Alma

W18 Cohort Spotlights

Meet Akshay and Chetan — two founders looking to create a social-academic college network that enables students to make more informed academic decisions.

Have you ever felt like the opportunities you have at college are overwhelming? There are so many things to choose between, including extra curricular activities, classes, professors, dorms, etc. Alma is a social-academic college network that enables students to utilize the data of thousands of other students on their college campuses in order to make more informed academic decisions. As students enter in more data, Alma is able to predict what students should be doing in college and who they should be meeting in order to succeed and form new communities.

Alma’s goal is to a be a centralized platform for social and academic connections on college campuses across the country. In the short term, this looks like perfecting the product at Stanford and Berkeley over the next three months and verifying the product market fit. 1500+ students are already on the platform, and students at 20+ other schools have already reached out to Akshay and Chetan on when they’re expanding to their campuses. In the long term, their hidden motive is to create a centralized database of every student to ever go through the college process, enabling Alma to create actionable insights for all future college students.

Alma’s team is great! We accepted them to the W18 cohort because they were passionate about their product, but also fun people to be around. Here’s a fun fact about Akshay:

I love hustling and going to concerts- last year in the summer I formulated a hypothesis Craiglist ticket-selling. This enabled me to not only go to the Outside Lands music festival for free, but also make a considerable amount of money. I wrote an article about it in the Huffington Post: https://goo.gl/27RcQv

The team worked really hard on developing their product with Cardinal Ventures. However, they have big plans for Alma:

They hope to create a generalizable model to launch to 20–30 schools in the upcoming year. Chetan and Akshay are both juniors who plan on working on this post Cardinal-Ventures through the summer and beyond, and in the next few years they hope Alma becomes a recognizable brand on all major college campuses. Their next immediate milestones include a silent launch to Berkeley in the spring, as well as a mobile platform to complement their web platform and increase their DAU/user stickiness.

For the reader

“I have…” We’re hiring brand ambassadors for other schools! If there are strong candidates at other universities that you know of (outgoing students with a strong campus presence and drive to make the college process better), we’d love any intros!

“I need…” We’re looking for contacts of people in the consumer social space (ie Yik Yak, Tilt, Whatsgoodly) for more insight on building sustainable products for college students.

Contact Akshay at aramaswa@stanford.edu if you are interested in any of the above opportunities or have something that might be helpful for the team!