Starting Up #3 - The Roommate Questionnaire That Made Me Millions

Episode notes

Jay Sensi tells the origin story of Campus Kaizen in Episode 3 of Starting Up — and it all started with a five-question roommate questionnaire and a Dallas Cowboys fan. In the spring of 2004, Lafayette College mailed Jay a paper form asking his name, major, sleep schedule, activities, and music preferences. Behind the scenes, staff manually matched 1,400 incoming students into roommate pairs by laying paper forms around desks and hand-pairing them over several days. The result? Jay got matched with a roommate who had zero in common with him — including being a Cowboys fan in Eagles country. But it wasn't just Jay. Almost every freshman he knew hated their roommate situation. Around that same time, "The Facebook" was rolling out across college campuses, and social media was changing the internet forever. Two things collided: everyone hated their roommates, and social networking technology was emerging. The lightbulb moment hit — what if there was a platform where students could find compatible roommates BEFORE moving to campus?