122: Matt Wilkerson — Bridging the Gap Between Education and Employment with Externships

Matt Wilkerson: [00:00:00] Our vision for Extern is that, you know, we say professional experience anytime, anywhere, for anyone who has the curiosity, the determination. , to go for it. And you know what? If you happen to try to go for it and it turns out at this moment you have to drop out or life circumstances change, or you get too overwhelmed, it’s not gonna be a bad mark against you to try again. You know, we wanna reduce anxiety, not create it.

Intro: Do you think money takes up more life space than it should? On this show, we discuss with and share stories from artists, authors, entrepreneurs, and advisors about how they mindfully minimize the time and energies. Spent thinking about money. Join your host, Jonathan DeYoe, and learn how to put money in its place and get more out of life.

Jonathan DeYoe: Welcome back on this episode of The Mindful Money Podcast. I’m chatting with Matt Wilkerson. Matt studied computer science [00:01:00] engineering management science at MIT before starting his career in venture capital and investment banking. Since then, he’s been kind of a serial entrepreneur and I wanted to have him on the podcast because he’s the CEO and Co-founder of.

Extern a company on a mission to help anyone discover and launch their career through real professional experience. Externs created externship for leading companies such as AT and T-H-S-B-C, meta Price Waterhouse, home Depot, national Geographic, among others, serving something like 38,000 students and career switchers.

Matt, welcome to the Mindful Money Podcast. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Excited for the conversation. I’ve, I’ve done a little bit of this. Um, you know Ryan, Craig, there’s been a few others that we’ve talked about, sort of pre-care things. Before we get into that, where do you call home and where are you connecting from?

Matt Wilkerson: Yeah, so I am based out of the San Francisco Bay Area in Walnut Creek. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia is where I grew up, and then went to school in Boston and spent 17 years in New York City. And so I’ve, [00:02:00] uh, kind of lived all over the country. Well, you’ve lived on the, you’ve never lived in like North Dakota, like all over the country.

Jonathan DeYoe: Don’t, don’t overstate. I, I, you’re, you’re right. Although, growing up, you know, my family is actually, my mom and dad are from Texas and Mississippi, so I spent a good amount of time, you know, visiting grandparents and family members there. Yeah. Growing up in Atlanta, you spend 18 years, is that, is that just pre-college years, 18 years in Atlanta?

Matt Wilkerson: Yeah, that was, it grew up there and. When I was thinking about going to college, I was fascinated with film and wanted to go and work in special effects for film. That was actually my, my big career dream. Hmm. Um, and kind of can talk about how that evolved to, to what I do today. Yeah, I grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, in a Gwinnett County and yeah, go back very regularly.

Jonathan DeYoe: I’m curious, I, I sort of, we sort of normalize this conversation about money, uh, and so [00:03:00] I’m curious what you learned growing up in Atlanta, you know, young boy, about money or entrepreneurship. Yeah. Well, I actually. I remember right when I started elementary school, we had these, you know, fundraisers and the big one at my school was this magazine sale that we would have.

Matt Wilkerson: It was kind of a fundraiser for the school. I remember mom dropping me off when I was, I guess six years old at people’s houses to go up and knock on the door and try to sell them magazines and you know, I’m sure you know, early on it was kind of like. Young kid, you wanna help them out. But as I got older, I started to go knock door to door myself, and I had to actually develop, you know, some sense of how to get someone interested in buying magazines.

And I always remembered that there were some kids. Who, ’cause they would have these rewards and there would be top seller in the grade or the school would get, you know, money and some [00:04:00] prize and maybe some big trip. I think I made it an high enough where I would get to go on a Six Flags trip. But I was, remember hearing, you know, some kids like their parents or doctors, so their parents just had to show up and at work and.

Or buy magazines for the office. And they had this like distribution network basically built in. Whereas I didn’t have that distribution network. And thankfully my parents said, you know, we’re not gonna go and try to sell your magazines to people at work. So I had to actually go door to door to sell every magazine to get high enough to go on that Six Flags trip.

So that, that was, I think, a very early experience. And then as I got into high school or late junior high is when the, the web exploded. I was in seventh grade when Netscape went public. You know, by the time I got into eighth grade, I was just fascinated with the internet, started to build websites around the theme of movies.

’cause I was a big [00:05:00] film fan. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. And so I, I built all these community websites for different movies and I had, I built up this community online. I would get movie scripts in some cases before the movie came out through these networks that I built. That was kind of like a world that I created just for fun.

You know, I wasn’t trying to turn into a business in high school. But yeah, those are some early things that I think I never thought of myself as becoming an entrepreneur. ’cause by the time I went to MIT, which I was very fortunate to do, getting off of the wait list. I was sort of overwhelmed at that point by just the caliber of people and intelligence there that I had this imposter syndrome and Yep.

For a period of time I thought, ah, I don’t know if I can be an entrepreneur. It’s just, you know, do I have the capability to do that? But since my journey kind of led me back to that, which we can talk about, but those are the early experiences. Yeah. I’m, I’m curious, were there other kids in the school? I know that the doctor, and I know I have this, I did the same thing by the way.

