Today we’d like to introduce you to Colleen Leung.
Colleen, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Gaido was built for students by students, a team of MBAs and Ph.D. from Babson College and MIT. We wanted to build a company around the UN Sustainable Development Goal #4, providing quality education and relevant skills for decent work for young people.
We developed Gaido to solve a problem that we were experiencing as students: the gap between the skills of graduating university students and job market requirements. Today, nearly 50% of graduating students are overqualified for the jobs they take, while recruiters are saying a lack of skills is their number one obstacle in hiring. There is an obvious disconnect here…
We wouldn’t be where we are today without the wonderful support from Babson’s Summer Venture Program, a 10-week accelerator for 15 of the best startups from Babson College, and all the advisors we have met along the way.
Additionally, a lot of merit goes to our team– as we conducted interviews during our market research we began attracting students to join the team unintentionally, the problem we are solving was just so relevant to them that they wanted to tackle too.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We wish! We were rejected by so many accelerators early this year and so we thought we didn’t have a viable business idea, but finally, someone (Babson) saw our potential even at the early stage that we were in and those 10 weeks in their accelerator program has given us significant traction. Today we will be launching at the end of August with two pilot schools.
$$$ is always a challenge, Marion and myself (Colleen), just graduated with our MBAs and so we’ve had to become innovative and entrepreneurial in a sense to find a way to financially continue moving Gaido forward. We are 3 co-founders (Colleen Leung, Marion Benitez, Mazen Danaf) and we’ve been bootstrapping Gaido since we’ve started; as we launch the coming weeks are critical for our team to learn from our pilots. We believe we’ll be in a good position to fundraise at the end of the year.
Please tell us about Gaido.
Gaido is a platform that uses machine learning techniques to identify a student’s skills gap and understand their job preferences through the liking or disliking of real job postings. Our platform is integrated with university course catalogs and based on a student’s career expectations we provide relevant course recommendations at the student’s university and as well as online certifications to complement their studies. Additionally, we guide students in obtaining real-world experience through recommended experiential learning opportunities such as internships.
Compared to University Career Services, our virtual career advisor is a low cost, scalable solution. We’re complementary service that enables University Career Services to be more efficient and effective. We also partner with universities to provide their Career Services with detailed metrics that give structured insight into student skills, preferences and job status. We also aren’t your typical job platform, such as Monster, Indeed, Handshake, LinkedIn and Hired where they match users with jobs based primarily on their work history.
Our platform matches on additional variables such as aptitude, values, and interests with a percentage match index for each job. Moreover, our approach is proactive in which we show the student not only the jobs they are currently qualified for but also actionable recommendations to land their dream job.
We’re proud to say that we are developing a solution that will help students become more intentional about both career and academic choices to optimize their educational investment and prepare for a career they will enjoy and be well-equipped for.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I grew up in Hawaii and so my favorite childhood memories stem from the beach. My typical Sunday was spent in the waters of Koolina beach on the west side of Oahu with my family.
At the end of the day my parents would call out for my sister and I to go home as we were busily hunting for sand crabs on the shore, as any typical eight or ten years old we would pretend we didn’t hear them and jump into the ocean and swim as far as possible until our parents forcibly removed us from the water and wrapped us up in our towels to go home.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gaido.app/
- Phone: 808-282-4317
- Email: colleen@gaido.app
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gaido.skills/
Getting in touch: BostonVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
