Nova is joining Handshake! 🤝
The Nova team is joining Handshake to further our shared mission to democratize access to opportunity
Just a few years ago, I was a college student who used Handshake to find my first internship. Now, we get the opportunity to pay it forward. It is with a deep sense of gratitude and pride that today we are announcing the Nova team is joining Handshake to help build the future of communities, content, and career social 🎉
It’s been a crazy journey, which all started three years ago when millions of students across the country were sent home from college because of COVID. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has helped build this community, and we’re excited to carry our values forward at Handshake.
When we started Nova in 2020, we set out to solve two main problems:
- COVID created a lot of economic uncertainty, and students and young professionals are often the most impacted during a recession.
- Remote school stripped away 90% of the value of college — the communities, friendships, and relationships formed IRL.
Our goal was to create a next generation professional social network centered around high quality and inclusive communities, content, and connections. We wanted to provide an online space to replicate the same magic that happens on campus, but together with students from campuses across the country, and help break down systemic barriers that gate keep access and information. Every student deserves to find meaning and success in their career, regardless of where they went to school or what zip code they grew up in. Online forums like Reddit have created digital communities for every pocket of the internet and removed barriers to information, so why not do the same for students and young professionals trying to navigate an increasingly complex and dynamic work environment.
We accomplished a lot as a community and company, and I couldn’t be more proud of this team:
- 🙌 Created a one-of-a-kind professional community platform used by a quarter million people across 50+ communities.
- 🎨 Made diversity one of our core values and fostered a community that represents over 1,100 colleges, 86% people of color, and 52% female or non-binary folks.
- 💼 Helped tens of thousands of students get hired, connect with mentors, and get referred to their dream company.
- 👩💻 Built an online events platform to organize hundreds of AMAs, conferences, career fairs, interview workshops, and tech talks with people like Sal Khan and Alexis Ohanian. We also hosted the largest online intern conference with over 10,000 attendees!
- 🫡 Created a professional social network fit for Gen Z and the creator age, with over 100,000 pieces of content, advice, questions, and conversations shared.
- ✍️ Published one of the most popular Substack newsletters of all time for sharing remote work opportunities, events, and resources to 80,000 students.
- 💰 Raised $3.7 million from some amazing investors to help turn our vision into a reality.
Handshake’s Founder & CEO Garrett Lord shares a similar founding story. Garrett grew up in the midwest and went to Michigan Tech, a lesser-known engineering school in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. He and his co-founders experienced firsthand how difficult it was to get their foot in the door coming from a non-target school and trying to break into Silicon Valley. So they too dropped out of college to solve this problem. Today, Handshake is the largest early career talent network that partners with over 1,400 educational institutions to connect over 21 million students and young alumni to over 750,000 employers!
Sitting down with Garrett, he shared that he’s “excited to bring our expertise in community building for millions of Gen Z to Handshake and work together to unlock opportunities for students based on their skills rather than their connections.”
Given our shared values, it felt right to join Handshake to help every student find the right job and the right community, no matter where they’re from or who they know 🚀
So what’s ahead for Nova, the product we built, and the community we share? The Nova team is joining the Handshake family to continue doing what we know best — building amazing products and inclusive communities for students. The Nova website will continue as its own standalone app, and the communities on Nova will continue to live on. That means all your content, conversations, and connections will still be available 🫶
To all of our investors, partners, and friends — thank you for believing in us and supporting us every step of the way. To our Nova members — thank you for creating the best community on the internet, and we’re so excited to continue serving you at Handshake. And to the Nova team — none of this would be possible without your hard work and tireless dedication to our mission. I’m so glad to have been able to share this adventure with you 💚
Thank you and onwards,
Andrew Tan & Nova Team ✨
