Her Campus Harvard sat down with Karine Hsu and Jeffrey Zhao, who recently launched Campfire, an online community for Harvard students.
Karine Hsu, Class of 2016, Leverett House, co-Founder of Campfire
Jeffrey Zhao, Class of 2016, Cabot House, co-Founder of Campfire
Her Campus: What is Campfire?
Jeffrey Zhao: It’s a discussion platform for students on Harvard’s campus. We like to think about it as a Quora or Reddit for Harvard students, where they can talk about what’s happening on campus, whether it’s courses or social issues or anything else, and also read and comment on what other people are saying about those things.
HC: When did you launch?
Karine Hsu: Last week! You can find us at campfire.college
HC: Are you planning on expanding to other schools?
Karine: Yes, eventually! Since it is pretty new, we’re waiting to see how things play out here before expanding. Ideally, we would eventually have a different page for lots of different schools, so everyone can have the same sort of community. We also think it could end up being a great resource for potential applicants or pre-frosh somewhere down the road!
HC: How did you come up with the idea for this?
Karine: The idea originated last semester, when a lot of discussion about the sexual assault survey results and the Black Lives Matter movement. Op-eds were being written, and lots of Facebook statuses, but there wasn’t really a place to discuss things. E-mail threads don’t include more than one House or one group of friends, and Facebook groups always seemed to get out of control. So over winter break, we built this in like… a week [laughs] and then launched it almost immediately.
Jeffrey: Yeah, it happened very quickly! But we’re really excited about it.
HC: Do you envision this as a place where all of Harvard’s campus is involved, including professors and administrators, or were you hoping for it to be a platform only for students?
Jeff: We definitely want to keep everyone on the platform on just students, as we think that’ll allow conversation to flow more freely, if people know the things they’re writing are only accessible by fellow students. For now, we think that’s what’s needed to really create a great identity and community. Eventually, though, we’ve considered including official statements from administrators and then allowing discussion to happen from there.
HC: Do either of you have a background in creating and/or running websites?
Jeff: I built a website sophomore year with my brother and I worked in software engineering over the summer!
Karine: I launched something about a year ago, it was a glass-door for internship type website. I started that with two other students, but it’s no longer active.
HC: Have you guys worked together on projects before, or what made you decide to team up?
Karine: We met the first month of freshman year, in the Chinese Students Association, and have been friends ever since!
Jeff: Yeah, we’ve been friends for a long time, and also both are really interested in the tech community, so we were talking about the problems we were seeing in communication of campus and decided we should build a platform to try and solve those problems.
Karine: We actually went through the Harvard Ventures Winter Accelerator Program for this project, which is an incubation program, for about a week.
HC: Do you guys envision running this website just the two of you, or are you hoping to get a staff together in order for it to carry on after you graduate? Would you want to pass it on after graduation so it can be run by current students, or would you want to stick with it?
Karine: We just launched last week, so it’s all very unsure, but ideally we’d love to take on more people and then continue to run this after graduation.
HC: Is there anything else you want to share with our readers about Campfire?
Karine: We’ve gotten a lot of traction just in the last week, from talking about classes during shopping week and things like that. Right now, we have about 550 users, and we had an AMA about finance job searches there which went really well, so we’re hoping that eventually this platform could replace in-person events for people who aren’t able to attend those for whatever reason.
HC: One more thing… how did you come up with the name Campfire?
Jeff: In high school, my friends and I… So first of all, I’m from Missouri, and there’s not that much to do around there [laughs]. So my friends and I would have campfires all the time and we would hang out at night and talk a lot, so the association I have with that just solidified in my mind the idea of a campfire as a meeting point and a social point where people in a community can gather and talk.