The guys that founded XuQa.com are smart, funny, frugal and now, famous! They were featured on a front page San Francisco Chronicle Sunday edition this past weekend (well, they were also already in loads of other publications already, including Forbes, the Guardian, Bloomberg, GigaOm, Techcrunch, etc.), but now the whole world knows how they toughed-it-out in order to make their business work. It's paying off, because XuQa.com is the only college-focused social network to turn a profit -- not bad for a collection of 20-somethings that wear sandals to work and eat KFC for breakfast, lunch and dinner ;-)Here's the excerpt (by the way, in the photo above: Ali, Prosper, and Murti):
"No one boasts more frugal beginnings than Xuqa, the popular online game. Like the game's players who collect credits called "peanuts," Ali Moiz, Murtaza Hussain and Prosper Nwankpa started their business with not much more.
Moiz and Hussain were students and Nwankpa had just graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in spring 2005 when they began. Their first server was cobbled together from spare parts stripped from old equipment in the campus computer center, where they built a site secretly hosted on the college's fast Internet connection. They raised money to buy new servers by trading dining hall meals back to the college for cash.
Often sleeping in the computer center, they brought in pillows and blankets on chilly winter nights. Campus police even mistook them for homeless people one morning and almost threw them out.
A year ago, they put their college education on hold to move to San Francisco, where they bunk together in a two-bedroom apartment, subsisting on a fast-food diet. They squatted in their venture firm's offices until the investors gave them more money to find their own office. They keep a lid on expenses by maintaining an office in Karachi, Pakistan, where most of their employees work.
"We keep the company lean and mean," Hussain said.
No comments:
Post a Comment