“It’s just important to start something — you learn a lot, it’s an important process, and your first attempt most likely isn’t going to be your last attempt. Starting a company is probably the best thing you can do for your résumé. In the early days one of the toughest things is choosing who you’re going to work with. Your company is truly defined by the people you hire. If you get people passionate about your product one way or the other I think that’s a good sign. If you put something out there and people don’t care, that’s a bad sign.”
— David Rusenko, a 2007 graduate of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, who spoke Thursday (March 22) during the second annual IST Start-up Week, being held March 18-23 on the University Park campus; details on the week's events are at http://ist.psu.edu/startup. A livestream is available at http://justin.tv/collegeofist and Twitter coverage is at #ISTStartup.
Rusenko is the CEO and co-founder of Weebly, a tech start-up based out of San Francisco, Calif. He also is the youngest recipient of the prestigious Penn State Alumni Achievement Award, winning it in 2010. Rusenko was named to Forbes’ “30 under 30” list in 2011 and 2012. He is a member of the IST Advisory Board and has recently endowed two entrepreneurship-focused scholarships.
Weebly is an extremely simple and powerful way for anybody to create a website. More than 15 million people have created a website with Weebly, and 12 percent of the U.S. population visits a Weebly website every month. Weebly was named one of Time’s 50 best websites of 2007 and has been featured in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal Inc. and Entrepreneur magazines, as well as on NBC and the BBC.