When you think of college guidebooks, Jordan Goldman's name may not be the first that comes to mind, but the scrappy New York City native has been competing with well-known media properties, including U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, for a decade. When he was 16, Goldman (pictured) wrote an article about an online message board about college admissions. When he was 18, he signed a deal with Penguin Books to create Students' Guide to Colleges. Now at 26, he has launched Unigo LLC, a site that enlists college students to review their schools.
In Tech Confidential's Behind the Money video interview, Goldman talks about the advantages of using student-produced reviews and other Web 2.0 tools, such as online video. He also talks about how he cold-called dozens of alumni of his own alma mater, Wesleyan University, to develop the idea for Unigo and raise funding for it.
Wesleyan alum Frank Sica, who is best known as the former president of Soros Private Fund Management, is the lead investor in Unigo. Tom Rogers, the CEO of TiVo Inc. [TIVO] who also hails from Wesleyan, serves on Unigo's advisory board (but is not an investor). Others in the alumni network Goldman has reached out to include Betaworks co-founders Andrew Weissman and John Borthwick, RRE Ventures co-founder Stuart Ellman, Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham and Blip Networks Inc. co-founder Dina Kaplan.
--Mary Kathleen Flynn
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