Dooblog

We spend a lot of time over at Doostang making sure bright people have bright futures. While careers are a serious topic we take quite seriously, we also most certainly like to have a good time.

It’s precisely this knee-slappin sensibility that we decided to bring to facebook. Over the weekend we released MASH by Doostang, a facebook application inspired by a prominent acronym in many of our childhoods… that is to say Mansion – Apartment – Shack – House. Check it out and predict your friends futures – we’ve jam-packed the game with all kinds of celebrities, locations, even the occasional job posted to Doostang, all of which combine to make for some pretty entertaining stories.

More good news: if you’ve been looking around for an invite Doostang without much luck, facebookers belonging to one of 50 or so school networks are now able to sign up for Doostang directly through the application.

And if that’s not enough upside, I’ll point out that any day you can bestow the below fate upon your little brother is a pretty good day.

Doo break for some MASH,

Chelsea

So Matt and I moved into New York in early October and set up the Doostang NY Office – the highlights include packing/unpacking an enormous UHaul, building Ikea desks, shopping for office supplies at J & R Computer World, and actually setting up the office while working on the ‘stang . The good news – we’re up and running full speed here on the east coast.

This past Thursday, I woke up bright and early to meet Mareza at JFK airport and kick off the NYC Doo Tour. We’re meeting with a lot of finance, consulting, and media firms here in the city to learn more about their recruitment processes and challenges. Our goal is to help them recruit top candidates and get our community more streamlined access to better jobs – sounds good? Yea, I thought so…

We’ve learned a whole lot the last few days and aren’t done yet – we’re packed with meetings tomorrow and Thursday. Mareza is headed back to Palo Alto on Friday but I’ll be making it happen here in the Big Apple full time now, exciting stuff for sure.

Also, if you haven’t checked us out in US News and World Report, we were included in their article “How to Network on the Web.”

Dooin’ it on the Street,

Jeff

The Doostang team continues to grow as Ronojoy Chakrabarti has officially signed on as Director of Product Management. While coming from a company with 16,000 employees, countless restaurants and several campuses (I’ll give you one guess) to our ocean-view suite with a mere 11 people certainly must be a change of pace, he is already enthusiastically working to improve the user experience for all of you. We’re extremely excited to welcome Ron as our latest addition to the team, and together we’re working on building a better Doostang for all of you.

In other news, the school year is under way and that could mean only one thing…yes, our campus interns. We’re lucky to have several undergraduates at various schools across the country helping us. From setting up events, reaching out to student groups, and adding some local flavor to Doostang, these guys are doing it all. While they may not be as recognizable as these two, we’re confident they’ll be much more productive.

Doo work son,

Nat

Things look very different at Doostang today than they did even a month ago – so different that my inner Daft Punk had to break its silence. Not only has the community continued to expand – reaching 300,000 members this past Monday evening – so has the Doostang family itself. Most recently, we’ve welcomed Bill and Michael, both of whom have joined our engineering team from Yahoo! and Xoom, respectively. We’re very excited to have them, and with each new addition I’m reminded what a privilege it is to work with such talented people.

In the midst of all this growth and excitement, though, one thing seems to be missing: chairs. Yes, chairs. I remember Michael’s first day clearly - I walked into the office that morning to find him kneeling on the floor chatting with Cwikla. On a couple occasions I myself have arrived at work during an interview or some sort of meeting involving outsiders to find my own chair missing. Better still are the times when whoever has taken my big comfy chair also takes the time to replace it with the stray lawn chair floating around the office – a parting gift that screams “thank you for being my friend.”

In any event, I have no doubt that we will get through this chair shortage together. There is hope. After all, TIME does remain on our side, and – much like this blog post - it seems Daft Punk will never cease to inspire young people to do inspiring things.

Doo to the stang,

Chelsea

Check us out – Doostang is BusinessWeek’s featured career network in its Special Report “Social Networking hits the Job Market.” Special thanks to my good friend Matt Clark for his continued guidance and support.

It just so happens that Nat was using Doostang to search for jobs before joining the Doo team – take it over Nat…

As a recent graduate preparing to enter the real world, I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. What I did know was it was time to get back to California. I had dreams of giving up the long Boston winters and the lowly Celtics to bask in the California sun and root for the mighty Warriors. The only problem was I had yet to land a job. After scouring the various boards on the internet I remembered a friend of mine had recently mentioned Doostang as a good place to look. Sure enough, I found several positions that interested me and talked to a few different firms in the area. I certainly thought that Doostang could be a very useful tool in my search for employment, yet what I didn’t know was that the search would end with me in Palo Alto, reviewing and positioning the very jobs I had only weeks earlier been applying for. I’m still settling into the post-college life, but I couldn’t be more excited to have the opportunity to work with a great team to continue to improve this site for all of you.

