Funny Guy, Smart Entrepreneur

Funny Guy, Smart Entrepreneur

October 19, 2011
Robins School alum Josh Abramson started CollegeHumor.com as a freshman student in 1999 and was employed full-time by his start-up after graduation

There is no doubt that the iconic Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook proved to the world that a college freshman with a big idea can revolutionize the way users experience the Internet, but before Zuckerburg, there was Josh Abramson, '03.  Abramson started CollegeHumor.com as a freshman at the University of Richmond in 1999 with his childhood friend, Ricky Van Veen, then a student at Wake Forest University, to share humorous videos and pictures online with friends. 

“During my freshman year in the dorms, all anybody wanted to do was send each other funny pictures and videos on the Internet,” he said. “After a month or two in Moore Hall, it seemed like someone needed to figure out how to put all of these funny things in to one place.”

Abramson, who was a business administration major with a concentration in finance and minor in philosophy, was inspired to start an Internet company that served as an archive-like site for content and selling ads. Thus, CollegeHumor, a comedy website that features user-submitted original videos and articles, was born.

Fast-forward to 2002, and CollegeHumor was so successful that Abramson found himself in a position of being able to dictate his own career after graduation. 

“I decided before my senior year started that I was going to work full-time on CollegeHumor when I graduated,” he said. “We were making about the same amount of money at that time as we would have made taking 'real jobs,' so it made sense to take the risk and go for it.”

And go for it, he did. In 2004, he launched BustedTees.com, an online t-shirt store that features humorous designs solely created by Abramson and his friends.

“I needed to figure out a way to better monetize CollegeHumor's audience, as it was very hard to grow our ad sales portion of the business at the time,” Abramson recalled. “Funny t-shirts seemed like an obvious fit.”

According to Abramson, BustedTees targets a male audience aged 18 to 25, while CollegeHumor targets a male audience from 18 to 32 years old. In 2006, Abramson sold CollegeHumor, BustedTees and Vimeo to InterActiveCorp (IAC), an American Internet company with over 50 brands spanning across 40 countries.

His work with CollegeHumor did not end with its sale to IAC, though. In February 2009, CollegeHumor expanded into television with The CollegeHumor Show, which appeared on MTV. The show was a scripted sitcom written by and starring nine CollegeHumor editorial staff members who played fictionalized versions of themselves. 

Abramson served as executive producer and primarily worked on the business aspects of The CollegeHumor Show. “We'd been working on a variety of film and television ideas for many years. This just happened to be the first one that we were able to push through,” he said.

In May of this year, Abramson took another entrepreneurial turn and left CollegeHumor and purchased back BustedTees from IAC. “So now, I’m focused 100 percent on that business,” he said. 

“It’s been a lot of fun going from managing a team of 100 people back to managing a team of eight,” he said. “These days, I’m trying to take fewer meetings and focus on getting more real work done.”

The medium in which Abramson works best — online — has not changed. “I like the instant gratification of doing work online,” according to him. “I can see within an hour or two how well something new is working, which still gets me excited.”

Abramson’s advice to other young entrepreneurs might be a little surprising: “No matter how much you study and learn in business school, you're still going to be clueless for a while in the real world.”

He encourages students to seek out as much real-world experience as much as they can possibly manage while in college. “You're likely to never have another four years of your life where you don't need to make money to support yourself. So go out and do whatever it takes to get close to a business you find interesting,” he said.  “Try to start a business. Work for free. Get internships.” 

"Students need to learn how to build websites — it's probably the most coveted skill in New York City right now,” he said.  “If you have the business and the technical savvy, you'll be incredibly well positioned.”

Abramson lives in New York City, and when he's not in the office, you can find him mentoring with Tech Stars, the number-one startup accelerator in the world that provides seed funding from over 75 top venture capital firms and angel investors. He is also involved with Summit Series.