One of the best parts of life in Silicon Valley is living in proximity to people who have a genuine ambitions to change the world for the better.

The three startups featured below are all working to improve equity in college and career opportunity, and deserve a shoutout for their awesome work!

If you’re interested in learning more about them, please reach out. I’m lucky enough to know the leaders of all three startups, and I’m sure they’d be interested to hear from you.

🐝 HIVE: inclusion-first recruiting site

Getting hired into a highly-competitive role like requires both having the right skills and being fluent in business: if you don’t know to attend to little, arbitrary details like addressing your emails and formatting your resume the normal way, you might not get a role that you’re otherwise qualified for. That can be problematic for folks like first-generation college students, children of immigrants, and even folks like veterans whose career experience comes from outside of the professional business world.

Hive is a inclusion-first recruiting platform that helps applicants learn how to speak the language of modern business.

They’re still a very young startup, just under one year old, but they’ve already built some cool tools — like a resume formatting tool that works from a mobile phone — and they’ve already had some inspiring successes:

💵 81cents: negotiation help for women and underrepresented minorities

We’ve known about the gender pay gap for a long time — my mom, an economics PhD and professor, wrote about it as early as 2008! — but it’s been surprisingly challenging to close. Even among MBA graduates from top schools, women make far less than men over the course of their careers.

81cents crowdsources salary/equity data and negotiation advice to help women and underrepresented minorities close pay gaps.

To date, they’ve recruited a network of over 1,500 professionals in a variety of locations/careers that have helped their customers earn $3.4 million additional dollars, at an average salary increase of 17%.

If you’re a candidate, you can buy a report that gives you an estimate of the “market value” of your skills. And if you’re already in a tech (or other highly sought-after job), you can sign up to be an advisor. (It’s a small time commitment for you, but a huge help for those you advise!)

👩‍🎓 Empowerly: affordable college counseling

Your first association with “college admissions consulting” might be “scandal,” and for good reason: today, high-quality, personal college counseling is reserved for the wealthy. At public high schools, each counselor serves 455 students on average, which leaves maybe two hours per year for a counselor to prepare a student for the admissions process.

Empowerly pairs students from all backgrounds with affordable counseling, and helps them get into the colleges of their dreams.

Empowerly’s results speak for themselves: 94% of Empowerly students are admitted to one of their top three schools. (That’s remarkable, about 3x better than the national average.)

StartX @StartX

Congratulations to Hanmei Wu and Changxiao Xie, Co-Founders of #StartX company @EmpowerlyInc on raising $1.6 million and the launch of Empowerly Score, the first real-time holistic diagnostic tool for college admissions! Empowerly Raises $1.6 Million and Launches First Real-Time Holistic Diagnostic Tool for College AdmissionsThe new Empowerly Score feature is the only real-time diagnostic solution using a three-pronged holistic evaluation system to predict college admission...finance.yahoo.com

October 8th 2020

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I’m excited to see where they go from here. Empowerly has already seen its student stick with them for the long run — from college counseling to internship counseling to career counseling — which proves their promise that opening up opportunities before college can help students for life.

Thanks for reading Silicon Valley Outsider! Here are a few past editions that you might like if you enjoyed this one:

• 🛶 Are Midwestern values incompatible with startup success?

• 💼 What startups want from business hires

• 📚 The Silicon Valley Curriculum

If you want to join 470 folks in getting an email from me each Monday, I’ll help you understand Silicon Valley using normal-human words.