Internships for the 21st Century with Adam Alpert of Pangea.app
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Podcast Notes
Adam Alpert is the CEO and co-founder at Pangea.app, the new company that’s paving the way for thousands of talented college students to enter the workforce.
Today Aakash and Adam sit down to discuss how Pangea came to be, the challenges with starting a company and where Pangea is going.
Find Adam:
Find Pangea:
Find Aakash:
Email: podcast@aakash.io
More episodes: aakash.io/founders-and-builders
Music credits:
Syn Cole - Gizmo [NCS Release] provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Autogenerated Transcript
[00:00:00] Aakash Shah: Hi everyone, I'm here today with Adam Alpert. He's a good friend of mine, a fellow Y Combinator batch mate, and co-founder of Pangea. Adam, how would you introduce yourself?
[00:00:13] Adam Alpert: A filmmaker first who stumbled into creating a company. Now people call me an entrepreneur, but I never really felt like I owned that term. My name is Adam, co-founder of Pangea. Initially from New York, born and raised outside the city and currently live and work up here in Rhode Island. Otherwise known as Silicon road, the next tech ecosystem that's totally bigger than New York and Boston combined. It's happening here in Providence and that's where I'm calling you from today.
[00:00:38] Aakash Shah: You don't necessarily identify with "co-founder" or you feel like it's not an identity that you assumed. Why do you say that?
[00:00:44] Adam Alpert: I feel like I encounter so many folks whose life mission it is to start a company. I see so many folks, particularly, maybe in college, and they're trying to figure out what they want to do. They want to have a startup, they want to be an entrepreneur. And I never aspired to do any of those things.
I never thought I had it in me. I didn't go to school for business. I didn't partake in any entrepreneurship clubs. I was a video nerd. I loved making stupid little videos and upload them to YouTube and Instagram all the way back from middle school.
I had a thing making content, doing some marketing work, but I never knew how to apply that to the world. So, when I was in college, I was looking for more video projects and just opportunities to be creative. I never thought I was going to join a startup or build a company.
People were like, well, how did you become like an entrepreneur? Did you always want to start a company? And the answer is always, no. I kind of like jumped off a cliff without realizing it.
[00:01:35] Aakash Shah: I find myself as a co-founder of, Wyndly not because I intentionally went out. It's just kind of life experiences brought me here. Did you fall in love with the problem that you're solving or did you meet your co-founder first?
[00:01:51] Adam Alpert: John and I, we were classmates at Brown and we met our junior year. But I think it was a little bit before that I fell in love with the problem. My parents got me a video camera when I was in sixth grade and I was diagnosed with ADHD that same year. I just never had the ability to focus on anything. With ADHD, sometimes you have this hyper-focus and with the video camera, it was the first time I really unlocked this hyper-focus. All of a sudden, there was just so much to learn about the technology and then you can create it and then you could share it. And it created this loop that made this endless process of improvements that this little itch turned into a little spark that turned to a flame and, all through middle school I started creating content.
Got to high school, I wanted to take more videography classes and my high school offered none of them. So instead of being like, oh, I'm going to take photography now, I started the filmmaking club. I started producing content for all the other clubs and ultimately for the school and then began lobbying to actually have some video courses that would give school credit. I think it was like in that timeframe in high school that I really kind of solidified my identity as more of a filmmaker. I don't think I was even that good, but I just really enjoyed it and I wanted to do more of it. I ultimately was successful in getting the school to start offering video classes and they actually ended up hiring a teacher who came down to New York to start teaching classes and she's there to this day.
So my whole application to college was built around the efforts and the projects I worked on in high school as a videographer. And when I ultimately ended up in college, I was looking for these types of opportunities to work on projects. I kind of found myself in between doing some more student run fun creative projects. I actually had an on-campus job doing videography and media services where I was going back and forth between different lectures and helping them capture and uploading online. Pretty boring stuff, but you know, it paid 15 bucks an hour and that was like the best pay you can get on an on-campus job.
I was trying to square away how can I do more of what I'm excited about and get paid to do it and not be bored to do it and actually work on things I was more passionate about.
And there was no good way to do that especially at a college like Brown. There's a lot of internship opportunities, but they're at big tech and it's at consulting and those were just things that didn't interest me. So I found myself a little bit lost and desiring a way to unlock and unleash my skill sets as a videographer.
