Have Resumes, Will Travel

In the summer of 1995, college juniors Rachel Bell and Sara Sutton were in a Boston taxi "stressing" about the prospect of finding jobs. Sutton complained that she had surfed the Net for an internship, but the search was fruitless. Bell remembered her father's advice: "You should really consider starting a company with a group of your friends." Their epiphany: an Internet job service for entry-level positions. "We were passionate about this idea," Sutton recalls. "We could reach out to students like us, and we could help our friends."

Friends themselves since their childhood in Pittsburgh, the two women took leaves from their respective schools (the University of California-Berkeley for Sutton and Hobart & William Smith College for Bell) to flesh out their idea. They raised some $60,000 from family and acquaintances and read every business magazine and book they could find before launching JobDirect (www.jobdirect.com) in August, 1995. Then they purchased a recreational vehicle and hired graffiti artists to spray-paint it to look like their Web site. They equipped the vehicle with 15 laptops for students to type in resumes and drove off on their first promotional tour of college campuses in the fall of 1996. Forty-three campuses later, their database contained the curricula vitae of 5,000 young job-seekers. "We knew it would work--there was just no way it couldn't," says Bell.