USC entrepreneurs have created a platform for other entrepreneurs that, according to its co-founder Ethan Lippman, has “solved access for students to jobs.”

Unistart is a free, centralized database of user-submitted startups sorted by college, allowing student and alumni entrepreneurs to connect with job seekers from their university. Jerry Teng, co-founder of Unistart and a 2022 graduate of the Marshall School of Business, launched a public database while attending USC with the help of Marcel Miro, Unistart’s other co-founder and a master’s graduate of the University of York, where founders from USC could submit their startups. The creation of the database, originally called USC Startups, stemmed from a lack of entrepreneurship resources at the University, Lippman said.

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“[Teng] was trying to get into entrepreneurship at USC, but it’s a who’s who kind of game,” said Lippman, a senior majoring in business administration. “You have to know people that are involved in the clubs and the clubs are a bit hard to get into … So he runs into the problem of ‘he wants to learn more about USC startups, but he has nowhere to go.’”

Lippman joined Unistart in January, and the team began expanding the platform to more universities and adding new features to support startups.

“There really is a problem with access to resources for stakeholders in the early-stage startup ecosystem,” Lippman said. “When I joined Unistart, I wanted to expand the scope of the company from just focusing on a database of USC startups to ‘How can we solve this problem of access to resources for all of the stakeholders and the whole early stage startup ecosystem?’”

Since then, Unistart has expanded to 10 universities, with plans to expand to 20 more. Lippman said expanding to universities outside of USC has been one of the most difficult challenges in growing the company, requiring networking with each university’s founders, groups on campus, clubs and school offices. 

Instead of expanding with prestigious startup schools, such as Berkeley, Stanford and MIT, Lippman and Teng focus on schools they identify as having promise to produce startups.

“We learn about the problems specific to their college campus,” Lippman said. “Every college campus is different. There’s different clubs. There’s a different community of students and founders. There’s different roles for the school’s entrepreneurship office.”

The Unistart database now has more than 1,500 startups from the ten colleges alone, including 200 startups founded by USC students and alumni.

Andrei Stenmark, a senior majoring in business administration, uses Unistart. In January 2022, Stenmark founded WAFL, a laundry delivery app where users can send their clothes to be washed, folded and returned. Stenmark said hiring and maintaining employees was challenging when starting WAFL.

“It was much harder than I thought it was to find good people,” Stenmark said. “I probably went through nine different employees in three months.”

Stenmark said Unistart has helped him form connections and get assistance for WAFL. 

“I use them for some social media stuff,” Stenmark said. “I’ve used them to find brand ambassadors recently. They’re insanely helpful.”

Aidan Bunch, a freshman majoring in computer science and business administration, is a developer for Unistart and recently added his own startup, Vertix Fellows, to the database — and has already seen the benefits. 

“[Unistart has] been very, very helpful,” Bunch said. “A lot of people use the site. So for sourcing talent, we put up a job posting and we’ve been able to source at least a couple candidates for the two days that it has been on there.”

Bunch said that before he came to USC and joined the Unistart team, he was hired for a summer internship by emailing startups he found in the Unistart directory. After talking to Lippman about his experience with Unistart, he asked Bunch to join the Unistart team as a developer. 

Since its launch, Unistart has added a startup news blog, a curated job board and a consultancy feature, where entrepreneurs can seek startup assistance on topics, such as pitching, fundraising and headhunting.

Lippman said Unistart is working on an investor outreach feature, which would help startups find investors and help investors find companies to invest in. His hope is that investors will invest in companies through Unistart, bringing all parties in the startup process together.

“We have jobs, we have startup data and we have capital,” Lippman said. “Bringing investors on the platforms is our endgame goal.”