I spent three of my Spring Break days work­ing with the CEO of FamZoo.com and Prince­ton Alumni, Bill Dwight ‘84. As a start up with only two employ­ees, Fam­Zoo “head­quar­ters” are located in Bill’s house in Palo Alto, CA. Fam­Zoo is an online vir­tual credit union that helps kids learn good money man­age­ment skills.

I started my first day, Mon­day, being toured around his home and office, fol­lowed by a 30-minute Skype chat with Bill and Chris Beau­fort — FamZoo’s other employee and Bill’s for­mer Prince­ton room­mate — about what they do each day, where they’re try­ing to direct the com­pany, etc. After our chat, Bill con­tin­ued to describe all that he does at Fam­Zoo. He talked about how he makes deci­sions (based heav­ily on ethics), how he inter­acts with users on FamZoo’s web­site, and finally how the com­pany has recently shifted and realigned its focus group — first, the com­pany focused on get­ting month-to-month pay­ments made by indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies, but now it has shifted to big­ger reg­is­tra­tion time peri­ods and has switched to focus­ing on sign­ing credit unions  and banks to make part­ner­ship deals. Bill also showed me how he keeps track of every con­nec­tion he or Chris has made in the past. Through using a pro­gram called High­Rise, Bill can effi­ciently man­age con­tacts, remem­ber how Fam­Zoo is con­nected to indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies, and find appro­pri­ate times to fol­low up with said contacts.

After get­ting sand­wiches for lunch, Bill and I came up with a project for me to work on on the side as I con­tin­ued to watch/learn from Bill’s day-to-day oper­a­tions. It was my job to fig­ure out how Fam­Zoo can increase its com­pany pres­ence on LinkedIn.com, and then begin to imple­ment some of these changes.

AJ and Bill

Tues­day was filled with two major events. First, I lis­tened in on a demo-call that Bill gave to a poten­tial Credit Union part­ner that was inter­ested in work­ing with Fam­Zoo. Through the hour long demon­stra­tion — which Bill knocked out of the park — I got a first-hand look at what FamZoo’s hard sell looks like, how Bill politely inter­acts with his cus­tomers, and the sheer power of a web­site like Fam­Zoo. I spent the remain­der of the day fill­ing out FamZoo’s LinkedIn Com­pany Page. I researched what all com­pa­nies can do on LinkedIn, talked with Bill to pin­point the best options, and then began to add ban­ner images, links, and descrip­tions to the page. The rest of the after­noon flew by as I exper­i­mented with addi­tions to the LinkedIn page.

My last day, Wednes­day, started with another demon­stra­tion with yet another poten­tial credit union part­ner — one of the biggest credit unions in the US in terms of cap­i­tal. After this sec­ond demo, I fin­ished off the day design­ing and edit­ing FamZoo’s LinkedIn Page. I left with the final “prod­uct” being a three step sequence for view­ers to fol­low in order to learn more about the com­pany, find out how they can part­ner with Fam­Zoo, and see all the reviews of Fam­Zoo from tons of credit unions and users of the web­site. Finally, I spent some time tin­ker­ing around with the web­site and all of its func­tions, and giv­ing Bill any feed­back I had dur­ing that time.

This blog pretty much sum­ma­rizes all that I did dur­ing my time with Fam­Zoo. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Princetern­ship pro­gram, it’s well worth your time.