What’s a Good Age to Start a Company?
This article was mostly inspired by Jeff Bussgang’s article A Lost Generation of Entrepreneurs;
We have a lost generation of entrepreneurs. Not enough 20-somethings, or let’s even say under 35, have had the opportunity to see success at a young age and learn the important lessons of start-up leadership … When my partners and I tried to develop a list of today’s under 35 entrepreneurs who had started companies and seen meaningful success with them, it was a depressingly short list.
When I first started exploring the Boston startup scene, I was brash and arrogant. In fact, Scott Kirsner, publicly asked, “okay, you’re angry, what are you going to do about it” in response to a rant that the community wasn’t doing enough for young, first time entrepreneurs. When I asked James Geshwiler if he was committing Common Angels (he’s the Managing Director) to any support of young first-timers, he immediately went to quote the Kauffman Foundation report from late last year citing that the average ’successful’ entrepreneur was 40. I used to get blindly frustrated at responses like that and wonder how were things ever to improve for young guys inspired to start interesting companies. But if you think about, it’s fairly logical right? 20-somethings can’t really be expected to launch, grow and run successful companies? A community or a society shouldn’t be supporting something that’s most likely going to fail?
Through my various interactions with people in the Boston startup community, especially with a lot of young peers launching companies, I started to wonder what really was the optimal age to start a company. A really close friend of mine took a year off from a top Boston engineering undergrad program to work on an education software-as-a-service technology. He and his team came up with something fairly interesting, but it’s a big project and startups are difficult. After much work, many lessons learned, he’s now back at school finishing off his degree, and ready to spend the summer at Google, possibly, and probably, leaving the dream of launching a company whilst still at school behind. Instead, he’ll probably go to Google after college, then to Harvard Business School a couple of years later. At that stage, he’ll have a bit of financial capital, be much more connected, and generally have far more knowledge to be in a much more optimal position to launch a great company. Am I sad that this would mean potentially one less young rock star Boston entrepreneur? Definitely. But do I think this is the right move for my friend. Most probably.
Given I haven’t started a successful company, am merely attempting to, I can’t properly answer the question in the title. What I will say is, without empirical evidence, there are a lot of early 20s (not to mention the freakish Mark Bao’s of the world) in Boston, and I’m sure in a lot of other places, passionate about startups. There is an element of ‘it’s the cool thing to do’ (thinking back to the post Why for Students Entrepreneurship is the New Investment Banking) but there are more compelling fundamental reasons why the ’supply’ of companies entering the marketplace founded by an early 20-something will increase by multiples in the next five years.
Is it best that a significant majority try and fail, but learn and try later in life, or are there solutions to this social phenomenon of young people going from lemonade stand to hiring their father’s friends.
Doing the BIG THINGS Differently
From a couple of conversations with a close friend in Boston who has recently started blogging, and then by girlfriend who just opened a WordPress account, I was challenged with the question – What do I actually blog about? It was in my explanation to them that one must find an audience to speak to, be empathetic to it, and provide something of value to them, that I realized, once again, I think I’m moderately good at giving advice (i.e. I’m gifted in talking crap), but often fail on executing on what I know I should. Who is my audience, who I am writing to, and most importantly, why should anyone listen?
It somehow seems that people out there are listening. Between my periodic comments on my posts and my WordPress Stats telling me that I do indeed get a decently daily readership, I thought I might as well state my intentions. So here it is. The Life of F Bi is a life of doing things, especially the BIG THINGS, differently. There have been some interesting lessons learnt from it, and for the most part I think there are some values in those stories. My intention is not to be a story teller, partly because I’m not a very good one. But rather to share observations and hopefully some insights as to why doing things differently might be of interest to you, especially if you’re young, don’t have too many financial or family obligations, and have the patience and ambition to discover yourself.
[Back in the day in London 2006 when I was certain I wanted to dedicate my life to climbing the ranks of investment wanking]
Now I am far from the most qualified person to convey this message, after all my life is far from extraordinary. On paper, I am 22, have no degree, no job prospects, and no visa into the country I wish to reside. Yet by 22, I have lived in four continents for a year or more, worked in a startup finance company in London straight out of high school, interned at PricewaterhouseCoopers whilst starting university, received a full-time offer from Australia’s biggest investment bank before even finishing first-year uni (which I took), started what became Sydney’s biggest youth-based think tank with no experience in academia or policy/advocacy work, bought my first convertible sports car before turning 20, and have now worked on my own startup from Sydney to Boston to Shanghai.