It was in that timeframe that I connected with my would become co-founder John. John was passionate about the problem too, but in a slightly different way. He wanted a way to help connect people. As more of an introvert, he wanted a platform where he can use it to meet more people and I wanted a platform where I could do more video work, so we started working together. I'm still in love with the problem, but I've really become in love with the process. Unlike with film where the next iteration is like a next video, you can just keep iterating that video and just continuously make it better and change it.
That was such an interesting unlock for me. So, now I love the process. I never thought I would. I never thought it would have so many parallels to filmmaking. And I love my co-founder John and we're good friends. We've lived together now for six years. We're co-founders together and he's my best friend.
[00:04:47] Aakash Shah: Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I think we haven't yet mentioned what Pangea is. So want to give us the elevator pitch?
[00:04:54] Adam Alpert: Sure. So more and more students like me are kind of confused about their direction in life and what they're going to do after graduation. And for them, the traditional internship doesn't make sense. They don't want to go into a large enterprise tech company and a lot of the smaller startups, small tech companies, don't offer internship programs.
So it's like, how do you figure out what you want to do? Where are you going to land? So what we're seeing happen more is gen Z in particular moving towards freelancing as a pathway after graduation. A new way to build a career new way to gain experience a new way to build relationships, it's more independent, more flexible. You're not tied into anything for two years. You're paid hourly or by project, and you're working with really cool companies that you wouldn't otherwise be able to work with if you were working through handshake or a traditional internship model, which are what large companies do today.
So we're the largest platform for college student and recent grad freelancers. We're at more than 1500 different colleges and we give students everything they need to create a freelancer profile, find their first clients get contracts, set up, get feedback, invoice and build a reputation that ultimately helps them land bigger and bigger clients.
What's really cool is because we start working with folks while they're in college, they continue to work with us even after they graduate. We have a number of students now who are freelancing full-time on our platform and they started with us when they were like a junior in college.
[00:06:09] Aakash Shah: Wow, that is incredible. What I really got from your elevator pitch is I see that through line, from your experience to what you're building. You were someone who wanted to be a filmmaker and you couldn't find that opportunity. At least you found something through brown, but I don't think helping professors set up their video capture is the same as being a filmmaker.
[00:06:31] Adam Alpert: Totally different, totally different. I felt underutilized. I was like, yeah, I can do this, I understand the technology and I had a six thousand dollar $6,000 camera that I was wielding back and forth between campus, and I would just like sit in the back of the room and I was just, so bored and tired all the time.
[00:06:43] Aakash Shah: You recognize that there isn't always an opportunity that matches what you're looking for, or your talent. Where you as yourself, Adam, but also a student who is hungry to do more and you built that platform for them. This drive to build something that you would have wanted, that I would have wanted, honestly for these students.
[00:07:03] Adam Alpert: Yeah. I built it for myself, right. In the early days it wasn't about building a big company. I think maybe part of that excited us, like, oh, I think there's a lot of people who could leverage this and oh, that could be really big, but it was something that when I was in college, I wanted to use something like this. I think a lot of like the first product we built reflected that in a way that it was very different than what it is today. It was a marketplace, but both sides of the marketplace were students, so it would have been me offering another student how to learn final cut as an example, or, you know, produce something for their film.
That was the first product we brought to market. And that would have been in 2017. We were so certain it was going to be successful, something that we thought we wanted, and we had all these ideas of what people were going to do with it. And then we launched it and it was like crickets.
I posted on Facebook. I got a hundred friends to sign up. But it was a slog getting like anyone to sign up, let alone use it. People didn't want it in that way. And it took us time to really learn to learn from our users and listen to our users. Ultimately, as a company, we were always trying to find awesome teammates and work with people.
And we didn't have a lot of money if any money. I would go on the campus job boards, which are all handshake job boards, and I would try to get approval and I couldn't get approval 'cause like we didn't have an office address or like the phone number was my personal cell phone number and we hadn't raised any money yet.
None of the schools would approve us. And here I am, I'm a recent grad from an Ivy League school. I couldn't even get approved by Brown. And I went there. I started reaching out to students on our network for like, "Hey, we need another engineer, we're looking for a designer".
