Jennifer Turliuk

After about 4 months spent in the San Francisco Bay Area getting to know the entrepreneurial scene, it hit me. If you name almost any famous tech entrepreneur in the Valley, during my time here, I’ve either seen them speak and met them in person, had a meeting one-on-one with them and interviewed them to learn from them, or spent between 1-5 days shadowing them.  And then I realized – not everyone in the world has had this opportunity. But maybe they’d like to hear about it. So I started writing about my experiences – basically some anthropological observations about my time with some of the most famous entrepreneurial luminaries in the world: Peter Thiel (Paypal), Joe Gebbia (Airbnb), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Eric Ries (Lean Startup), Steve Blank (4 Steps to the Epiphany), Reid Hoffman (Linkedin), Brad Feld (Techstars), Jessica Mah (Indinero), Matt Flannery (Kiva), Randy Reddig (Square), Brian Wong (Kiip), Sam Zaid (Getaround), and more. Here is my first entry. I would love to hear people’s thoughts on it and whether they would like to hear more of these stories.

A Day at Kiva with Matt Flannery
“Focus your life on the ecstasy, not the laundry”

This is what Matt Flannery, the Founder and CEO of Kiva, said to me as we strolled along beneath a waterfall in a park in downtown San Francisco. He was kind enough to let me shadow him for a day and sit in on all of his meetings (well, all the ones I could legally attend). I was a fly on the wall – an anthropologist, as he put it – observing the employees’ day-to-day activities with as little alteration due to my presence as possible. And I learned more from this experience than I could have ever imagined.

I learned that being CEO is not about being the expert across every domain. It’s about hiring people who are incredibly smart and driven in certain functional areas of expertise, and helping to spark their fire. Everyone at Kiva that I observed acted as a mini-entrepreneur within their domain, from the fundraising officers proposing new methods and practices for securing donations, to the marketers creating their own customer acquisition funnel and campaigns, to Matt’s assistant, who got him to install Tripit on his iPhone (having pre-loaded all his travel arrangements into it) and produced a clear plastic folder that she’d thought would be good for him to put all his travel receipts into. They didn’t ask for permission or instruction on what to do – they just did. And they were some of the most passionate and engaged people I’ve ever encountered. An amazing illustration of this was the engineering and product team (affectionately known as “Braincrave”), who invited me to join them for lunch and proceeded to gush about Kiva and how they got 2 weeks out of every 10 to work on projects not connected to what their managers wanted them to do, how this was more efficient than regular 20% creative time where people have every Friday afternoon off because it meant they could get full projects done, and how it led to them creating a real-time visualization dashboard of loans being made and repaid. In an environment where no one can hire engineers, these told me that even though many of them had startup ideas on the side, they couldn’t bring themselves to leave Kiva because they loved it so much – a completely different answer than anything I’d ever heard from any other ‘wantrepreneur’.

Now back to this laundry detergent analogy (which is particularly relevant to me because as some of you may know, my prior career was in marketing laundry detergent). One of Matt’s afternoon meetings was cancelled and I had the rare and precious opportunity to go for coffee with him and then take a stroll around a nearby park. I was asking him all sorts of questions about whether he thought it would be best to start a non-profit or a for-profit, and whether I should try and get some experience first. I’d been told that the best model for making a positive impact on the world was to try and accumulate as much wealth as possible, and then to use it for good. I also asked him what he thought about getting an MBA. His overall message was that I was too focused on the laundry – the stuff that doesn’t matter (referencing a book called “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry”). He said it wasn’t about for-profit or non-profit, non-tech or tech – it was about focusing on solving a problem you are really passionate about, little by little, day by day. That would help you determine what the best ways were to solve the problem. Matt said that many entrepreneurs were too focused on making a company, raising money, and meeting deadlines, and that this could cause problems – unlike this, Kiva (and many other great businesses) started out just focusing on a problem and not even planning to become a big company. He also said that MBAs were not helpful to becoming an entrepreneur, and that in many cases they can actually harm your entrepreneurialism – they teach you the intricacies of doing the laundry, when really you could just be doing the laundry without knowing so much about it. Also, trying to accumulate a lot of money so that you can then give it back is not a proven success path: the richest tech entrepreneurs did not set out to make a lot of money (or to make a lot so they could give it back later) – they did their daily activities because they were fascinated by them and totally passionate about the problem they were solving. So it’s more about focusing on the ecstasy – what you love to do – and this passion will be what makes you be able to jump out of bed every morning.