So for someone who doesn’t really believe in luck, I’m partly arrogant, but partly think there’s some method to this madness. For the last few years especially, I’ve been dedicated to doing things differently. Whenever there was a chance to do something different, I usually took that as a good reason to do it, just on that principal. And the more different the better, and the bigger the better. To decide to go to London with no real job opportunities, not knowing anyone, to just ‘work and live’ was a really big deal, and it was really different to my peers who were just going off to college. And for that reason alone, I chose to do it, and for that reason alone, it turned about to be one of the best decisions of my short life. Much more recently, as of a couple of months ago, when I decided to drop out of school, leave the country I feel in love with, and go to Shanghai to pursue a startup without really knowing anyone and with flimsy language skills at best, it was pretty different, and for that reason I think it’ll turn out to be another case of something working out because it was a BIG THING done differently.
So what’s my point. Take the risk, find that BIG THING you really want to do, that you’re scared to do because it’s different. What’s the worst that’s going to happen, you delay graduation for a year, you delay your career. But what happens if it works out? It could change your life in unimaginable ways for the better. Doesn’t that sound interesting to you?
A #StartupVisa Story: Goodbye Boston, Hello Shanghai, (Get Ready Montreal?)
Last Saturday I took the famous Route 128 heading north from Boston for Maine for Christmas. Besides 20 minutes at South Station waiting for my Bolt Bus next week, Saturday was the last time I would be in Boston for sometime. Unfortunately, it wasn’t by choice. Early Thursday AM, there was an article from Wade Roush pushed lived onto Xconomy titled, Invent a Cool Clothing Company, Now Leave the Country – Fan Bi, Blank Label, and the case for the ‘Founder’s Visa’. Credit to Wade, it was a really comprehensive piece. He did a great job of giving Blank Label exposure which I had been hounding him about for a while. And he also drew attention to the #StartupVisa which I’ve been, sometimes anonymously, supporting. This post was an opportunity for me to respond, give insight as to what and who in Boston I will most miss, and talk briefly about the adventures for 2010.
[Photo: Cort Johnson and I talking about Blank Label prelaunch on Dart Boston's Pokin' Holes]
Before anything else, I just want to say that I was overwhelmed by the response from friends, people in the Boston startup community, and the general startup observing public. I received a several calls of shock, loads of emails of support and a large twitter mobilization looking to help. It’s hard enough founding a startup, but being concerned about keeping visibility low to not set off any immigration alarm bells whilst trying to publicize an innovative, interesting consumer startup was difficult. I remember when our first major feature piece was published in Forbes, and I was waiting anxiously that there wouldn’t be anyone pointing and saying, what’s going on here. The reality about starting a company on a student visa are honestly very grey. I had reached out to Brad Feld and Vivek Wadwha, who’ve been incredibly helpful and are the real white knights in all of this. They campaign for something much bigger than themselves, receiving criticism and abuse, but understanding the greater importance. This was a post Brad generously let me include on his blog. [Photo: Sitting down with Brad Feld at MassTLC unConference in August]
There’s a lot about Boston that I will miss, my girlfriend Caryn, my close friends from Babson and Olin college, the Dart Boston community, and the other young Boston entrepreneurs, 8 of whom I highlighted a few articles ago. More than just the people, it’s what the people represent, and what the people believe. And that’s Boston is an epicenter of opportunity for smart, risk-taking, young people to do extraordinary things. There’s this real sense of a Boston revolution through human catalysts like Scott Kirsner and Bill Warner. It seems like I came in at a good time. Before I came to Boston, I found the idea of entrepreneurship interesting. A year before that, I was certain I wanted to become an investment banking superstar. I had done a year full-time in investment research in London, I had worked in Sydney for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Macquarie Bank, but for some reason I thought I’d look into this ’startup thing’. I came on exchange to Boston, studying at Babson College, with an idea that customized clothing for the masses would be interesting. I didn’t know anything about scaling, high-potential, building a team, tapping a niche, online marketing, e-commerce, venture capital. Well I pretty much didn’t know anything about anything, except that if you asked me to price a stock, I could do it in four different ways. Boston, in that one year, taught me everything I know about startups. Admittedly it isn’t much, but it’s a long way from where I started.
