badges awarded to users who have completed online training to master common workplace tools such as Slack.

The next challenge

To get the word out and attract more users, the startup will need to experiment to see what works best, says orn, who has been advising the co-founders..

e company recently partnered with six charter schools in California that will incorporate Fearless+ into their guidance counseling e orts. e startup is also working with the local chapter of a large youth leadership group to introduce the platform to its 2,000 members. And it is advertising on TikTok and Instagram to reach students directly.

“We would love to capture those 24 million high school students across the U.S.,” Vyas says. ■

Anne Kadet is the creator of Café Anne, a weekly newsletter with a New York City focus.