TIRANA, Sept. 1 – Back in 2000 Endri Tolka from Albani, Taher Baderkhan from Jordan and Abi Mandelbaum from Colombia were freshmen roommates at Brandeis University in the U.S. Now, 15 years later, the trio are co-partners of YouVisit.com, a company that offers virtual tours of college campuses, has offices in New York and Florida and about 50 employees.
Founded in 2008, YouVisit.com allows prospective students to virtually tour hundreds of college campuses, click-by-click, through photos and panoramic images, including some classrooms and labs that may not be stops on a normal tour.
Their experience as international students helped inspire their business. Many students from abroad aren’t able to visit campus and often need to rely on what they can find online and what others tell them to help inform their decision.
“From an international prospective, we want to give students an opportunity similar to that of actually visiting a campus,” Tolka told Brandeis University portal.
This includes the development of tours using virtual reality headsets, Tolka explained. Although the headset tours are not quite consumer ready, Tolka said delivering a virtual tour that’s as close as possible to the real thing could make them a hit with prospective students at college fairs.
The idea for the business was simple enough. Mandelbaum, who is from Colombia, met Endri Tolka, from Albania, and Taher Baderkhan, from Jordan, when the three were undergraduates at Brandeis University, studying computer science. As high school seniors deciding where to go to college, they’d been too far away to go on campus tours, and they figured there were lots of far-flung college applicants like themselves who had to rely on guesswork and luck.
When the trio decided to pursue this idea in 2009, virtual reality was in its infancy and mostly used just by gamers, writes the prestigious Forbes magazine. Mandelbaum was studying for his MBA at Wharton then, while Tolka was working at Fidelity and Baderkhan was at Accenture. They chipped in $2,000 a piece – enough to cover the cost of the cameras and other equipment they needed upfront – and stayed up late at night writing code. They scrambled to pay their bills, and Tolka asked his parents to pay his rent for a time. And they ran the business on a shoestring: After paying for a few airfares to visit prospective clients in person, they quickly switched to cheaper web meetings.
Their timing, for starters, made things tough. In the wake of the financial crisis, banks weren’t lending – and with their student loans, the idea of borrowing to start a business seemed laughable. “The bank would’ve looked at us and said, ‘you have all these student loans, and you’re trying to raise money?’ Our own financial profile was pretty bad at the time, and nobody had the cash to loan out,” recalls Tolka, 34, who is the company’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer as quoted by Forbes.
“There is a lot of pressure that comes with getting financing because you need to constantly be spending money,” Tolka says. “A lot of startups we talk to – they raise all this money and think they have conquered everything. But that is the first step. Then you get pressure from investors to spend that money, and raise more money. Raising money isn’t a sustainable business.”
But, by then, YouVisit – which has offices in Avventura, Florida and New York – had cash flow coming in from existing clients to expand the business, and there wasn’t much reason for the cofounders to take on the added pressures that come with outside financing. YouVisit branched out from schools to corporations and non-profit organizations. Today, its clients run the gamut: Harvard and Hewlett-Packard, New Belgium Brewing Company and New York City’s Central Park, and, even, Zumba. All told, YouVisit has built more than 1,000 virtual reality experiences for clients worldwide, at a typical cost starting at $10,000. YouVisit’s revenues are now in the range of $5 million to $15 million – and have been doubling every year for the past five years – and the business has 75 employees.