[Photo: down the main strip in Shanghai, Nanjing Rd]
Where does the new year and beyond take me. Well I’ve always been fairly opportunistic, so I thought I’d take my early exit out of the country to spend time on the supply side for Blank Label. We’ve seem some interesting first couple of months growth and soon we’ll be able to do some interesting logistics plays. We will be disparate, but we always have been. As many friend know, without a car and being stuck in the Boston suburb of Wellesley for college didn’t make traveling very easy, i.e. the team worked from their places of convenience and we’d only see each other once every couple of weeks. It’s personally very exciting to spend time in Shanghai, my city of birth. So many people speak of the promise there, I can improve my Chinese, get better in tune with the culture, I’m sure meet some interesting people. For Blank Label, it’s going to be incredibly beneficial to have someone absolutely accountable out there. My mandate is to make our product better, faster and cheaper than what it is now, and I’m confident that is possible.
What happens after that? I’ve had a lot of lawyers reach out to me in the last week or so, and we’re working on strategies that give me some hope. But I’m not too anxious. I might stay in Shanghai a bit longer, I might move to Montreal and commute to Boston, I might spend some time back home in Sydney. I’ve been fortunate for a recent 22 year old to have had an exciting life traveling, living and working in different parts of the world, and now it’s starting a company on two continents. I’m excited for where the journey takes me. Please don’t be a stranger and do say hi along the way.
first time entrepreneurs, do 2 of the following 3
a big advocate for the influence of environment, i find myself surrounded by first-time entrepreneurs because i find it useful to share notes, laugh about mistakes we’ve all made, and mostly importantly have a common naive belief we can all change the world. the statistical reality is that we all won’t. that in fact it’ll be well less than half of us. unfortunately that fact alone will put off a lot of people.
one of my favorite entrepreneurs, founder of pyramid digital solutions, blogger of on startups and co-founder and cto ofhubspot, dharmesh shah, once said, entrepreneurs should i) learn useful things, ii) meet interesting people, iii) make money, and if you’ve done two of the three, you’ve done okay. as a first time entrepreneur, this was especially pertinent. everyone knows founding a startup is a rollercoaster, in the morning you feel like you’re going to change the world, in the afternoon you feel your company has three weeks left to exist. in the lows i inevitably go through, i think about dharmesh’s point is well made. in the worst of it, i’m still so glad i’ve given this a go. my personal development as a human being, my learning curve as a business person has been so much better for it. i’ve had the most amazing opportunity to meet truly inspirational world changers. and thankfully blank label’s started making money. but if for whatever reason if the last one wasn’t the case one day, no one can ever take the other two away from me.
[photo courtesy of tomdog, dharmesh teaching more useful startup lessons]
being in a student leadership position at babson, i get the good fortune of seeing and meeting a lot of students at babson and olin college exploring opportunities for their first entrepreneurial endeavor. they’re always concerned about their idea not being a big enough marketing opportunity, that the idea isn’t somehow sexy enough, that they’re somehow not going to make massive bank in three years. first i tell them that very few people make serious bank in three years. i also encourage them to pursue opportunities that they or someone they know and trust have the skill set to carry it out. but more importantly in my most cliched voice possible, i tell them to pursue something they’re actually genuinely interested in, or dare i say it, even passionate about.
balance of probability will have it that you’re not going to make bank on your first venture, but if you care about it, you’ll be active in it. with that, you’ll cross the biggest hurdle in a startup, and that’s the initial 100 day momentum, i.e. getting started. you’ll research, you’ll speak to prospective users, you’ll tell everyone and anyone you meet. you’ll meet the most amazing people, many of whom will genuinely want to help you. and you’ll learn so many useful things about so many different things, and arguably most importantly, about yourself.