Jonathan DeYoe: I [00:06:00] sold sandwiches door to door. I sold magazines, door to door, chocolates, door to door. I sold trophies, door to door, like I sold all kinds of stuff door to door as a kid. ’cause we didn’t have any money and that was how we swear. Got by. Did you also have the kids who. The parents just said, yeah, yeah. I’ll just whatever make the donation or do the whole, I’ll buy 50 of their own.

You know, they, the families that had lots of money would just, yeah. I’ll, I’ll just take care of it for you. Yes. Now, yes. I’m wondering today, I don’t know if you’ve ever done this sort of analysis in your head, where are those kids? Because I actually think, I talked to lots of entrepreneurs and every one of them had to sell door to door.

Their parents said, we’re not gonna do it for you. Go do it. Yeah. And I’m wondering if that learned skillset. Because entrepreneurs get, people tell ’em no all the time, are you gonna invest in my company? No. Are you gonna in invest in my company? So I’m wondering if that helps. What do you think? Tie that through.

Matt Wilkerson: Absolutely. It’s funny, I, it wasn’t until you asked me this question right here, I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Absolutely. And you know, I don’t really know where those specific students are. I, it’s probably maybe two or three [00:07:00] friends I still keep up with regularly from that era. But. I do know that there is something to the struggle.

Mm-Hmm. And it’s, there’s kind of a, you know, conversation happening now is, you know, are we losing that as a society, those opportunities to struggle, but also kind of see through the patience and the fortitude to kind of see that through. See things through that are difficult, that are hard where it’s not obvious how, how it’s gonna help you and have those setbacks.

Right? Because I remember plenty of times where I was knocking on doors like most people did not buy, right? But you just keep going door to door. And I remember like, okay, I went through my whole neighborhood and I wanted to expand. Well, let me try to go to other neighborhoods. So I’d get my mom to drive and drop me off and.

This was back when, you know, I guess it was still fine to like [00:08:00] let small kids go up to doors, stranger’s doors. I think a lot of people may not even do that today. No doubt it. But I think that taught me. ’cause when I was young it was always like I was the last kid in my class to have a Nintendo. I really wanted a Nintendo.

I remember going and polling everyone. Everyone had a Nintendo and you know, parents like, look, if you want a Nintendo, you can have one. Just work. Save up money. And by it. I think those little things they add up over time, absolutely create that foundation. If you grow up having those situations easily bought for you, you may not as a parent understand what you’re doing, but by the time you’re in college kind of view of how things work in the world, you’re either prepared for that experience, that shock that many kids have of like.

You’re in the world for the first time, you know, sort of in college and then afterwards you’re absolutely in the world. And so I think the [00:09:00] entrepreneurship, that spirit comes from proving to yourself that you can go and solve problems. Yep. You can meet it, solve it, get past it. Totally. I, I wanna get to extra, but before we get to Extra, and what were the steps that led you to founding the company?

Jonathan DeYoe: What did you see and what did you say, okay, this is something that’s missing, I need to do this. Yeah. So. It’s it a couple things. The first started when I was in college, I actually had a internship actually at MIT. They called them externships. It was canceled a week before I was gonna start. These were like four week programs where you got to work with an alumnus and I had applied, I’d interviewed, it was with a Fortune 500 company and a week before they said, Hey, sorry, we don’t have the resource or manager time to support you.

Matt Wilkerson: We’re just too busy. Obviously disappointing ’cause you only get so many. Chances to do internships like that in college. And so then fast forward to my first job out of [00:10:00] college. Well, I, like many students, had I came in, like I mentioned with this, you know, dream of working in special effects for film.

Industrial Light magic. Pixar. Even interviewed with Pixar at one point, but by that time later in college, I’d been exposed to so many different things. I was more or less confused about what I wanted to do. I remember I walked into one interview for being a software engineer. ’cause I’m like, well, I majored in computer science, so I guess I’m doing a software engineering.

I walked in and I’ll always remember the interview because the interviewer basically stopped me and said, you don’t really know what you want to do, do you? And I was like. Thinking, not really. He’s like, you might wanna spend time thinking about what it is you wanna do. ’cause I can tell that you’re just here and you’re going through the motions.

And I actually went back and I reflected on that. What I did in the meantime while I figured it out was like, what many ambitious, but maybe still confuse students do, is I went, wanted to go work in consulting or banking. That was what the, the [00:11:00] trend was back then. This was oh 4, 0 5. Before the great financial crisis and kind of that, you know, frenzy that led up to it.

So I started interviewing and every investment bank rejected me because I didn’t have any internships in finance up to that point. I was exploring and they could tell that, and they’re like, well, we don’t wanna take a bet on you because we’ve got all these other candidates who have had two, three internships since freshman year.

You know, that’s who we’re going to. That’s the safe bet. Luckily, I had done some networking with some alumni at Morgan Stanley, and I guess I honestly, it was just fluke luck. Plus the fact that it was the last interview I had with a bank, and by that point I didn’t really care. I. I just, just like, you know what?