And the students started to respond to that, and then I had a couple of friends who were also starting companies around Rhode Island and they wanted access to teammates. They had gotten rejected by schools when they were making job postings and things like that. And finally, we pivoted the business or narrative depending on how you look at it in 2019 to really focusing on these freelancing opportunities and really helping companies have a much easier way of identifying, hiring, and working with what we like to call them as emerging talents.
The pivot even was a result of our own frustrations and trying to work with really talented folks out of Brown, RISD, and other schools and not being able to do it. So we kind of took our technology and we reworked it in a way that would make even more value for the students, but also unlock all this value for like a whole different market which were companies just like us. Other startups, small companies, tech companies, brands.
[00:09:22] Aakash Shah: So it sounds like what really unlocked Pangea, and where you found a little more traction is when you stop trying to match students with students and instead went for more traditional opportunities. Is that right?
[00:09:34] Adam Alpert: A hundred percent, I think I remember Michael Seibel giving this talk on the notion of product market fit. Right? Which is when you find new users and they come back and use your product again and again, and again. There's like two ways to get the product market fit, and one is adjusting your product and one is adjusting the market.
Definitely the first year was a lot of adjusting our product around, but being relatively immutable in our market. Let's say we had a thousand people sign up, we found like the 10 that were actively using the product and we talk to them. We rework the product around their needs and ultimately they wanted buyers, right. So it became very logical for us. Well then who's going to buy their stuff. It's probably not other students, it's companies like us.
And then we opened it up and initially was very, very broad. It was like any kind of company or any kind of person who's was a non-student,, it wasn't even necessarily companies in the early days. And then you get a hundred people signing up and you find like the five or the 10 that are actually using it.
And you're like, okay, cool, like what about them? Let's go find more people like that. As opposed to like trying to continue to build a product that serves a hundred people who have nothing to do with each other, trying to find the 10 that are using it and then iterating around those 10. Assuming there's a market of companies like that, which again, for us, it was , not just any person on the east side of Providence, it was other founders of startups and there's a whole lot of those. A big part of the unlock was when we started shifting around both the product and the market and testing with both sides.
[00:10:55] Aakash Shah: I feel like if I could go back and tell myself at the very beginning, like what not to do, it's just, I would knock out any notion that everyone is my customer.
[00:11:06] Adam Alpert: Yes.
[00:11:07] Aakash Shah: It's like, no, everyone is not your customer. Find who wants your product, who is actually using your product and find more people like them, because that's where you're going to get your initial signal, but that's also where you are going to feel passionate about serving.
I feel bad if I was working my butt off and I see that nothing worked. Right. I bet you probably felt really good the first time you got that initial signal.
[00:11:30] Adam Alpert: Yeah. And it feels good now, like seeing how many customers and everything. Oftentimes, when I go back to college campuses and I talk a lot about the history and the journey, I show it through our revenue chart. It's like a step function. With us, it's like our market place is hard. There's a lot of pages and it isn't like a smooth curve either. It's a bit jaggedy, but you can tell there's these different inflection points and each of those inflection points was some change we made oftentimes with the market that we were focusing in on, or a piece of the product that helped us ultimately grow.
A lot of our history has been a story like narrowing down. It hasn't even been drastic pivots. Initially we were a marketplace where college students could offer anything. They could be a deliverer, they could do laundry, they could give French lessons, they could be a culinary chef for hire for the evening, and then like they could sell things. We narrowed it down, so we got rid of the garage sale stuff, and that allowed us to focus in and that helped us 10x revenue. Then we got rid of all the low end services, all the delivery, all the things that are just commoditize that honestly you can just go on Uber or an on-demand app and get so much easier.
We got rid of those things and we started focusing on high skill stuff, and then we got rid of tutoring. We just kept focusing in and every single time we like thought we were narrowing or like excluding things, we grew. Which is like this weird kind of correlation between when you go narrower, you end up unlocking this larger market, because you do a better job serving a narrow subset of folks in a very specific way. If you try to be everything for everyone, you end up being nothing for everyone. It took us time to absorb that cause it always felt like a compromise. But we've had to, because you spread yourself too thin.
[00:13:00] Aakash Shah: And the company won't work. I feel like as a founder, I want to fix everything for everyone. Because you probably don't want to leave everyone behind. When you think about why you start Pangea and what you want Pangea to become, do you want to leave anyone behind?
