01 / Founder + product strategy
Kroot
Building one platform where students get hired, schools see why, and employers hire better.
- Oct 2026Student product launched
- 200+Users in month one
- 70%Activated
The mission
Find your way forward.
Kroot is one platform for early-career recruiting, built for three customers: the students looking for work, the schools that prepare them, and the employers hiring them. All three run on one dataset that gets sharper with every student who joins.
The challenge
Recruiting is broken on all three sides.
Students send 200+ applications to land offers, updates get lost across their inboxes, and the insider prep that decides offers goes to the few with mentors.
Schools don't know where 45% of their graduates land (NACE), because career centers rely on surveys. Employers can get around 1,000 applicants on one posting within six hours (TechCrunch). AI made applying free, so they hire on interview performance and can't tell who will succeed on the job.
Why now
AI broke hiring's old signals.
AI is taking entry-level work: there are 19% fewer workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs than among their peers (Stanford Digital Economy Lab). It's breaking the old screens too: 62% of hiring managers say candidates fake better than they can catch (Checkr). What replaces those signals is verified outcomes: real interviews and offers, from students' own inboxes, shared with permission.
The student product
The whole search, on autopilot.
- 01
Find roles before everyone else.
Live. A job board built for early careers, with instant alerts the moment a posting lands.
- 02
Track everything without typing anything.
Live. Connect Gmail once, and Kroot logs every application and every stage change by itself, through a Google-verified integration. No spreadsheet, and one tab where students used to need five.
- 03
Know where you stand.
Rolling out. Recruiting intelligence shows where your cohort is in each process and what to do next.
- 04
Learn from the people who just got in.
Next. Kroot Fellows, students who just landed the role you want, coach the next cohort. Their offers came through Gmail sync, so their advice is verified and current.
One platform. Three customers.
Students
Live now. Free tools students use every day of the search, and the source of Kroot's data.
Schools
Next. Placement insight for a whole cohort: which students won offers and why, and where the curriculum works and where it falls short.
Employers
The vision. Hire for performance on the job: Kroot learns what an employer's top performers look like and finds the applicants who will perform like them.
How it compounds
Every student makes Kroot more valuable to every customer.
- 01
Students join for free.
The job board, the self-updating tracker, recruiting intelligence and coaching from Fellows.
- 02
Outcomes come straight from the inbox.
With permission, Gmail sync captures real interviews and offers as they happen. Students opt in, and insights are shared only in aggregate.
- 03
Intelligence sharpens for everyone.
Every new outcome improves what the next student sees, and the Fellows coaching them went through the same process this cycle.
- 04
Schools and employers buy the insight.
School-funded accounts and posted roles bring in more students, and the loop runs again.
My role
I co-founded Kroot and co-lead product, design and strategy. I led our pivot from Elevait, a coaching marketplace with 227 users, and defined Kroot's product strategy, roadmap and launch priorities. I shaped the school and employer products with input from university administrators, and I lead a seven-person team across product, engineering, design and marketing, with advisors from Techstars, Shopify and Applied Intuition.
Key decision
Leave coaching for recruiting.
Why: Recruiting is a much bigger market, and we saw a chance to build a data layer under all of it: verified outcomes from students' inboxes, which no survey or resume can match. Coaching came with us. At Elevait, about 200 students learned from peer mentors and landed roles; at Kroot, those mentors become Fellows, verified by their own offers.
Outcome
What I learned
Start with the user who creates the data. If Kroot is the tool students open every day of the search, the outcomes they bring become what schools and employers need. That's why the student product has to be great on its own.