__ Harvard undergrad Geoff Cook wants the diploma. As long as it doesn't interfere with his Net startup. __
Sitting in one of Harvard's old classrooms, listening to the droning sounds of a lecture on Mill and utilitarianism, I feel the cell phone vibrate in my pants pocket, and I duck out in a hurry under the glare of the professor, who must wonder why I can never sit through an entire class. The student sitting on my right gives me a dirty look as I push past her and out the door. Seated on a bench outside, I sell a couple thousand dollars' worth of ad space on my Web site, CyberEdit, and return to my seat with a satisfied look on my face, much to the disgust of the classmate I pass once more. Constant phone calls, missed classes, late papers, last-minute getaways to the Virgin Islands - such is the life of the undergraduate Internet entrepreneur.
As a freshman in 1997, I started CollegeGate (www.collegegate.com) to provide application-essay editing services to college and graduate-school applicants. In the beginning, the site was my way of avoiding a $10-per-hour library or food-service job or - God forbid - a gig cleaning toilets. But over the next two years, the company succeeded beyond my expectations, growing from $10K in revenue per academic year to more than $50K, with seven editors on staff. Throughout 1997 and for most of 1998, I edited every document myself, never intending to run a startup - I was just a student trying to graduate magna cum laude in applied mathematics. I had set out to maintain my 3.85 GPA, write a thesis identifying new sources of risk in financial markets, and live an altogether exemplary academic life.
But toward the end of my junior year, editing orders had increased dramatically, and I began to sense the potential for explosive growth of a document-production portal. I decided to turn down the typical summer internship on Wall Street and instead try to grow CollegeGate and launch a larger site, CyberEdit (www.cyberedit.com), to provide a complete document-production resource to students, job seekers, small businesses, and Web sites. I viewed the summer of 1999 as critical; if I could double annual revenue to $100K, I'd know that I could not walk away from my business. The only decision then would be whether to quit school.
That summer, my girlfriend, Kerri Lynn Eustice, and I moved to California to live and work in a villa complete with a pool, a Jacuzzi, mountain views, and a private garden. I had decided to skip the anonymous Silicon Valley apartment. I wanted a partial taste of what it would be like to have money, to know what the payoff would be like if my company were successful, to understand what I was pursuing in the first place. Kerri, whom I'd met in seventh grade in South Plainfield, New Jersey, helped with business development. But more important, she kept me sane by forcing me out of the house on weekends after I'd put in 20-hour days doing site improvements and sending out business-development email.
At the end of that summer, I could see that CollegeGate and CyberEdit would easily pull in $50K a month by October and would employ more than 40 editors. I began to consider how to position the sites for a first round of venture funding. Given the impact I'd been able to have on revenues in just three months of full-time effort, dropping out of school seemed like an attractive option. Returning to a cramped dorm room and paying to study irrelevant subjects did not. I decided to ditch my senior year at Harvard.
The Industry Standard reported that I had chosen CyberEdit over an Ivy League diploma. However, as the final deadline neared, I was forced to reconsider: John Funk, a mentor of mine, questioned my judgment. I had met Funk in Vail in 1997 and interned at his company, InfoBeat, the next summer. Funk advised me not to throw a Hail Mary pass in the first quarter of the game, unnecessarily pinning all of my entrepreneurial aspirations on one idea I had had as a 19-year-old. If I were to leave school and make a six-figure salary running a million-dollar company, I would never return. I knew he was right. Funk was only four years out of business school, founder of InfoBeat, and the youngest member of its management team. This was not some career manager telling me to follow the well-worn path, but a young person who had achieved what I hope to accomplish someday soon. So I listened. And I decided that, even with half a million dollars in revenue backing me up, it didn't make sense to leave school.
What may surprise you is why it made so much sense to stay. Naturally, like any business student, I wanted to choose the least risky option. Jeff Bezos has said that leaving a successful career in New York to start Amazon.com was the least risky thing he could possibly have done, considering the potential for regret if he had not launched the company. In my case, the risk to consider was whether spending one more year at Harvard would mean slowing the revenue growth of CyberEdit and CollegeGate. That I wouldn't tolerate. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that college was the perfect place to be.
Just think about how little time a student actually needs to devote to schoolwork - and how conducive the campus lifestyle can be to entrepreneurship.
