Co-Founder
Yu Huang
Leads product and vision. Yu shapes how Six Degrees grows — from the graph model to the interfaces people actually use.
LinkedIn ↗We're two founders from Berkeley and Northwestern who saw that the best opportunities in college don't move through job boards — they move through people. Six Degrees is our answer to that.
Explore the networkYu Huang & Sean JungBerkeley × NorthwesternEst. 2024
Co-Founder
Sean Jung
Leads growth and business development. Sean shapes how Six Degrees reaches new campuses and builds the partnerships that bring the network to life.
LinkedIn ↗Who we are
We met on day one.
Yu and Sean met on their first day at UC Berkeley and became each other's first friends on campus. In the weeks that followed, they kept running into the same pattern: the people landing the best opportunities — research spots, internships, founding teams — weren't necessarily the most qualified. They were the most connected.
Not because they were better networkers. Because they happened to know someone who knew someone. The right intro at the right time made all the difference, and most people never even knew those paths existed.
We built Six Degrees to change that. Starting at Berkeley and Northwestern — two campuses where networks are dense and the stakes are high — we're mapping the social graph so anyone can see the warm route, not just the people who already know where to look.
The Theory
People are usually closer than they seem.
Six degrees of separation isn't just a trivia fact. It's a structural property of human social networks — and most platforms are built as if it doesn't exist.
01
Short chain
Any two people on earth are connected by a surprisingly short chain of relationships — usually six steps or fewer. Most people feel this intuitively but never get to see it.
02
Invisible closeness
Social proximity is usually hidden. You share classes, clubs, employers, and advisors with people you've never met. That overlap already exists — it's just not visible.
03
Made navigable
Six Degrees surfaces those paths. Search a person, company, or lab and see the shortest warm route through real shared context — so the first message doesn't feel cold.
Cold applications get ignored. Warm intros get replies.
— Why we built this
Why we built this
The best intros don't happen by accident.
Cold applications get ignored. Warm intros get replies. That's not cynicism — it's how trust flows through networks. The problem isn't that people are closed off. It's that most people can't see the paths that already connect them. We built Six Degrees to make those paths visible before you ever send a message.
What we're building toward
A map for every campus.
We're starting where the networks are densest and the need is clearest: Berkeley and Northwestern. But the product is built to scale to any campus where social capital compounds quietly. Our goal is simple — make the hidden structure of student life navigable for everyone, not just those who already know who to ask.