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December 2010
Cornell Alum Attempts to Make a Living on the Internet
This is a guest post from Walter Chen, BS '04, as part of an ongoing series of posts about his experiences as a Cornell startup founder in San Francisco. He is the co-founder of Leasely, which makes online tenant screening dead simple. Walter previously contributed to Lincoln on MetaEzra. He can be reached at @smalter or walter@leasely.com. I saved about $100k working one year as a lawyer, but with $50k in educational debt and zero income over the past three months, I'm in a situation in which I really should try making money soon. At least, I feel that way. Leasely will only start generating revenue once we're able to sell our dead simple online tenant screening services. We're busy jumping through various regulatory hoops with respect to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act and credit bureau rules. I freaked out a little bit the other day -- you know, lying in bed, late at night and far from home, thinking, man, I need to make money real soon now or the dream will be dead. There's the far flung dream of immense and immediate startup success. Reading about dudes that are younger than you who just made a zillion bucks can make a guy impatient. But there's an even more basic question of whether you're capable of simply making a living in a situation of your own devising. It might be a sad fact to face that you can only survive off the largesse of someone else who knows how to create wealth. In something of a manic fit, over the holidays, while some guys were hanging with their families, and maybe other guys were working feverishly on their startups, I kicked off a few new websites to start my media empire side business. The concept is that my media empire will pay my bills while I keep working to make that apartment rental application process happen online. I started CaptchaTV.com with a friend. Basically, go there to read some thoughtful analysis on Community and Mad Men. It was easy for me to start a StarCraft fansite named after myself, because I'm pretty good at the game and I'm an egomaniac. With a different friend, I started MagicalMoFo.com, which makes it painless to submit your startup for coverage, reviews, mentions, and links. I helped a third friend, a law buddy, build JudgeFederal.com, which will become the comprehensive source of information on federal judges, their law clerks, and the judging process. And there's one last secret site that hasn't come out yet. So far from all those sites I've made about $12 maybe $4 of which came from ads and $8 of which came from sales. All my fears have been allayed. In about a week's time, those valuable internet properties have received about 3,500 visitors. Right now, the math isn't looking great. I'm hoping that without expending much effort, I can have the three content sites each at about 10k visitors per month, which is 30k total monthly. That's about $40/month. Not pretty. The $8 of sales came from MagicalMoFo.com, and probably represented the first time I've sold something I created to a stranger on the internet. The problem there is that I'm not sure the site is scalable. And I don't mean scalable to the gazillion dudes out there with fledgling startups -- I mean whether I can even handle 10 orders per day. I went to a website where you can pay a Filipino guy $.50 per hour to get carpel tunnel for you. The service MagicalMoFo provides involves me hiring "SEO consultants" in India to do some cutting, pasting, and clicking on my behalf. I guess the way to go if I get any kind of volume is to hire some Indian guys to supervise other Indian guys. I already trust Pankaj, so he's probably a good choice. The other day my co-founder Rodrigo regretted screwing around in college when he could've been building valuable internet properties (like MagicalMoFo.com) without concern for this boring life stuff. I feel the better for it, in some ways, though. The compelled resourcefulness and the sense of scrappiness -- those motivate. First, apartment rental applications, StarCraft, startup SEO, television criticism, internet wiki law, and some other thing -- next, the world. Walter Chen | December 30, 2010 (#) Merry Christmas To All While the gang here at MetaEzra is busy judging the results from our MetaEzra holiday contest, we'll let E.B. White '21 take us away: All of my best to you and yours this season. Matthew Nagowski | December 24, 2010 (#) One Thought on Opium Longtime readers of MetaEzra know that I'm not one to indulge in sex and booze stories, to say nothing about an English major turned heroin dealer. It's a big world. And Cornell is a big place filled with