These 2 Penn grads want to bring out the best of the internet

With today’s social media feeds flooded with all kinds of content, Taylor Culliver and Dilip Rajan don’t want people to “settle” for just any articles.
It’s why the two recent University of Pennsylvania graduates started Vyrtex, an online platform where people can connect through content they curate themselves. Users can sign up for the site and start creating topic-specific “collections,” which is where they can add and organize articles they want to share with others.
The idea came to Culliver in an entrepreneurial journalism course, and after meeting Rajan during spring of his junior year, he and Rajan started working on it the summer before their senior year.

It's really about creating that identity through the things that you're reading.

“We both saw this major issue with the content we were coming across,” Culliver said. “That wasn’t suitable for us, so we were like, ‘How do we bring the best content to the forefront?’”
Culliver, who was the president of Penn’s campus newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian, said Vyrtex acts as “the point between, where people and content come together,” which is where the name comes from. (They went with a “y” because the URL for “vertex” was already taken.)
Since launching in the beginning of September, the platform has gained traction in terms of development and number of users. A Chrome browser extension lets users save any article they’re reading instantly, and a “Discover” page makes it easy to find something based on a range of topics from tech to sports to social justice.
The month of September was dedicated to a whole slew of events and promotions, which included partnerships with groups on Penn’s campus like the Latin@ Coalition and the Asian Pacific Student Coalition, to highlight the platform’s goal of encouraging people to be curators of the content they feel needs to be brought to the forefront.
“We want to empower people to curate what content they think is best,” said Rajan, who served as the president of Penn Masala, a well-known South Asian a cappella group.
“It’s really about creating that identity through the things that you’re reading,” Culliver added.
Think of it as a This.cm for the college set.

Launched a new version of our site today, complete with mobile capability, snaps, and more @ http://t.co/uBDiMrJqI2. pic.twitter.com/u5lWKdRJgn

— Vyrtex (@teamvyrtex) July 8, 2015

With Culliver’s experience in media and communication and Rajan’s focus on product features and user attraction, the two feel their platform differentiates itself from other curation sites by creating a “shelf life” for the quality content users are reading. But even with the importance placed on quality, Vyrtex is meant to empower, not to hamper.
“If you think something is quality, by all means, it belongs on Vyrtex — everybody has a different standard of what quality is,” Culliver said.
For the future, the duo is focused on adding more features like an in-site reader and a mobile app, in addition to maintaining an email newsletters and retaining users. They also plan to promote across colleges nationwide with a campus ambassador program, in hopes of bringing out the good side of the web for all.
“This is something that our generation, millennials, are especially interested in, the kind of intersection of their social network and all the content they read,” Rajan said.
“I think the main message that we want to communicate through everything is that great content exists, it’s there,” Culliver said.