2023-Management-Paragon_One

MATT WILKERSON: Hello, everyone. I'm Matt Wilkerson, MIT class of 04EECS and co-founder of Paragon One. We are scaling a new form of internship between employees and students. So what does this mean? We've introduced a platform that we call the Remote Externship Platform. The idea here is that it's a software powered mini internship that allows companies to reduce friction between students and employees while they work on real projects. Now, why would you want to do this? Well if you've ever worked with interns before, and I'm sure most of you have, you know it takes a lot of work, right? You have to train them. You have to support them. You have to answer all the little questions that come in. They're around for two or three months, and then they go. And you wonder, was it worth it?

Well, we're making it worth it for more students to participate in these work projects, especially students from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds because, through software, we're reducing the amount of workload that employees and HR staff have to do to support large numbers of students. We're also making sure more employees can participate in engaging and mentoring students at scale, maybe through volunteerism programs and CSR programs. The result is that your companies can actually now enhance and engage students from underrepresented backgrounds and so accelerate your DEI employer brand. This is important for signaling to students that you're committed to their career development. What is a remote externship? Well, think of it as an online live classroom experience, except replace the academic project with a real work project. And replace the professor lecture with time with the company.

30 to 50 students in a cohort can work on a project. You only need one employee to spend less than an hour per week to support those students. Each student maybe spends about 10 hours a week. They can do this from anywhere in the world, any time during the year. So it's incredibly flexible for them, and this happens over a 6 to eight week journey. In fact, it's a little bit inspired by the externship program that used to be here at MIT. I think they call it something else now. This is possible because we're leveraging conversational AI machine learning and software enabled services to make sure that, again, friction is reduced. Everything from recruiting, training, onboarding, supporting students. We even have teaching assistants that use data to track how students are performing and when to intervene.

The way to think about this for students now is that hundreds of them at a time can go through a single project, get the support that they need, and your staff-- our staff that supports those students-- knows how to help. For companies, this means enterprise secure scale. Think about leaders at your companies now tracking student performance across hundreds, maybe thousands of students that are working within teams across your company. Tracking diversity goals that you're hitting, what schools they come from. Impact community goals that you're hitting, and which students you now want to funnel into your recruiting funnel. Internship programs because you have data on how they performed on real projects within your teams.

This means now 50 times more students from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds can participate can in work projects at companies compared to an internship program. PWC, for example, over the past year has engaged over 1,500 students on real work projects across their consulting and advisory teams. And they only needed 30 employees spending less than 1 hour per week to support those students. 92% of their employees involved in those projects reported being more engaged in their DEI activities. HSBC, who we met through the ILP program a little over a year ago, they brought 30 students into their innovation team to envision the Web3 bank of the future with DeFi technologies. And they hired two from that program. We're working on other programs for later this year.

One in two students lands a fortune 1,000 job within six months of completing an externship, internship, or job. If there's still a little bit younger, it might be an internship. Majority of our programs are highly over index for underrepresented talent, and companies can run programs globally. It's set up. It's remote. It's global. We have students from over 150 countries that have participated in programs. And what's most amazing is that, because we're offering something to students they can't get easily anywhere else-- work experience as part of their education-- we've built a community of raving fans. This is our external ambassador network that companies are tapping into to reach students at over 500 universities.

And historically, Black colleges and universities represent nearly half. Nearly half of them have alumni in our program. So what we're here today for is to just meet other corporate leaders and build our community of corporate partners. You can see some of the companies we work with today, from HP to Home Depot, to National Geographic, PWC. So feel free to come by later to learn more. Thank you very much.