8 Young Boston Entrepreneurs I’m Glad I Know
last tuesday i attended the masschallenge #massaccess speed-networking event, and the evening really epitomized why i love boston so much. first, it was a great event so kudos to john, akhil and david for the great work. the format was really innovative, six 10min slots to meet six new people in an hour. with some 200 people or organize, the event was pretty well organized. there was sushi and open bar afterward which was a really nice treat. what was also really nice was being invited out to dinner by bill warner. a week after winning the masstlc innovation catalyst award, it was no great surprise to me for bill to round up a few youngens and invite us out to dinner, no great surprise but a really nice gesture nevertheless. he spoke of the changing startup scene in boston, and credited the involvement of a lot of young people being proactive within the startup scene. being a young person, in the boston scene, i thought i’d shed a spotlight on a few youngens doing some interesting things.
the best thing about all these guys is they’d genuinely love to help in any way they can …
evan morikawa – twitter and linkedin
someone i’ve openly said that i’d love to co-found a company with one day, evan’s a brilliantly smart engineer, specializing in software. what makes evan’s relatively unique is his understanding and love of design, both raw graphic as well as user design. his team is pushing hard on a saas education startup, alight learning. the alpha is currently being tested by teachers, with hundreds more waiting for the beta.
jeremy levine – twitter and linkedin
i’ve been really impressed with jer’s progress in the last few months on his sports stock market startup, star street. they’ve planning on launching in a few months, and with every guy jer talks to get excited about the opportunity to trade their favorite sports players, i’m excited for him. he’s equally excited about the developing boston startup scene, having moved back to cambridge from syracuse where he went to school.
jason evanish – twitter, blog and linkedin
one of the most active young networkers in boston, the face and brains behind greenhorn connect, an aggregation of boston startup events, and other resources, i think jason’s actually trying to do the impossible and actually make it to all the events on offer, so don’t be surprised if he tweets about multiple events in the same evening. so if you want any advice on how to get the most out of boston, especially as a young startup enthusiast, evanish is totally the guy to connect with.
michael raybman – twitter and linkedin
a startup i personally can’t wait till launch, way savvy is a flexible travel search site that shows me what the best options are if i just wanted to go skiing sometime this winter with a rough budget of $500, i.e. it’s for those without exact dates months in advance, and exact destinations. i mean i just want to go boarding somewhere cheap, don’t really care when or wear. michael is the founder and they’re planning launch late this year/early next year.
danny wong – twitter and linkedin
someone who regularly makes me feel guilty that i’m not working hard enough, not because i’m genuinely not, but rather because this guy’s an absolute beast. someone you’ll be relieved to have on your team, we’re definitely lucky to have danny as blank label’s lead traffic controller. he oversees all our seo/sem, social media and networking, and affiliate marketing. a great networker in his own right, especially in the domain of of online marketing.
chris jacobs – businessweek profile
winner of this year’s businessweek 25 under 25, i can say from living with this guy, he has one of the biggest and craziest personalities of anyone i know, which is really saying something given most of the people i hang around are startup people, and by nature supposed to be a little crazy. he is a partner at emergent energy group, a renewable energy consulting startup with over 30 clients. they’re more excited projects they’re entering into are in urban development, definitely one to look out for.
cort johnson – twitter and linkedin; and jake cacciapaglia – twitter and linkedin
these two are quite attached at the hip, but of the dozens of times i’ve seen them, i think i can honestly say that i’ve never seem them more than 10 feet apart, and have definitely never seen them independent of each other. the guys behind what is becoming a cornerstone of the young boston startup scene, #pokinholes, dart boston has also expanded to #rule53 and #captialize
. these guys are both true connectors, they passionate promote youth entrepreneurship in the form of giving the limelight to young boston entrepreneurs actually starting companies
the great thing about these guys is that they’re all 25 or under. i can’t wait to see what they do in the next 25 years. whatever it is, i just hope that it’s in boston.
of course there’s no forgetting matt lauzon and seth priebatsch, the founders of paragon lake and scvngr, respectively. but they’re already well on the way to making it so need to give them more praise then they’ve already received … kudos to highland, the venture backer of both these young rockstars
why for students entrepreneurship is the new investment banking
it’s all about sex appeal, and it seems that the cash-poor, unglamorous, ramen filled world of startups has managed to overtake the steel and glass tall buildings, expense accounts and suit and tie life of investment banking in the eyes of college students. of course the first reaction most people while have is d’oh, financial crisis mr blogger? isn’t it obvious. they’ve probably already clicked out.
for those of you who haven’t, i want to engage in a conversation with you that suggests the fundamentals of why young people are thinking more seriously about getting involved in startups, either by founding one, or joining one early-stage, is more fundamental than the economy and the fewer job opportunities on wall street. 