At school I would have my meals cooked for me and would also have a plethora of fast-food and delivery options. I could devote almost 18 hours a day to business while having enough diversions to keep me sane. Like most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, I would work, eat, and sleep in one room and never lose focus on my goal: to increase market share and rapidly grow revenue. Living in a dorm, I'd be more or less incapable of splurging on anything but a fancy restaurant now and then or a weekend trip to the islands, so the money I made would be recycled into the company. Moreover, at college - and especially at Harvard - I would have access to an incredible number of talented, ambitious people willing to work for low pay plus equity. By leaving such a focused, work-intensive environment so teeming with available labor, I would in truth have hurt my young business more than helped it.
And so I decided to stick it out, after all - but on different terms than before. With business skyrocketing, my attitude toward the academic work I once took so seriously has become seriously flippant. As a freshman, I took classes for the intellectual challenge and carried a heavy course load. I contributed in class, did the reading, and was in every way a diligent student. This semester, my courses include Issues in Ethics, The Literature of Social Reflection, Introduction to Psychology, and the obligatory Intro to Computer Science I - in other words, practically a free ride!
I have one hour-long class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I skip all but one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays - making for about five hours of classroom commitment. Some of my courses are available on the Net via RealVideo, so these can be missed at will. I spend an additional 10 to 15 hours a week on assignments and studying, which brings the academic grand total to 20 or so hours a week. Meanwhile, I work about 60 hours a week on CollegeGate and CyberEdit, managing my staff, identifying investors, building relationships, adding affiliates, generating press, and considering various marketing strategies. In one recent week, I created a compression/decompression software package for my computer science class, completed a paper on utilitarianism, screened and hired 12 new editors, forged a partnership with Tutor.com, wrote 50 checks to employees, and added functionality to a Perl script that manages my 300-member affiliate program.
I eat and breathe business, with my cell phone interrupting meals, nights out, and classes - and I welcome the calls. Among the 50-plus people on the CyberEdit and CollegeGate payrolls are my mother, my best friend, my two roommates, an ex-girlfriend, and various acquaintances I've met over the course of my college life. I find that I end up employing most of the people I know well.
My schedule is not conducive to a strong social life. Kerri attends Rutgers University, and I see her about twice a month. On Friday and Saturday nights, I no longer consider it a sacrifice to pass up socializing in order to stay home and work. There are occasions when I have some free time and want to go out, only to discover that my friends all are bogged down with CyberEdit and CollegeGate work assigned by the person I employ to manage editors and ensure quality. And though I've had lunch with a few founders of Boston-based startups, including Adam Kanner of edu.com, I'm generally too immersed in my own business pursuits to network with other entrepreneurs in the local startup scene. But I don't regret this lack of socializing at all.
I see my immediate future on the Internet - and in a world where it seems clear I have only a couple of years to make my company worth $100 million, relegating most other interests to the future seems like a reasonable thing to do. Far from following a track that leads to fulfillment only after graduate school, I will feel like a failure if I'm unable to increase my companies' revenues to a few million dollars a year within the next year or two and if I am not a millionaire by my 24th birthday. I am in a mad dash to grow my business and accumulate money. I believe I can retire at 24 and that I will then start my life anew, becoming a musician or actor or pursuing another business idea.
When I become so obsessed with the immediate success of my business that I lose perspective, it is Kerri who reels me in. It's important to have someone to connect you to reality, to remind you that you are living a charmed life and that you cannot piss away what good fortune has brought you.
Still, I have to admit there are times I wish I had dropped everything and dropped out. Making a large amount of money at 21 greatly reduces my patience with teaching fellows who threaten to take points off my homework if I don't put my name at the top of every page, or with professors who are snide when I ask when the lecture videos will be available on the Web, or with teachers who don't allow late homework under any circumstances - even if I was in San Francisco on the due date, meeting with a potential strategic partner. Ultimately these are just minor annoyances, a small price to pay in order to leave school with a million-dollar company and a diploma, but they reflect Harvard's antiquated, and at times defensive, attitude toward the future.
Here's what I find curious: that college is not the hotbed of entrepreneurial energy it could be, given the number of talented and highly motivated students. I know of only two or three other serious entrepreneurs at Harvard who have six-figure revenues and the goal of making that number exponentially bigger. I attribute this situation to misguided bureaucratic policy.
The Harvard student handbook states: "Students resident in a University dormitory are not permitted to operate a business out of their room, whether the commodity be goods or services. No student shall use Harvard resources to conduct any business-related activities. No student may list his or her dormitory address, campus mailing address, telephone number, e-mail or Internet address, or website in conjunction with any business enterprise."
