By: Jake Uitti
MONTGOMERY The Somerset County Business Partnership will honor Catherine Cook, a senior at Montgomery High School who founded an online Web site with millions of members, as the Young Entrepreneur of 2006 at its annual awards luncheon Dec. 5.
Catherine is being honored for her work in creating an online forum called myYearbook.com. The Web site, Catherine said, is a social networking site built around high school.
The Young Entrepreneur Award recognizes achievement, encourages the development of business skills and salutes the entrepreneurial spirit and the ideal of community service, officials from the county business partnership said.
The recipient receives a certificate, recognition in Somerset Business magazine and the Anthony F. Picheca Sr. Entrepreneur Award of up to $1,000 from the Somerville and Bridgewater Rotary Club.
Catherine started her work on the Web site in April 2005. She said she got her idea from flipping through a regular print yearbook with her brother, Dave.
"We thought that yearbooks should be online," she said. "So we started brainstorming possible features like superlatives, classes, groups, wills and personal profiles. You see people every day in your classes that you know nothing about besides what they look like and their names. We thought an online yearbook would be a good way to get to know more people."
Catherine said her brother, Geoff, started a Web site at Harvard University called cyberedit.com, a college admission essay editing service. She said he sold that site in 2002 and became a millionaire. Geoff, she said, invested $250,000 in myYearbook.
Since then, Catherine has hired the services of programmers to work on the site and she now has 16 employees in her New Hope, Pa., offices. These also include member support personnel and a director of safety.
Catherine said safety is a major priority with her site. She said she is planning to partner with socialsafety.org for age-verification systems so that, for example, someone who says he or she is 16 years old really isn’t 38 years old. Any image that is uploaded to the site, she added, has to be reviewed beforehand so nothing inappropriate is posted.
The site, she said, is similar to sites like the hugely popular Myspace.com "but we have better search options than Myspace," she explained.
In order to drum up interest in her Web site, Catherine said she advertised it at Montgomery High School.
"To get members, I wore T-shirts that highlighted some of our cool features," she said. "In only one week, 200 people from my high school signed up and were immediately addicted. After adding tons of new features that our members wanted, myYearbook became available to every high school in the world, not just Montgomery."
After just nine months, myYearbook reached 1.3 million members.
"It feels pretty cool. It was unexpected," she said. "Now I’m thinking about going into business, economics or international business" while in college.
Catherine, who said she is looking at top-tier schools, said even her mother logs on to her site.
"She is confused by it," Catherine said with a laugh. "She thinks it’s cool, though she doesn’t exactly understand it."
Catherine said when the site first launched, her mother was worried about her grades slipping, since Catherine was staying up late at night working. Soon after, though, she said, the grades did not become a problem and she was able to keep her 4.0 grade point average.
She said she still works about 25 hours per week on the site.
Since the site’s launch, myYearbook has been featured in CosmoGirl, Business Week, Red Herring, the front page of CNN, MSNBC’s Entrepreneur magazine, Money, The Star-Ledger, ABC News Now: Money Matters, ABC Philadelphia, Fox 29 and more.
The site is also one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web, having grown from 3 million unique visitors to 4 million in just one month in 2006. There have been several offers to buy the site for more than $10 million, Catherine said, and the site is currently evaluated at about $20 million.
But, she said, she is not done contributing to the site and thus not ready to sell it.
"What I get excited about most is thinking of new ways of connecting people in online social networks to enhance the richness of the communication," Catherine said. "I expect to have another 3 million members this year, and I am currently looking for funding from Venture Capital firms."