When I threw away my aspirations to be an investment banking superstar (check out the loser on the left), I thought I was being some kind of rebel, but as most instance in my life, nothing all that special, just context. If you look around, you see a new breed of college student, people call us Gen Yers, Generation U, Millenials. At Blank Label we call ‘us’ Connected Individuals, and have coined the term #CONNECTEDINDIVIDUALISM. We’re impatient, generally needy, have been brought up fairly entitled, mostly in small families. We associate with independence, we see more young people than ever doing really cool shit. And that really cool shit is not making money off the buying and selling of others. Yes, that was a jibe at bankers.
But if you think about those characteristics as a generation we generally embody, a lot of them are closely correlated with why young people are starting companies these days. We’re giving the finger to the corporate rat race. We’re thankfully irrational enough to think we actually have a decent shot of founding a startup, I’m sure by serious of orders of magnitude if you measured what young founders thought their chance of success was vs what was realistic based on balance of probabilities, the economy would be seriously worried. Thankfully that’s a hard study to do. What the real catalyst driving a lot of this is the actual success of young entrepreneurs. Much of the reason why I wanted to go into banking is because peers who were a few years older were talking about the six figure salary, the friday night open bar parties, the ass-kicking intensity. This was all incredibly sexy to me. 
And amazingly, sex appeal is important to a young 20 something year old male. With the growing list of young rockstar entrepreneurs spread around, the attention has turned to being sexy by starting a company. And think about the ego rush of a young person hiring someone older than them. Damn! And the king of them all Zucks is getting a freaking movie made about him!
Entrepreneurs south of 30 will always be a minority in comparison to those who spend time as academics or research experts, those who get corporate gigs, and those who just want to spend their time surfing. Everyone’s different, everyone’s passionate about different things, and I fully respect that. But there’s no doubt in my mind that this generational group of entrepreneurs has been growing over the last 10 years, and will grow at an even quicker rate in the next 10 years. Make no mistake, I am not qualifying necessarily massive hits from young entrepreneurs, only that more young people are founding companies or getting involved in startups. What this really stresses is that there’s an amazing opportunity for schools, government and the investment community to seriously change the impact young people have the future of the world, and it’s amazing how large an impact small tweaks can have.
5 things i learnt from futurefoward conference #ff2009
so there weren’t exactly and only 5 things that i learnt from the futureforward conference i attended on thursday, but one of things i did learn from @chrisbrogan (seated right in the photo); ‘for whatever reason, when you put a number in front of your blog title, it has a higher chance of getting read. if you want to write an article, ‘i hate lebron james’, you should in fact title it, ‘5 reasons why i hate lebron james’. so i guess that’s one. credit were credit was due, he was as awesome in person speaking as he is online blogging. a couple of other side tips, he recommends caused based marketing (marketing yourself or your company related to a specific cause) and promote others (either on twitter or your blog, almost like a malcolm gladwell-esq ‘connector’). 
staying with social media, lesson two comes from @edwardboches, chief creative officer of mullens (seated left in the photo, the guy in the middle is brian @bhalligan, @hubspot ceo), and that was how to balance the strengths of experienced content creators with digital natives to have maximum impact on consumers. the point was that, sure, young people have been brought up on the internet, we don’t use books and print, we were on facebook first, we know about social networking, we use social media for news, not traditional mass media, but that doesn’t mean we know about strategy. in fact, in many cases we don’t know the meaning of the word. you ask many young, first-time founders, and we’ll tell you about our crazy ideas, and we’re often okay with the short-term tactics, but breaking them down into strategic, high-level thinking is a different challenge. that’s what we have our advisors for at blank label. i don’t have any expertise in anything, but it’d be just down-right stupid of me to think that i know how to think 12 month, 3 year and 5 year strategy for technology, online marketing or fulfillment. again, that’s why we have three advisors in those verticals to help us with that.
lesson three came from one my favorite people in boston, @billwarner; ‘angel investing is a really bad way to make money, but i do it really because i see it as an honor’. now the lesson to me was that if i could ever find an angel investor like that, i’d be pretty stoked. with angel investing moving ’so professional’, it was just really nice to hear that there are still people like bill, even if he is the exception and not the rule.