I’m just gonna show up and do this thing. I don’t care. I think maybe that combination of like the air of like not trying hard or caring with having interviewed with someone that had been in my shoes, they had done computer science. I. Helped. So long story [00:12:00] short, got into Morgan Stanley as an analyst.

Moved to New York. I got tendonitis in my hands nine months in from typing too much, so I couldn’t type for about another nine months. I had a VP in the group who said, ’cause at this time, I’m like, oh, I can’t type. I’m an analyst. My career’s probably over. Luckily there was a VP that said, Matt, we have the summer interns at this point.

Can you please. Just spend your time sitting behind them, training them, coaching them. ’cause they’re super busy. Or sorry, they’re green. They need a lot of help. The team is super busy. Yeah. You became the person that was missing in your external Yes. At at MIT. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I, I sat behind them, trained them for the summer.

They had this like personal concierge level, like employee analyst helping them, which most interns don’t have. Right. So by the end of the summer, they’re so good. That they’re as good as the full-time analyst. They all got full-time jobs to come back into the [00:13:00] group. So those two experiences, having the extra and internship canceled, seeing what the impact would be when you had more employee time to devote it sat in my head of the real constraint around giving more young people access to internships.

Work experiences as a form of education and training is employee time. That’s the scarce resource. And so just quickly getting to, to exter and in between then I co-founded my first startup was an e-commerce marketplace for, for hard to find fashion and luxury goods. I did with a, a friend from college and then I wanted to go and, you know, focus on this, this problem of education to work.

You know, a very deep, kind of almost intractable problem. So the first attempt at that was a, a company and and product called Paragon One, which originally was a career coaching platform for [00:14:00] helping young people connect with industry experts. From all sorts of disciplines to help them with exploring careers, preparing for interviews, giving them resume feedback, all the things that you normally would want from your career services center.

But most career services centers, they’re just under-resourced. They don’t really have the capability to help young people other than, you know, set up some interviews and go to career fairs. So I was trying to fill that need in the market. What I learned was. Coaching was nice, but it was more of a vitamin, not a painkiller.

The painkiller was, students were still saying, look, I did the coaching, but I’m not getting the opportunity to interview ’cause I don’t have any experience on my resume yet. Or if I am getting the opportunity to interview. The interviews aren’t going well because I don’t have anything to really talk about, or my confidence isn’t there because I [00:15:00] haven’t done work in this space before.

So we took those insights and that led to the company we run today. External. External. Yeah. So before we dig in, there’s a lot of crazy statistics around employment underemployment and some earnings after college. I don’t know if you have those at your fingertips, but can you kinda paint that picture for us?

So a recent statistic from the Strata Institute showed that over half of college graduates are underemployed a year after graduating. I think they said, I think the stat was 52%. So that means about one in two college graduates are not really using their degree that they went to get. Another statistic, this is from LinkedIn job zone data, almost 40% of entry level jobs.

Are requiring three or more years of work experience now. Yeah, I know that one. I know that one silly. That, and that has been going up over time. So there’s a [00:16:00] few different trends happening here. Covid has driven it, the recent, you know, softening and the job market layoffs. You have more experienced people in the market competing for jobs.

You have of course generative AI coming on the scene, although companies haven’t really. Embraced the use of that. You know, there’s a lot of investment right now, and maybe you know this bubble, but companies aren’t embracing that quickly enough. However, they are aware it’s there, and so there’s this sort of pervasive attitude of, well, do we really need to invest in these like college training programs or new graduate training programs as companies used to.

Another stat from Handshake is that the college recruiting platform is that. Internships are down year over year, 7%. Hmm. So all of this combines to what I, into what I call the work experience supply shock. There’s not enough work experience for the [00:17:00] purpose of getting trained, building skills, discovering what you wanna do as a young person, and ultimately building that resume that gets you into the career.

And that also that the economy needs. Do you think that part of the problem might be institutional? In other words, at the college level, there’s a misalignment of priorities. Students need to get the education yes, but they also need to get experience to get jobs after they graduate. Do colleges understand that and are they investing in that in a way that they should?

So I think colleges do understand this. Okay. They, they understand this conceptually. Where it becomes challenging is that you’re taking organizations and systems that were over time set up and structured in a way that does not allow for the execution of that awareness. Hmm. I’ll contrast most universities and schools with a particular set of schools that were designed [00:18:00] with that understanding from day one, co-op programs at.

Schools like Northeastern and Drexel and Waterloo. There’s a stat I I posted on my LinkedIn recently of last year. The acceptance rate at Northeastern, which has one of the most, well-known co-op programs was lower than the acceptance rate at certain Ivy League institutions. Upen Cornell. And I think Dartmouth.

So that’s not normal. Like why is that? And I believe it’s because students and parents, if they’re gonna be spending now an enormous amount of money, they want to make sure that they are coming out the other side with actual tangible skills. A resume. They wanna be competitive now. Yeah. And that’s why I think Northeastern is now getting so many.

