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Continued from previous page
Connections in Action
David Niu, WG’02, and Andy Liu,
WG’02
For David Niu and Andy Liu, Wharton
connections began before they were even
officially Wharton students. The two
men met in 1999 as admitted applicants during Wharton Welcome Weekend. At the time, neither knew whether
they would attend, much less that they
would end up as business partners on
two successful Internet companies. The
latest, BuddyTV, is a two-year-old web
community where TV fans read and exchange
news and commentary.
“We end up sleeping on the couches
of two other students who were gone
for the weekend,” says David of their
first meeting. “Both of us were considering
deferring at that time. We both
ended up attending, and we bumped
into each other in the fall at a Preterm
lecture by Professor Peter Fader.”
The two were intrigued by Fader’s
research, and eventually turned it into
a business called NetConversions that
they honed with the help of Wharton
Business Plan Competition and other
Wharton resources. With Fader and
his PhD student, Wendy Moe, plus interest
and advice from Wharton alumni
and other VCs who visited campus, the
venture, which applied Fader’s research
toward increasing sales at web companies,
showed so much promise that the
fledgling entrepreneurs dropped out of
school to pursue the company full-time
in Seattle, Andy’s hometown.
Then the tech boom blew up, and
the two moved back to Philadelphia
to finish up their Wharton educations.
They brought NetConversions
with them.
“We actually operated the headquarters
of NetConversions from a Chestnut
Street apartment for a year,” says David.
With another year’s worth of education
tailored towards their entrepreneurial
venture, David and Andy had
their degrees in hand, and a company
that was in better shape than ever. They
returned to their Seattle operations,
then sold the company in 2004 to
aQuantive (which was recently acquired
by Microsoft) for up to $7 million.
After the acquisition, they stayed on
as senior executives for 18 months before
they were ready for the next chapter
in their business lives.
“We tried to take off some time to
think about what we wanted to do next,
what we enjoyed and what we didn’t, where we thought there would be opportunities.”
Three or four months
later, Andy and David had founded
BuddyTV. The new company didn’t
take long to get off the ground either.
“Everything is much easier the second
time around. The experience of the
labor pains and growing pains at Net
Conversions was something we were
able to leverage for BuddyTV to jumpstart
the growth and maturation of the
company. It was easier to recruit people,
it was easier to talk to VCs.”
BuddyTV now averages more than
3 million unique users per month, and
in 2007 it attracted a $3 million investment
that was led by Gemstar-TV
Guide. Andy and David still wear many
hats, but their site officially proclaims
Andy as the site’s publisher, David as
the editor-in-chief, and their team includes
about a dozen staffers.
“Whenever I talk to people about
what’s been helpful, I always mention
the experience and the people I met during
my time at Wharton,” David says.
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