all types of people, so something like this was bound to happen at some point. Let's just trust that she wasn't the recipient of any of my annual fund gift money. But it does give one pause to ask just who was she selling to. Six ounces of pure heroin yields around 3500 doses of the stuff. And I certainly think that there can't be more than a handful of heroin users among Cornell students. The incidence of use among the general adult population might be around 0.2 percent, so that would be associated with around 40 students users at Cornell and 200 in the Ithaca area. So that might be an upper bound to the Tompkins County heroin market, or so one can hope. Matthew Nagowski | December 21, 2010 (#) Bob Saget is a Pledge, Sort Of I'll add a few things to Matt's earlier post about Bob Saget's made-for-TV pledging experience at Seal & Serpent. Quick points: Although the episode uses the toga party as the culminating event, and I remember that the party was talked about a lot that weekend, these types of big events were not the most memorable parts of my fraternity experience. For one, unless you have Bob Saget there, most parties attract freshmen as guests with a few sophomores and juniors thrown in. By the time I was a junior, and definitely by senior year, the only time I would party with my upperclassmen friends was when I went out in Collegetown. Moreover, during my time as president, my social chair and I came to loathe open parties. So many things can - and did - go wrong during big parties, and they really weren't too much fun when you had to talk to inspectors and police, send people to the hospital, clean up, and manage everything going on in the house. The real fun of being in a fraternity is just the experience of living with some of your closest friends. Saget hits on this dynamic a little bit at the end, when he's sitting on the roof with a few of the brothers. These kinds of interpersonal connections are more meaningful and more lasting than open parties. Still, this was a really cool experience for Seal & Serpent, and (unlike as was rumored) they didn't have to reveal any secrets for the episode. If Saget wants to make a sequel episode in which he receives more serious hazing, he can contact Mr. Elkin's fraternity. Elie Bilmes | December 20, 2010 (#) A Joke On Fair Cornell Seth Meyers, of course, is a Northwestern Wildcat, and brilliantly manages to make the real joke on Harvard: Matthew Nagowski | December 19, 2010 (#) University Archives at Center of Albany Bickering In a curious incident of Albany-style pork, outgoing Governor David Paterson has earmarked a quarter million dollars to Cornell to archive his papers from his governorship. New York State is one of the few states in the country to not have strict archival rules in place, and in allocating the funds to Cornell, Paterson has actually vetoed a law that would have required all future executive-office papers to be archived at the New York State Archives, along with such governors as Al Smith, George Clinton, and FDR. Needless to say, a lot in Albany aren't happy about Paterson's veto, which they note is costing the state money: "Had they come here, the taxpayers wouldn't have seen any extra expense," said Christine Ward, who maintains the papers of governors Alfred E. Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Cultural Education Building on Madison Avenue. "The governor's records would have been included along with all the other records being transitioned," Ward said. "I have many colleagues at Cornell University in the archives there and they are a highly respected archival organization, and I respect them. But I am always concerned, as a general rule, when records that are public records go out of public custody." The incident raises a lot of curious questions as to not only: 1) why Paterson would veto the bill (does he have anything to hide?), and 2) why did Paterson pick Cornell, of all places? After all, he's from downstate and attended Columbia. To be sure, Paterson seems to have developed an affinity for Ithaca and Cornell over the course of his tenure in Albany: his daughter attended Ithaca College and Paterson frequently makes appearances at things like Cornell's Sy Katz parade in Manhattan. But in the spirit of cutting the bloat out of Albany (and being a Cornell homer), here's an idea: disband the New York State Archives and store all of the material at Cornell. Cornell, as the state's land grant institution, is the perfect repository for such papers. Matthew Nagowski | December 19, 2010 (#) Jerk Cornell Alum Tries to Build Startup Based on Caring This is a guest post from Walter Chen, BS '04, as part of an ongoing series of posts about his experiences as a Cornell