My Story: From a Dot-Com Bust to Stanford B-School & Authorship

I don’t know where it came from but I did know that the guys on the board made big decisions for the company and you could make a living going to board meetings and talking about big ideas. After you wrote down your goal, the teacher told us we had to find someone who had that job and interview them. I found a friend of mine’s dad who used to run Gymboree and now runs a nano-tech company. It was a great learning experience.

And I always grew up having admired Stanford because of its prestige and reputation but also because it was my local college. After getting rejected from Stanford, I went to Duke where I majored in economics and computer science. That was very intentional having come from Silicon Valley. I knew I wanted to do a startup so I thought that would be a good mix.

At Duke, I was president of my fraternity and president of the Greek honor society. I learned a lot of stuff outside the classroom in terms of leadership, but even at the end of school in 2005 I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do so in my senior year I got a job as a consultant with Marakon Associates. I did that for about a year and one-half in New York. I learned a ton about business and I worked with some really smart people. But consulting was ultimately not for me. I wanted to do something on my own. I have always been very entrepreneurial. Without knowing what I wanted to do, I actually left the firm, moved back home for three months where I tried to come up with business ideas.

I went to the library every day for three months and that’s when I started talking with a friend of mine in Los Angeles who managed Barry Manilow. I had met him through my fraternity. We started talking about different business ideas. I said, ‘hey, you control all the tickets to Barry Manilow’s concerts. Maybe let’s start an auction where we can sell the best seats.’ So during the early summer of 2007, I started a business called FrontRowManilow.com. It was an auction site where fans could bid for the best seats. Manilow was doing 60 shows a year then, and we would get 15 to 30 tickets for each show to auction. Before, scalpers would scoop these tickets up and charge exorbitant prices. We were able to stop that. It was better for the artist because he was able to capture some of the value that otherwise would have been captured by the scalpers. And it was my first website.

It was a niche business but it did well enough to get me a start. I’m no longer involved but it’s still up. I gave up my ownership interest in the company before school started so I would have more time to focus on school. When I applied to Stanford, I was still running the site.

In August of 2007, I started JuicyCampus. I did a lot of brainstorming and I thought that college students were spending more and more time online. I thought people spend a lot of time gossiping offline so why not give them a place to gossip online. It seemed like a logical next step. What I failed to realize was all of the differences between online and offline and the differences are tremendous. I started the site thinking this would just be a fun site where college students could come and have fun and gossip like they do offline. And then it turned into something I had never anticipated. It was much more negative. The posts became just vicious. It was within the first few months. There were lots of personal attacks and accusations. It just got very mean.

But at the peak, we had about one million unique visitors a month, got lots of attention from the media, and raised $1 million from investors. We had office space in Los Angeles and 11 employees. The plan had been to raise more funding but by October of 2008 the economy really crashed down. So we ran out of money and had to shut the site down on Feb. 5, 2009. I thought it was a good time to apply to business school and that’s when I applied to Stanford, Harvard, and Kellogg.

My first impressions when I came to Stanford? I was just blown away. I knew this was an incredible place. There are not that many spots like Stanford in the world. It’s exciting. It’s inspiring. There is just so much to do here. There are a million ideas. The faculty is incredibly smart. So is the staff and my classmates. Everyone impresses. The new campus is sensational. It’s fostering a new level of community and learning that is remarkable.

Cons? I really can’t think of anything. I am really happy here. The hardest thing about the GSB is there is so much going on that time management is difficult, but this is a good problem to have.