Fresh from landing $200,000 from NYCSeed earlier this month, career development site Path 101 Inc. launches officially Tuesday after testing the service since the summer.
"Like any good startup, we're a little rough around the edges," blogs CEO Charlie O'Donnell. "But we feel that the best thing for the product is for users to come through and constructively tell us what they think."
"Path 101 has always been about opening up career opportunities to people using data," says O'Donnell. "We believe that it's not that people don't know what they want to do with their careers -- they just don't know what's out there to do. By crawling the Web for resumes and analyzing that data in our Resume Genome Project, we're learning more and more about what real career paths actually look like and figuring out how best to expose that data."
Dubbed the "mayor of New York" by Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson, O'Donnell is a born career mentor and uber-connector. One of his many roles is the founder of NextNY, a grass-roots community for up-and-coming techsters. He also teaches a class on entrepreneurship at Fordham University.
O'Donnell couldn't have picked a better time to launch an online career development service. Last month, the nation's unemployment rate climbed above 8% as the economy shed 651,000 jobs.
Prior to the funding from NYCSeed (a private-public partnership that aims to support New York City startups), Path 101 raised $350,000 previously from a slew of well-known angel investors. Among the early backers are: Wilson and Union Square co-founder Brad Burnham (O'Donnell once worked at Union Square as an analyst); former hedge fund manager Roger Ehrenberg, who led last week's investment in Domdex Inc. (a New York startup still in stealth mode); and Meetup Inc. CEO Scott Heiferman (backed by Union Square).
O'Donnell expects to raise $2 million to $3 million from venture capitalists later this year. Watch our interview with him from last fall in this episode of The Deal's Behind the Money show, below or download it at iTunes. - Mary Kathleen Flynn
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This is a great idea. With the crisis ongoing, many would benefit from this site.