Doo work son,

Nat and Jeff

I’m very excited to announce our most recent addition to the Doostang team – Nat Chambers. We were very lucky to find Nat to take over as our Community Relations Manager, a critical role that’s been all Mareza until just yesterday. You guys will all get to know Nat a little better over the blog, and I thought a good place to start would be a little Q&A, so here goes:

1) Where do you hail from?
I’m from Atherton, about 10 minutes north of Palo Alto.

2) Since you’re a local, what’s your favorite thing to do in the bay area?
I take my Mexican food pretty seriously, so heading down to Middlefield and Fifth never gets old. Between Tacos el Grullense, Apatzingán, El Taco del Oro, and even Aguililla from time to time, you’ll be hard-pressed to find such a high concentration of quality tacos.

3) How’d you get involved with Doostang?
When I was a sophomore in college, I lived next door to two seniors, one of who happened to be Jeff. Within the first couple weeks we became good friends. Over the next couple of years, we stayed in touch, hanging out when Jeff came through the East Coast. This summer, I was home and remembered Jeff was going to be in the area for a few months so I gave him a call to get dinner and catch up. When I told him I was looking for a job, he said that Doostang was hiring and that I might be a good fit for the position. A couple weeks, several office visits and one Lynyrd Skynyrd concert later, here I am.

4) How does that make you feel?
I’m really excited to be here…but still somewhat in disbelief that I’ll once again be in constant contact with Jeff Fernandez.

5) Here at Doostang, we all seem to be known for one thing of another. Cwikla for his love of tequila, Jeff for his Prius, Mareza for the Q, and so forth… What will it be for you?
That’s a tough one. Maybe it will be my passion for what my parents, peers and even some friends lovingly refer to as pure noise. I listen to heavy music…Pantera, Slayer, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Horse the Band. Still, that’s not to say I don’t enjoy a little James Brown or Sly and the Family Stone every now and again.

6) Oh yea also… Ditka or Doostang?
Let’s just say I’m not much of a Bears fan…

Welcome, Nat!

Chelsea

I had the pleasure this week of speaking with Lindsey Pollak, a writer, editor and speaker specializing in young professional career issues. Needless to say, we had plenty to talk about…

Lindsey was kind enough to mention Doostang in her career advice blog – you can read more here.

And also be sure to check out her new book, Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World.

I just ordered my copy, and have a feeling I’m exactly the person it’s intended for…

Have a great weekend all,

Chelsea

Doostangers, Happy Tuesday!

Hopefully your weekends were restful and enjoyable. We spent Friday saying goodbye to Jeff, who hit the road, headed back to New York after a great summer here in Palo Alto. As of right now, he’s been home for a day and a half. We said goodbye to him on Friday - for the less geographically inclined, that’s about 3200 miles. At that pace it would take him 80 days to get to the moon. All he’d need is a flying Prius.

Go Jeff!

All’s well on the Doo front. We’ve got our sleeves rolled up and are getting ready for a few big releases for the fall. We’ll keep you posted!

Doo it up,

Kanyi

PS - Closing in on a quarter million!

We’re really excited about the growth and expansion the community this summer – Doostang has grown to almost 220,000 members and we are preparing a few releases to help our students/alumni with the upcoming recruiting season.

With continued growth comes more diverse opportunities on the job board – it has been filled with an increasing number of open jobs/internships at Polo Ralph Lauren, the US Senate, Teach for America, Goldman Sachs, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, NBC, Parsons School of Design, Bergdorf Goodman, New York Times, HBO, Microsoft, United Nations, IBM, British Consulate, Oppenheimer Asset Management, Columbia Records, Forbes, Yale University, McKinsey, Intuit, Adchemy, Nokia, Credit Suisse, US Congress, and Guess (among many others).

As the community is growing and the job board is booming, we are preparing to expand our team. Of course, we need desks, chairs, and computers. So Chelsea and Mareza hit up the Apple store last week and bought some pretty amazing MacBook Pros. Kanyi and I jumped in the Prius today and navigated Ikea – we managed to fit four desks, four lamps, and 4 trash cans in the car without pulling out my two 10” subs. Well done, right?

Dooin’ it in the heat,

Jeff

;)
Chelsea