“Everyone loves to talk about themselves,” Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Formspring Ade Olonoh said via video conference Tuesday night, “and we all want to learn more about each other.” He was speaking at a digital question-and-answer session hosted by Penn’s Interactive Media Group.
Formspring is a web-based program that allows users to create a profile and answer questions about themselves. These questions may be posted by anyone on the internet, who often choose to remain anonymous. Launched in late 2009, Formspring attracted over a million registered users in its first two months.
Olonoh’s talk focused on the challenges that he has faced as an entrepreneur. Though websites like Facebook and MySpace have been involved in controversies regarding cyber-bullying, Olonoh doesn’t view Formspring’s anonymity as a potential source of this kind of abuse. If anonymity were the main cause of cyber-bullying, he said, then the bullying wouldn’t be found on websites like Facebook that require users to reveal their identities.
Olonoh took an indirect route to founding Formspring. After earning a degree in engineering, he held a series of freelance positions and started several now-defunct businesses. In early 2006, he launched a program called Formstack, which allows businesses to collect and organize data. Formspring began as a side project based off of Formstack, but eventually grew into a much larger business.
Discussing competition in the internet start-up world, Olonoh said that though there have been “quite a few sites that ripped off Formspring,” he doesn’t feel threatened. He believes his site’s uniqueness was a major factor in its quick success.
Despite Formspring’s initial rapid growth, the website’s popularity has decreased in recent months, according to the Interactive Media Group’s speculation. “We wanted to shed light on the fact that services can start out to be successful but may not always be that way,” Wharton freshman Chadwick Prichard, who coordinated the visit, said.
Olonoh’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs was simple: “Know what you want, and then just do it.”
“I have a company right now,” Wharton and Engineering sophomore Markus Beissinger said, “so it’s cool to learn from [entrepreneurs’] experiences.”
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