being a narcoleptic, my lesson number four was fairly interesting, and it comes from ben rubin, co-founder and cto of zeo. ben calls it a personal sleep coach which tracks your daily sleep patterns, and educates on how to get better sleep. his story was fascinating to me because i haven’t met any young entrepreneurs with his kind of patience. zeo got to market 3 months ago, after six years, starting from junior year at brown. i said one of the most ignorant things of my life over the summer. to one of our advisors, i frustratingly asked, ‘i’ve been working on this for a whole year, why aren’t i successful yet!’. ha! HA! ben’s story of belief, passion, and vision was pretty inspiring, and i wish him the best of luck.
so i go to a lot of events, and sometimes i worry that i go too many. at the conclusion of the day’s events, i was chatting with john landry, angel investor and founder of lead dog ventures, and joe caruso, angel investor and founder of bantam group, comes over, interjects, and says to john, ‘i don’t know if this guy’s a good entrepreneur, but he’s a damn good networker’. now the point of mentioning this was 30% self promotion and 70% passing on a lesson, lesson five, that you really want it to be other way around. i will continue to network because i think it’s fundamentally important to me. i) it’s motivating to meet smart, successful people. ii) you get interesting feedback and perspective. iii) you receive encouragement and validation. but those things only work if you have a startup that is making useful progress.
we finally made it – now the real work begins!
the last two days have been significant to me because it’s the first time in the 15 month history of blank label that we made revenue on two consecutive days. i should also try and put the 15 months into context. this was a 15 months were i did almost everything wrong. i’m a guy, who only 24 months ago, was certain that i wanted to spend the rest of his life in the corporate rat race, aspiring to become an investment banking superstar. i knew nothing about technology, knew nothing about supply chain/fulfillment, knew the wrong things about e-commerce. as a ‘business guy’, i was supposed to understand strategy. what strategy? the learning curve is steep, being analytical is useful. i have my parents to thank for a good work ethic, my mother to credit for being somewhat sociable, and my father to blame for the genetic flaw of being in love with risk taking.
now besides the fact that for the last 15 months until yesterday i had no real idea of what i was doing, and today i think i’m even more lost than i was yesterday, the 15 months have to be discounted for ’school months’. it hasn’t really been ’serious heart and mind’ until probably a few weeks into the summer where i wasn’t distracted by settling into a new country, meeting new people, being fascinated by a white powder falling from the sky, covering the grounds. since then, i’ve really discovered a new sense of commitment, more profound than anything else i have in my life previously. being closed into a high volume of aspiring student entrepreneurs at babson and olin college, it’s actually interesting to observe the relatively strong reverse correlation between gpa and business traction (especially revenue). both schools have a policy that they teach ‘entrepreneurial thought and action’ which is a nice way to say that it’s okay if they don’t produce entrepreneurs out of college, it’s more important that they teach students how to think ‘entrepreneurially’ for the rest of their lives, i.e. something that’s vague and impossible to track. but this is not the place for such a dialogue. in any case, treading the borderline of passing and failing as never been better for business, and i only wish i had realized this earlier.
so if you haven’t caught on yet that blank label had our lean launch on saturday, yes we were working all day halloween (in fact i was getting text messages around 11pm from our chief interweb builder as i had finally started to relax and thought i could enjoy a couple of hours of my first halloween). of course there are errors, and yes there are bugs, and we know about the glitches, but we’re real, and i can’t tell you how good a feeling that is. wow! i highly recommend it. but being in the real world also brings in real world implications, real world responsibilities. these next few weeks are going to be absolutely crucial for us. the last thing we want to be is the one night fad that didn’t capture any momentum. we have to be smart with our analytics, we have to spread out our publicity traffic, we need to keep building and fixing, we need to make sure fulfillment is executed without any delays. is it strange that all these challenges sound awesome to me?
