Alumni Spotlight: Jeff Eschbach ’14

Get to know some of Kellogg’s alumni who are bringing bold entrepreneurial visions to life. 

Build, design and problem-solve: That’s all Jeff Eschbach ’14 wanted to do with his career, and for more than 15 years, that’s exactly what he’s done.

As an engineer and technologist, Eschbach has helped design new phones and other mobile technologies for Motorola and created computer chips for Intel.

But now he’s taking his technological acumen to the courtroom with Page Vault, a company he founded in 2012 as a student to independently store and safeguard Internet content for lawyers to use as evidence later in court.

Eschbach created Page Vault after speaking with members of the larger Northwestern community, including law and engineering professors. He and his team were able to pinpoint a growing issue within the legal community: securely capturing web content as evidence.

Acquiring content from places like Facebook and Twitter has become a growing problem as posts can be deleted or altered as easily as they’re published. A simple screen grab from a lawyer’s desktop doesn’t cut it in front of a judge anymore.

“You could fake it, so now you need a trusted third party, and the lawyers now are understanding how important that is,” he says.

Common methods, like making a screen capture, can violate the chain of custody — from capture to court — and tampered evidence could put the whole trial at risk. Other methods like hiring a private investigator or issuing a subpoena are often expensive or don’t capture the desired content in time.

With as much effort as a Google search, Eschbach’s company can quickly find and verify the information’s source via the webpage’s server, then copy, date and store it in the cloud to be retrieved later.

Learn more about PageVault and how Kellogg helped Jeff get where he is today