Paragon One

Students from underserved and low-income backgrounds lack connections and professional experience (such as internships) when they graduate which leads to unpreparedness for the workplace.

Paragon One provides the easiest way for students to try out a career and build professional experience — thereby closing the gap between education and the workforce.

Through our software-enabled platform, students from any experience level, anywhere in the world, and year round can explore careers through real industry projects and engage with employees without burdening those busy employees at the host company.

Paragon One removes the heavy lift for teams including training, project management, student collaboration, and tools that support streamlined mentorship and support of students.  Company teams only need 8 - 10 total hours to support 50 students.    

The chasm between education and workforce is enormous.  Only 38% of college graduates in the past decade agree that their higher education was worth the cost.  Only 11% of business leaders “strongly agree” that higher education institutions are graduating students with the necessary competencies.  The culprit is that the vast majority of students do not have meaningful professional experience upon leaving their schools.  This is especially true for disadvantaged students from underserved or low-income backgrounds.  This is not only a problem in the US where Paragon One is based, but around the world, affecting hundreds of millions of students.

In the US, companies struggle engage and assess students from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds.  This is because the typical corporate internship program is designed for students who either have experience, go to a top school, or have family connections.  So students from underserved backgrounds don't get these experience.  The problem is made worse by the lack of time and bandwidth busy employees have to support students who may not be ready for the workforce and are just exploring their interests.

Solving this human time constraint problem within organizations is at the heart of solving the scalability of employability for students.

Enter Paragon One's software-enabled Remote Externship platform.  Students from any background, anywhere in the world, and anytime during the year can engage with companies over 6 - 8 week industry projects.  Students get to engage with employers in structured webinars while inputing work and collaborating with other students in a learning management and workflow management system.  

Paragon One takes on the heavy lift for teams including training (through reusable modules and templates), workflow management, remote collaboration between students, and tools that help Paragon One’s program managers (who are like TA's in a class) provide mentorship and help students complete successfully.  

Projects in data analytics, marketing, strategy, and more can support up to 50 students at one time while only requiring a few hours of company team time to support those students.  The result is that a company can engage an order of magnitude more students while saving over 90% of team bandwidth.

Our platform uses software and data to supercharge and scale human time, making the entire process of training, guiding, mentoring, and assessing students much more efficient for companies.  The remote-first experience means more students can be reached in more flexible ways.

Our target population includes students who are disadvantaged in getting traditional corporate internships.  These could be international students whose native english fluency isn't strong.  These could be students from minority or low income backgrounds who aren't reached by typical internship programs.  Paragon One has worked with all such students.

We understand that many of these students need extra support that traditional corporate employees don't have time to provide.  That support may come in the form of structured training or in the form of guidance and mentorship. 

Our platform is designed to be remote-first and to put the student experience first in a remote environment.  We built the experience with the student in mind first, not the company.  

We also know that brand name companies can provide a life changing springboard to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Having a resume with experiences from Facebook, PwC, Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer, and other top brands are what can help students get more interviews and have better stories to tell.  We are beginning to integrate the company's needs into our product so that we can onboard more brand name firms and change more student lives.

Paragon One's remote externship platform reduces the barrier to gaining professional experiences and creates more access to student communities around the world.  It leverages virtual and remote as an advantage in reaching, engaging, training, and assessing students from all backgrounds in a flexible way that meets the needs of underserved students.  Students no longer have to live in expensive cities to access Fortune 500 opportunities. 

As Richard said: "It's truly incredible to see how I started as a Facebook extern, and then navigated to intern, and have now navigated to being an FTE... I'm so grateful for Paragon One."

Paragon One has served approximately 1,000 students in the past year and we now work with organizations such as Facebook, PwC, Hewlett-Packard, National Geographic, Pfizer, Snapchat, and Cloudflare.  We are a team of 15 employees and seeking to scale in 2022.

Students from minority backgrounds like black, hispanic, and LatinX are underrepresented in large corporations.  The corporate partners and clients we work with often are aligned to increase opportunity for students from these minority backgrounds.  

We also find that students from underserved or low-income backgrounds who lack the access to professional experience at top corporations come from black, hispanic, and LatinX backgrounds.

We continue to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds.  

Most recruiting platforms just focus on another version of getting more resumes into a database.  Most training platforms are focused on courses and skill assessments.  Most "internship" platforms focus on connecting students to companies who have to put the same amount of effort into the experience.  They provide a more efficient way to do the same thing that was being done.

Paragon One tackles the problem of access by designing a new way to leverage employee time within companies to create new "internship inventory" that didn't exist before.  We create experiences that would not have existed otherwise for students.

We expect to create a new category that will require educating and expanding the market.  We will show organizations how they can launch student projects directly from teams and without going through the cumbersome HR processes normally in place.

Paragon One also handles compliance needs such as confidentiality, NDAs, FLSA regulations, stipend payments, and more things that can create friction for scale within organizations.

We leverage software as a way to create efficiencies for students and managers.  We allow managers to focus their time on the fun stuff!

We use software with early stages of machine learning.  Our founders hold bachelors and masters degrees in computer science & engineering from MIT.

Our platform is used by over 1,000 students from over 150 institutions, and used by a couple dozen companies including large corporates like Facebook, HP, Pfizer, PwC, National Geographic, Cloudflare, Snapchat, and more.

See product demo here: 

No risks

We have served approximately 1,000 students in the past year and about 1,500 students total since we launched remote externships two years ago.

We aims to serve 100,000 students over the next five years.

Over 90% of students land job offers from SOME company after externships while rating the impact of externships an average of 9.5/10 in helping them land those offers.

Also, we aim for corporations to use remote externships as a primary recruiting tool.

We aim for students to simultaneously get academic credit towards their degree when they do a remote externship by getting accreditation.  

We are finding that close to 90% of students find offers from companies within 12 months of finishing externships.  

Students currently rate externships an 8/10 in helping them land these offers.

15 full time

10 part time

Our founders are MIT graduates who studied computer science and engineering.  They are serial entrepreneurs in the internet space with 3 e-commerce companies founded/run/exited between them.

The rest of our team comes from Google, Coursera, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Grubhub, and the education industry.

The team is a graduate of YCombinator.

Matt, the CEO, developed tendonitis at his first job in investment banking and couldn't type for a year.  So he spent that time tutoring and mentoring interns who all got full time job offers because of their experience and skill.  He began thinking about how to better leverage employee time to train students at scale.

Our team includes representation from women, black, hispanic/LatinX, LGBTQ, middle eastern American, and international employees from China/India/Brazil.  We bring diversity of thought and culture from around the world into the building of our product. 

Because our solution helps underserved student populations accelerate their careers and find better economic opportunity.  Capital can help us reach our goal of 100,000 students served in 5 years much faster.

We also believe that we could partner with ServiceNow to integrate within corporations faster.  Going into corporations and managing the risk and compliance departments is a heavy lift for us and the ServiceNow platform may help streamline our go-to-market.

We serve students in all the locations we mentioned.

We have employees in the US, China, India, and Brazil.

We work with corporations in the US.

Nothing to add.

Organizations that can help us scale to reach more students in a more efficient way.

Organizations that can help us scale inside of corporations.