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FORBES ASIA MARCH 2020ENTREPRENEURS
Sasha Contreras despaired
when she had to quit her $12-an-hour Xerox
customer service job and uproot her life in Yelm,
Washington. Her husband was starting work as
a chef at a casino in rural Mississippi in Febru-
ary 2016. A year later she discovered he was hav-
ing an affair. Unemployed and alone, she spent
every waking moment searching Google for jobs,
then discovered Jobcase, a social media job-
search platform for blue-collar and service-in-
dustry workers.
“That site literally changed my life,” says Con-
treras, 55. A free sign-up granted her access to
millions of job listings and a stream of helpful
posts written by strangers, many of whom were
also searching for work. Through a link posted
by a member, in late July 2017 she got a custom-
er service job that paid $10 an hour. Two years
later Jobcase led her to another customer service
job that paid $13 an hour. Though she’s not look-
ing to make a move, she logs on to Jobcase daily.
“If I see something that touches me, I’ll respond
because I remember what it was like to be look-
ing,” she says.
“We’ve got to do this for everybody,” says Fred-
erick Goff, Jobcase’s founder and CEO, after hear-
ing Contreras’ story. When he founded the Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts-based company in 2015, he
set out to do what LinkedIn hasn’t been able to ac-LinkedIn for
the Working Class
By Vicky Valet Photograph by Michael Prince for ForbesS
Jobcase is building a social networking site for warehouse employees and waitresses.
Jobcase founder
Frederick Goff at
his headquarters
in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. In 1991
he hitchhiked from
Toledo to New York
City to land his first
full-time job.complish—create a site where the 80% of work-
ing-age Americans without a four-year college de-
gree can network, find jobs and manage their ca-
reers. (A LinkedIn spokesperson says its mission
has always been to support the entire workforce.)
Goff has raised $118.5 million at a valuation
for Jobcase that Pitchbook has at $445 million.