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 Entrepreneurs Truong, Chao, and Sternglanz. FLINT BORN |
Most students see recruiting as a chance to join a corporation. But Wellie Chao '98, Seth Sternglanz '98, and Phuc Truong '98 saw it as an opportunity to start one. In their junior year they founded Crimson Solutions, an on-line firm with a small but lucrative niche helping campus career centers streamline corporate recruiting.
Today the 17-person company is based in Boston. At its website, www.crimson-solutions.com, students can find company information and meeting and interview schedules, and send electronic résumés to prospective employers. (In one three-day period last December, the site received 60,000 page-views just from Harvard students.) For employees at Harvard's Office of Career Services (OCS), the amount of paperwork involved with recruiting has dropped substantially, letting them focus on counseling and workshops.
The idea for Crimson Solutions came to Chao during a summer-job hunt. While researching possible employers at OCS, he had to run out to get change for the photocopier. When he returned, the office had closed, and by next day, someone had ripped out the information he wanted to copy. "I was really frustrated. There's got to be a better way of doing it, I thought," says Chao. The Internet offered an obvious solution: "If we put this on the Web, everybody would have access to it 24 hours a day." Chao approached OCS, they drew up a contract for $3,000, and he spent the summer programming with his blockmates. In the fall, they expanded the service to other schools, including Brown and Wellesley.
Over lunch in March of senior year, the three committed to going into business full-time. Crimson Solutions had won second place in a Harvard Business School entrepreneurship contest, impressing one judge so much that he became a major investor. "I realized there was no better time to start your own business than right out of college," Truong says, "especially in the Internet industry where failure or success comes within a year or two and the start-up costs are low." Now Sternglanz is vice president of technical support, Truong is vice president for new product development, and Chao is chief information officer--although, as Sternglanz says, the titles don't dictate boundaries: "As in any growing company, everyone tends to do the random tasks that don't fall exactly under one person's responsibility."
Despite the corporate titles, the young entrepreneurs were until recently treading a narrow line between college and the "real world." Truong's mother used to bring home-cooked Vietnamese food to their former Charlestown office almost daily. Occasionally Chao still bikes to meetings in the Boston area. "We don't have families to support. We're used to being poor and toughing it out," says Truong. "And even if we fail, we'll gain so much experience that plenty of employers would love to hire us." (In fact, Chao reports, competitors are "really taking us seriously," and the team has brought in two experienced managers to help with the business side.)
Running a company has already proved trying, with clients who choose rivals, unexpected electricity outages, and computer problems. "Some days it's really bad," says Chao. "But you can never lose perspective"--keeping an eye on the long run. The team wants Crimson Solutions to be a one-stop career shop for students nationwide. "With the 45 schools already signed up, we have access to roughly 400,000 students," Chao says. "We hope to grow way past a million."
~ Jennifer 8. Lee