startup founder in San Francisco. He is the co-founder of Leasely, which makes online tenant screening dead simple. I've never been a particularly successful student. My high school grades were bad enough that at some point, by dad broached the subject of community college. My cousin Eric was a Marshall Scholar and got his Ph.D from Oxford in Mechanical Engineering. Once we were chatting, and Eric leaned in and told me his secret. He said, "Pretend like you care." When I was just starting out with Leasely, I described the concept to Kevin, a close friend of mine. I told him about the product from a few different angles. I said it was as simple as taking a process from pen and paper to the internet. I also compared it to a common application for apartments that high school students have for colleges. He said, "It sounds like a great opportunity." "But," he added, "I'm personally not looking for opportunity -- I'm looking for inspiration." One dominant analogy playing itself out on the web right now is that of customer happiness as business development. I think it would be tough to have that maniacal drive to make customers happy without caring for them and being inspired to help them through technology. People like Tony Hsieh and Steve Jobs are showing dweebs like myself how technology should be a means to the end goal of providing a great user experience. When I was in college, I remember some guy happened to walk by my open dorm room door and did a double take. He asked, "Did I see you in Goldwin Smith last week yelling at your English professor?" "Probably!" I said. I also got into it with my technical writing professor because he thought I mocked him openly in class. I did regret my contentiousness once -- I argued at length with a computer science professor for giving me a B+ after I had gotten a 100 on every exam and assignment before doing poorly on the final project. I didn't have much of a leg to stand on -- my program took about 8 minutes to launch when it should've taken a second or two -- and it didn't work. It seems like young programmers these days are far more business savvy, and I imagine that their arguments are less about, say, how nice functional programming is, and more about how to get customers coming back to their site for more. I know that programmers and computer scientists have a heritage of lionizing the outcast and rebel, and it's hard to do your own thing without financial independence. In establishing my new venture, I'm forced to move away from my previously combative instincts and instead focus on the needs to the customer. To my surprise, I don't have to take Eric's advice here; with both economic independence and pride on the line, I do genuinely care. Walter Chen | December 16, 2010 (#) Things That Can Boil My Big Red Blood 'Tis the season to be jolly. But alas, there have still been some things that have been getting underneath my skin recently. Here's a non-exhaustive list: 1) Calling unpaid alumni leadership 'volunteers'. What's in a name? Not much. But there's something a bit demoralizing about how the alumni office refers to unpaid club presidents, class correspondents, college alumni board chairs, etc., as volunteers. Are the leaders of student organizations considered to be volunteers? Nope. And neither should alumni. It's not like we're volunteering our time for the local soup kitchen. Sure, we're volunteering our time and effort, but it's so much more than that. We're engaging and leading a community that we love. If you want to get technical, everybody on the Board of Trustees is an unpaid volunteer too. But I don't think anybody is going to refer to Meinig as a volunteer anytime soon. And besides, Chris Marshall is the secretary of the Cornell Alumni Association. So he works for us. 2) Referring to a singular alumnus or alumna as a plural alumni. Latin may be an elitist language more befitting the folks at places like Harvard and Yale. But that doesn't mean Cornellians should be uneducated about its use. 3) Fraternity brothers who denigrate other fraternities. I wasn't in a fraternity, and I'm often of a 'plague on both your houses' mindset, but when you have graduating seniors like Andrew Elkin engaging in antics more befitting a middle-schooler, it really makes you wonder what type of value-added the Greek system is providing campus. Here's Elkin taking a back-handed swipe at Seal and Serpent in the Sun's coverage of Bob Saget's Cornell television show: “There are high school students across the country that watch that and to them, this is the Cornell Greek system and that’s just unfortunate,” said Elkin, a member of Phi Gamma Delta. Would Elkin rather have had Seal and Serpent members binge drinking