College CEO: College Humor

collegehumor

Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen were two typical college students in 1999 when they decided to harness the power of the Web. Forget file sharing, competing with Microsoft or Napster; these guys just wanted to collect all the crap that was floating around their school’s computer networks and showcase it for the world.

The end result, CollegeHumor.com, is genius in its simplicity. The site links to funny websites, stupid videos, a few (very funny) columns and some weird/hot/bizarre photos submitted by students. “We thought, if you’re a college student, you could either write for your school paper and have a thousand people see it, or you could have roughly a million people see it,” says Van Veen, whose offices are now in NYC.

With a book, The CollegeHumor Guide to College: Selling Kidneys for Beer Money, Sleeping with Professors, Majoring in Communications and Other Really Good Ideas, and more than nine million visitors hitting their site every month, the two co-founders sat down with COED in the Fall of 2005 to share their vision. (more…)