Spotlights
Meet Charlie Maynard — a hustler looking for a better way to make education more affordable!
Working out how to pay for college is unnecessarily complicated. It makes college acceptance a confusing and uncertain time — not the incredibly exciting moment it should be. This is where Going Merry comes in:
Going Merry is making education accessible for everyone. It started by simplifying the scholarship application process and will soon be helping students in many other ways, in order to give all students the confidence to be excited again.
Since their graduation from Cardinal Ventures on the Spring of 2016, Going Merry has grown a lot:
- During the last school year, for example, Going Merry partnered with three Bay Area schools and helped their students apply to five times as many scholarships compared to the year before.
- In August, they opened up a site nationally, and students around the United States signed up to Going Merry.
- Right now, they have relationships with over 300 schools in 22 states and 1500 students signed up in the last week alone.
At this point, Going Merry has built software that helps students find and apply for scholarships and donors create them. Moving forward, they are focused on helping as many students as they can… Some of the next steps for them include adding more scholarships, building relationships with other schools, etc.
How did Cardinal Ventures help Going Merry?
According to Charlie, Cardinal Ventures was extremely helpful for them in the ideation stage. “We had a problem and a solution, and Cardinal Ventures helped us make it into a company,” said Charlie. In addition, he says that CV’s resources are extremely valuable!
For the reader
“I have…” job opportunities! Going Merry is looking to hire back-end and front-end engineers to join a team of 4 Stanford and CMU grads. They are trying to build a team of 8–10 people in the next three months. The exciting thing about joining Going Merry is that they would think of the new people in the team as founding members! Contact charlie@goingmerry.com for more information, and don’t forget to say Cardinal Ventures sent you!
“I need…” connections to anyone who has won a scholarship (to get the details of that specific scholarship) or who wants to create a scholarship.
Fun fact!
Charlie once attended a Navy SEAL trip in Northern California. After being woken up at 5am by gun fire, he spent hours in freezing cold water training. It was one of the craziest weekends of his life! It was a great bonding experience, but it made him realize that he never wants to be a Navy SEAL.
