I'm impressed. A kid has the guts to go out, follow his idea, meet some well-connected folks, sell those folks, get some funding, execute on his idea, and then sell the NYTimes on it.

Reminds me of a quote I read from John Mackey, founder/CEO of Whole Foods: "I would say that entrepreneurs are only a step up from panhandlers because you've got to go out and hustle money, and you're mostly selling dreams and enthusiasm."

(From a really great/long interview here: http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/06/former_house...)

There are other ways to start a startup. You don't need all that to be successful.

Good idea for a startup.... buuut it might be better if their site worked.

I tried to register and:

Invalid postback or callback argument. Event validation is enabled using <pages enableEventValidation="true"/> in configuration or <%@ Page EnableEventValidation="true" %> in a page. For security purposes, this feature verifies that arguments to postback or callback events originate from the server control that originally rendered them. If the data is valid and expected, use the ClientScriptManager.RegisterForEventValidation method in order to register the postback or callback data for validation. System.Web.UI.ClientScriptManager.ValidateEvent(String uniqueId, String argument) +159 System.Web.UI.Control.ValidateEvent(String uniqueID, String eventArgument) +108 System.Web.UI.WebControls.DropDownList.LoadPostData(String postDataKey, NameValueCollection postCollection) +55 System.Web.UI.WebControls.DropDownList.System.Web.UI.IPostBackDataHandler.LoadPostData(String postDataKey, NameValueCollection postCollection) +11 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessPostData(NameValueCollection postData, Boolean fBeforeLoad) +353 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1194

Yup. Same error for me as well--it was started by a non-hacker... :) However, just quickly glancing the article, I thought that it was a very useful idea. Back in the college app days, I would scour rankings, reports, guides and would get annoyed that they'd show only a peek. Also, it wasn't super clear how something like U.S. News Report graded the colleges.

It's probably under huge load from the NY Times article.

Nope, that's a misconfigured server, an error that only crops up when using multiple server without having sync'd some keys in the machine.config properly.

I got the same error on a few pages, but the site also (repeatedly and reproducibly) crashed my browser when I tried searching for a college.

I thought I would love the site after reading the article, but the actual execution kind of sucks...not just because of the programming errors, but because of the general site design and 'flow.'

NYTimes has a history of these "All is takes is guts!"-type articles.

http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/01/18/build-a-crappy-website-m...

It takes more than guts, and it's not easy. It just pisses me off to see article after article telling the "I woke up the next day to cash my first million dollar check!" story.

To get the real truth about running your startup, forget about all these fairytale fantasies and read Diary of a Failed Startup. That's the true story of what you face.

http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/

It's definitely a new approach but not a new idea: http://www.collegeconfidential.com/

This really is a great domain (problem area, not uri) for a wiki though.

This sort of thing would be great if it was cloned or expanded to cover UK universities. There have been an increasing number of really ropey institutions and courses popping up over recent years and many students don't realise they're in such a university (get 'em in, take the fees, put them through the least rigorous process possible, print them a degree in something like "e-Music" or "Film, TV and Radio Studies") until they're quite heavily invested.

A site where people could frankly and honestly say "this course was worth doing for me because" or "I feel that I made the wrong decision coming to this uni because" would be brilliant at a time when uni education here is becoming more expensive and people are starting to have second thoughts over whether it's worthwhile. At present, the most popular such site in Britain is a simple vBulletin forum. There's a gap there if someone wants to run with it!

I made a little site along these lines a while back but other stuff came up and I never got around to finishing it. I've just put it up here - http://www.yamooki.com - if you want to take a look. Never got around to adding a review feature, I'll do that and hook it up with Facebook Connect when I get a spare couple of days. That (FB Connect) should make some interesting things possible, like being able to add as friends those users who have shortlisted same course as you, male/female ratios etc.

I was thinking the same thing. I used collegeconfidential.com to pick students' brains when I thought I wanted to transfer back in 2005, and I know it was around for at least a few years before that.

You're right though in that this is a new approach, if not a wholly original idea. The presentation needs work (that's been mentioned elsewhere here) but I think they've got the right idea about the next "big thing" in the admissions guide market.

CC was a huge time sink for me back in high school.

CC? Compiler Construction?

So my guess was wrong. What does CC mean?

In this context, college confidential. See great-grandparent.

Ah, ok. Obviously. Thanks.

"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"

An office on Park Avenue and 25 employees before the idea has even been proven. Madness.

I've asked a ycnews user who was one of six Stanford students who were working together at the start of 2007 to create a startup where students from different colleges would record video tours of their schools, to comment. I think they had applied for Summer Session 2007 funding, but I'm not sure.

There's really nothing new under the sun, but success has as much to do with timing and luck than with skill and perseverance. When I was 17 I founded soc.college.admissions for a related purpose. For those of you who don't remember USENET, think of it as the poor man's web. Mostly text only, and uncontrollable, it was eventually overrun by spammers and eclipsed by the Web. And does anyone remember sixdegrees.com in 1998? It was the first LinkedIn/Facebook site to see major publicity. The not-yet-ready public was horrified at the privacy implications, and it died.

TheU.com pretty much did the same thing -- not sure what happened to them. The site was pretty decent (more so for entertainment purposes) when I was going through the admissions process.

unigo.com has some serious issues on Firefox:

If RadComboBox is not initially visible on your ASPX page, you may need to use streamers (the ExternallCallBackPage property) Please, read our online documentation on this problem for details http://www.telerik.com/help/radcombobox/v2%5FNET2/combo_exte...

how does it make money?

Advertising.