A recently launched Irvine company uses technology in concert with a personal career counselor to help recent grads find jobs.
Qidian offers workshops and individual coaching. Founder Petersen Walrod started it because he was “a confused and lost college graduate” who perceived an “unemployment crisis for post-college millennials, especially those with nontechnical degrees.”
Forty percent of all recent college graduates are underemployed, and the average student debt is more than $35,000, he said.
He co-founded the company with his father, Wallace Walrod, who holds a doctorate in regional economics from the University of California-Irvine, serves as president of the startup, and has been in charge of research at the OC Business Council since 1997.
Petersen Walrod said he differentiates Qidian from other career counseling services by the fact that it “provides the first career coaching service that heavily uses data and skills-based analysis rather than traditional counseling, which focuses on the individual’s psychology.”Â
The technology component is based on a predictive and personalized labor-market analyzer called the Skills Wizard. It uses a quantitative model of the labor market to determine which jobs best fit an individual’s skills, Walrod said. The personal component is Julie LaCroix, a career counselor whom Walrod met at a conference and who’s also passionate about helping grads find jobs, he said.
The workshops are day-long, intensive experiences that enable participants to identify under-utilized skills and to understand potential job opportunities, what they bring to the table, and the rules and tools they need to succeed, Walrod said.
A RAD idea
A startup created at California State University-Fullerton’s incubator in Placentia held its first event on Aug. 27: a pop-up shop at the Yorba Linda Farmer’s Market.
RAD Toy Store aims to present pop-up shops that sell science-related and eco-friendly toys and games. Potential buyers can play with any toy before buying it, founder Iris Dorn said.
She’s the wife of Robert Adam Dorn—thus the company’s acronym—of Yorba Linda-based home-design firm RAD Design Build. She’s also a mother of two girls and holder of a master’s degree in physics from CSUF. Her love of science, education and children inspired her to create a toy store that sparks interest in the sciences and encourages milestones in educational development, she said.
She makes small wood toys herself. Toymakers make the rest of the models. The toys include items such as Curious Engineer Kits that enable kids to make a robotic arm or a catapult; a dig-and-play Egyptian tomb; and a 3-D log cabin puzzle.
She said she’s so far funded the venture herself.
Startup Seeks VC Firm
Some “large, strategic technology companies” have asked a Mission Viejo startup to find a lead VC firm to put a valuation on the company and set up its first financing round. Xitore is in the midst of raising a Series A round of $5 million to $8 million by the end of the year and is looking for a lead venture capitalist, Chief Executive Mike Amidi said.
Xitore has designed a data-storage device to increase bandwidth and reduce latency. Bandwidth is the data transfer speed, and latency refers to the delay before the data transfer begins.
Amidi has worked in the storage industry since the mid-1990s and said he noticed a problem with slow speeds. So he set out to disrupt the industry and has already received interest from “large, strategic technology” companies interested in investing.
Xitore is in the process of designing its controller, which will be the core technology of the product. It plans to make its first prototypes available to customers in 2017, Amidi said. The company has received one patent for its technology and has six more in the pipeline.
Amidi said he hopes that major players in the market, such as Western Digital, Intel and Samsung, will take notice and invest in the company.
Xitore officially launched in 2014. The startup recently revealed some of its technology at the Flash Memory Summit 2016 in San Jose and has raised an undisclosed amount of funds from friends and family. It prefers to draw upon institutional investors for its first raise, Amidi said.