Applicants. Now the question is, well, why don’t [00:19:00] more schools, you know, implement something like that that’s not trivial? You’re, you’re literally ripping apart the entire. Infrastructure of how most universities are built and designed, how they make decisions, how they run the values, how faculty fits in with, with that co-op program, it’s very expensive.

It’s not non-trivial to, to run these co-op programs. ’cause you have to go and work with employers and build relationships over years. Make sure that the work they’re doing is aligned with the academic piece. So I just think there’s probably a dozen priorities actually that universities have and university leaders have.

And how they make decisions. It doesn’t flow through this one thing that we all know students need, but actually is one of probably a dozen priorities that are actually being focused on by universities. And it doesn’t sound like you can’t just say, okay, career services, you know, make some connections with some industry and you know, link students with that.

Jonathan DeYoe: And it’s not something you can just bolt on. You have to, you have to rip apart everything. Why is that? I mean, is there some. [00:20:00] Higher level decisions that can be made to simplify it or, well, I think it shows up in a few places, and you know, again, you do have some schools that are doing important work here in certain areas.

Matt Wilkerson: Some schools, you know, it tends to be the schools that have higher tuitions and are more expensive, but they take some of that tuition and they apply it to students to go out and get internships with stipend. So it’s almost like a way to market. To companies as a way to like take those students on the schools are covering it.

There’s situations where you’ll have professors that do partnerships with companies to bring projects into the classroom. Mm-Hmm. But the reason it’s sort of not a holistic thing is if you go all the way back, universities were really designed around this idea of producing PhDs for research. Right?

That’s kind of like the top of the pyramid. And so all of the like action where professors wanna spend their time, and this is still, it’s important work. It’s like [00:21:00] societal work, doing original research publishing. And I think what happened is that that then produced this machine of, well, we need a bunch of students to come in to obviously fund the activities of the institution.

And those students who go through the bachelor’s program. We’re gonna like, you know, hopefully pick out the best of the best or funnel a certain number into the PhD program, and the rest will give a bachelor’s degree and say, look, you did pretty well. You’re gonna go out into the world and do something with it.

And so the academic Senates and everyone, they designed the curriculum. Mm-Hmm. Ultimately, it’s to feed into a PhD program historically. So it wasn’t with the mindset of, well, what if someone is gonna take that bachelor’s degree and apply it today? What would they do now? It used to not matter so much because.

Go far enough back. Getting a college degree was, yeah, your minority of people did that. And so just going through the exercise of it meant [00:22:00] as your ticket, you signaled something to the market. Also, there was the rate of change was slower. Mm-Hmm. So things that you learned, you know, particularly if we’re talking more in kind of the STEM fields.

Engineering, you could kind of apply in the real world. Now, I think what’s happened is there’s a lot of debate internally, first of all around what should be in these curriculums. You get so many stakeholders that leaders at universities have to satisfy to make happy to make these changes. And so even if you wanna update curriculum, it takes a really long time to do that.

And the world’s sort of in the meantime, like moving quickly. This, you know, we all talk about AI right now is sort of the poster child of this rate of change, but we’re kind of going into this steep asymptote of change right now. So an institution like university is now just so overburdened by its weight.

Yep. That even if it wants to, even if the leaders at the [00:23:00] top want to make change, getting the organization like that to change so rapidly is it’s near impossible. Do you think that leads into alternative credentialing or the certification space? Is that why we get that? Yes, it has, and you see it showing up in a lot of different places.

There’s brick and mortar versions of this. There’s obviously been the explosion in online credentials over the last decade and decade and a half. Is there any value in that? There is. I think the first pain point that solved was just where do I go and, and learn basics, right? Like it used to be that all this great information was locked up in the universities.

Now I can really learn any topic. There’s no kind of like sacred topic that you get to learn just because you’re a member of a certain university. So that’s the first thing it did. So it democratized the acts, the ability to learn. But now what’s happened is there’s so much out there to learn so many options.

It’s almost like, well, where do I go? Why do I learn what and for [00:24:00] what purpose? And what I think is now happened is there is an implicit assumption if I go and I do these things, it will also help me to build my career, learn skills that will help me get ahead of my job. And to get new, new jobs. And while I think yes, with the right person who’s focused, knows what they’re going and learning, absolutely.

There’s plenty of ways to learn and upskill in your job today, but if you’re trying to break into a new career, particularly if you’re a student trying to get your first career, these tools, these credentials don’t do much. They don’t do much. Most employers, most hiring managers, they don’t look at.

Alternative credentials. Not to pick on any one company, but the, the Udacity, the Udemy, the Coursera’s, the LinkedIn learnings, you know, again, great platforms to learn, but they’re not looking at signals there to determine if they wanna make a bet on someone. And so [00:25:00] there’s this whole debate now around skills-based hiring.

People know conceptually we should be doing skills-based hiring, and some employers are doing it and they’re saying, well, we’re not gonna look at the degree. But that’s only happening in categories of work where there’s far more demand than supply of candidates like engineering. So dropping degree credentials and engineering.

