Their story has quickly become Penn State lore of the new millennium: An idea that started out as one student's response to a class project has now developed into a potentially multimillion-dollar company.
In the spring of 2006, David Rusenko, Class of 2007, was a student in IST 402 (Tech For Popular Culture) when he decided to develop an e-portfolio creator. He soon enlisted the help of longtime buddy Dan Veltri, Class of 2007, who majored in finance, and Chris Fanini (senior-information sciences and technology).
"Once we got started, the idea kind of morphed into all forms of Web creation," Veltri said. "We worked on the project over the summer. I worked at GE in Connecticut, and David was working for Merrill Lynch in New York, so I would take the train down there to meet him."
As a true sign of the founders' technical bent, the company, which features a "what you see is what you get" Web page creator with drag-and-drop content, generated their name by randomly combining consonants and vowels through a computer program, Rusenko wrote.
The name they settled on: Weebly. Within a year, www.weebly.com, which focuses on "Web creation made easy," had received more than half a million dollars in investment from Silicon Valley heavyweights like Ron Conway, an original investor in Google.
Meanwhile, Freewebs.com offered a number in the "low millions" to buy out the company, Veltri said, but the trio decided to focus on growing by acquiring investments instead.
Weebly has also received acclaim from some of the top media outlets in the country, including Time.com's 50 best Web sites of 2007 and a myriad of tech blogs -- all without the help of a publicist.
The project didn't really start to take off until a meeting in New York City where the trio presented Weebly to tech-savvy groups, including a last-second meeting in front of Y Combinator, a high-tech "boot camp" that was crucial to their success.
The Weebly team was accepted into the Y Combinator program later that afternoon, and "in true Penn State fashion, we went out to the bar and bought each other a shot," Veltri said.
Penn State ties, however, went much deeper than drinking habits.
With the assistance of their Y Combinator mentors, the three relocated to California and moved into a downtown San Francisco apartment with the help of Matt Brezina, Class of 2003.
Brezina, a co-founder of e-mail plug-in startup Xobni, said Weebly's success was not based on talent alone.
"I don't think that genius is much involved," he said. "Genius is understanding what people want, and then executing on the idea."
The Weeblies, as they are often called, met with investor Mike Maple a week before presenting their version at Demo Day -- the final presentation of the Y Combinator program -- and a month later secured $650,000 in funding, Veltri said.
Veltri said the trio has other projects in the works, such as Snaplayout for MySpace pages. The company's business model is still in its earliest forms, Veltri said, adding that the company is working on a "top secret" idea that should be released in February.
Brezina, whose own company is currently hiring and would "love to" hire Penn State software-engineering students, said he thinks Penn State's programs are lacking in some critical areas.
"You don't get exposed to [startups] enough at Penn State," he said. "You think you're going to be working at Lockheed Martin, while, if you're at Stanford, you do a summer internship at YouTube."
Veltri wanted to give back a final word of advice to the Penn State community: "Don't get stuck in the status quo."
