Startup Spotlight #55: Forage

Forage runs online training programs with large companies to educate and recruit college students.

Nov 16, 2020

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I got the chance to speak with Thomas Brunskill, co-founder and CEO of Forage, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Forage works with large global companies (e.g. BCG, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, KPMG, GE, JPMorgan Chase & Co) to create free open-access online training courses for college students to build career skills and confidence. Their partner companies use these courses to inspire, engage, and hire students from a broad & diverse audience. Over 1 million students have enrolled in their courses since the start of COVID-19 and we currently offer courses in the US, Ireland, South Africa, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Hong Kong, China, and Australia.

Brunskill is the CEO and co-founder of Forage based in San Francisco. After completing a law degree at The Australian National University, he chose to pursue a career in corporate law through a bad combination of watching Suits and Boston Legal. Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t a great reason to choose a career and he left his role as an M&A attorney to build a product which he wished he had when he was trying to choose his first career after graduating

Startup Spotlight: Forage

Forage cofounder and CEO Thomas Brunskill.

Problem: How do you figure out where you should start your career and how do you build the skills and confidence to land that role? From an employer’s perspective, how do you give every student a fair chance of putting their best foot forward and find the candidates who truly want to work at your organization?

Market: The global recruiting market as a whole is estimated to be $200 billion (using Josh Bersin’s estimation) or $4,000 per hire. Given our long-term vision is to build a credentialing system for the world of work, not just for entry-level positions, we’d use this as the TAM we’re going after.

Solution: Companies post free online courses on our website which simulate what it’s like to work in a particular role at a company. Students can complete these courses to build skills, experience, and visibility, with the goal of building a portfolio of work projects that is too hard for employers to ignore!

Team: There are 31 people in our globally distributed team - our team members are based in Australia, Hawaii, California, Florida, New York, and the UK. What I love about a distributed global team is we have such an eclectic group of people with unique experience and backgrounds - I learn something new from my colleagues every day which is one of the best things about my job.

Recent Success:

Brunskill: We built a product students actually wanted. There are so many companies that exist to serve the employer (in the HR-tech space) but don’t think deeply about how to deliver value to the candidate side of the ecosystem. Our product does that - every student that comes onto our website walks away with real value whether that’s career skills, experience to put on the CV, confidence, or career visibility. With very limited marketing spend, we’ve seen incredible results in terms of student engagement - over a million students have participated in our courses in the last 6 months alone and 63% of these students found our website by word of mouth.

Recent Struggle:

Brunskill: There are few, if any, products in the market like ours. We’re asking companies to change the way they have recruited over the past 30 years. Rather than the ‘hire then train’ model, we are asking companies to use software to ‘train and then hire’ candidates which is a massive mental leap. We have struggled on whether we should sell the long-term vision of our product to companies up-front or sell our product as a solution to a specific short-term problem the employer is facing. It sometimes feels like a Catch-22 - not selling the long-term vision upfront can harm the velocity of product adoption post-sale but leading with the long-term vision can sometimes overwhelm the sales prospect. Getting the right balance is something we are still trying to figure out.

Founder Advice:

Brunskill: I’m not sure I’m in a position to give advice yet(!), but in my view building an iconic company requires a series of calculated, contrarian, bold bets. If you base your decisions on the consensus of the advice you receive, you’re not going to build something truly unique. You have to see something others don’t and that is almost always going to attract skepticism (even criticism) and resistance. Know that this pushback is coming and don’t abandon your unique viewpoint in the face of that (unless of course, the observable primary evidence points you in a new direction!). Too often (myself included) I see founders overweight the advice others give them and abandon their unique viewpoint, which is ultimately the soul of the company.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Brunskill: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Shaan Hathiraman, Founder of Flockjay: Flockjay connects startups with elite, pre-trained sales professionals & educates job seekers through remote learning.
Katherine Allen, Founder of Flo Recruit: Flo Recruit builds virtual and in-person recruiting event and interview program software.
Simon White, Founder of Rebank: Rebank is the fastest way to manage your business banks.

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