If you’ve been spending enough time building on your own and watching stuff on GitHub. You don’t necessarily need a bachelor’s degree in engineering, right? It’s just about what you built. But in most fields, you don’t have this supply problem with candidates. You actually have too many candidates with degrees that are in plenty of supply.

So in that case, the way hiring managers actually hire for skills, they look at experience and it’s not a precise thing, it’s just, Hey, I feel more comfortable looking at someone’s experience. ’cause I know they’ve actually had to struggle. To solve problems for a real [00:26:00] business outcome as opposed to, I learned a skill in this simulated course.

Jonathan DeYoe: Right? Okay. So colleges are unable to do it. These certification programs don’t really get all the way there. Real work experience is the most important thing. That’s what people need in order to get the job. Can companies fix it? I mean, why aren’t there more internships at companies? You said they were 7% lower this year than last year, so where do you come in?

Matt Wilkerson: Yeah. Companies will be needed to fix it. Let’s, yes. Let’s start with that. Yeah. They will be needed. Can they fix it? I would say that in the way that the system is designed today, the economic market system is designed today. They’re not incentivized to fix it. It’s a cost structure. I mean, it’s just something that costs them money.

It’s a cost. Yep. And, and let’s just even start with the ones that are large and do wanna build pipelines with young people, right? Even there, internship programs. Now what they really are about is we all think of them as well. [00:27:00] Internship programs are opportunities that give students a chance to like learn and get trained.

That’s not how companies think about ’em. The ones that run, let’s say formal internship programs. They go to colleges and go to career fairs and so forth. They look at it as investment to get talent, talent to fill, you know, the needs of a very, usually a very large organization. And there usually has to be a full-time seat.

At the end of an internship, they’re gunning for, you know, 80 to 95% conversion rates, uh, for their internship program. So there generally has to be a full-time seat. There isn’t a full-time seat on the other end. Then they’re probably not gonna create an internship for it. And I think that’s part of the reason why there’s this contraction.

So there’s no incentive to create internships for the sake of creating an internship and training a student. Now that’s like the large part of the market, the big corporates. Then you have the rest of the market where maybe you’re a startup, small, medium business, [00:28:00] or just a company that just doesn’t have a formal internship program where it’s more ad hoc, Hey, you know, so and so’s like.

Daughter or son. Yep. Looking for an internship summer. Could you give them, could you give ’em an internship or you wanted, help some students at your alma mater and you like the idea of mentoring? It’s so, it’s more of these ad hoc processes that come up, or, or maybe you say, look, I, I do want a little bit of help on a project and I have the time and I’m willing to train someone.

But even there, I would say the people who even enjoy working with young people and mentoring, most of the times they just don’t have the time. They just don’t have the time and energy. So it’s like, you know, I could spend that time, but then I gotta come up with a plan. You know, interns show up us. Maybe I hired an intern, but like in my situation where mine got canceled in many cases, maybe they don’t cancel it, thankfully, but the student still shows up.

The person’s not ready yet, and they’re like, oh, I’m, I’m busy right now. Here’s something to work on while I think of [00:29:00] the real project to give you in a couple days. Oh, you’re done with it earlier than I thought Here. Work on this in the meantime. And that, that’s kind of the experience for those other internships.

So I say all this to mean the incentive isn’t there, and this is what we’re thinking about now at Extern, is how you recreate the system from the ground floor up in a way that’s win-win for companies and students. Alright, so how do you do that? You’re thinking about it. Yeah, I’m not, so I’ll just kind of start with just a quick, like what this is.

So what we did was we invented a new form of work experience. It’s called the externship. You can think of it as just an easier version of an internship. Easier meaning it’s more accessible to students, it’s more flexible. They can do projects from anywhere in the world. Most times of the year, not just the summer, it’s flexible with their time so they can work on projects when they have the time.

Mostly there’s some live sessions with [00:30:00] the company and with TAs and program managers, but they generally can fit it in like they might a class into their schedule. And then it’s also easier for companies to launch and, and run. Because they don’t have to do all of that heavy lift that I mentioned. They can focus on the fun stuff like showing up with a group of students, answering questions, essentially doing like a guest lecture, doing that maybe every other week.

And then getting to see who the kind of the top performers are. And just to give you a sense of the scale here that we’ve worked with, you mentioned 38,000 counting externs that we’ve been able to enroll since 2020. 25,000 of those actually have come in the last year, and that’s because we’ve been doing a lot of work using software product to take projects that would normally be out of reach for 99.9% of [00:31:00] students because either they don’t technically have the qualification or skillset yet.

Or they don’t go to the right school or you know, a company might even interview. They don’t have the connections and so forth. And we take projects ’cause we actually reject probably 99% of the projects that even come our way that we could take. But we take the ones that are, we think are really interesting, pushing the boundary of new skills that students can learn.

