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The first business for
Ben Kaplan ’11
ran aground
when he was a Fourth Former at St. Paul’s, six years
before he raised his first million. An avid paddleboarder,
the then-16-year-old entrepreneur had developed a
summer fitness routine based on modified boards, a
big body of water, and countless abdominal crunches.
The trick, he says, was to inspire healthy living, but
the selling point was an opportunity to exercise out-
doors, something Kaplan appreciated all his young
life. He targeted friends of his parents, many of them
recent retirees without regular fitness routines.
But not long after building a small clientele, Kaplan
realized his newfound business had one giant flaw: The boards he’d
constructed – a combination of fiberglass and epoxy – couldn’t
support much weight. They started sinking.
And so sunk Kaplan’s first business, which made the next one that
much sweeter. After graduating from St. Paul’s, Kaplan, now 24,
attended Holy Cross. He played hockey and studied, while dreaming
up his passion projects. Kaplan and a few friends began tinkering
with an idea, all based on relatively simple questions: What were
college-aged socialites doing? Where were they going? How could
they find one another?
Those queries led to the creation of
WiGo
(short for
Who Is Going
Out
) in 2014, an app that allowed users to hone in on specific social
groups to figure out who was going out, where they were going out,
and when. The catch? Five percent of the school’s population had to
sign up in order for the app to “unlock,” giving WiGo a rarified air of
exclusivity in a market that covets the next big thing.
With technology
the norm of
their generation,
young alumni are taking traditional education
and applying it to non-traditional careers
by Matt de la Pe
ñ
a ’04 with Peter Harrison ’07
Marian Bull ’06, freelance writer and editor /
PHOTO: MATT TAYLOR-GROSS
Ben Kaplan ’11, founder of WiGo