[00:13:12] Adam Alpert: No, right? So much of Pangea has such a democratic value of it, right? Where it's, let's let meritocracy speak, let's give people more access to more opportunities that are not your run of the mill. How do you even get a job at Microsoft or Google or if you don't already have things in your balance. It's like this chicken and egg.
Can we actually expand the pool of opportunities, make them remote so anyone can do them anywhere in the country, you don't have to be in New York or Boston to get access to these things. You don't have to go to a campus where it costs like $1,200 to get at a career fair. Which all virtual listings, you know?
If you're a company, you can't go to all 7,000 universities, you're not going to spend that much money, you can't be there right? So a lot of it is how do we create more opportunities? How do we become more democratic? That's why we don't let any unpaid internships on our platform because we want everyone to be able to take an opportunity without having to make a decision between does it pay or does it not pay"? Everything should get paid and you should make the decision based upon the opportunity itself and the quality of the talent.
So it's like, we don't want to leave folks behind, but you also need to struggle with building liquidity in a marketplace. For instance, should we allow nursing students and pre-med students and pre law students? There's all these majors and interest areas among students that there's a need. Like I remember we had a bunch of students sign up for all it's like zoology.
And they were like, where are all the opportunities at zoos? And I was like, well, that sounds really cool and interesting, but like, we're trying to just get tech startups to hire students, to run their social media right now. We don't even have 10 people. It's hard to have that compromise cause you want to be everything for everybody, but I think a big part of maturing as an individual and as a company is learning how and when to say no. Even recently, we said no to a client. They were going to hire a hundred Pangeans. They were going to hire 50 of our folks and they were going to bring 50 students they're already working with, into our platform.
But they wanted a couple of things, they needed a different fee structure, managing a hundred contracts. Our platform is not built for that. Our dashboard isn't set up to like work with a hundred people, at least not yet. It's great if you're working with like two or three. Even when you get to like four or five, It's like, oh my God. And you have to pay each individual invoice, things like that. I was like what's going to happen if we ping this person's credit card a hundred times.
So like, we had to say no to this person because we were going to have to like, do all these like product build outs, which again are things that are reasonable. They're not our core client right now that's hiring one to two to three Pangeans in a specific use case, and they're going to use the product in the way that we have working for the 300 other people that are already using it.
And that was hard to say no, because if I were to like reverse myself, 18 months, I had a company and be like, we're gonna hire a hundred Pangeans I'm like, we're going to do it. You know? Oh my God. It's another reason why we don't really go knocking on the doors of large enterprises because we don't integrate with an applicant tracking system. We don't integrate with the different payroll system. We don't have single sign-on. Our team functionality is still in beta. You have to say no to opportunities and that's really hard.
[00:15:55] Aakash Shah: It's a question of who you're building for, and it sounds like you're building for the students right now. You're building for the people who are trying to find more opportunity. The Adams of the world, the filmmaker Adams with their camera that just wants to break out. You're building for them instead of necessarily building for big bureaucratic enterprises.
[00:16:18] Adam Alpert: We're building for the Adams and we're building for the Aakashs, right? It's for the Wyndlys of the world, that are in the early stages, they're finding product market fit. They're finding traction. But they haven't raised like their A or their B or their C yet.
You want to say nimble, but you also want to plant seeds and build relationships with folks who could become your next full-time team member. Also the marketplace you have is challenging because you have both sides and you have to narrow both sides. We saw this in the early days before we were Pangea dot app or that freelance marketplace, we were Craigslist.
We'd have students sign up from like culinary school in downtown Providence, which, by the way, one of the best culinary schools in the country. We definitely punch above our weight with the restaurants, but it's affordable. So we had all these culinary students who are super talented, but then we'd have a student sign up and like, you know, Nebraska looking at like, have like someone deliver them coffee or something. The two sides have nothing to do with each other. So you get these awesome culinary students have a great product, but they're geographically constrained as well as they're only going to serve people who are looking for food. Not someone who's like looking for delivery or someone who's looking for a French lesson.
So you have to narrow because otherwise you have to build two marketplaces.
