Young entrepreneur, Catherine Cook has often been described as the female Mark Zuckerberg after setting up social networking site myYearbook.com. The site she started from her bedroom 6 years ago now has a user base of 25 million and growing.
Catherine’s social network site is one of the top 25 most visited sites in the US. She came up with the idea when she and her brother David were complaining about the photo used in their yearbook. myYearbook is a site where members can make new friends by creating profiles, interacting through Chatter, a real-time stream, sending virtual gifts, and playing games.
Catherine founded the site at the age of 16 while still in high school. Burning the midnight oil she worked all through the night after school to get the site up and running. Working with developers in India she would be on the phone all night.
'Looking back I was only getting two hours sleep a night. It was hard to manage school and work, but soon afterwards I graduated from high school, and just as the business was taking off I realised my personal life was suffering too,' she said.
Within a year of launch Catherine moved out of the bedroom and into a state of the art office in Pennsylvania with 12 employees.
The site passed breakeven in 2010 and has recently been valued at $20 million. myYearbook has received $16.9 million in funding to date. And although not a serious rival to Facebook just yet the site created by the now 21 year old Catherine Cook is a great achievement.
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