David Kozhuk went back to college with something students were supposed to want: jobs. He was working in finance, his firm was growing, and he wanted to recruit at UMass Amherst. The arrangement sounded promising. There was an auditorium, catering, an introduction from the dean, and time set aside for interviews. Three students came.
For an employer, this was an inconvenient afternoon. For Kozhuk, it became a question he would spend years working on. He had relied on career services as an undergraduate. Why had an office so useful to him failed to become part of so many other students’ lives?
The small audience supplied the beginning of uConnect, the education technology company he founded in 2013. Today, as its chief executive, Kozhuk is still concerned with the distance between offering help and getting people to use it. His business began with an awkward discovery: a university could have opportunities, advisers and connections, yet students could pass through without encountering enough of them.
A student who knew where to go
Kozhuk graduated from UMass Amherst in 2008, having studied finance at the Isenberg School of Management. He was an enthusiastic customer of career services. Three financial-analyst internships helped him gain experience before graduation. He had made use of the machinery that universities assemble to help students cross into working life.
“But I was particularly motivated,” he recalled. That qualification matters. His eventual business would have to serve people who approached college differently. A system can work beautifully for a student who knows where to go, what to ask and why to keep returning. The harder test involves the student who has yet to form the question.
There is an appealing wrinkle here. Kozhuk’s founding experience came from having benefited from the institution he later tried to improve. He understood the value of the office because he had used it. The recruiting trip forced him to reconsider whether his own experience was a reliable guide to everyone else’s. Being a satisfied customer had left him with a rather incomplete sample.
From investment gaps to a campus gap
His first professional chapter was in finance. He worked as an analyst at Brook Venture Partners, then joined the founding team at Arctaris Capital. A small team there raised more than $80 million and completed more than 15 transactions. These were collective achievements in his finance career, before uConnect.
That background gives his later move an interesting continuity. His work involved businesses in underserved credit markets, including places such as Detroit and Albuquerque. The opportunity lay partly in seeing value that was receiving too little attention. At the university, he encountered another kind of overlooked resource: career support that students were failing to use.
The analogy has limits, but it helps explain the question that interested him. Creating additional resources would accomplish little if existing ones remained hard to discover. A university could invest in employer relationships and advice, then lose students somewhere between the service and its audience. Kozhuk had found a problem that could survive even when everyone involved was doing useful work.
First, ask the people running the office
Before launching the company, Kozhuk spent two and a half years researching the market and visited 150 schools on the East Coast. Kim Figueroa at Isenberg offered feedback on his prototype and supported an early pilot while he was still working at Arctaris. The people responsible for career services helped shape his attempt to improve access to them.
That is a less cinematic beginning than the familiar tale of a founder seeing the future in an afternoon. It is also more revealing. A disappointing event suggested a problem. Conversations and testing had to establish whether the problem extended beyond that event, and whether his proposed solution would help the people expected to use it.
LearnLaunchX became another part of his education as an entrepreneur. Finance experience does not automatically teach someone how to build software for universities. Kozhuk had to learn a different business, with different customers, constraints and working habits. He had left one professional ladder and was now responsible for finding somewhere to put the next rung.
By spring 2013, uConnect had launched with UMass Amherst and Bentley University. The following year brought a very visible encouragement: first place at New Hampshire’s TechOut startup competition and a $50,000 prize. Kozhuk appeared with the sort of oversized check that makes even a sensible business milestone look pleasantly theatrical.
“The prize money means a lot for a company like ours,” he said at the time. He wanted to grow the team and make connections with higher education institutions in New Hampshire. Those were practical ambitions for an early company: more people to do the work, and more schools willing to give it a hearing.
An office cannot follow everyone home
By 2017, Kozhuk was describing a stubborn perception problem. Students often associated the career center with an immediate transaction: finding a job or internship. Some assumed they needed a finished résumé before visiting the people who could help them prepare one. Others postponed engagement because they were not looking for work yet.
The circularity is almost comic. Students could feel unprepared to seek preparation. Kozhuk’s response was to make career exploration feel more approachable through student stories, industry information and examples of alumni pathways. Those materials gave people reasons to engage before the final, urgent job hunt.
His early description of uConnect as a marketing platform is useful here. Marketing meant helping valuable information reach its audience in a form that made sense to them. The virtual career center could give resources a visible, accessible home. The underlying editorial question was familiar: what would make someone care enough to keep reading?
By November 2020, uConnect had raised $1 million in a round led by Strada Education and York IE, with Mike Volpe and Travis Warren also participating. The company’s case to institutions tied career support to their ability to recruit and retain students. Kozhuk was asking colleges to treat the experience as part of their central promise to students.
The graduate returns with software
The connection to Isenberg endured. By April 2022, the school was inviting him to Flavin Auditorium to talk about starting and growing his business. Its own IConnect career site ran on uConnect. The former student who had drawn heavily on career services was returning as a supplier to the institution that had helped him begin.
It is a satisfying reversal of roles, though the relationship was never simply a sale. The early feedback and pilot had made Isenberg part of the company’s development. A person who knew its career office as a student could now see it through the responsibilities of building a product that the office would actually have to use.
That continuing relationship gives a human scale to an otherwise abstract software story. Somewhere behind the platform terminology are advisers, students and alumni trying to get useful information to one another. Kozhuk’s career keeps circling back to the practical work of that exchange.
Picking a fight for the career office
In February 2023, Kozhuk publicly pushed back against investor Ryan Craig’s proposal to abolish career services. He argued for greater investment, stronger campus partnerships and more institutional authority for career leaders. His examples included faculty involvement, career-focused courses and programs that trained people across a campus to have better career conversations.
He was defending the people who had become his customers, certainly. He was also defending the value he had experienced as a student. His argument gave career professionals an organizing role: they held relationships, resources and expertise that a university would still need, whatever it decided to call the office.
“Career Everywhere to me means every student meaningfully engaged in career planning and exploration throughout their entire journey.”
David Kozhuk
Later that year, he laid out three phases of career services: building services and technology, scaling them, and integrating career support across the institution. He called that broader approach Career Everywhere. Faculty, alumni, employers, families and university leaders could all help students encounter career questions earlier.
The organizational complication is clear. Spreading career conversations across a campus still requires someone to coordinate the work. Kozhuk wanted career services to lead that effort while drawing on others. The virtual center was one part of a larger arrangement of people, responsibility and repeated encounters.
The question after the click
In January 2026, Kozhuk outlined the next phase: smarter discovery, more consistent measurement of engagement, and closer connections to student outcomes. His roadmap described AI-assisted search, an engagement score and analytics intended to help institutions examine activity alongside results such as employment and early earnings. These were plans for a progressive rollout during the year.
The distinction between finding a resource and benefiting from it gives this chapter its interest. A busy website provides evidence that something is being used. Understanding what that use means requires further questions. Which students are engaging? What are they looking for? How do their experiences relate to what follows?
By the September 2026 Product Pulse agenda, Kozhuk and customer-success leader Jess Kitt were discussing AI Search, outcomes-data uploads and labor-market information as connected parts of that effort. Engagement scoring and additional analytics appeared among the work ahead. The product had acquired new capabilities, while the original question remained recognizable.
Kozhuk began with an office that had helped him and an event that scarcely anyone attended. His ambition now asks universities to make those useful encounters more deliberate, and to understand their consequences. The three students who came to his recruiting presentation were easy to count. The work he chose afterward concerns everyone who never made it into the room.