Campus Entrepreneurship

Great piece by Zachary A. Goldfarb in the Washington Post about Daylert, a venture created and launched by a campus entrepreneur at Virginia Tech. Moreover, its early activities appear to have made use of the campus as market model. The articles goes through the successes and struggles that the social networking firm/website has experienced.

From the article,

By the time he arrived at Virginia Tech in January 2004, Fahad Hassan still was not over his first business failure. He had poured his heart into a computer support business in his final year of high school, but after a promising few months the customers dried up and the expenses ballooned.

At Virginia Tech, he didn’t feel invested in classes and even got rejected as a business major. He was so stressed that he took a term off.

Then, in the summer after his junior year, inspiration struck. The Gaithersburg student pulled out a notebook — a brown diary where he’d write personal notes and paste motivational messages — and started to sketch a Web site.

He imagined a social networking place, featuring the friend-linked-to-friend aspects of such popular destinations as Facebook and MySpace. But his site would include calendar and contact features, and mix in course management software favored by schools and colleges.

Last year that idea became a company called Daylert, with Hassan as its 21-year-old chief executive.