The Whether powered by Better Weekdays was announced the winner of the Launch startup competition held by SXSWedu in Austin, Texas (part of the South by Southwest Festival), on Thursday, March 9. Chris Motley is the CEO and founder of the St. Louis-based company.
The SXSWedu competition targets early-stage companies that are focused on supporting teaching and learning. The Whether was one of 10 finalists being considered for the $2,500 award.
The Whether by Better Weekdays, is a job-matching application that helps universities improve the job-placement outcomes of its graduates. It also helps companies hire candidates based on job compatibility and culture fit.
“My story has been one of serendipity,” Motley said, “it’s literally been right place, right time. You meet a guy, you meet a woman and you get connected. And I thought that we were at a time in society where technology should be able to create serendipity for folks.”
Motley, hailing from the South Side of Chicago, was born to a 13-year-old single mom. He went to boarding school in Georgia through a program called “A Better Chance” before majoring in history at Columbia University.
Better Weekdays lists its core values on its website: humility, integrity, attitude, curiosity, collaboration, expertise, a strong work ethic and service to others. Its short-term goals are revenue generation and raising capital. However, Motley said that “customers come before raising money from investors.”
A year from now, Motley plans on his company being represented in at least 20 cities across the country. Better Weekdays takes a very regional approach to finding talent. “We care about economic development on a region by region basis,” Motley said.
Motley downplayed the significance of the monetary award that came with winning the competition. “The value and the impact in winning is that it gives us national visibility,” Motley said. “So now, we have people calling us, versus me having to bang on a bunch of doors saying, ‘This is who we are, we’re legit, trust us!’”
The Whether app is free to the students and job hunters whom the platform is intended to help. Motley described the app as being very simple and easy to use. “We get the simplest information we can get, such as which degree you’re pursuing, and use that to connect you to relevant jobs,” he said.
“We aggregate about a million live jobs every day, scraped from all across the internet,” Motley said. The Whether connects the skills of those jobs back to what a student is majoring in and the courses they are taking.
Motley’s company has been recognized several times in the past. Exactly two years before he won the SXSWedu competition, the White House announced that it would use Better Weekdays’ platform for its new job initiative, TechHire.
In April 2015, Better Weekdays received $175,000 from the Missouri Technology Corporation, a public-private partnership that provides early-stage capital to entrepreneurs and startups. In June 2015, the St. Louis-based nonprofit Arch Grants awarded the company $50,000.
The Whether hasn’t limited the opportunities it provides to only students who attend large universities or already have a degree. “Our company’s vision is to personalize career pathways,” Motley said. “You have to unpack what career pathways means, so part of it is mentorship, part of it is experiential learning and part of it is curriculum. It’s holistic. It’s not just about the internships or the jobs but all of those things.”
For more information about Better Weekdays, visit https://www.betterweekdays.com/. The Whether can be accessed at https://thewhether.com/.
Tashan Reed is a St. Louis American editorial intern from the University of Missouri.