He closed one of the most amazing days of my life by saying that it was too bad I’d just come for a day of boring meetings, and that it wasn’t really the fun stuff. If he didn’t consider what I witnessed today to be fun, I can’t even imagine how awesome his definition of fun must be.

After the laundry…the ecstasy.

I had the amazing opportunity of meeting with John Krumboltz at Stanford this afternoon. John is a sort of ‘meta’ figure in the field of career counseling – he counsels career counselors on how to do career counseling. When I first learned about him and his work, I was incredibly excited about the possibility of meeting with him while here in California – and he certainly did not disappoint. Our hour together exceeded all expectations that I had. John has perspectives on career counseling that are unlike pretty much anything I’ve ever heard before – but they are the ones that resonate with me the most. Here are my biggest takeaways from our meeting:

There’s no way that you can declare in advance what career is best for you, yet this is the way career counseling is done in most of the world. For example, in England, you have to declare what career you will do for the rest of your life at age 15, and after that, it is very difficult to change. He reference the example of a guy who had written ‘chemistry’ on the little slip of paper given to him at 15 because he’d heard that you could make a lot of money in it. John met him 10 years later, and having done three degrees in chemistry and finally entering a job in the chemical industry, he’d realized that he hated it – yet at 25, he planned to stay in it for the rest of his life anyway because of all the time and work he’d put in to get there, and how difficult it would be to switch. In my eyes, this is a massive tragedy – a young person committing to stay for the rest of their life (or for any length of time, for that matter) in a job that they hate. John and I agreed that this would probably lead to many health problems (as I had in my corporate job after only a few months – eye twitches, neck pains, and back problems that I’d never had before in my life) and for him to come home at night and be mean to his family – for the decision of what to do during the day to affect all areas of his life and make him hate his life. Think of the potential that is lost there – imagine what impact he could make if he was doing what he loved instead.

Krumboltz’s perspective was to simply try out some alternatives to see what you like, because you never know what the world will look like a few years from now or what you will want/like in the future. 

Don’t do something now for the sole purpose of getting you to something better later, because the world is changing quickly, and that thing may not be needed anymore or you may not even like it when you get to it. In which case you can choose something else. For example, if I am interested in becoming a VC, I may see the steps towards that as working for a consulting firm or investment bank for 2 years, then doing my MBA, then getting a VC job. Well what if by the time I finish my MBA, VCs are no longer needed in the world for some reason, or I get a VC job and hate it? If I liked the consulting/i-banking and MBA experience, then it’s no worries. If I hated every minute of those 4 years, then that would be pretty sad.

Focus mainly what you would like to do now: His method of counseling advises you to make a list of the things you’d most like to try next, and then choose what is best from among them. For example right now I’d love to travel to India and live in an ashram, go to Startup Chile, do a week at 10 different startups, DJ for a season at a ski resort, etc – and at this very moment, I see the spending a week at 10 different startups as the best option. Then he said to figure out the first step towards making that best option happen – in my case, how would I get the first startup agree to let me shadow them for a week?

Stop thinking/reflecting and just do something: He said you learn more by trying/doing things, not by discussing theories or meditating on it. He said life is a long series of experiments. He never ‘decided’ to be a college professor, but it was the best among the opportunities available to him at the time, and he loved it so much that he stayed. Start doing something valuable for other people now. Engage in the world in a meaningful way. Try to learn from it and do a good job at it.

