Cirque to Start-Ups

Breanden Beneschott '11 graduated from high school in 2004 and has taken time off to pursue his diverse interests: gymnastics and entrepreneurship.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your experiences working in Nevada. What were you doing there?

A: I was in Lake Tahoe doing aerial silks with people who had been doing Cirque du Soleil in the past. I was a gymnast my whole life and took a year off from Princeton in 2006-07. A guy had gotten hurt at the last minute, and I happened to be in the area, so they asked me to step in. I spent eight months or so performing big shows in massive nightclubs.

Q:What did that mean on a day-to-day basis?

A: There was no rehearsal. I basically improvised everything, but people really liked it. I worked maybe a total of 20 minutes a week. I started work at one in the morning, and then I'd go and party with the crowd.

Q: Did you always plan to stay there for half a year before coming back to Princeton?

A: Yeah, but it was the most fun I've ever had. It was an amazing group of people. I was working so little, but they paid an extremely high amount for that much work.

Q: Why did you take time off in the first place?

A: I initially took time off because I was filing a series of patents for automatic data backup for cell phones. I was exploring that and I was doing the silk stuff at the same time. Then I helped start a company called Zandigo/Admish, where I worked for about a year and a half . I took that for quite a ways as the CTO, the director of technology.

Q: What happened with that project?

A: I ended up leaving to work on another project, and since then I've worked on a number of different ventures. Last year, with Kellam Conover GS '09, who is now at Stanford Law, I wrote a business plan and entered a couple of competitions and won them all.

Q: What was that project?

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A: It's called smsPREP. A couple of times a day we send out practice standardized test questions, and it works on any phone. If you were going to work on the MCAT, for example, we send you these questions, and you sit and work on them, and we give you feedback.

Q: How has the reaction been so far?

A: People love it. We launched about a month ago with just an ACT/SAT program, and it's really popular.

Q: How will you continue work on smsPREP in the future? How does Princeton figure in?

A: Well, right now we're working on the GMAT, GRE and MCAT, which are college exams. Once those are up, Princeton's definitely a great target. We're talking to people at Business Today for press release-type announcements.

Q: How about once you graduate? Do you think you'll continue with start-ups?

A: Yes. Silicon Valley is the greatest place to be.

Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Gabriel DeBenedetti.