And also more and more will be, you know, focused on skills of the future. Everything from startups to Fortune 500. So you mentioned some of the names there earlier. We’ve done that for about 45 companies. So think of, you know, 38,000 externs across 45 or so, companies we’re able to support four more externs than companies would with just having interns.

Jonathan DeYoe: I think it’s dawning on me a little bit. Is it like match.com for externships and projects like that? That kind of a thing. It has an element of [00:32:00] an online dating app. Where I would draw the comparison is more in, you know, if you think of the challenge in the world of, say, recruiting and how most platforms and most tech platforms I’m talking about, I’ve thought about this challenge.

Matt Wilkerson: It’s, it’s from the standpoint of the, of solving the pain point of just the company, right? So the handshakes and deeds, LinkedIns. It’s, well, in handshake’s case, they’re also solving the need of the career center, but with most kind of job matching marketplaces, the sort of demand is the company. Yeah.

Getting them candidates, screening candidates. Nobody really thinks about like demand in these situations from the student or the learner or candidate side. And that is because there’s a whole population of students that are just sort of, you know, well. You apply and if you don’t hear back, like, sorry, you’re not [00:33:00] really the person we’re serving.

We as a team, we’ve, you know, talked about the story of a graduate who’s graduating now called Harmonica. I. She is worked really hard on her degree for four years. She is got hopes and dreams for her career. She wants financial stability, but she’s also probably taken on student debt. So she needs to find not just a job, but you know, a job that’s gonna pay that off.

Ideally, jobs that’ll give her the skill sets to build for the future. AI skills that won’t be replaced by ai, but she’s appli. What’s happening now is she and many millions of students. If you go on TikTok, you read news reports. Applying to hundreds of job opportunities now. Hundreds of job opportunities hearing back from a small number.

But their rejections mostly hearing nothing. Yep. Like silence. Yep. And there was a New York Times article recently where the headline was a quote from a student. It feels as though I am screaming into the void with each application. Yes. The online dating analogy comes in. ’cause what we’re [00:34:00] really doing here is we’re saying, look, you know, in some cases a company might want a student more because they’ve already got certain skill sets.

And, you know, great, let’s let that happen. But in other cases, the student might benefit more from an experience right now, and they’re not necessarily ready to get hired by the company. Maybe they’re not gonna flow into their internship program, but there’s still some, some value we can create by bringing those two sides together, making it easy, and not necessarily having it to be this like direct one-to-one.

Relationship where the onus is then normally on the employees, right? And so they’re like, look, unless that student has checked all these lists and was ready to work, I don’t wanna spend any time training them. And that’s not how we grow the economy. So I, this is 20 years ago. I started a company 20 years ago, and I went to.

Jonathan DeYoe: I don’t know if it was Upwork or you know, one of these places where you post a job, you post a, I need somebody to create a logo. Here’s my company. I need a logo that has this element, that element, this element, and I put it [00:35:00] out in the world and I get 17. I. Logos and the one I pick is the person I pay.

Right? Is it kind of like that? Like companies have a project, you kind of vet the project, you put the project on the platform, and then 15 different people work on that project. 15 students work on this externship and then the company gets all 15. And so there’s a connection between the 15 and the company who may or may not ever use the solution, but there’s a connection, so.

Matt Wilkerson: So there is definitely some of that. I would say the inspiration is a little bit from the. Capstone projects that you do sometimes see in, in classes or business schools do this a lot, right? Where Yeah, you partner with someone at a company. I think what we do here is we take it a step further and, you know, first of all, we try to make sure we do projects that are, we call strategic but not urgent.

Hmm. So it’s not something that super urgent, like employees should be doing strategic but not urgent. It’s can’t just be like a, a student job that you should just be qualified to do. With your experience as a [00:36:00] student that you know, should just be a job that you’re getting hired for, even if it’s a short term job.

But then what we’re doing is we’ve used software and like a really great process and some, you know, well-placed incredible members of our team who make sure that that company. It feels so kind of magical, easy. It flows. They explain what are your goals for a project? What are you trying to solve within your team?

What problems are bubbling up? Okay, here’s a category of work. So we, we might do it in marketing, we might do it in product. So in product it might be a customer discovery or a product discovery project where students go and interview. Small businesses or consumers or Gen Z or builds a prototype and goes and tests that.

It might be a data analytics project or more of like a consulting market, research finance. I wanna do cybersecurity as we get into early next year. So we take the goals and then with the use of [00:37:00] software and content and industry experts who we bring around the table to design. A structured learning experience.

So the student gets kind of what they dream of having on their first day and first week on the job. Or an internship where you show up and like, here’s what to learn this week, next week. And it’s meant to tie to the work that the student’s doing at that time. And so now you can kind of multiply this ’cause through our platform we’re able to scale this better.

You can multiply this across, in some cases, hundreds of students working with a team over the course of a year and maybe intervals and cohorts some of the work the students do. Maybe it’s not at the level yet. A lot of it in many cases isn’t at the level ’cause they’re doing something for the first time.