Every work experience is valuable: He said it’s better to have some job than no job, and that you can learn a lot even if your job is not your ideal one. He said everything you try is a learning experience, and that you shouldn’t view the experience or yourself as a failure if you end up not liking it. He referenced my time in the corporate world as a very valuable experience, and I agree – I learned so much about how I did and did not want to live, what types of work environments I wanted to and did not want to work in, etc. Had I not done had that experience early on in life, I might have made some majorly bad choices later in life. He said that you can learn a lot from mistakes and therefore it is good to make mistakes.

Avoid over-committing unnecessarily: He cautioned me about committing myself to 10 weeks at 10 different startups if I didn’t actually need to. I could start with one day or one week, see if it was a good learning experience, then decide if I want to stay there, go somewhere else, or stop the experiment altogether. I like this idea of making the minimum viable commitment to an experience, rather than jumping in and committing to a year without any testing first to see whether I liked it or not. If I were a student doing the corporate job search right now, I’d ask if I could spend at least a day (or even a week) at each of the companies I was considering – I’d do as much prototyping as possible. I’d talk to past and present employees at the companies. Etcetera.

Set a fun limit instead of a time limit: I asked well what if I spend a few years flitting about to various countries and working for a few months at a time, and then no one wants to hire me because I look so flighty? Wouldn’t my time be better spent trying to work for somewhere like Facebook or Google where afterwards the job possibilities will be endless? He asked if I would enjoy working at those places or at the job opportunities that came about after them – and I don’t know the answer to that. He said you shouldn’t set a time limit on experiences (e.g. “I will stay here for 2 years”), but a fun limit – if you’re not having fun anymore, then quit. Don’t stay in a job you hate just because you are worried it will look bad on your resume if you leave soon after starting – he said these days, that idea is a fallacy because people change careers so often. Plus if you are really worried, you can take it off your CV or only put the year on your CV and explain it to prospective employers in the interview. Don’t be a slave to your CV. Requiring ‘2 years of experience’ is a stupid system – and although you do need to adapt to the stupidity of life in some ways, you can choose to play it like a game. You get success in life by surprising your opponents (Dell, Jobs and Gates did this by succeeding despite their dropout status). He said the world is a crazy place, but you can decide to enjoy it anyway.

You learn the most through what you do in the real world, not through lectures (except if you want to be a stenographer – a professional note-taker). Plus, professors don’t necessarily get chosen based on who has the most knowledge of a topic – they often get chosen on the basis of whether they have a PhD or not (which doesn’t necessarily mean they know more – therefore having a PhD is helpful mainly because the ‘system’ says it is valuable). His view on education was similar to what I’ve been hearing a lot lately – that although having a degree does not necessarily mean you know more, the world is structured in such a way that people with more degrees get more opportunities and more money in jobs. Yet the value of a formal education is grossly over-valued – he stressed that a degree won’t automatically get you a job and that there are lots of unemployed masters and PhD graduates out there. Finishing a degree doesn’t automatically guarantee success, but neither does dropping out (if you were to look at Jobs, Gates, Dell and Zuckerberg as examples). He said in order to prototype a potential degree experience, you could talk to current students, attend classes, and think hard about the potential time and cost commitments of removing yourself from the workforce for a few years. He said to be very cautious about committing yourself to it, but that you could always drop out. And you won’t know if the degree is useful until you finish it.

If I were to boil down John’s proposed steps for career transitions into steps, I would say that they would be as follows (you will notice that this is similar to the design process and also to the lean startup model – it’s amazing how many things in life you can apply these ideas to):

1. Ideate: Make a list of the most fun/awesome/cool/educational experiences available to you

2. Prototype: Choose the best option. Figure out how you can make it happen with the minimum viable commitment

3. Test: Do it to your fullest ability, try to provide value, and learn as much as you can. If you like it, keep going with it. If it gets boring, learn from the experience, and go back to step 1.

I’m going to give this a try.

So it’s now been 4 months since I left my job. I’ve come to realize that a lot of that time has been spent reflecting and thinking, which has been good – but now it’s time to commit myself to something and go full-speed ahead at it.

