Q&A The Muse

Name/Title/Company:

Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO, The Muse

What is the mission of your company?

We help 4 million job-seekers make better decisions about their career, via beautifully immersive job search, actionable career content, professional development and predictive job matching. Great people come to us to answer the question, "What do I want to do with my life?

Explain your business model—how do you make money?

Companies pay $6,000-$60,000/year subscription to post jobs and a profile on our site. We have 100 current customers ranging from McKinsey and AOL to Pinterest and Foursquare to Teach for America and NPR. Newly added current customers include Gucci, Facebook and Intel.

Whom do you compete with in this space and how are you different?

Existing job search products are clunky, transactional and overwhelming, and they target people who are (1) actively job searching and (2) know what they want. [Example: a typical search on LinkedIn returns 5,500 results with little differentiation between companies/options.] They don't allow candidates to browse, they don't allow companies to showcase culture, and they fail at making connections based on "fit." Candidates & HR directors alike hate this.

We are the only company to treat the job search as more of a relationship than a transaction, and we are absolutely committed to this belief. Our user is an individual looking to find a passion, discover a job that fits, excel in that job, advance in that job, build a career out of that job: in short, that job-seeking is part of a larger cycle: only one of a series of important career decisions that individuals make. We're there for all of them.

Where are your headquarters?

New York City

Number of full-time employees?

11 full-time employees plus numerous freelancers and contractors

Year Founded ?

2011

Funding round?

Seed round raised

Funds Raised?

$1.2 million

Key Investors ?

Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Great Oaks Ventures, Eric Ries, Cathie Black, Gordon Crawford

Prior experience

Kathryn Minshew previously worked on vaccine introduction in Rwanda and Malawi with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and worked at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. She has appeared on CNN and Bloomberg, spoken at MIT and Harvard, and was recently named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Media and Inc.'s 15 Women to Watch in Tech. She also regularly contributes to WSJ and HBR on career and entrepreneurship topics.