Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

2011 Grad Teams Up With Brother on Grand Social Networking Success

When Catherine Cook (MSB ’11) entered Georgetown University in the fall of 2007, her prospects were already looking quite bright. Having co-founded the social networking website myYearbook.com with her brother Dave in 2005, she appeared destined for entrepreneurial greatness. Two months after she graduated, in July 2011, success came in a big way when she sold her company to Latino social networking site Quepasa for $100 million. the guide caught up with this successful, ambitious Hoya to talk about how she got where she is today.

 

How did myYearbook start?

 

I got the idea back in 2005 because my family moved to a new town and I wanted a way to make new friends. There were a lot of people in my new school who had been there for a while and already knew each other. I started the site to make new friends.

 

How did you get the idea for it?

I was a sophomore in high school and my brother Dave was a junior. We were flipping through a yearbook from the year before, and that’s how we got the idea. We realized that there was nothing in the actual yearbook that would help us [get to] know new people or make friends. It’s a horrible tool for meeting new people. So, we thought we might as well build something better ourselves.

 

How did you guys know how to make and maintain a website?

At first we did a lot of research. We were just like any typical 15- and 16-year-olds at the time. Yeah, we were pretty tech-savvy. We were always on the computer. We did a lot of AIM chatting, but we weren’t into coding at that point. So what we ended up doing was pushing the original development off to Mumbai, which required a lot of work to have the site exactly how we wanted it. We were up ‘till three or four in the morning every night just getting everything we wanted to our developers in Mumbai. And then we finally launched in April 2005.

Did you maintain the site while at Georgetown?

Yes. My oldest brother became our first investor when we had the idea. So he bankrolled the idea, which made it easier for me to be able to go to college, because he stepped in. And now we have a 100-person team.

 

So you’re serving with the company right now?

Yes. I’m actually at a conference in France right now, but I’m still working in cost development and business development.

 

Did your Georgetown education help you out with your company?

I would say definitely. Well, for one, I think that going to college in general makes you mature a lot more than had you skipped it. I absolutely loved my marketing major, and I find it incredibly helpful when I’m working on the site. It’s hard to put it into concrete terms exactly. When I came to Georgetown, I didn’t have a specific set of skills, but I came out with a different way of thinking. It made me more creative and probably a little more open-minded.

 

How and when did you get your company to sell?

We signed an agreement to merge with the corporation Quepasa back in July, and the reason we wanted to do that was because it would double our user base [and] it would triple our deductible market. … [W]e think there’s an opportunity to have a billion-dollar brand around meeting new people, and to do that it has to be a global brand, so we wanted to make a global footprint, and the corporation is very big in South America and Latino countries. And lastly, for the combined company, this means we’d be able to reach more members faster.

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