A Fund to Give Greenbacks for Grades

After getting his degree, Michael E. Kopko ’07 did what many recent college grads do—packed up his stuff and moved into an even smaller living space in New York.



However, instead of choosing (selling his soul to) Goldman Sachs, he decided to gather some of his friends from high school and start his own company: GradeFund.com.



GradeFund connects college students to sponsors who pay them for their good grades. Potential sponsors range from parents to prospective employers. People who pay you to get good grades? Sounds like parents...awesome parents.



And this isn’t Kopko’s first go at entrepreneurship; he and his brother Matthew founded DormAid during college, a project they continue to manage.



“It gives me the ability to express my creativity. My only limits are my ambitions,” Kopko says.



But running a company at this age isn’t easy, especially when many of your partners are still in school—Matthew Kopko is currently a law student in Chicago, and chief of marketing for GradeFund, Roy Moran, is a senior at Emory University in Atlanta.



And people aren’t paying them to do well: “I’ve made some sacrifices, a few tenths of a point on my GPA,” Moran admits.



But things are looking up for the fledgling Web site. As of last week, GradeFund claimed over 800 users, 34 of them with Harvard affiliations, according to Michael Kopko. GradeFund also scored its first corporate sponsor in ZooToo.com founder and president Richard Thompson. An entrepreneur himself, Thompson said that he does his best to support young people who act upon their ideas such as Kopko with GradeFund.



“Do it the day you come out of college,” he said of starting your own business. “There’s no better time, and in this economy, you’re not gonna get a job anyway.”