A Tale of Two Sites

The Story of Student.Net

COURTESY SKLAR.COM

Ever since Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to create a small software company called Microsoft and became the world's richest man, college students have been lured by the promise of the big bucks that could come from starting a high-tech venture. Unfortunately, Gate's incredible success is the exception, not the rule. Industry magazine run countless stories of the computer start-ups that flounder after battles with media giants.

However, some start-ups do thrive, thanks to hard work, persistence, some luck, and solid connections. One example is Student.Net, a web publishing company whose founders included five Yale students and one Columbia student. Stewart Ugelow TC '97 -- who dropped out of Yale to run the company -- David Sklar BK '97, Eric Ng TD '97, Donnan Steele TC '97, Bret Martin, BR '97, and Johnathan Davis of Columbia founded Student.Net in December of 1995. Almost three years later, the Cambridge-based company, now with fifteen employees, has two successful sites under its belt: Student.com, (not to be confused with Student.Net, the name of the company) a website tailored for the college student and TVgrid.com, an interactive, customizable TV schedule. Ugelow and Sklar also run personal sites at ugelow.com and sklar.com, respectively.

'We thought we could do a better job.'

Sklar, now Student.Net's Chief Technical Officer, and Ugelow, the Chief Executive Officer, began the company -- along with their friends from Yale and Columbia -- with the idea of providing innovative content for college students.

COURTESY SKLAR.COM Student.Net's David Sklar, BK '97

"I was a junior at Yale in 1995, and some friends of mine at school and myself and another friend at Columbia were not psyched about what was available online for college students," Sklar said. "We thought we could do a better job."

Ugelow agreed that there was a need for such a college site. "It was something we had talked about, and I had done a lot of writing about the Internet for professional media organizations, so I knew there was a real opportunity there," Ugelow said. "College students were online in greater numbers than any other demographic group, and all of the services people were launching from a commercial standpoint were aimed at people like my parents."

COURTESY UGELOW.COM Steven Ugelow, Student.net's, artistically represented

To cater to the vast online college population, Sklar, Ugelow and company created the Student.Com website with a vision of providing "a place online for college students where they could meet other college students, read original content that was created by other college students -- do things that traditional media didn't allow."

However, there were a number of pitfalls and obstacles that Sklar, Ugelow, and company had to overcome. "We're trying to solve the same problems that tens of hundreds of other online publications are trying to solve, too," Sklar said. "If you're the TV news department or the New York Times, people have been doing the type of thing they're doing, there's lots of established ways of doing things. Online, you're trying to figure out new ways of involving users."

Sklar explained that since customers are no longer simply readers, the trick is to figure out "ways to get things that they're interested in, in addition to trying to make everyone happy."

Ugelow adds that it was difficult being so young and inexperienced, "Any time you run a start-up it's hard, especially when none of you have any experience," he said. Not only did they lack knowledge of how companies work, they were too young to rent cars, had no credit histories when applying for a corporate credit hard, and lacked credibility in luring talented employees.

The secrets of success

Eventually, the company managed to find success, due to a few solid connections with other, larger media companies. These cooperative alliances include work with Rent.Net, an online real estate directory; JobDirect.com, a job search service; the venture capital firm Media One (formerly US West Media Group), the Washington Post; and the search engine Northern Light. However, like many web-publishing companies, Student.Net is still operating in the red. Though Ugelow said that the company is currently not making profits, he and Sklar both highlighted the variety of potent connections, frequent visitors and bright minds that the company draws on.

Sklar explains that starting from the ground up has led to a gradual growthwhich will hopefully continue. "We're an Internet company that's been in the business for three years, which is a rarity. [The company has] changed and grown a lot since December 1995," Sklar said. "There's new stuff everyday. It's a lot busier and more vibrant now."

The success can be attributed in part to the Internet's wide audience and low production costs. "One of the things that was helpful about being online [was that] it was a lot easier to start a web site to reach a lot of college students than a magazine to reach a lot of college students," Sklar said.

Now located in Cambridge, the company has two divisions: those in charge of producing editorial content and those who take care of the presentation and interactivity. The company focuses on maintaining its two flagship sites, Student.Com and TVgrid.Com.

The content: College life and the couch potato's best friend.

The Student.Com site provides a destination that helps teenagers meet one another, provides discounts on various items, and supplies interesting reading material written by the staff and student correspondents from colleges across the nation. For example, one past article, inspired by the Yale Daily News' freshman issue, covered sexual acts that take place inside college libraries.

The site's interactive features include a reject-o-matic to send fake job rejection letters from McDonald's or Arthur Andersen, numerous surveys (i.e. Ally McBeal - cool or annoying? 51% gave her a thumb's up), a personals section, and tailored content for registered users. However, the customized section, at present, is still limited. A custom page for Yale students simply provides a few extra links to Yale Broadcasting Company (WYBC) and the YDN.

One major plus for the site is the limited advertising, according to the company. A page on the site explains, "We're not a marketing ploy and you won't find any advertising in content's clothing, unless it's really funny or they have really, really deep pockets (think: Sultan of Brunei)."

The website lists numerous "Media Mentions." Student.Com reached the "Point Top 5% of the Web" twice, and received accolades from Yahoo!, Microsoft MSN, the New York Times Online, and AmericaOnLine. In addition, the site has received positive press reviews from The Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times,and Rolling Stone.

Student.Net's second website, TVgrid.Com, follows the same vision of Student.Com - providing better, more interesting content to a specific audience. For Tvgrid.Com, the audience consists of TV viewers, and the content includes TV listings in a grid format, customized for a user's location. Sklar explains that the site attempts to outdo its competition through a variety of assets, including using the best and most current information available and interactive features such as the ability to get email reminders about shows. The TVgrid site can also be customized so that visitors can easily jump to their local schedules, and a search engine to find show times.

The Yale factor

Now that the company has two successful sites under its belt, the six founders, can look back at the role their college educations played in their careers. Because Ugelow and other staff members dropped out, it is unlcear whether college contributed to their sucess.

In some ways, attending Yale while starting the company proved to be a liability. "I traveled a lot when we first started this," Ugelow said. "I had a couple of very supportive professors who were willing to look the other way on a couple of deadlines." He also pointed out that students at other universities reportedly can receive class credit or other support for such an undertaking.

However, he also points out that Yale's collection of brilliant people, which provided five of the six founders, was integral to the creation of Student.Net. "I would never have met my partners any other way," Ugelow said. "We took advantage of the same reason that people come to Yale in the first place - you go to class with the smartest people in the country, live with them, learn with them, work with them." And while he felt that what he learned as a history major was not very applicable to his career, he says New Haven offered other resources -- for example, their lawyer is still based in the Elm city.

Sklar had similar sentiments. "There is not much computer-science specific [skills] that [are] helpful now that I learned at Yale," Sklar said. "Most of what is helpful is the random and diverse things that I learned in taking all those classes about all sorts of things. It makes it easier to think of all sorts of ideas of what to put on the website."

Sklar, content with his career choice, advises future Yale grads "to not fall into the clutches of investment banks. And while it can be difficult to start your own business, there are a lot of opportunities for quirky, small companies."

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