and date-raping freshman girls on television? Or maybe calling each other bro and texting each other 'HMU' while bragging about how wasted they got last weekend? Or was he just disappointed that the brothers didn't know how to find the prime factorization of 42? Inquiring minds would like to know. 4) Roughly 6500 people have read MetaEzra for one reason or the other in the last few weeks. But we still have only received a handful of submissions for MetaEzra's holiday contest -- 161 things that every Cornell alumnus/a must do. Enough. That's the real reason for this list. Stop trolling Facebook and IvyGate and submit your entries today! Matthew Nagowski | December 15, 2010 (#) Revisiting the Budget Model InsideHigherEd is running a story today on the endless debate in higher education administration: should university budgets be centralized or decentralized? As MetaEzra readers know, Cornell, perhaps possessing one of the most complicated budgets in the country due to its unique convergence of public and private funds, has recently planned for a more centralized budget model, and IHE picks up on the story: “You’re essentially undoing the decentralization that has made Cornell the great institution that it is,” said John Bishop, associate professor of human resource studies in the ILR School. “The provost gets the power to kill off a campus if he wants to and to do whatever he wants.” In a Friday interview, Bishop told Inside Higher Ed that he worried a centralized model might involve high-level administrators in decisions on hiring, which are best left to experts in their fields. Moreover, there are healthy incentives for colleges and schools to pull their own weight in a decentralized system, he said. Bishop is unable to argue the counter-factual, however, and it's possible that Cornell could be an even greater institution if there was more cooperation, say, in public health research and programs across the colleges. As I've written before there can be very high costs to decentralization. “If [schools] are successful, they should continue,” Bishop said. “If they’re not, then the provost should decide, 'I can’t subsidize these guys so they are going to go down.' ” Bishop's comment is also striking because as a contract college professor he surely knows that four of Cornell's schools would not be 'pulling their own weight' were it not for funding from the state of New York. And anybody have any thoughts as to how much student demand there would be for ILR were it not for the discounted tuition? At any rate, the article goes on to report that Cornell still hasn't figured out how it's going to implement its centralized budget process just yet: The fears Bishop and others expressed have not come to fruition at Cornell, because the university hasn’t adopted the task force’s recommendations, said Elmira Mangum, Cornell’s vice president for budget and planning. At the same time, the university is reviewing its budget policies and aiming to develop a system that is more transparent and standardized across colleges, she said. Let's hope that examination comes sooner rather than later. Matthew Nagowski | December 13, 2010 (#) Most Students Who Turn Down Cornell Attend Non-Top Schools Back in August, MetaEzra was the first to break the news that Cornell would begin matching the financial aid packages for students accepted at other Ivies. At the time, we noted that the policy was both a merit-aid policy in disguise and an attempt to get around the Ivy League's crack-down on Cornell's enhanced need-based aid offerings for athletes. And now the Chronicle is reporting about the latest evolution in Cornell's financial aid policy: "While we do not have hard evidence that financial aid was the primary factor, we think it is safe to assume that net price could be one of the top five factors," Keane said. Cornell has no way of knowing how many students will take the university up on its offer. Thus, the range of anticipated costs is wide, from $800,000 to $1.8 million in the first year, and $2.8 million to $7.2 million over four years. Cornell has not yet announced its plan to pay for the added costs associated with the policy; Keane said fundraising is likely to play a role. Without the new policy, some families would have paid up to $100,000 to attend Cornell rather than one of its competitors. For example, a family who earns $250,000 a year would not have qualified for aid from Cornell to pay for the $55,000 price tag. But the same family would have paid less than half that, or $25,000, for its student to go to Harvard, Keane said. "Now, we're saying that student will pay $25,000 to go to Cornell and get $30,000 in aid," he said. The article is noteworthy not only for discussing how much the new plan may cost the University, but also for explicitly detailing where students who turn down Cornell end-up attending. Here's a chart I put together:
