How far would you go to keep your dream alive? It’s a difficult question that we hope to never have to answer. But at the young age of 24, entrepreneur Matt Ivester was faced with a dilemma: shut down his company and let his partners down or continue to foster cyberbullying.

Just a year and a half before the site was shut down, Ivester founded JuicyCampus.com for college students to gossip freely about parties, classes, sports and campus life. Its motto, “always anonymous… always Juicy,” invited students to share secrets anonymously.

“The idea was that people gossip offline, and it’s for the most part harmless, so I thought online would be no different,” Ivester said.

Ivester was inspired to start the company knowing he was more connected to the college scene than older and more experienced entrepreneurs. He created JuicyCampus to try to capitalize on this advantage.

“I started brainstorming ideas, and I thought [an online college gossip site] would be popular,” Ivester said, “and I was right; it was incredibly popular.”

JuicyCampus quickly took off. “I raised a million dollars from a venture capital company and took the site from seven campuses to 60 to 500 campuses nationwide,” Ivester said.

“This was a great opportunity to take a risk and see if I could do something big and ambitious. I thought if I screw it up and it all goes terribly wrong, I would be no less qualified than I was at the time,” Ivester said. “What I didn’t think through, of course, are the ways online gossip is different from offline gossip and the damage it would do.”

Ordinarily harmless gossip can do infinitely more damage online because it’s permanent and spreads quickly. To make matters worse, JuicyCampus users began posting malicious rumors about students including lies about students’ sexuality and commenting under threads such as “biggest slut.”

Ivestor’s once promising company began to crumble as media bashed his site.

“It got gradually worse. At first it was fun and popular, so I thought the media was overreacting. But over time, it sunk in,” Ivester said. “I found very quickly that advertisers didn’t want to put their brands next to negative user content.”

Even as JuicyCampus hurt students and lost money, Ivester had a difficult time pulling the plug.

“I had taken a million dollars and hired employees. They had relied on me. I couldn’t just shut the website,” Ivester said.

Ivester tried to stay optimistic; he thought he could shift the tide on the site. Ivester wrote a blog post titled “Hate isn’t juicy,” but his plea for an end to negative posting had little effect.

“I was naive,” Ivester said. “The hardest part was emotional. By the end it was incredibly emotionally draining because I knew what I was doing had a net-negative impact.”

Luckily, JuicyCampus’ failure gave Ivester the opportunity to reset. Ivester has taken his experiences running JuicyCampus.com and written the book “lol…OMG,” which is now the best selling book on the topic of online citizenship. In “lol…OMG,” Ivester discusses how students do things they think will be fun, “lol,” only to realize later that their actions are causing unintended negative consequences, “OMG.”

Similarly, Ivester has introduced a new app, Kindr, designed to use technology to spread kindness.

Looking back at JuicyCampus Ivester has regrets, but he feels the positive choices he now makes constitute his past failure.

“I look at [JuicyCampus] as a great learning experience. I was able to take that experience and do something really positive in writing “lol… OMG,” Ivester said. “Feeling like my work has a positive impact is really important to my work and will be now for the rest of my life.”