Um, but you still might have maybe like 10, 20% of students that. It does work that is worth bubbling up to the company. It’s worth their time. And there’s different ways that they can engage. Some of them go on [00:38:00] to do final presentations to CXOs at some of the companies, some then get to engage further.

Recently had about 10% of their externship cohort go into their internship program. Hmm. So companies kind of work with the talent in different ways, but whether or not the company hires the students for an internship or full-time. We track where the students end up going, and we’re actually gonna be updating a new study later, the beginning of the fall that we’re working on this summer.

Late last year, we had run a study where our enterprise sponsored programs, the students that had gone through them about one in two, ended up landing a Fortune 1000 job within 12 months or internship if they’re still in school. Not that Fortune one thousands, the. Litmus test of success, but it’s at least an indicator of where the students are able to go and do.

Jonathan DeYoe: I’m very curious, and I don’t know if this is an appropriate question and we can edit it out if we have to. Do the companies pay you? Do the students pay you? [00:39:00] How do you guys make money? But you’re like creating resource that the companies don’t have. You’re filtering out all the students to get the right ones.

That the company, I’m guessing that the company pays you. Is that how that works? So, yes, we make our money from companies. So that’s how we’ve made money. Today. We have these two modes. One where companies can, certain companies could launch a project for free, but in that case, it’s very kind of cookie cutter.

Matt Wilkerson: You have to commit to doing a certain number of projects throughout the year. Hmm. They have to meet certain goals that we have for students. Meaning, like, it’s gotta be, you know, on average, more beneficial to the student. It needs to make sure it’s, you know, part of the structured learning process. Gotta be something really interesting.

A lot of our vc, pe, certain product externships that you just don’t normally get a chance to do as a student, we call our enterprise tier. These are for companies that typically are gonna be large corporates. They’ve got budget [00:40:00] and they have a very specific recruiting goal. In that case, they say, look, we wanna focus on a certain population of students.

And we also would like for those students to have maybe higher levels of support. We want to maybe have a more customized project that we do that’s gonna take more work to design. And we also want some support flowing into our recruiting funnel in some way. And in some cases, we’ve even done like, you know, special events with some of our enterprise partners there.

That money that we get in those cases we’re able to offer. If, if we ever get paid, we are able to offer stipends to the student. But that also then funds the rest of our programs that we’re able to do. ’cause most, you know, the key here is how do you incentivize companies and employees to offer more of these really amazing, interesting opportunities for students to do when they may not have been thinking of running an internship program.

Jonathan DeYoe: So [00:41:00] I know that financial outcomes are important, but I’m imagining you actually measure impact. In other ways as well. So how do you measure impact? Yep. We measured at all different stages, starting with giving the access to the opportunity. Externships are designed for students, you know, today, right now, I think we’re, we’ve been able to get our acceptance rate up from last year was 10%.

Matt Wilkerson: Last quarter we got it up to about 25%. So we’re trying to make sure we make more and more room, and for those students, we wanna keep externships free to be able to access and do the impact that we then measure after that is are the students reporting that they’re actually learning? I. And that this is actually an experience that was worth their time.

So we have a net promoter score of 70, which you look into how that works. It’s, um, incredibly high. We also have a whole student [00:42:00] ambassador program where students who are excited to go out and think, now we’ve got about 3000 ambassadors that go and, and they’ve done the externship and they actually go and educate.

Other students on how it works, how it is different from an internship supporting them. And then after the program, what we do is, I mentioned that stat earlier, you know, are they actually getting not just job outcomes or internship outcomes, but good ones? Yeah. Right At good companies and so that, you know, one in two, getting Fortune 1000 internships or jobs.

From the enterprise sponsored programs and we’re gonna run a, an analysis later this year on kind of all, all of the, the programs that have been sponsored. ’cause we’ve been ramping up the non-enterprise ones more recently to really fill this demand that we’re seeing from students. And then the other piece is, you know, what we want to move toward is a world where we can reward students in various ways.

’cause I mentioned, you know, we reject around an 80% [00:43:00] today, we wanna. In the near future and we’re building our product in a new way where they can start to prove themselves. Instead of it just being an application, they can start going through an what we’re gonna call an external academy. So imagine now I come in, I want to explore consulting and product and and cybersecurity, but I don’t know.

I don’t know yet. What I wanna do. I want to try different things. Well start to do some training modules and through your experience, unlock. New opportunities unlock externships, and as you do externships, you could even get certified on those externships and then unlock more advanced externships. And so what that does is it rewards students who put in that work and take that opportunity.

What it also will do is it’ll allow companies to, you know, we want to be able to give them an opportunity to bring students into their programs, particularly for the really competitive ones. Where it’s a more meritocratic process and [00:44:00] we can say, look, if you were a student and you did a couple of externships and you did well, like, you know, you should have an opportunity to take that next step and, and build that resume.

So now you’re creating like a pathway. Yeah. That ultimately can land in a, an internship or a full-time job with a company. That’s like the vision of how we paint this, and this goes back to what I mentioned earlier of re-architecting the system from the ground floor up, creating a new. Um, kind of new system that at least for students, they can at least see where that pathway is going.