Matthew Nagowski | December 11, 2010 (#) Cornell Alum Newly Minted CEO of Unrenowned Silicon Valley Startup This is a guest post from Walter Chen, BS '04, as part of an ongoing series of posts about his experiences as a Cornell startup founder in San Francisco. He is the co-founder of Leasely, which makes online tenant screening dead simple. Walter previously contributed to Lincoln on MetaEzra. My dad's a mathematician, and he can be stern. When I was applying to college, I asked my dad at dinner, "What do you think about Cornell?" A guy a year older than me had gone there from my high school. "It's overrated," he said. "Well that's where I'm going!" I replied. I applied early sight-unseen, got in, and off I went to frosty Ithaca, New York. I had this thought when I was in high school, like, "Uh oh, in college, I'm expected to pick one thing and study it. How will I be able to do that when I hate everything?" Driving around my hometown before freshman orientation, I figured that computer science would be my major because that was the only high school class I didn't sleep in. My dad had been worried that Ithaca was geographically situated too far from Silicon Valley, but was mollified by a Cornell admissions person who told him that half the CS graduating class in 2000 were CEOs. I don't remember any CEOs from my graduating class. I didn't know much back in my high school days. I thought about applying to USC to be near Silicon Valley and date hot snobby girls. Well USC has a great football team with lots of tradition and cool colors. That's the same reason I liked Michigan growing up. I remember talking to my older cousin Mike about where he'd go to college. I said, "You should go to Michigan because they have a great football team with lots of tradition and cool colors." Mike said, "I'm thinking of going to Cornell." I said, "Where?" After Cornell, I went to Michigan for law school (following in the footsteps of my idol, Ann Coulter), then I had a year in Detroit clerking for a judge, and then a year in New York City working at a law firm. Now I'm in San Francisco, working on my own startup with a few of my buddies. Earlier today, I went to buy some pricey health insurance because I spent half the day yesterday first discovering, and then freaking out about necrotizing fasciitis (also known as "flesh-eating bacteria"). The insurance agent asked me what my current occupation is. That's a long way of saying -- I'm finally a CEO. The managing partner at my old law firm had worked his way up in the prosecutor's office in the Southern District of New York, had made partner at the big important New York law firm of Cleary Gottlieb, and used to be General Counsel at 3M. I founded my startup in a day and then I told him, "Hey, now we're both General Counsels!" He graciously wished me well without diminishing my accomplishment. Picking a college was just a shot in the dark for me, but more than ever what it's shaping into is a band of fellow travelers. As a startup, I feel more alone than ever without the support of an institution, its prestige and history, and its people and processes. My insurance agent gave me an apple to eat for my walk home because she figured that I was poor. But what I have as a result of my associations with fancy institutions is not a name for strangers to know but friends and friendly people with a shared past wanting to see me succeed. Check out my upcoming series of posts to follow the harrowing life of a Cornell kid doing the startup thing in the San Francisco Bay Area. And if you want up-to-the-minute updates, then follow me on Twitter. I can be reached by email at walter@leasely.com. Walter Chen | December 10, 2010 (#) Bob Saget and Seal and Serpent I had completely forgotten about Bob Saget's television show featuring the Seal and Serpent fraternity until MetaEzra reader AB reminded us of the show and the fact that the entire episode is available for free on A&E's website. AB writes: The sloppy math from frat member '42' in not only an insult to the spirit of Douglas Adams but it is also ironic considering elsewhere in the show Bob Saget gushes over having a conversation with a frat brother who actually uses the word 'oligopolist' in a sentence. Otherwise, I'm not the best contributor on this site to talk about the portrayal of Cornell's Greek system, but the brothers come across as earnest and genuine (even if some of them seemed like they had a makeover just for the show), the alma mater is used as background music on many occasion, and the sweeping