Tonight I read a bit from The How of Happiness, which is an amazing book, and it talked about how overthinking and rumination are major sources of unhappiness. Well I realized I have been doing a lot of overthinking about what is the perfect path for me over the past few months/years. Should I do an MBA? Join a tech startup? Start a tech startup? Start a non-tech startup? Do an overseas international development position? Take investment? Be a non-profit/for-profit? All these questions and an abundance of answers/opinions/social comparison available out there…but at some point you have to stop seeking information and simply act. I think unfortunately at my corporate job I got a little too good at analyzing things in meetings for months on end before executing .

Don’t get me wrong, the last few months were great. I’ve accomplished some things that I never would have, had I stayed at my job. Here’s an update on what’s been happening: my last day at my job was on a Friday in June, and by Sunday, I was in Silicon Valley (having visited in February and absolutely loved it here). I met Dave McClure (who runs an incubator called 500 Startups and is one of the top investors in Silicon Valley) for my interview to be his shadow (I’d been selected as one of the top 6 finalists in the competition from hundreds), and leveraged the title of Dave McClure Shadow Finalist to meet with tons of awesome people on that trip including major CEOs and investors in the Valley. On that trip, I was incredibly excited to be invited to join MaiTai, a group of kiteboarding investors and entrepreneurs that is run by a major venture capitalist and a pro kiteboarder. I’d set a goal of being invited by age 30, so was super excited for it to happen within months of setting the goal – I’ve found that since writing down my goals, I’ve been achieving them quite rapidly. I found out that I didn’t get the shadow position, but I did use my interview time to build relationships with people at 500 Startups and get job opportunities from three of the startups there (at this point I was working on my own calendaring startup but was open to new opportunities). I opted to take a position with Launchrock (who makes landing pages for startups) as their “Hustler in Training”, which would entail marketing, sales, and customer service. I hung out with them for a week, then went back to Canada at the end of June to get my visa stuff sorted out. What was supposed to be a 5 day process ended up taking a month and a half, and at the end of it all, my application for a J1 trainee visa got rejected by the visa agency, who had an internal rule (not a government rule) that the sponsoring company had to be in existence for over a year. Would have been nice of them to bring this up from the start. Without a plan, I wondered what to do next, and told my family the day before the 500 Startups Demo Day (mid-August) that I was considering flying back to California. At 4AM, I decided that I did indeed want to go, and at 3PM, I got on a flight and was at Demo Day the next day. Back in California, I continued my cycle of attending events and conferences and meeting with people. I wavered between a few ideas: a ridesharing company, AirBnB for online teaching, etc. But I always came back to Founder2Founder and the idea of encouraging more young people to find and choose careers they are passionate about, as well as reducing poverty through fostering entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship is said to be the surest cure to poverty by the founder of the Grameen Bank and also the author of the World is Flat). At the end of August, I went to Burning Man, which was an incredible week of art and music in the desert. I am so grateful that I was able to go to such a festival, and was amazed to find a strong intersection between high-tech entrepreneurs and spirituality at the festival and afterwards. Afterwards, I had a meeting with Dave McClure again where I pitched him to try and get into the 500 Startups incubator with a vertical of Founder2Founder that I am creating: an online university for entrepreneurs, developers and designers. I’ve gotten some pretty awesome speakers on board and staPartway through my pitch (which ended up happening outside without my laptop – good thing I knew it well), he said something along the lines of “Wait, are you raising funding?”. I was like “Um, yeah” (thinking to myself, this is why I’m talking to you) and he responded, “Can I invest in you?”. Again, “Ummm…yes!” He said let’s fast-track this application and a bunch of other positive stuff that made me think I was IN. Then a guy walked by and Dave told him that he should invest in me too and be my advisor – then after the guy walked away, told me that the guy was one of the founders of Youtube…! At this point I felt like I was on top of the world, or in some alternate universe. Then a few hours later my cofounder at the time called and said she no longer wanted to commit to it full-time, but wanted to take on more of an advisory role while she investigated all her options. My heart sank.  My follow-up meeting with another 500 partner a few days later didn’t go so well – he didn’t like my team at the time, didn’t like that we didn’t have a product, etc. Well it turned out he was right and after a conversation with my two other potential cofounders, we decided it was best for us to part ways as well. I’d gone from a team and an offer to be part of the incubator, to nothing at all. But the 500 partner had said I could handle his objections, so I formed a new team and built a product within a week. We met with him again and did a live demo, but it was still no dice. Dave said he’d like to see my progress over the next few months and then perhaps have me join the January class of 500 Startups – and that he might put in $10K now if I could get some referrals from two domain experts he knew (I’d already had about 6 referrals sent their way, but he wanted more). This combined with a little bit of the typical post-BM blues (BM is such an idealistic environment that it is hard not to) was quite disheartening for me, and I spent a few days moping around. With a declining bank account, I started reluctantly updating my Linkedin profile and browsing job opportunities. But then, just as I was about to consider throwing in the towel, I got an email saying that I’d gotten into a program called Startup Chile! $40K equity-free and working on my business in Chile for 6 months! My spirits were lifted immediately – I love traveling and spending 6 months in South America was one of the other goals to do before 30 that I wrote down a few months ago. I was able to choose between starting the program in November or January, and decided to start in January so that I could do something I’ve been wanting to do since I first visited the Bay Area in February – live in a co-op in Palo Alto for a few months and attend events and talks at Stanford. So now I’m living in a 3-house co-op near Stanford with 12 people, and 5 chickens in our backyard. We share chores, meals, and have parties. It’s amazing – so far the best group living situation I have ever been in. And at Stanford, I’ve been going to things like the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series (they bring in a different entrepreneur each week and it is open to the public. Today was Brad Feld who started an incubator called Techstars, and last week was the CEO of Evernote) and a class called Valuescience, which the prof is letting me sit in on. Being near Stanford, although awesome, made me even more paralyzed with indecision – should I do an MBA? PhD? MA? And Steve Jobs’ death made me think, should I try and do a tech startup and make millions/become famous so I can get the word out better about choosing a career you are passionate about?

