Business Coaching

WePay cofounders went after their dreams of starting a start-up.

If you’re a recent college grad with

Rich Aberman and Bill Clerico faced a tough decision as they approached the end of their senior year at Boston College. Start an innovative online-payment processing company, or start a new job and grad school?

They decided to take the latter option –Aberman set out for law school at New York University and Clerico took a job as an investment banker at Jefferies — and they promised themselves that, one day, they’d start their business. But they soon saw themselves getting sucked into their day jobs, with little time left to “really start on” their entrepreneurial ambitions.

“It only gets harder to start a company as time goes on,” Aberman, 25, told Entrepreneur.com. “As you get used to a salary, you start getting comfortable with a certain lifestyle, which becomes hard to leave for the uncertainty of being an entrepreneur.”

WePay launched March 30, which allows individuals and groups all over the world to establish an account and collect money in a variety of ways–from paper checks to credit cards–and then use a debit card to spend the money in the account. They already have several thousand users, ranging from sports teams to fraternities to groups of roommates managing rent and utilities. WePay collects transaction fees ranging from 50 cents for bank account payments to 3.5 percent of credit-card payments for each payment received; outgoing transactions are free.

Aberman and Clerico were able to get their college business idea back on track after a minor detour, but they strongly recommend starting right out of college.

“You have the degree under your belt, and you haven’t tied yourself into a particular lifestyle or career path,” Aberman says. “If you take a risk, and it fails, the worst that happens is that you have a unique experience that you can use as an impressive factor to get you into graduate school or to rock a job interview.”

Adds Clerico, “If you wait until you work for a few years or go to graduate school, you are just piling on reasons not to take the risk, and you reduce the chances that you ever will.”

What do you experienced entrepreneurs out there think…is it better to get started with a start-up sooner rather than later?

Information is everywhere! The relevant and irrelevant bombard you on the Internet, cell phones and all the other technology we take for granted on a daily basis. While communication has never been easier, the information we get is filtered and, often difficult to understand, especially when dealing with government agencies.

Recently, the White House urged federal agencies to make their information available to the public in an easier way and a new internet boom has begun…Dot-Gov startups.

Companies such as Socrata, have become government contractors by simply providing information to the public. And Socrata isn’t the only company jumping on the bandwagon. Interest is high in this relatively new avenue for Internet growth, both from App innovators and business people, as well as the government itself. There have been at least 10 events throughout the United States over the last year devoted to this concept, including the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington D.C. on May 25^th of this year. The federal government has shown how important it thinks this field is by holding App contests, providing prize money for developers who’ve built Apps with public data.

While many companies have seen internet revenues drop precipitously since the Dot-Com crash of 2003, Dot-Gov startups are doing well for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they serve a useful niche in our world. As government expands, citizens need tools to understand and navigate through certain agencies. Thanks to easier accessibility, citizens are able to participate more freely in society. This leads to a greater understanding of how the government works that was limited in the past.
In our society, almost everybody has access to instant messaging, texts, and the old fashioned phone call anytime, anyplace. And while we all strive for quicker, less-limiting forms of connecting with others, some groups in our society have refused to get on board. The most prevalent of these groups used to be government agencies but that is clearly changing. With so much technology and information at our fingertips, the attitude of government agencies had to change, finally, for the better.