The Kuders launched VirtualIntern.com earlier this year with Jim Hackbarth, a recruiter the two cornered in a conference room during Net-Vendor’s goodbye party for its intern staff in Atlanta. After a few minutes of listening to their pitch, Hackbarth agreed to mentor the brothers on their start-up idea to help students find internships on the Web. “We knew as students how hard it was to truck down to the career center between 9 and 5,” Nathan Kuder explains. “And how inefficient.”
Nine months later the three secured $1.5 million in seed financing from the Princeton, N.J.-based Acorn Technology Fund, and Jason and Nathan have scored college credit for what Nathan tags “practical experience.” Hackbarth is now president and CEO of VirtualIntern.com, and the brothers also have full-time salaried positions: Jason is VP of international operations (pursuing expansion into Europe and Southeast Asia), and Nathan, as founder, handles product development.
The brothers claim that 50,000 internship positions from 2,200 companies are listed on the site, with the majority available during the summer. VirtualIntern charges companies to list their openings, but it is free to students, who receive passwords to access the listings according to the type of work they want.
Nevertheless, Jason and Nathan Kuder are still college kids. Nathan entered his junior year at Syracuse this fall, and Jason plans to graduate in the spring of 2001 with the six credits a semester he will earn from starting his own company. They still have to turn in biweekly reports to their adviser.
Their cushy experience is not lost on the boys. Jason knows firsthand about the unglamorous side of internships: two years ago, as a sophomore, he interned at the human-rights group Amnesty International in Washington, D.C., preparing news briefs for his supervisors. “I got $4.50 a week,” Jason says, laughing. “They paid my Metro fare. And I thought that was a great value-add.”