If I do this, it unlocks that. Very cool. It’s very exciting to see this kind of thing being built, and I hope you guys do incredible work and hit those impact goals. I think it’s, you know, it’s good for the world, right? It’s good for the country. Definitely. And one other impact goal I’ll mention very quickly is yeah, the majority of our students.

Come from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds. Great. So that, that’s always been a big early focus. You know, you can define that in, in many different [00:45:00] ways demographically and come regionally. And so our vision for extern is that, you know, we say professional experience anytime, anywhere, for anyone who has the curiosity, the determination to go for it.

And you know what, if you happen to try to go for it, and it turns out at this moment you have to drop out or. Life circumstances change or you get too overwhelmed, it’s not gonna be a bad mark against you. Right. You get a chance to try again. You know, we wanna reduce anxiety, not create it. Yeah. Love it. I like to ask everyone, every guest, to simplify things for us in just one quick, one quick way.

Jonathan DeYoe: I just wanna say, if you were talking to a recent graduate or someone that’s about to graduate, what is one thing that they could do today that would lead to a better first job? Well, I would say. The ability to look beyond the rules of the system because it’s very easy to come in and sort of hear, well, like [00:46:00] you’ve gotta apply.

Matt Wilkerson: I’ll just say like, apply on this job board and follow these instructions. I didn’t mention this, but the reason I got into MIT off of the wait list was because I ignored their instructions. Wow. They specifically said, you’re on the wait list. There’s not, and they like, there’s nothing you can do. Do not send us anything.

Like, no, I sent them a lot of things. I sent them, you know, movies I had built in 3D Studio Max to show my passion for doing film because there was no place to do that in the application site. I said, well here’s an opportunity to do that. And I got in, I was one of 11 of like hundreds. I know that that helped of course.

So just know that the end of the day there’s always people and humans. Yes. On the other side and you know, the proactivity. Reaching out, emailing someone with a thoughtful, well-thought email. If you’re interested in something, working at a company or just building a relationship, what’s something you can do to help them or provide some value?

Designing a couple of slides and saying, Hey, I thought [00:47:00] about this problem you’re working on. Maybe it doesn’t mean it’s always gonna work, but having that attitude of the proactiveness. I think there’s a certainly a pocket of students that have that, and I think a lot of them show up to extern. But I also read and hear about a lot of despair that just comes from like, Hey, I, I followed the rules.

I did everything I was supposed to do, and it’s not working. It’s almost like that’s why those rules are there. The system is there because that is the test. It doesn’t mean you go and you break the law or you do you something illegal, but know that that is the test. Yeah. It gives you the bar that you’re supposed to go over.

Jonathan DeYoe: Right. You gotta go above and beyond. That’s, yeah, totally. My dad taught me that for sure. Matt, is there anything that people don’t know about you or don’t remember that you want ’em to know? I think the, the main thing and the thing that’s guided me and I know is, is very much part of even how our whole company and team works is that you are always learning.

Matt Wilkerson: You are never an [00:48:00] expert, and I’ve never considered myself an expert in anything. You know, I’m kind of a self-proclaimed polymath. Just learning, learning, learning. Always a student, you know, I’m excited to learn so much right now about generative ai, right? And everyone is, as so many people are, and just always having that attitude of, of learning and not having to feel that you have to know it all right now.

Yeah. I went through a period, ’cause you know, after you graduate, you have this period in your life where you gotta like project confidence, you gotta project like that. You know, stuff you miss a lot by not. Listening and being open to different perspectives and pushing yourself to keep learning as fast as you can.

Your measurement of success should be how fast you learn because that will, people will see that. Companies, they will notice your, your rate of learning. That’s what companies want now. Yep. I’ve been a meditator Buddhist for a long time. That’s beginner’s mind. And it, it, it affects everything positively, right?

Jonathan DeYoe: Yes. Your work, your relationships, you raising [00:49:00] kids, you know, everything is better if you’re curious. If you’re learning everything is better. That’s beautiful. Finally, tell people how they can connect with you. Yeah. So my email is matt@extern.com. And our website is extern.com. Sounds like intern, but E-X-T-E-R n.com.

Matt Wilkerson: And yeah, you can go there as well to both see opportunities that we have for young people, but also if there are any employees at companies out there that are like, you know what? This sounds kind of cool. I’d like to check it out and maybe I’ve got some interesting projects. You can go and see the kind of work that we do with, with various startups and corporates. Feel free to reach out to me.

Jonathan DeYoe: That’s great. Matt, thank you so much for being here. That’s all gonna be in the show notes, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Jonathan. This was great.

Outro: Thanks for listening. Full [00:50:00] show notes for each episode, which includes a summary, key takeaways, quotes, and any resources mentioned are available at Mindful Money. Be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. And if you’re enjoying the content and getting value from these episodes, please leave us a rating and review at ratethispodcast.com/mindfulmoney. We’ll be sure to read those out on future episodes.