Mindmap

Your compass to navigate the modern career paths

Careers have changed dramatically in the past few decades, and the single-employer “lifer” careers of our parents and grandparents that came with a gold watch and pension are all but extinct.

The new workplace has unprecedented career mobility, with millennials changing jobs every couple of years and increasingly seeking meaningful work, yet most of the tools available to help with gaining greater self-awareness and a more satisfying career (such as Meyers Briggs and StrengthsFinder)  were designed decades ago for a different world.

Thus, the modern professional has a vast array of career possibilities, and very little in the way of tools to help them shape a meaningful career for themselves.  

As ambitious millennials, we worry that our careers may not do justice to our potential, and could simply end up as a string of disconnected “gigs” resulting from seeking greater pay, greater impact, or simply variety.  Or, we may follow the well-meaning advice of professors, mentors, and parents and end up with a career that matches someone else’s definition of success.

Enter Mindmap.  Our systems are designed to help users gain deeper insight into themselves and start to build a meaningful career from the inside out.

Unlike the typical tools of most career centers that use generic questions to produce a generic personality profile, our system uses deep data from each individual user to produce specific and actionable insight into their unique interests, preferences, and strengths.

We collect data from our users’ online and real world activity as well as emotional affect data to help them define and develop their unique “threads” of interest, and understand what contents most excite and engage them to help guide them toward their natural pattern of growth.

The stakes of this are tremendous. About 80% of workers aren’t engaged with their jobs, which means that not only are these workers not enjoying themselves, but the world is deprived of their unique contributions. Additionally, by helping people form more careers that more closely touches what they find most engaging, we believe this could unlock vastly more gains in the form of individuals’ unique contributions to the world. Who knows what Einsteins are trapped in uninspiring careers, with their incredible contributions not yet developed and unarticulated?  By helping these as-yet unremarkable people find their groove and unique paths, we hope to unlock untold human potential.

Almost all of the assessment tools available today are based on the principles of humans, being a fixed type. Our solution views individuals as a work in progress and tracks their personality traits and strengths as they evolve throughout their life-long learning journeys. moreover, Our assessment model isn't based on self-report which helps with eliminating flaws and unconscious biases. Our content recommendation provides students with a feed of available learning content that they can consume on their own.    

We use machine learning to turbocharge principles from Stanford d.school's “designing your life” courses that turn the principles of design thinking inward to empower participants to design a better life for themselves. We also use machine learning to provide customized learning content to our users.

We're planning to launch our pilot in September with our existing partners.

We're going to have 5 more "founding university partners" (they're all based in the US).

we keep iterating and improving the platform based on our user's feedback.

we'll keep working on our learning content recommendation feed algorithm to provide individuals with a more relevant and useful material. 

we'll develop our social media & marketing strategies.

We'll articulate our mission to more advocates and creatives to get more people exposed to our work. 

we'll improve our skills on hiring and recruitment.

We're currently focused on helping university students because this is a critical period in people's lives that they set the foundation of their professional career path. In the nest 3-5 years, we're planning to add more universities to our ecosystem as well as people who have graduated within 1-5 year range and entered the workforce. This is the beginning of our vision of providing a life-long development and coaching tool for all employees. We're also planning to bring investors on board and grow our team as we grow to serve more people through their employers. 

We will meet our customers at the beginning of their professional development path by selling our product to universities' and colleges' career centers. Transitioning from school to work is a critical period for most students and it's essential that schools help students through that time by providing the right tools and coaching. Schools offer these services through their career centers which is where we deploy our solution and enable coaches to help students better.

Availale to the judges

Available to the judges

Roya is a multi-disciplinary designer engineer who develops software solutions for enterprises. She understands the processes and can navigate the challenges we face in developing a SaaS business at scale.

Peter is a system thinker! He's our user advocate. Graduating from Stanford's d.school, Peter developed a sensibility for understanding the user and the techniques that lead to a solution that users love. 

Naji is a machine learning PhD from Carnegie Mellon and he's our nerd. He has a background in developing deep learning algorithms at an enterprise level for companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft. 

We're a SaaS B2B company. Our product is built to help young individuals find their potentials as well as enabling their coaches and mentors to help them find their path. Currently, we offer our SaaS product to students through their higher education institutions. Our long term vision is to expand our product offerings to include corporates and position ourselves into their employee training and engagement budget. 

We’re partnering with private higher education institutions and we’d like to grow our exposure to the other types of institutions that are through the government system. MIT Solve not only helps us share our ideas with a broader audience, it also increase our chances of getting advice from leaders and advisors who are interested in and engages with this space. 

Our key barrier is people's skepticism. As many assessment tools promised to help people and failed to deliver actionable steps, we're dealing with people's pre-notion of what this platform is. We'd like to speak at different events, talk to the alumni to find out ways to eliminate the skepticism.