#79 - Liz Wessel

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Liz Wessel. Liz is the co-founder and CEO of WayUp, and WayUp is a job and internship platform for college students and recent graduates. They were part of the winner 2015 YC batch.
All right, here we go. At what point did you know you wanted to start a company?

**Liz Wessel** (0:26)
So my sophomore year of college, I was at Penn, and I actually started my first business at the end of sophomore year.
So I went to Stanford for a three-day boot camp called BASES, Entrepreneurial Boot Camp, or something like that. And I remember going to the Jamba Juice at Stanford, and they asked me, can I see your Stanford ID? And I said, I don't have one, why? And they said, oh, you'd get like 10 or 15% off your Jamba Juice.
And I paid full, because I was a Penn student, but I remember thinking, wow, that's really cool. That's a great perk for students. I should do this at Penn. So I get back to campus, and I walk around to all the restaurants, and I say, do you have any loyalty program for students? And they all said no. And so I said, okay, if I got your logo in the wallet of thousands of students at Penn, would you give them 10, 15% off? And every single restaurant and bar said yes. And so I said, okay, and I'm not gonna pay you for that or anything, and I'm actually gonna charge students, and they were like, okay, we don't care.
And so I ended up, over sophomore summer, I also was doing an internship at Blackstone in Tokyo, but meanwhile, I was starting, as we all do. But meanwhile, I actually went about hiring this company in China to create thousands of cards that would put the logos of all these businesses on the back, and I called it the Penn Eats card. And I got back to campus, and my junior summer, I hired all my friends to basically go around selling these cards for 15 bucks a pop. And we sold thousands, and it was awesome. And it was very, very, very cool.

**Craig Cannon** (2:03)
And that kind of gave you the bug?

**Liz Wessel** (2:05)
I was addicted. I thought the concept of creating something from nothing and solving a problem or helping people is just such a cool opportunity, and why wouldn't you want to do that over and over?

**Craig Cannon** (2:17)
Because you weren't an engineer, right?

**Liz Wessel** (2:19)
No, I took a bunch of computer science classes, but I was not what I would call an engineer.

**Craig Cannon** (2:24)
Yeah, and so were you inherently drawn to creating a software startup, or did you try out other ideas?

**Liz Wessel** (2:30)
That first business, it was like a Wix website and a bunch of plastic cards, so not really much software there, though I did, to be fair, sell a bunch of cards online, but not much software there. I remember, though, my senior year when I wanted to start that next project, and that's the one I worked on with my co-founder now of WayUp, JJ.
We very much were keen on having it be a software business, or an internet company.

**Craig Cannon** (2:54)
Okay, but you didn't start it immediately after school.

**Liz Wessel** (2:57)
So, the story of WayUp, the high level is my senior year, I'm happy to tell the funny version of it from college, but the high level is my senior year, JJ and I worked on a project together that would help college students find campus ambassador jobs. And so we worked on that, we launched it, and then I went to Google in California, and then I moved to India to lead brand initiatives for Google. JJ went traveling around the world as a backpacking freelancing web developer, and then as all good backpackers do, went to McKinsey in New York. And so we kept in touch over the years, but that website kept growing and growing to tens of thousands of users and big businesses and so on.
And we knew we each wanted to start a company, and so we quit our jobs two years after college and started WayUp with the insight that that website we had started in college, which was really just a project, had grown so much. You know, at YC, they say make something people want. If you build a website that you barely do any marketing work for and it's grown that much, then we knew that they had something. And so we shut down that website because it was just like a kind of half-assed project, but we took the insights from that and built WayUp off of that.