Minnechaug graduates find success with CampusLIVE

Date: 2/8/2010

Feb. 8, 2010

By Courtney Llewellyn

Reminder Assistant Editor



WILBRAHAM -- Jesse Morgan and Chris Ziomek have done a lot over the past year and a half.

Members of the Minnechaug Regional High School class of 2005 and recent graduates of the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, Morgan and Ziomek first spoke with Reminder Publications in October 2008. Back then, Morgan was a marketing intern and Ziomek was the assistant sales manager with the nascent CampusLIVE.

CampusLIVE is a resource built for students, by students, according to Ryan Durkin, Chief Operating Officer for the company. Every site is personalized for each college it serves. In October 2008, 33 schools had CampusLIVE pages -- today, there are 150.

CampusLIVE pulls together links, news, a Google interface and weather forecasts onto a single page, and sells subscription-based advertising to local restaurants on it, ranging from $50 to $200 a month.

"CampusLIVE is now a funded company, with $320,000 about to close this week [in angel funding, which means the company received investment from a number of wealthy individuals who are putting their dollars on CampusLIVE to take it to the next level]," Durkin said.

The potential for future success is what kept the Wilbraham natives at the company.

"It was pretty set in my mind that I'd have my job here [after graduating]," Morgan said. "I put in a lot of work as an intern. I believed in it."

Now the Director of Marketing, Morgan commented that it feels amazing to be a part of a company that's growing this quickly. CampusLIVE has been receiving requests from schools across the country to establish pages.

"It's a lot of data entry, a lot of hard work, but I love seeing the results firsthand," he said.

Ziomek, head of Business Development, agreed, noting that their Web site is the number one college homepage in the country.

"We've had a very good reception from a lot of schools including Villanova and Arizona State," he explained. "It works well because the site is student and university friendly."

Ziomek said he's expecting CampusLIVE to get much bigger because the company still has the goal of setting up a page for every college in the country and because the company has a great team.

"The core people here are rock stars," he said. Because of that, he believes "the sky is the limit."

In addition to their hard work with the up and coming company, Morgan and Ziomek are also involved in their community. Morgan coaches youth basketball and the Wilbraham Summer Softball League and is currently Vice President of the Morgan Memorial Scholarship Fund. Ziomek is a co-founder of the Wilbraham Summer Softball League.

"Jesse Morgan and Chris Ziomek were hired as full-time employees of the company after graduating in May," Durkin stated "They've come a long way since interning, and are now co-owners of a funded company that is doing very well in the digital media/tech space."

"We're definitely in it for the long haul," Morgan said.

"We're going all the way until we win it," Ziomek added.

To learn more about CampusLIVE, visit www.campuslive.com.