Young entrepreneurs launch website to help students find real-world experience
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REXBURG — Three young Upper Valley entrepreneurs are launching a website to help college students find more real-world work experience.
Co-founders Ben Orchard and Jared Nygren, and designer Ka Hang Ho, all current or former Brigham Young University-Idaho students, are in their early 20s. The trio has started Talent Cloud, a new website that connects students and businesses based on project-specific work.
“You could take up as many as five projects at a time and in different areas that you want to learn. These are paid opportunities, not (just) for experience,” Ho said.
The company is still in its infancy, but it has had a promising start. Talent Cloud was invited to compete in a State Entrepreneurship Competition in Boise. Talent Cloud placed third in the Social Technology category and was awarded $2,000. In the Rexburg Business Competition in April, the company placed second against other local businesses and won $3,000 in seed money.
“Judges have heard our idea and believed in it enough to invest money,” Nygren said.
Orchard says Talent Cloud will help businesses and students search for one another. For students, having a platform to connect while completing work will allow them to build their resumes and sharpen their skills well before entering the field full time. Nygren said he hopes the site will remove some of the stumbling blocks of gaining preprofessional experience.
“Talent Cloud seeks to alleviate these pains by connecting the talented student body of universities with growing businesses to complete project-specific work. Our vision is to create an unprecedented level of collaboration between community, businesses and universities,” Nygren said.
Students who log on to Talent Cloud begin by creating a profile or brand based on college/university, major and skills. From there, they are able to access a database of proposed projects.
“It could be anything. We’ve developed a list according to Forbes of specific freelance projects that have proven to add value to businesses such as marketing, writing, photography and videography. Students that have (these) skill sets can go and look for projects,” Orchard said.
After a project is complete, businesses and students can rank one another based on the difficulty of the project, relevancy to the businesses and other factors.
“What we hope to accomplish in the later stages of Talent Cloud is an algorithm that ranks students based upon the number of projects they have completed, the difficulty of that project, feedback from that business and relevancy to that business,” Orchard said.
The official soft launch of Talent Cloud is this week, and projects for students in the Idaho and Utah areas will be available.
Ho said students and businesses can look forward to connecting, communicating, and having effective experiences.
“I think when they get on they should be looking for opportunities to work. It’s ready for students to start on it, to work as a team, and to build that connection,” he said.