Launch Day!!!

Today marked the launch of CoNotes (http://www.conotes.com). Wohooo! A very needed step for me psychologically, but a pretty insignificant step in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it is nice to just have it out there for people to respond to.

I haven't really say anything in my previous posts about my startup, so I guess now is the time. CoNotes aims to solve a huge problem for most job seekers: lack of accurate and relevant information about companies. How do I know this is a problem? Well think about the job that you have now. How different was your impression of the company before and after you started working. My guess is that a) either you didn't know enough to even have much of an impression to begin with; or b) it has changed a lot.

I want to change that because we spend 1/3 of our lives working, so it critical that we know what we are getting ourselves into when we take a job. I want provide you with company information that is both accurate and relevant to you. How is this possible? Well as a product, think of CoNotes as a "Wikipedia + Yelp" for companies. But it is very different in one critical way: the information is guaranteed to be sourced from peers. Unlike other players in this area such as Vault or Wetfeet, where you have no idea where the information is coming from (it could be some 10 year old kid across the street), CoNotes limits its network of contributors and readers to peers. The first network of peers that I am piloting with is my own, the MBA student network. For MBA students, you can count on the information coming from other MBA students at peer schools.

So that is the concept in a nutshell. Currently, the site can be considered in a very early release state. The feature set is going to be built up gradually over time, but a lot of the most critical features are there right now.

If you are a student at one of the following schools, you should have access to the site.

• Columbia Graduate School of Business
• Cornell University
• Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
• Fuqua School of Business , Duke University
• Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley
• Harvard Business School
• IMD Business School
• INSEAD
• Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
• London Business School
• MIT Sloan School of Management
• Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Stern School of Business, NYU
• Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon
• Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth University
• UCLA Anderson School of Management
• University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
• University of Michigan
• Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
• Yale School of Management

New features will be rolled out soon. But for those of you who are eager MBA students who are always in recruiting mode, hopefully the set of features in there will get you going. Check back often, as this is a viral community. As more people sign up, the amount of valuable information increases exponentially.

And definitely let me know what you think. I love feedback. But right now I need to sleep. Coding is fine and often times very interesting, but IT stuff just hurts. It's never fun setting up a server. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...