[00:17:22] Aakash Shah: The focus is keeping your roadmap honest and it's keeping your business strategy honest. Let's pivot as you have so many times in your career thus far, and let's say it's five years from now. Pangea is a hundred million dollars in revenue. You're considering an IPO you're considering this, you're considering that. Tiger global's about to drop like the biggest series Z anyone has ever seen on you. What does Pangea look like and what are you doing?
[00:17:49] Adam Alpert: First of all, I think that what Pangea looks like at that state and time is we're the first thing that someone thinks of when they're starting their career off as the first place to go to find work. And we're like the go-to place to find and work with young professionals . I don't necessarily think we're going to eat the entire world. I think the world's very abundant and I think there's going to be really great products that are better for highly specialized experienced talent that are 10 or 20 years in their career.
I want to be the place where you're looking for someone who's got zero to 10 years of experience with the boundary of zero to five. We're just like that aspect of the freelance marketplace. I want to do a lot of work in terms of demystifying and de-stigmatizing freelancing for gen Z and then ultimately gen alpha, which would be the generation that comes after gen z. Those are the things I want Pangea to become. I think there's a lot of work to do in terms of, independent contractor rights, work-life stability, things that the gig economy platforms have kind of avoided. Benefits, security and stability, pathways for success. I think one of the interesting things that separates a Pangea from one of these larger gig on demand platforms is the career growth that comes along with the work that you do.
Each project or each client you work with can lead to a bigger and bigger contract and a bigger client and a longer contract, and you don't have that when you're driving cars around. Things don't really snowball in a way that helps you progress. I think that those platforms do a lot of good for a lot of folks who are using them to work, but I want Pangea to change the status quo.
This is really going to put your entire career on a different growth trajectory and that's what I want to be for people. I want to build a platform that also grows with folks. Upwork and Fiverr, like once you get really good and you build clientele, like you don't want to be giving up 20% of your earnings or 10%, or any percent of your earnings to the platform. You'd rather like have your own personal website and find your client yourselves.
So I think a lot about what does our product need to become and evolve to, to better support folks that are three years out of college, four years out of college, five out of college that have their own books of clients right now. Their needs are very distinct than someone who's a sophomore in a marketing program, who's just excited and wants to get into a startup and just do whatever they can to create value. I think that like our user types are going to continue to evolve even within that narrow subset.
[00:20:01] Aakash Shah: Absolutely. The platform that enables anyone to become a freelancer and build their careers is an incredible vision. I'm absolutely certain you can do it. Is there anything you want to tell the listener?
[00:20:14] Adam Alpert: We have 25,000 students right now on the platform who are hungry, enthusiastic, and want to help really exciting companies achieve their missions and their goals over the next six to 12 months. I encourage all of you to think about ways that you could delegate some of the work that you do to someone who's emerging in their career, someone who could learn from you, but also someone who can create immediate value for you and free up some time. We have a lot of amazing folks who are designers, who are engineers, who are marketers, who are ops folks who want to help you out. We've created a really awesome streamlined way to post an opportunity. It's a hundred percent free to create account and post a job. Go to our website, it's Pangea.App and just click the button that says post a job.
That would be the number one way you could help me out, but also help out the younger version of yourself. Give someone an opportunity who's hungry, enthusiastic, and wants to make a difference. The matches that work on our platform are the ones where there's really good Pangean and mission and passion alignment.
That's something that we really privilege and something that we try to imbue in all the connections that we help facilitate.
[00:21:14] Aakash Shah: I would plus one everything Adam just said. We use Pangeans extensively at Wyndly. They've been a great part of our growth story and if you're not using a Pangean, you're missing out. They are very, very bright students and they're really hungry. They're probably like you, and they're probably trying to take over the world too.
[00:21:31] Adam Alpert: And if there are any startup founders out there who want to talk about marketplaces or growth or are kind of like stuck in a chicken and egg problem, or like they just launched a product and they're trying to get the first a hundred users, shoot me a note on LinkedIn. I'm just Adam Alpert. Company is Pangea.App. I love hopping on calls with fellow founders who are maybe six to 12 months behind where we're at and just seeing what knowledge and stuff I can help you out with. There are folks that are six to 12 months ahead of me who helped me out tremendously. It's the way the world goes around. I'm happy to find time to talk to any listeners out here about marketplaces, startups, YC, whatever you need.
[00:22:02] Aakash Shah: Wonderful. Thanks for coming on.