A junior at Washington & Lee University, Crews has the classic "what I did on summer break" story after teaming with some high school buddies to create Jalo Group LLC.

Jalo, pronounced "halo," oversees a student-friendly Internet portal, operates a monthly college news magazine and now boasts Web sites around the country.

"We wanted to create a company that offered a general portal for college students like a Yahoo, Lycos or Excite," says Crews, a business administration major. "The original idea focused on Internet research plus useful and entertaining links. The more we got into it, the more we realized we needed to provide information on a local level to students."

The first site is up and running in Charlottesville, where partners Kyle Halliday and Martin Bales attend the University of Virginia. Another partner, George Willcoxon, attends Princeton, which — you guessed it –– also has a site.

Jalo offers articles and features from a volunteer staff of about 20 students, as well as links to pages about health and fitness, travel, music, alcohol and more.

The company launched a site at the University of California at Berkeley in October, and sites for New York- and San Francisco-area students are under construction. Penn State University should be added soon.

Everything’s going gangbusters except the bottom line. The four partners, all from California, have invested approximately $15,000 of their own money in the project, but they haven’t seen much in return except long nights at the PC, some warm fuzzies and a ton of bootstrapping experience.

Crews isn’t discouraged, though. He says his site’s ability to communicate with the hard-to-reach college community is the business’ calling card.

"If you can reach [students] in an environment in which they feel comfortable," he says, "where they feel someone isn’t sanitizing the information and telling them what to do, that’s valuable. There’s a lot of demand out there for reaching college students."

Crews hopes that demand will lure outside investors. There’s not much overhead now that the site is up, and Crews is doing a lot with trade-out advertising. But he says the project won’t make money until he can work on it full-time.

"I’ve been contacting venture capitalists, running the idea by them and seeing what they think," he says. "Everyone says, ‘Send us a business plan with financial projections, a PowerPoint presentation.’ They really want to talk and see what we’re about, and they want us to show them we’re for real."

Crews says he’d love to work on the project full time once he graduates and that his partners are similarly committed.

In any event, with their experience launching JALO.com, Crews and his gang are facing a promising future. "I’ve been getting job offers," Crews says. "They can’t find enough good people, people who understand the Internet, know how to do business on the Internet and can do Web development.

"There’s really something to be said for pursuing your own business. I feel I’ve learned a lot, we’ve all learned a lot. That’s probably the most significant thing we’ve got out of this."

— Mike Ashley