By Tim Byron '98
We're calling them Entrepreneurs, but many in the CMC community might call them Troublemakers. The short story: The five founders of claremontmckenna.com—seniors David Enrich, Devin Erhardt, A.J. Prager, David Alvillar, and Matt Grossmann—built a controversial online Web magazine promising "the word on the street" at CMC. Their editorial content relied on anonymous sources and hearsay—and subjected student leaders and faculty members to celebrity-grade scrutiny. Their renegade Insider's Guide promised "the lowdown on life at CMC" to prospective students. And they did all this under the name claremontmckenna.com—a domain name that they beat CMC to registering, tying up the school in almost three years of negotiations. Troublemakers—short and simple.
But the lessons of the longer story are a little harder to distill. These five students found a demand, and created a product to meet that demand. In fact, you may find more of a classic CMC entrepreneurship story than you expect. Read on...
The tale begins—as so many college entrepreneur stories do—in a dorm room at 4 in the morning. In the wee hours of Nov. 18, 1998, Erhardt and Alvillar were hanging out in Enrich and Grossmann's Boswell Hall dorm room, lamenting what they perceived as a declining social scene on campus. They also felt there was no easy-to-use information source for Claremont students—on the Web or elsewhere. "Even simple things like finding campus phone numbers and promoting five-college parties were difficult," Erhardt says.
The five wanted a way to discuss campus issues—grades, dorm life, events—and perceived a "media vacuum" in Claremont. "CMC's Web site was first and foremost a marketing tool, with no information for students once they got here. And the college newspapers didn't have a critical function—they either reprinted or regurgitated CMC's press releases," says Enrich.
The founders disagree as to what came first—the discovery of the claremontmckenna.com domain name or the idea to start a student-centered Web site. But that night, a cursory Internet search located the unregistered and available name. They saw an opportunity: a highly visible domain name they could use to build an information center for CMC's students, faculty, prospective students, and alumni, with campus calendars, student directories, news, a message board, online bookstores—the possibilities were limitless. The four pooled the $150 domain name registration fee and purchased the name that night. The next morning, they shared their plan with Prager, who pitched in and became part of the operation.
Whether the site was designed to be contentious from the start is a point of disagreement for the five founders. "We never meant to criticize the school," says Alvillar. "Trying to stir up the administration and get into a name dispute was the least of our intentions." Prager and Erhardt, for the most part, agree. "We weren't trying to be adversarial," Erhardt says. "We love CMC. We were trying to open a dialogue, and promote discussion."
But it was Enrich and Grossmann who did the bulk of the work building the site, and both are open about another trait they had—the desire to tick off authority figures. "The Drudge Report blossomed about nine months prior to claremontmckenna.com," says Enrich, "and it was pretty influential on Matt and me. I was very confident that what we were planning was legal and appropriate, but it did appeal to us to rile up the administration."
Enrich's first posts to claremontmckenna.com got students and faculty paying attention quickly. Besides photos taken of CMCers in the midst of raucous weekend parties, they posted two stories: "The Horrendous Hub," an unfavorable review of CMC's student center, and "The War," which used anonymous sources to detail a rift in CMC's faculty concerning accreditation.
In early 1999, CMC administration attempted to stop the use of the claremontmckenna.com domain name, offering to refund the $150 registration fee. The founders found this offensive—especially at a time when dot-com stocks were soaring and the domain-name trade was big business (with business.com and autos.com selling for $7.5 million and $2.5 million, respectively). The application of trademark and copyright laws to the Web was being decided in court battles daily. Household names such as Volkswagen, Harvard, the New York Yankees, and Coca-Cola all were either entering lawsuits or settling to protect their intellectual property.
"From the start, the school was very emphatic that the problem was not with the content of the site," says Enrich. "It was about the name—about their intellectual property."
