Ad venture From dorm room to the top-floor office, from incubator to accelerator, the saga (so far) of a student startup By Janelle Nanos ’02
Tom Coburn is charming, and if he had gone through with his education plan—a biology major, graduation in 2013, followed by medical school—he surely would have developed a lovely bedside manner as a practicing physician someday. But today the redheaded 22-year-old Hopkinton, Massachusetts, native is one of Boston’s youngest CEOs, and on this autumn morning he’s targeting that charm instead at the construction workers building the brand new office space for his online startup, Jebbit, in the Landmark building near Fenway Park. Riding the elevator in the building’s historic tower, he chats easily with the hard-hat-wearing worker three times his age. The elevator doors glide open to reveal stunning floor-to-ceiling windows . . . and one of Jebbit’s programmers dangling like an orangutan, by one arm then the other, from the steel girders on the ceiling. The programmer grins goofily down at his colleagues slouched on a gray sectional sofa below him, their baseball caps turned backward and laptops on their laps. Coburn shrugs and smiles as he continues with the tour. The construction worker chuckles and turns to Coburn: 16
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“I’ve been here a week and I still have no idea what it is that you guys do.” “We’re in online advertising,” Coburn replies. That’s certainly one way to describe it. Coburn’s company, Jebbit, is attempting to completely rethink the way we interact with ads online, and since sharing a first-place finish in the undergraduate Boston College Venture Competition (BCVC) in 2011, it’s gotten some significant traction. The past few years have been a bit of a blur for Coburn and his cohorts: They’ve been accepted to two of the country’s most competitive startup accelerators, raised $1.8 million in funding, found partners in brands such as Coca-Cola, Bose, and Ralph Lauren, and been named to the Boston Globe’s “25 Under 25” hot list. Jebbit today has 13 employees, 10 of whom are under the age of 22 (and nine of whom occupy the same Cleveland Circle house). Last year, Coburn and two cofounders—chief technology officer Chase McAleese (also a member of the Class of 2013) and COO Jonathan Lacoste ’15—left Boston College before they could graduate to pursue Jebbit full-time.