Non long ago, Googler Vinay Bhargava (at present 41) found himself at a career crossroads. So he asked for advice from teenagers at Thomas Jefferson High Schoolhouse for Science and Engineering (TJ for short). "I want to make sure before I resign from Google that this is a proficient idea," he asked the students of the Virginia magnet school.

The idea was Mytonomy.com, a hub for crowdsourced college counseling founded past Bhargava and Sean Burke, a TJ schoolhouse counselor–the TJ students gave Bhargava the go-ahead to quit his job at Google and launch the site, which has since garnered nigh $250,000 in funding; afterwards this month, information technology enters a freemium style and begins a airplane pilot program in some 15 public schools effectually the country.

The desire in this state to make good decisions when applying to higher is enormous. Some form of counseling is common at many schools; among wealthier metropolitan areas, some families have been known to spend up to $30,000 a year on private counseling (though a few chiliad per year is the boilerplate effigy). But a single college counselor can merely know and then much. On the other hand, the alumni network of given high schools can be a deep pool of specialized knowledge. Only, beyond the occasional coffee-and-donuts encounter-and-greet, encounters with alumni have historically been hard to come by.

"I causeless the Internet had solved this problem," Bhargava tells Fast Company. Information technology hadn't. He and Shush struck on the idea of inviting alumni to contribute videos offering advice to their younger counterparts. How important is the overnight visit? Should you exercise early on decision? How should you prep for standardized tests? The site answers all of these questions. More to the bespeak, the site has the potential to answer them in highly personalized ways. A TJ alum who was the first in his family to go to college can hand down wisdom to a current TJ educatee in the same situation. "We're really scaling alumni mentoring," says Bhargava. Non everyone, after all, tin afford a private college counselor. "We're trying to democratize that."

Though piloted at TJ, and currently gratis, Mytonomy (the name is supposed to be a play on "autonomy," though information technology sounds a chip more similar a term from a lit theory class) is nearly to undergo a change. On the 20th, information technology plans to enter a freemium model, with much of its content behind a paywall. Individuals can pay $250 a year for the service–"one-half of what Kaplan charges," points out Bhargava–and schools and districts tin negotiate licenses at a discount. "The ROI of preventing a bad determination here is very high," says Bhargava.

15 schools, including some from the DC area, Detroit, Rochester, and the Bay Area, will exist shielded from the paywall for several months, as function of a pilot program. These schools are inviting alumni from their schools to submit advice-laden videos that they hope will be particularly helpful within their community; after all, the students at the DC Seed School, an overwhelmingly African-American public boarding schoolhouse, may take very different questions from the students at The Palo Alto Loftier Schoolhouse, another partner. If you're a schoolhouse administrator who'd like to join the ranks of this airplane pilot programme, Bhargava says it'southward not too late.

What'south in it for the contributors to the site? For some, if they add together 4 videos, a $20 Amazon gift menu. More to the betoken, though, a sense of giving back. How many of us would similar to go dorsum and impart our wisdom with our younger selves? Unabridged pop songs accept been written about information technology. In its taking-youngsters-by-the-shoulder quality, Mytonomy is non unlike Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project, if utterly different in its goals and telescopic. "That'due south a very powerful form of storytelling, and very credible. 'Hey, I was like y'all when I was younger … and it got better.' In our case, information technology's 'Hey, I was similar you, I was the first in my family unit who went to higher, I went to NOVA [a community college], simply so I went to VCU, I got a degree in Homeland Security, and now I accept a job.'" (A real video on the site.)

"I know that as a senior in college, I felt I was getting a completely curated view of every college I visited," one contributor, Kevin Pujanauski, in UVA's Class of 2013, says. "It was always the less formal conversations afterwards the tours or over dejeuner that were most valuable. To me, Mytonomy captures what was valuable virtually those conversations and makes them available at the click of a mouse." Overall, Bhargava hopes that the website will show students that in that location are many paths to success: that but considering you lot didn't go into MIT or Stanford, it doesn't mean "you're boxed in, or your life's over."

When the site retreats behind a paywall, what about the pupil as well poor to afford admission? In the future, Bhargava might consider sponsorships from local businesses–"swish branding," he says, of the "brought to yous past Verizon" sort. "It'south a journey to serve everyone," he says. "We're a startup, we're not gonna be perfect correct abroad." Currently, Bhargava and Burke picket every video uploaded to the site–1,200, currently–themselves. With a target audition like this, quality balls is pretty essential.

"Y'all tin can't have a 14-yr-old watching a random video, and having a kid at higher tapping a keg," he says.