vistas of the Cornell campus (con fences) are breathtaking, as always. Bob Saget even sheds a tear or two when he's not making jokes about male genitalia and waxing false-poetic about the life of college students. I'm certain more official arbiters of taste will beg to differ, but good job, Seal and Serpent. You made this decidedly non-Greek alumnus proud. Matthew Nagowski | December 08, 2010 (#) Africana Ruckus Distracts From Real Changes MetaEzra has been too busy dreaming up the 161 things that every Cornell alumnus must do to weigh in the controversy over the Provost's announcement that Africana Studies will receive increased funding to launch a PhD program while having its oversight functions transferred from the Provost's office to the College of Arts and Sciences. But, I couldn't help but to finally chime in: Isn't it ironic that in a year of traumatizing budget cuts, including the dismantling of the Education, Swedish, and Dutch programs, along with the gutting of Mathematics and Theatre, Film, and Dance, that the announcement of a budget increase would yield the biggest protests? Of course, the subtext behind the move and the resulting student protests is that the vocal faculty members are actually not so much concerned about the fate of Africana Studies at Cornell (which I suspect will prosper) but of the fate of their particular niche of research and expertise: the ideology of identity and protest as a means to overcome racial barriers in society. By coming under the purview of Arts and Sciences, Africana faculty will see more overlap with sociologists and economists who may have a different way of thinking about race in a globalized century. The problem, of course, is that Fuchs's decision doesn't reflect a racial barrier, it reflects an administrative need. And so students are now being treated like pawns in a game of faculty politics, told by their professors to put up a fight over something that would undeniably help them: being exposed to different and opposing perspectives on their major. Isn't that what an education in the liberal arts should be all about? Here's one anonymous black alum writing on the Daily Sun's website: I think what the faculty in Africana fear most is review from Arts and Sciences and they fear that new Professors who are actually experts in African languages, religions, and economics can be brought in. In other words, they are fearful for their jobs. The New York Times actually hinted at this trend a couple months back when it reported that culture is now (again) an acceptable pursuit of study for questions of poverty: But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned. Perhaps it is time to re-assess the culture of protest on Cornell's campus, and where exactly it is getting the involved parties. It's obvious that those who consistently teach a culture of difference aren't getting anywhere. One final thought: the ability to disagree encompasses more forms than just vocal protest; students might even be able to learn how to use the power of theatre and film to convey powerful messages were it not for the gutting of that department last year. Matthew Nagowski | December 06, 2010 (#) |
-- WSJ: Cornell Wins NYC Tech Campus Bid (EBilmes) -- Barrier Update: City Approves Nets (DJost) -- Big Red Cymbal Guy (Nagowski) -- New York Times Survey on Campus Recruiting is Flawed (KScott) -- Barrier Update: Legal precedent suggests City of Ithaca will not be held liable for gorge suicide (DJost) -- Despite MSG Loss, Big Potential for Big Red Hockey (EBilmes) -- City Council Will Vote on Suicide Nets (DJost) -- An Encounter on the Upper East Side (Nagowski) -- Showing Off Your School Spirit (Nagowski) -- Chipotle Ithaca? (KScott) -- Cornell at the ING NYC Marathon (KScott) -- Crossing Over a Fine Line: Commercial Activity on Campus (KScott) -- Milstein's Downfall (Nagowski) -- Can any Cornell-associated organization really be independent of the University? (Nagowski) -- Slope Media Revisited (EBilmes) -- Slope Media Group Approved for Byline Funding (KScott) -- Occupy AEM? (KScott) -- New campus pub to be good for both Greeks and non-Greeks (Nagowski) -- Gagging the Election (Nagowski) -- The Changing Structure of Rush Week (Nagowski) -- Ivy League Humility in the Midwest (EBilmes) -- Of Median Grades and Economics Minors (Nagowski) -- Homecoming Recap (Nagowski) -- My Cornell Bookshelf (Nagowski) -- The Sun's Opinion Section Has Suddenly Gotten Good (Nagowski) -- Remembering the 11th (Nagowski) -- Cornellian Tapped as Top Economic Advisor (Nagowski) -- Cutting Pledging, and the Good Which Comes With It (EBilmes) -- Why Cornell Should Not Close Fall Creek Gorge (Nagowski) -- Welcome to the Class of 2015 (Nagowski)  |