The fact is, I found a product/market/self fit with Founder2Founder and its 10-week launchpad program. The participants and speakers really enjoyed it and had great successes during and after the program. People from other cities have asked to start chapters in their hometowns. Sponsorship organizations and investors alike have confirmed a need for this sort of thing – one that fosters direct interaction between entrepreneurs and investors, helps people with ideas and teams they have chosen and are already passionate about, and leads to a deeper connection than attending a conference. And I’ve also been offered  funding from Startup Chile for Founder2Founder. So that’s it. No more ruminating on the best course of action – the MBA and job at a startup will always be there a year from now if I need them. But for now, it’s time to go balls to the wall with Founder2Founder for the next 9 months (til the end of Startup Chile) and see where I can take this baby. And now I’m going to be more public/intentional about it. I read today that making your goals public to others increases the chance that you’ll achieve them by 10 times. At first it was hard for me to put this on the internet, let alone my own personal blog with my name attached to it, for fear of failure in the goals I commit to publicly on here. But I’m going to blog about my goals and progress to keep myself accountable. Lacking the structure of a boss cracking down on me or deadlines in school, I think this will really help me to be more productive. My first goal is to make goals for the remainder of my time in Silicon Valley tomorrow and then post them by tomorrow night.

I’ve decided to write this blog post in response to the messages about career advice that I’ve been getting from students in their final year in the university program that I graduated from. Specifically, from one girl who encouraged me to pursue my startup upon graduation (I should have listened) and did a totally badass international internship in the startup world but is now somehow considering partaking in on-campus recruiting with corporations. This blog post is dedicated to you.

Now I don’t profess to be any sort of expert or big success (though hopefully that will come soon). However, I hope to provide a few tips to graduating students who have interests beyond the corporate world, so that they do not end up absolutely miserable like I did. If I’d have followed this advice, I would have skipped months of unhappiness to the point of desperation and gone straight for the position I’m happily in now – accepting funding for my startup and working away at it.

