When Russ D'souza '07 and Jack Groetzinger '07 landed consulting jobs after months of competitive recruiting, they did not expect to leave their positions after less than a year to start a business. Yet barely two years after leaving the College, D'souza and Groetzinger are just a few months away from launching a commercial version of Scribnia, a web site they designed for users to find and review journalists, columnists and bloggers.
The web site is currently in private alpha stage, meaning that only invited users can access it as part of the feed-back process. Users can find, read and review online columnists and bloggers, and Scribnia will also provide users with suggestions of other authors they might like.
Because the web site is still in its trial phase, D'souza and Groetzinger have not yet reached out to the Dartmouth alumni network, D'souza said, explaining they will make that step next.
"It's a way for people to discover new people to read," Groetzinger said.
D'souza and Groetzinger, who also created the furniture rental business Evolving Vox as seniors, said they knew they wanted to start their own business at some point, but saw going into consulting after graduation as the best way to prepare themselves for the challenges of founding and running a company.
"I interned at a consulting firm prior to senior year, and I liked it," D'souza said. "I saw so many students that I respected go into consulting."
Corporate recruiting was "the college process all over again," Groetzinger said, adding that "people get swept up in it."
"We just wish that students were more aware that [starting a business] is a viable option," he said.
D'souza and Groetzinger said that if they had known more Dartmouth alumni who had started businesses after graduation they may have been more encouraged to do so themselves.
"I don't know any of my classmates who did something similar to this," Groetzinger said.
While both Dartmouth graduates said they did not regret their time in consulting, they agreed that it is not a necessary step to take before launching a business.
After college, D'souza said he thought consulting "was the perfect thing to do if you wanted to start a business," but later realized that "the best way is to actually start a business."
The duo recently received funding from DreamIT, an early-stage venture capital firm that frequently targets recent graduates with a prototype of an idea, Groetzinger said.
These accelerators offer capital to start-up businesses in exchange for a small stake in the company's profits, and the number of the firms of this type is increasing, D'souza said.
While searching for capital, D'souza said he met many recent graduates from schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, but not from Dartmouth.
"Dartmouth turns out the same caliber of graduates, but Dartmouth students seem less likely to pursue entrepreneurship," D'souza said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Neither entrepreneur was heavily involved in business- or technology-oriented organizations while at the College, they said. D'souza was a history major and took a small number of computer science courses, and Groetzinger studied math and economics. Both were members of Chi Gamma Epsilon fraternity.
They started Evolving Vox during their senior year, when sharing an apartment made them realize how difficult it was to find furniture, according to D'souza.
Because most students are "so connected to computers," they thought putting the business online would be the easiest way for students to use it, D'souza said. After graduating, they sold the business to a group students from the Class of 2009.
Scribnia forced them to spend more time learning how to program, D'souza said, adding that they "had to approach this like any other academic study."
