First Things First: All About A Different Company

Okay, so I have few posts under my belt. I thought I would share a condensed version of the story of how I came to write, All About a Company (Students2U), rather than All About a Different Company (Inthequad.com). 


So here goes,

I've had ideas bouncing around in my head for quite some time now, dating back to my undergraduate collegiate days (about 4 years ago). I had an "epiphany" while in business school, the way certain things work in a college/university often times stink (now I'm true to my Alma mater and not bashing them specifically so read on and you'll get the point). Without getting into specifics, I'll just say that the way things are done are just plain outdated in many ways. So, I noticed a group of my peers (accounting students), coordinating their schedules together. This may seem normal on the surface, but while being around them for some period of time I noticed what they were working out was, a way around purchasing every single text book needed for the courses; they were trading and borrowing! So what pops in my head? A peer-to-peer textbook buy/sell/trade website! What did I do about it? Nothing. Read on.

So, I graduate from college (yipee!) and go to work in the corporate field learning the ropes in a huge company. This company just so happens to basically offer employees the ability to go back to school to continue their education, ie for me a masters in business. So I went back to school (yipee?) to gain the critical "150 hours" of course work to be able to sit for the CPA exam. Through a couple of classes I attended I met an intelligent guy (I'll hold the names to protect the innocent ;) let's call him Dave), whom I decided to pitch my idea to. Dave loved it, so I brought him on board and we started brainstorming like crazy at what else was missing for college students. Turns out their were several! So we incorporated, In The Quad, Inc., and bought a domain name inthequad.com. The basis for this name was we would be a virtual campus "quad" where students could connect, share, etc. Keep reading!

So after fleshing out many ideas (which I can't share them all here due to intellectual property rights), I started to learn/look for development help. Through this, however, we learned that we both wanted to run the company and had differing visions for the direction. Dave wanted to push the company toward an entertainment genre, while I wanted to focus on the students services aspect of our niche. We had some, text message, debates and actually found that we could not reconcile our differences. Now that may sound harsher that it really was, but what we decided to do was "spin-off" the student services into a different company, with each of us owning reciprocal interest in each others' company. We also decided on who could take what from our brainstorming sessions (hence the IP disclaimer above). We agreed on a number of other things, such as board seats on each company, regular meetings/brainstorming, etc. In other words, it was a peaceful departure (I have a post planned for more details on the "split").

In a nut shell, that's how I got to writing about "All about A Company."