Clearly, strict compliance with the statute requires only that the student not use the university network, telephone number, or mailing address. With a cell phone, a separate ISP, and a PO box, a student can run a business and stay within the rules. But no student I have ever spoken to even understands what the statute means, and I'm certain the policy deters would-be entrepreneurs from trying to turn a good idea into a serious venture.
Harvard provides no undergraduate classes on HTML, ecommerce strategy, or, indeed, entrepreneurship. In fact, the only class related to computers that can be taken by novices is a work-intensive, irrelevant course on the C programming language. Nor does the university provide any support to student entrepreneurs hoping to find serious capital. (The one officially sanctioned competition awards a first prize of $5,000 each year to a student with a winning business plan.) I suspect that Harvard, with its focus on the classic liberal-arts curricula, typifies many elite institutions. But according to a recent study commissioned by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, 7 out of 10 of the nation's teenagers want to become entrepreneurs, and a majority of US teens would rather own a small business than manage a large corporation. This wealth of creative spirit is untapped on campuses nationwide because of inadequate support services.
Even Harvard Business School, of all places, takes an antientrepreneurial position by not allowing faculty to serve on the advisory boards of student ventures - unlike its counterparts at MIT, Northwestern, and Stanford. School policy also forbids students to renege on job offers they have accepted; this rule favors large corporations that recruit on campus early in the school year and hurts startups that might not fully recognize their staffing needs until the end of a student's final year.
I believe universities should incubate the entrepreneurial ideas of their students and help connect good ideas with resources and talent, much like an idealab! or a small-scale Silicon Valley. I believe such a policy would pay for itself many times over through large alumni donations. The more student entrepreneurs view a university as helping them achieve their dreams - as opposed to being a de facto hindrance - the more likely it is they will later want to give back to their alma maters.
Maybe I'm asking too much of Harvard - it's a university, not a startup incubator. But a fact often lost in the clamor over education for education's sake is that about half of Harvard's 1,600 seniors participate in on-campus recruiting, many of them finding entry-level positions at giant multinational investment banks and consulting firms. Standing in the midst of Harvard's career fair last fall, surrounded by McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and IBM information tables, it became clear to me why the university does not provide meaningful assistance to student entrepreneurs or to those interested in working for a startup. Harvard is already an industry incubator: It's one of the prime manufacturers of future investment bankers and consultants. These jobs entail brutally long hours and decades of climbing the corporate ladder - and, prior to the onslaught of the Internet, they were considered premier positions. (Just ask Jeff Bezos.) If Harvard were to turn off this spigot and instead offer meaningful entrepreneurship education and help students join startups, it would risk alienating big business.
I hope Harvard will consider how much riskier it is not to change. With the generation of tremendous wealth made possible by the Internet, colleges that assist their student entrepreneurs can usher in a fund-raising era unmatched since the time of Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. The entrepreneurs of today are not antieducation; like the 19th-century industrialist dynamos, they simply pursue a different interest, one that could result in fabulous wealth. If schools actually helped these students, they might see donations akin to Vanderbilt's gift to Nashville's Central University (later renamed after him) or Rockefeller's founding of the University of Chicago, and not the relatively paltry gifts of men like Bill Gates (Harvard dropout) and Steve Ballmer (Harvard graduate), who despite their combined net worth of more than $100 billion have underwritten only one building at Harvard - one valued at less than 0.2 percent of the university's total endowment.
I see a clear need for change by institutions that seem ignorant about the new economy, and I hope high school students will increasingly vote with their tuition dollars to attend universities that will help them pursue their dreams. Until then, college entrepreneurs will have to be driven a little harder to succeed and assume they will receive no deliberate assistance from their schools.
But don't drop out. As I have discovered, college campuses are excellent places to find employees and, depending on your major, can be a low-stress environment, ideally suited to working hours on end toward the achievement of one goal: an IPO.
As for me, I'll miss Harvard's ivy-covered buildings and philosophical dining-hall conversations, but I won't miss its heavy-handed policies, and the lack of a support network. When I graduate, I plan to move CyberEdit and CollegeGate to California, both for the weather and for access to a workforce galvanized by the possibilities of the Internet and the idea of participating in the largest business transformation of modern times. I know I will continue to recruit from the Harvard undergraduate student body. I hope that within a few years I can also return to campus as a speaker; I'll try to convince other students to do as I did. With any luck, it's advice they'll no longer need.
