Glen Meakem, the ex-Marine who founded and catapulted online services firm FreeMarkets Inc. to the top of Pittsburgh's dot-com heap during the late 1990s, has set his sights on another promising local venture, College Prowler Inc.

Meakem has invested $500,000 in the publisher of college guides, which are designed to provide incoming students what they really want to know about campus life. He also will serve as chairman of the venture, co-founded by Carnegie Mellon University graduate student Luke Skurman.

The former FreeMarkets chairman, whose firm was sold last summer to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Ariba Inc. for about $300 million in cash and stock, agreed to make the investment and to sign on to the top executive post after a Duquesne Club lunch in July with Skurman.

"We really hit it off that day," the 24-year-old Skurman said. "You could feel the energy going back and forth. We were really clicking."

For his part, Meakem liked what Skurman's firm is selling. The guides offer "off the record" ins and outs of life on over 200 campuses, from the quality of the opposite sexes to cool places to hang out -- the sort of stuff that moms and dads don't pay much attention to but high school seniors view as absolutely critical.

"This is stuff I wish I'd known when I went to college," said Meakem, 40.

Meakem has been advising the College Prowler team of six 20-somethings in their offices in the basement of a dingy Oakland-Shadyside office building since last summer. The strategy is to meld Meakem's sales and marketing expertise with the College Prowler staff's work-to-the-bone ambition to land the guide in every bookstore across the country by the end of 2005. "Truthfully, not enough people know about us," said Skurman.

Meakem has kept a relatively low-profile since his departure from Ariba at the end of September, a few months after the merger was completed. Armed with $5 million he said he would like to spend locally, he's made only one other investment, in South Side-based startup Akustica Inc., a producer of tiny acoustic semiconductor chips.

College Prowler, www.collegeprowler.com, is compelling not just because it already is publishing and selling the guides and generating revenue, but also because of its great team, Meakem said. "My philosophy is, you invest in people. If there aren't great people to invest in, then don't," he said.

The connection between Skurman and Meakem is obvious. They frequently chime in on each other's thoughts and rarely disagree.

The duo was introduced in May by CMU President Jared Cohon, and followed that introduction with a 2 1/2-hour Duquesne Club lunch that ended in Meakem's former FreeMarkets office.

"Is he going to be as good as the myth?" Skurman said he remembers thinking about Meakem that day. "He really is."