In The Tell-All Campus Tour, Jonathan Dee explains how Jordan Goldman got his Web 2.0 company, Unigo, off the ground:
With no money, no contacts and no business education whatsoever, Goldman began where any 21st-century self-starter would: “I Google-searched ‘business plan,’ and I found one and just plugged my own words into it. Then it wound up that Wesleyan has an alumni database, and so I looked for people who worked in finance and who graduated 10 or more years before I did. I e-mailed about 500 people, and I just said: ‘Look, I have this idea. What do I do now? What comes next?’ It was a fairly untraditional fund-raising process.”Actually, with the exception of the bit about Google, it was as traditional as can be, but given that he was 23, Goldman can be excused for thinking that he discovered the Old Boy Network. About 50 Wesleyan alums answered his e-mail messages, and one of those replies — from Frank Sica, a former president of Soros Private Funds Management — was the stuff of drama.
“He said, ‘I live in Bronxville,’ ” Goldman recounted. “ ‘At 7:30 I order my eggs at this diner. I’m done by 8. Come up to the diner and tell me about your idea, and I’ll give you until I’m done with my eggs.’ ” Armed with only his idea and the ability to talk a blue streak about it, Goldman set his alarm and took a train to that diner. No one who has ever met Goldman would have any trouble guessing that by the time Sica was finished with his eggs that day, he was on his way to becoming the young man’s lead investor.
Now Goldman goes to work every day on Park Avenue, in an office with an interior window through which he can keep tabs on his 25 employees, nearly all of them even younger than he. This month his Web site, called Unigo.com — a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families — went live for the benefit of tens of thousands of trepidatious high-school students as they try to figure out where and how to go to college. Not coincidentally, it also aims to siphon away a few million dollars from the slow-adapting publishers of those elephantine college guidebooks that have been a staple of the high-school experience for decades.