INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Six months after completing Y Combinator 12-week accelerator program, The Lobbyis announcing a $1.2 million investment.The startup connects
job seekers to Wall Street bankers, venture capitalists and other finance&insiders& for advice and personalized career coaching
Founder and former investment banker Deepak Chhugani wants to help people who don&t come from elite backgrounds or have the network of an
Ivy League graduate land high-profile finance roles.&There a huge chunk of people that never get noticed,& Chhugani told TechCrunch
&Thebest opportunities are usually only privy to people that are from those wealthy networks.&Chhugani, a Bentley University graduate who
began his career at Merrill Lynch, believes he was only able to break into Wall Street because the firm had a hole in its Latin America MA
group and he&d grown up in Ecuador.He and his other non-Ivy League friends who are or have been employed on Wall Street, in venture capital
or private equity, are lucky, he says
Despite being perfectly able to succeed, many people of similar backgrounds have had no such luck navigating the finance job
market.&TheLobby is creating the real meritocracy that we tell ourselves the job market is && or at least should be,& said Matt Mireles in a
Mireles, a scout investor at Social Capital, invested personally in the seed round alongsideY Combinator,Ataria Ventures,37 Angels, former
Travelocity CEO Carl Sparks and Columbia Business School chief innovation officer Angela Lee.Using The Lobby, job seekers can connect with
professionals over anonymous 30-minute phone calls, where they can conduct mock interviews or fix-up their resumes
Insiders, who are paid by The Lobby customers, can give the honest truth about what it like to work in finance, a sort-of real-life
Glassdoor .As for the name, Chhugani says he can&t promise any of the startup customers a job, but he can promise to get them in the
lobby.&The ones who work really hard and deserve it will get up the stairs.&Here are 64 startups that launched today at Y Combinator W18
