Doostang takes $3.5M for elite-focused job site
Doostang, a Silicon Valley company that seeks to hook up highly qualified people with high-end employers, has raised $3.5 million in a round led by Shasta Ventures.
Doostang is in a very crowded industry. It is filled job-oriented sites like TheLadders, a job board for six-figure salaries and up, and more specialized job boards on multitudes of niche-oriented Web sites. Also, sites like LinkedIn are gaining currency among highly networked people – who ask their friends to give them suggestions about specific job openings.
Partners at Shasta Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm, say they think there’s still too much clutter at these other sites, and that Doostang aims to be the most selective. Doostang, as we’ve reported, is invite-only, and boasts that it started at Harvard, MIT and Stanford (thus borrowing from the playbook of Facebook, the site that became popular among colleges after it launched at Harvard).
The challenge with this, in our view, is that the most selective candidates will always have an easier time finding jobs through their own networks, and LinkedIn, Facebook, or the proverbial “grapevine.”
The round includes other undisclosed investors. Techcrunch has also covered the news.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
