Please describe your proposed solution.

<u>The Problem</u>

Crypto and Cardano would be considered emerging tech and of high interest to young motivated individuals who are just starting their career. The issue is there is not a clear path for them to breakthrough into the industry like there is at more traditional companies. Companies spend boat loads of money on recruiting to college-level students for the long-term benefit these hires provide

<u>Solution</u>

• Provide parallel functionality to our job center that is specifically catered towards students

• This sets expectations and makes browsing the site for students way more manageable

• Add the ability to create a profile and connect LinkedIn for students to network with other students that share similar interests

• Create a mentor system so that at a base level students can understand what is going on in the Cardano ecosystem and what opportunities are potentially available to them

<u>How we accomplish this</u>

• We will need to gauge interest and determine if it is more appropriate to launch a local or online job fair. From a buildout perspective it will be a shorter timeline to go with a local job fair while an online system is built out but this is more dependent on partnering with the right company or university.

<u>The Result</u>

• A network of students that now have awareness of the Cardano ecosystem and its capabilities

Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

• Web3 and Cardano is much more open than traditional companies. With the help of mentors student developers can hop in a discord and be speaking to many of the top devs building on Cardano
• Entrepreneurship is on the rise yet it is often hard to know where to start, especially for students.
• Entry level Job fairs for students are a crucial recruiting tactic for companies and we have the ability to disrupt it with a much more attractive working situation for student entrepreneurs

What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

• Keeping a healthy distribution between students with Cardano related opportunities available.
• We don't want to have too many students or universities onboard before having the necessary resources to accommodate them.
• A way to mitigate this is to have a webinar or training session and networking events which will leave students with something to take away if nothing else works out for them.

Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Phase 1 - (ongoing)

Garner interest among a wide range of universities and entrepreneurship clubs and companies to gauge demand

Phase 2 - (6-10 weeks)

Build out the student center for our app

*Phase 3 Local - (2-4 weeks lining up with normal job fair seasons)

Conduct local job fairs based off the results from phase 1

*Phase 3 Online (2-4 months based on scope of online job fair system)

This can potentially balloon into a very large undertaking so we will work to find a quality solution that still offers a good experience

Phase 4 - (ongoing)

Align candidates with mentors

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

10k development - (2 months two developers)

5k marketing/partnerships - (2 months)

2.5k mentorship program - (spread proportionally based on participants)

Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Keith Hedges - Was a software engineer for four years at fortune 500 company before shifting to work on Cardano full-time. He has worked on a music NFT platform called https://artistdrop.io/, is a core contributor to Freeloaderz, and has been running the Hedges Stake Pool since epoch 254.

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-hedges-396548a8/)

Erick Avalos - has many years of software engineering experience at a publicly traded company dealing with high integrity code. He is also a core developer of an NFT project on Cardano

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/erick-avalos-13014012a/)

If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, we are builders on Cardano over everything. We are already building out our main product and this extension would be a great product market fit.

Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

We will be working in an agile manor for development milestones as well as keeping up with business needs for our students and mentors

What does success for this project look like?

• Successful online job fair
• yearly or bi-yearly in-person job fair
• robust mentorship program

Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

entirely new