First let’s start with what not to do:

1. Don’t listen to your parents.
Seriously, don’t. Now I love my parents very much, but let’s face it: parents have a different objective for your career than you do – security. Your parents want you to be safe and have enough money to live off of, so obviously most will (either consciously or unconsciously) point you in the direction of the most well-paying, secure option. Do you really think that they are going to be excited about the fact that you want to jaunt off to Africa to take a barely-paying job helping local entrepreneurs? No! But that sounds pretty badass to me! I can’t even believe the number of people I know that, when I ask them why they picked the job or career that they are doing, answer that it’s because their parents told them to. For the love of God, do not become one of those people. If your parents really love you, they will get over it and support you in whatever you do. I know mine did. At this point in your life, pay does not matter – unless you have massive amounts of debt, or a significant other and kids that you are supporting. Choose a great experience over high pay, because it’s better to enjoy every day than to hate work and end up blowing the extra cash anyway on partying and vacations to try and make it palatable.

2. Don’t believe the hype that you need experience before doing what you love.
This is simply not true. Don’t get convinced that marketing laundry detergent or pushing boxes around on slides will help you be a successful entrepreneur, fashion designer, or whatever your dream is. Know that some of the most successful founders (e.g. Google, Apple, etc) had little or no experience at all. As a recent HBR article put it, “To paraphrase Warren Buffett, a career strategy based on doing what you dislike today so that you can do what you like tomorrow is as wise as deferring sex while young so that it can be enjoyed in old age.” Happiness is wanting what you have – so aim for that instead of having a deferred life enjoyment plan.

3. Don’t listen to anyone except yourself.
At the end of the day all that really matters is you and what you want. Everyone looks at things through different lenses based on their experiences, so no one can have the right answer for you – except you! Try to stay away from the gossip about who got what interview, what offer, etc. Knowing that stuff is not going to help you in any way – it will only clutter your mind with useless stuff that will distract you from your pursuit of awesomeness. Also, mentors and role models are great, but again don’t take their word as gospel. They may have tried something and failed, or not been brave enough to try something. But since it was their life path and choices, in most cases they will defend it and perhaps advise you along the same path. Remember, you are different! (in a good way)

Now here’s what you SHOULD do.

1. Make your friends jealous.
My best career advice is think of the most badass thing you could do after graduation, and then do it. Don’t do something unless it’s going to make all your friends jealous. And not just your friends in your program – a number of people in my program were jealous that I was going to be doing marketing for laundry detergent…but no one outside of the program seemed to share the same excitement…including me, once I got out of it! Have confidence in yourself – you are graduating from one of the top programs in the country, and in the world! It’s not just bean-counting firms and laundry packaging companies that want to hire you! Make a list of the coolest companies you like and reach out to them (e.g. for me that would be hot startups with awesome investors involved, Google, IDEO, etc). Or dream up the most amazing business you could start, and apply for university business plan competitions and grant programs for student entrepreneurs (e.g. QCBV at Queen’s gives out $15K to a graduating student that is starting their own business!). Think of the most interesting countries you’d like to live in. Write all these things down and draw them out – as soon as I started doing this, I started rapidly achieving goals I thought it would take me years to accomplish. Reach as high as you possibly can, because this is the time to do it. If you set incredibly high goals, the worst that can happen is you fall slightly short of them and still end up with an awesome outcome.

