Editors note: Juliana is currently a Sophomore studying Physics & Computer Science at Harvard and BostInno’s CampusConnect representative. She is an active member in the Harvard community and a member of the entrepreneurs club. Stay tuned for more updates on Harvard’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and some of the young startups not yet covered!
When most people think of Harvard entrepreneurs Facebook and Microsoft usually come to mind. However, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates were both college drop outs and never graduated. Meet the next generation of Harvard entrepreneurs; two student web start ups that you better be keeping an eye on: HerCampus, an online magazine that customizes itself to your college, aiming for 1000+ colleges in the next few years, and ParallelCities, a soon-to-be phone app that helps you connect with the right people at live events, with a focus on professional networking events.
Bostinnovation spoke to student leaders from these initiatives, and here’s what they had to say:
Who are you? Responses by Stephanie Kaplan (Harvard Class of 2010). Other key figures are Windsor Hanger (Harvard Class of 2010), Annie Wang (Class of 2011)
What do you do? HerCampus.com is an online magazine for college women that individualizes its content college-by-college by establishing My Campus branches at schools across the country. With national content on Style, Health, Love, DormLife, and Career, supplemented by campus-specific content produced by teams of students at 60+ colleges across the country, Her Campus serves as a hub for everything college women need to know about today.
How did it happen? Windsor, Annie, and I met as undergrads at Harvard through running Harvard’s lifestyle and fashion magazine, Freeze. After we transitioned Freeze online, it experienced enormous success, and we decided to enter Harvard’s business plan competition, the i3 Innovation Challenge, with our idea for Her Campus. We won i3 and launched in September 2009, one year ago. Since then we have grown from 1 campus branch to 60+, from a team of 3 to a team of 500+ college students, formed content partnerships with Seventeen and The Huffington Post, marketing partnerships with Juicy Couture, New Balance, Rent the Runway, and been featured on ABC, Fox News, and in The Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report, CNN Money, AOL Money College, Business Insider, among others. My co-founders and I were named to Inc. magazine’s 30 Under 30 Coolest Young Entrepreneurs. Three years from now, Her Campus will have expanded to branches at 1000+ colleges and be the leading expert in the college space for advertisers, consumers, and media outlets.
How did Harvard support you? Harvard’s resources for entrepreneurs have been critical to our success. The i3 Innovation Challenge gave us the momentum to launch our venture, and the office space we received at HSA from the competition is absolutely amazing and has enabled us to run our business so much better than we could have without it. We love working in the Innovation space with tons of other start-ups right around us- there is so much creativity and passion and it is a really inspiring place to work. We have also met so many amazing people that Harvard has brought in as speakers, who have become invaluable contacts for us.
Describe Boston in three words. Ambitious, Young, Inventive
Who are you? Responses by Sidi Gomes (CEO and Co-Founder of ParallelCities) who received a masters degree in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School Design. Other key figures are Teddy Wing (Co-Founder and CTO,Tufts Undergraduate, Class of 2011), and Elizabeth Tang (CMO, Harvard Undergraduate, Class of 2011).
What do you do? “ParallelCities is like Foursquare, but for strangers. It is launching as a geo-location social networking mobile application that adds a layer of information to the people surrounding you at live events, allowing you to overcome the information gap that prevents you from finding and connecting to the right people. We are focusing on professional networking events where the participants are already spending a great deal of time and resources on making new connections. However, they are confined to using the old-fashioned method of shaking enough hands in the room such that hopefully, by the end of the event, they have connected with the right people. We recognize that this is a very ineffective method – a shot in the dark, so to speak, and ParallelCities has therefore created a much more systematic and dynamic way of making these connections.”
How did it happen? “ParallelCities started as my master’s “Digital Urbanism” thesis project, which was a social internet browser of sorts. However, given its easier means of implementation, it has evolved into a mobile application for your smartphone. In three years from now, ParallelCities will be the social networking platform of choice for the world’s urban populations. The problem in today’s big cities is that out of the thousands of people we meet, only a small percentage are people with whom we share a meaningful common interest. However, through social augmented reality, ParallelCities allows you to find this unique set of people, thereby preventing meaningful connections from being unrealized.”
How did Harvard support you? ParallelCities is a direct outcome of my master’s thesis project, so I cannot say that being [at Harvard] didn’t influence its ultimate realization tremendously. However, I do feel that much of the impact occurred after I left campus and began to discover its business resources. In particular, I shifted the project’s focus significantly as I began thinking about it from an execution standpoint. I look forward to utilizing even more of the HBS resources directly in the coming months, starting with the Business Plan competition.
Describe Boston in three words. “HAHvahd,” “chowder,” “Sox/Celtics”
Stay tuned to hear more about the latest and greatest innovative initiatives on Harvard’s campus!