While CMC and the five went back and forth wrangling over the name, Enrich broadcast daily updates of the dispute on claremontmckenna.com. Fellow classmates and alumni visiting the site witnessed a real-life soap opera unfolding, with CMC Goliath to claremontmckenna.com's David. The founders encouraged supporters to e-mail CMC, and hundreds of students and alumni did. All the while, Enrich and company continued to improve the site, adding a review of Kevin Starr's official history of CMC, as well as more stories of campus life. And that February, they were tipped off to Pamela Gann's selection as the fourth president of CMC—days before the information was public. "I actually called President Gann at her home in North Carolina that night," Enrich remembers. "She was friendly, but she wouldn't discuss it with me." He also debuted an interactive guide to student body elections, with photos and personal statements from each candidate.
It wasn't long before claremontmckenna.com's gritty content led to sticky legal issues for the College. Enrich's exposes on student body fund mismanagement often accused fellow CMCers of abusing positions of authority for personal gain—sometimes relying on sketchy sources. And while CMC's code of conduct forbids injurious speech about fellow students, California's state law upholds U.S. Constitutional rights to free speech in private colleges. The result: long hours of mediation with Dean of Students W. Torrey Sun and a retired judge.
Enrich pushed to keep building more features, adding a guide to nearby restaurants, a list of online radio stations, weather forecasts, and more. "Many of these were no more than a link to a page on Yahoo! or the Weather Channel," Enrich explains.
"But they were part of our master plan to make the Web site a popular portal for CMC students." And as Enrich added features, the other four founders offered support and advice. In the spring of 1999, the site introduced claremontmckenna.com e-mail addresses and the Insider's Guide to CMC, a Web page for prospective students promising, among other things, "the dirt on CMC," written by Ben Mori '01. Traffic on the site grew to 400 unique visitors a day—considerable, but a fraction of the thousands of unique visitors to CMC's official site. By this year, their online message board was averaging more than 100 posts a day, and claremontmckenna.com had grown into the source for news and information about student life.
This May, after almost three years of negotiations, CMC and the founders reached an agreement. The founders agreed to relinquish the name and launch a new site, cmcstudents.com, which will be linked to the old site for a year. The College set aside restricted funds of $50,000 to cover operating expenses for 10 years. Dan Carroll '04, Jon Huang '04, Marie Kurahashi '03, Dave Mahler '03, Sarah Rice '04, and Dave Shlachter '03 were named by the founders as the new student managers of the site. In addition, CMC also agreed to fund three scholarships in the cmcstudents.com name: one administered by the Robert A. Day 4+1 Program to be given to a CMC student entrepreneur; one administered by CMC's Salvatori Center to be given to a student conducting research in civil liberties and new technologies; and a fund administered by the Kravis Leadership Institute to support Web-based student projects. The operating expense fund and the annual scholarships are being funded by donor gifts for these purposes. (This cover story was also part of the agreement.)
Having earned their degrees and moved on beyond Claremont, the founders look back on their experiences with pride. "We thought there was a huge void at the school. We took the initiative, and we filled it successfully. We've successfully completed everything we set out to do," says Alvillar, who leaves CMC for an investment banking position with Goldman Sachs in New York.
"We had a lot of run-ins with the administration—it would have been easy to back down," Prager says. "I'm really proud of us for sticking together." Prager also is taking the investment banking route—with Bear Sterns in New York. Enrich, banking on his ability to ferret out a good story, leaves CMC for journalism, starting with a stint at U.S. News & World Report.
"It's probably a pretty common entrepreneurial step to start a venture, not completely sure of what you're going to do but with an overall vision and a hope it's going to grow into something," muses Grossmann, whose senior thesis on multiparty democracy in America took best thesis honors from CMC's government department. He is pursuing a doctorate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
"What we did here totally epitomizes CMC's ideal of 'Leaders in the Making,'" says Erhardt, who will join McKinsey as a consultant. "We recognized an opportunity, planned out what it would take, utilized new technologies, and did this all by working as a group."