Fall 2025
“I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just didn’t know when it would happen.”
Madison Long excelled early at skills such as negotiating, leadership and public speaking. She knew at a young age that she wanted to help the next generation of young people, but becoming a teacher would not allow her to have the impact she wanted at scale.
The result? “I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” Long says. “I just didn’t know when it would happen.” Indeed, before age 30, Long started, restructured and sold a multi-million-dollar company.
A graduate of North Central High School in Indianapolis, where she was senior class president, Long was seeking a university where she would have vast resources and a built-in community, but not get lost in the shuffle. She found it at Purdue.
Long excelled both in and out of the classroom. She received the business school’s highest honor, the Emanuel Thornton Weiler Outstanding Student Award, and was named one of the “2017 Best & Brightest” undergraduate business students nationally by the website Poets & Quants.
“Madison was a fearless go-getter,” says Darren Henry, BOP director. “She was confident in her abilities as a business student and that led her to pursue extraordinary career opportunities. Her confidence and drive powered her to succeed as a student and subsequent business professional.”
Following graduation, Long joined Microsoft as an analyst in its finance rotation program in Redmond, Washington. She learned different aspects of the company during her two-year stint, but came to the realization she needed more from her career.
“Madison was a fearless go-getter. She was confident in her abilities as a business student and that led her to pursue extraordinary career opportunities.” –Darren Henry
“I wanted to have a job where I was closer to the impact I was making. Running reports in Excel didn’t give me the direct correlation that I needed to have in trying to make peoples’ lives better,” she says.
Long left Microsoft in 2019 for what is now known as the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation. She began as a senior business analyst and then became a program development and analytics lead. She was manager on several projects, including the 2020 Women in the Workplace report, the largest study done on the state of women in corporate America.
She also had another project in the works, one that began in her last six months at Microsoft. Along with another Purdue graduate, Simone May, the duo created a company that would match content creators with companies that needed inventory. The new creation — which was called Clutch, signifying the idea of “coming through when it counts” — was launched in 2019.
“The company wasn’t built around celebrity or influencer endorsements. It was matching real-life people who make compelling content at scale with companies who could use the content over a wide variety of platforms,” Long says.
The companies seeking content would pay for a certain amount of material from several creators at a price per month. Clutch compensated the creators, who were not charged to participate, keeping a commission for profit.
To get Clutch off the ground, Long, who served as CEO, had to get funding.
“To be honest, I didn’t even know what VC stood for when I started,” she says. “Luckily, since I was in Palo Alto working at the foundation, I was in the middle of Silicon Valley. I talked to everyone I could and networked like crazy.”
“I wanted to have a job that was closer to the impact I was making.”
Her first funding came from another BOP alum, Roland Parrish, whose name adorns the library in the Krannert Building. She found support from other sources, including $1.2 million from Precursor Ventures, and the company was up and running. At its peak, Clutch worked with about 500 content creators and 50 customers. The company won $100,000 in both the Pitch HearstLab Texas and the Black in Tech Summit Pitch Competition, and it was listed among Adweek's “Creative 100 2023.”
But not everything was perfect. In 2023, Long decided she needed to downsize.
“We got to the point where we realized that we either had to go public, through an IPO, or put ourselves in a position to be acquired. Looking at the trends, including the introduction of AI and the possible ban of media such as TikTok, I didn’t believe an IPO would be possible,” she says.
The full-time staff was cut in half, from eight to four, and Long began to seek investors interested in buying the company.
“My priorities were to allow our creators to continue to do great work, to take care of our customers, and to make sure our employees would have soft landings,” she says. After talking with several different partners, Long decided to sell the company to Plaiced, based in Toronto and Los Angeles.
“We accomplished a lot at Clutch, but I’m proudest of the outcomes of the people we worked with,” she says. “One is working at OpenAI, for instance, and they’ve all landed on their feet.”
“Innovation is entrepreneurship. So is being diligent and efficient. It’s not a surprise that so many CEOs and entrepreneurs come from Purdue and do great work.”
Long has returned to Indianapolis, joining the family home health care business. She is operations manager for CareGivers, Inc., and says she uses the lessons she learned at Clutch in her new role.
“I’ve been able to introduce AI solutions for process improvements, and I’m excited to become an expert in mergers and acquisitions in legacy businesses,” she says. “I think there are great opportunities in the area.”
Long, who turned 30 in May, credits her alma mater with much of her success. She points to the financial assistance and advice from alumni and Purdue Innovates, which provided $200,000 in 2022, as being invaluable in her career. She says the lessons learned came early.
“The first things we were taught there were grit, perseverance and integrity. Those are fundamental to being an entrepreneur. Some people don’t have real-life stress tests until they get on their jobs, but we got it at school,” she says.
“Innovation is entrepreneurship. So is being diligent and efficient. It’s not a surprise that so many CEOs and entrepreneurs come from Purdue and do great work.”