2. Get out of the bubble.
Even if you try your hardest not to listen to the job gossip going on around you, it’s hard not to let it creep up on you in project meetings, etc. My solution for this is to get out of the bubble. If you can scrape together the money to do it (or if you can find a company that will fly you somewhere for an interview ), I would strongly suggest booking a trip of at least a weekend (more ideally a week) to somewhere that is relevant to what you want to do – either a country you badly want to work in, or the ‘hub’ location for the field you are interested in (e.g. if you are interested in technology/entrepreneurship, go to Silicon Valley. Advertising/finance: New York. Music/movies: LA. etc.). Trust me, you can handle the time off from school. This is more important. In advance of your trip, do some research to figure out who you think is doing the coolest stuff there, then email them to set up meetings with them for when you are there. Learn from them about the scene, their company, and what advice they have. Bonus points if you find someone who’s doing what you’d like to be doing a few years from now. I did this when I first visited Silicon Valley – I found and reached out to everyone from angel investors to the founders of Square and AirBnB. People are surprisingly accessible and willing to meet with you (especially when you are a student!!!). If you’d like, let me know and I can send you my email template that I’ve perfected to the point that I can use it to secure meetings with pretty much anyone.

3. Leverage this time.
This time is precious. You are still a student. But not for much longer. Leverage your student status in as many ways as you can. Since you are in your final year (and even for those in younger years), career should be an absolute priority above marks (unless you are planning on doing something where marks matter, such as management consulting, i-banking, accounting, or grad school. Hint: in most other cases, marks do not matter!). In addition, you are shielded from the big, bad, scary ‘real world’ – you can spend all day researching career stuff without an employer peering over your shoulder and having to step out for multiple ‘dentist appointments’ (AKA interviews) in a week, and without creating an empty hole on your resume between jobs. Most importantly, as a student, pretty much anyone is willing to talk to you. Why wouldn’t you use that to email the CEOs of the coolest companies you can think of and ask them for a phone call meeting? Get advice on your business idea from the professors you most admire? Scrub the alumni directory for the people with the most interesting careers you can find and then have coffee with them? Get free or discounted industry memberships and conference passes? Leverage this time as much as you can.

So there you go. Those are my tips. If none of it works out (though I can pretty much guarantee it will because you are such a rockstar), then you can resort to taking one of the boring jobs being spoonfed to you. (oops, did I say that?)

Also check out this article on the same topic: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/sep/30/even-artichokes-have-doubts/

I’ve been thinking more and more about the concept of doing what you love. For me, it’s not just being an entrepreneur, but supporting/helping entrepreneurs in whatever ways I can. It’s what I’d do without being paid for it – er, what I have been doing without being paid for it, through running the Young Entrepreneurs’ Club and the Queen’s Entrepreneurs Competition. I can’t help it – I just do it! And have been for pretty much the past 6 years – if you count running my high school’s Social Action Conference. It’s all about helping people pursue what they are passionate about – and entrepreneurship just happens to be an amazing expression of pursuing your passions. I’m going to make sure I keep this in my mind as I choose what to allocate my time to in the upcoming months/years. You can read what Paul Graham has to say about it here.

So I didn’t get the job shadow position. But that’s OKAY! My tenacity is higher than ever. Everything happens for a reason, and some pretty awesome stuff has been happening that maybe wouldn’t have if I had gotten it. I’ve been meeting up with some incredible people including mentors and entrepreneurs from 500 Startups, one of the founders of Square, a VC who also kiteboards, people who work at Twitter, and many other cool people! Also saw some great talks by Mark Suster and Naval Ravikant at the conference I volunteered at, Founder Showcase. Just getting to know the scene here and where I fit into it. Yesterday I went kiting down in San Mateo and it was epic! Also went to a startup party on the weekend at a house with the same layout as the house in the Social Network! Here is a picture from it. (Photo credit: John Knapp)

And then today, I went to work at a coffee shop, and who ends up sitting across from me but Tim Ferriss! He is the author of 4 Hour Work Week, a book that I have read multiple times and has definitely helped inspire me along this journey! Beside me was a girl doing an awesome adventure where she is completing a bunch of her dreams in 60 days (http://iris60days.com/). When I mentioned that I thought it might be Tim, she said that her journey was actually somewhat inspired by him as well, and asked me to film an interview of her with him.

Here he is endorsing my startup, ha! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh9UbZ7TTs4

All I know is that none of this would be happening if I hadn’t chosen to follow my dreams! Sounds corny but it’s true.