Alumni find success with start-up Yext

Like most operations research and financial engineering concentrators, Daphne Earp ’10 and Collin McCarthy ’09 had always pictured themselves working in the investment-banking sector following graduation. The fall of her senior year, Earp had even taken a job at a Wall Street firm, which she secured through senior recruiting.

Yet after leaving the University, both McCarthy and Earp had a change of heart. While McCarthy worked in a five-member office for Extole, a fledgling Facebook application developer in the Bay Area, Earp made the planned move to New York City but began work in an office of 100 people in Chelsea Market rather than the Financial District. Her company of choice was Yext, a start-up that has partnered with Yahoo, Bing, MapQuest and other local search platforms for businesses to update their information and connect with customers.

Yext, about which Earp learned during her senior year at Princeton, was recently named New York City’s 10th fastest growing company by Inc. Magazine.

Meanwhile, Eric Vreeland ’10 always knew he wanted to work at a start-up. As a child, he developed a love of entrepreneurship after making $5,000 running a lemonade stand at a golf tournament near his house. An internship at a hedge fund the summer after his junior year validated these feelings, he said, and Vreeland decided to “take the road less traveled.”

Earp, McCarthy, Vreeland and Jennifer Keeley ’11 — all close friends at the University — were reunited at Yext after graduation when various circumstances pushed them to forego jobs at more established start-up enterprises.

An ORFE major, Earp always assumed she would wind up on Wall Street — but she changed her mind in the spring of her senior year when she took a class called ELE 491: High-Tech Entrepreneurship taught by electrical engineering professor Ed Zschau ’61.

Zschau, who also taught Yext Chief Operating Officer Tom Dixon ’02 and Chief Technology Officer Sean MacIsaac ’02, suggested that Earp write her final paper on Yext. In doing her research, Earp was drawn to the energy of the company and realized that it was where she wanted to be.

For McCarthy, the financial crisis made investment banking jobs an uncertain career path. “I didn’t see start-ups as being extremely risky compared to what was going on on Wall Street,” he said.

Earp has since brought three fellow Princeton graduates to Yext. Keeley began work at Yext the Monday after Commencement. Summers abroad through the Princeton in Asia program spurred her interest in social entrepreneurship, Keeley explained, and she wanted to find a similar atmosphere as that of the nonprofits with which she worked while in China and Thailand. In the spring of 2011, Keeley and a group of friends won first prize in the Green Business Competition sponsored by the Class of 1976 — and thus she felt that working at a start-up was a natural choice for her.

“Look outside of what you always expected to do,” said Keeley, who majored in English at the University and had never expected to work in a technical job.

“I figured I’d take a risk after a consulting job or after business school,” Earp said. “But doing my paper [on Yext] changed my life.”