turned twenty-two today
how much has changed in the last 365 days …
october 24, 2008
had dinner with a big group of friends at this chill lebanese restaurant in surry hills, this really trendy part of eastern sydney. who was there? a pretty good mix of high school friends, university friends, a girl i was desperately trying to hook up with. there were probably about 20 people or so. many of whom would be some of sydney great future lawyers, management consultants, bankers and doctors. where was my life at? i was still sitting one butt cheek in that world, one butt cheek in the world of startups. i mean, i didn’t really know too much about startups back then (that actually makes it sound like i know anything about startups now). i had read richard branson’s first autobiography, losing my virginity, which was much of the inspiration, and still is to this day. i was half way through guy kawasaki’s the art of the start. i was already using kawasakisms as a part of my natural vernacular.
i was also much more of a party-goer back in the day. i was living with one jacob list, flatmate, in the suite of sin. on my 21st, it was a big drinking night. even though i used to drunk fairly regularly, without ever being seriously concerned about it, my 21st was one of the few nights i had actually got blackout. i also used to blow money like crazy. i was still on the high of my most recent six months at macquarie bank were i was earning decent bank. that round of a dozen shots i bought for my friends, what was i thinking …
especially considering it lead to this …
i will never forget one james clement forner whose car i vomited in. i passed out in the club, had to be assisted out, stumbled to my friend’s car, and thanked him by vomiting in the gap between the seat and the door, i.e. the hardest place in the car to clean vomit.
october 24, 2009
last night i had dinner with a small group of friends, very low key, just in downtown allston. without any intention, but just because of contextual reasons, all young founders of startups, and i’m proud to say, none in social networking. i had come from a kairos society networking event, met a few interesting mit students working on very cool startups, and a few harvard students wanting to solve the energy crisis with a perpetual motion device or make a lot of money by building a social networking app. that was mean, but kind of true.
i had a wellesley girl come over last night, we’ve seen each other a few times. we hung out and she spent the night. i had an early start with a group meeting with my product design and development class. i wanted to sleep in, but two of the team members are risd industrial designers who’d come up to meet at babson so i couldn’t exactly bar it even thought it was early, and my birthday. we working on a product solution to intersection accidents.
i spent most of the rest of the day working, trying to get ready for the blank label launch in a week’s time. our team’s been punishing themselves pretty intensely doing copy, design and dev work like crazy. i guess one thing that hasn’t really changed in the last year is the amount of time i invest in school. last semester i feel i was a little more serious, but this semester has been an absolute shambles. last week i’m pretty sure i failed my first mid-term since art history in year seven.
where i will be on october 24, 2010?
A Truly Amazing Weekend
The combination of events and experiences of the past three days have really typified how much life has started to evolve for me by putting myself in the right environment. The tales of the past three days will live in my memory for some time yet to come.
Friday
12am; My roommate Dinesh and I are working, him on his energy efficient lighting startup, me on Blank Label. We’re joined in our room by Samuel who wants to capture the energy Dinesh and I have.
4am; We get some shuteye as Babson Forum starts early in the morning.
8am; Alarm goes off and I jump out of bed. Strange given I usually snooze quite a few times before actually rolling out of bed. But this is a special weekend. Dinesh and I run to Samuel’s room to wake him up.
9am; I catch the second half of Helen Greiner’s story on the journey of iRobot. I catch her in the foyer afterward and re-connect (several months previous I had asked a semi-stupid question to a panel she sat on).
10am; Catch Alan Webber, founder of Fast Company magazine, again in the foyer (reaffirming that conversations in the foyer in between talks are the best thing about conferences), talk about young entrepreneurs making moves in Boston, especially about his appearance on Dart Boston the previous evening.
11am; Watch a panel with Gail Goodman, Chairman and CEO of Constant Contact, Kevin Colleran, tenth employee of Facebook, and Gary Vee, social media rockstar, moderated by Barry Libert, Chairman and CEO of Mzinga. Gary Vee, as expected, is a rockstar on the panel, and catching him for a couple of minutes afterward only confirmed this.
12pm; Have lunch on a table with some Babson entrepreneurs, Kevin Colleran from Facebook, and Mark Atkins, Chairman and CEO of Invention Machine Corp, talk about all sorts of crazy things. We then listen in on a keynote talk by Doug Otto, Co-Founder and ex-CEO of Deckers Outdoor Corp (UGG Boots), after which I wait inline patiently to speak with him, pitch him Blank Label, to which he responds he’s totally into mass-customization and that I have to follow up.
2:30pm; Watch a panel talk from three Babson alums, Matt Lauzon, Lin Miao, Francesco DeParis, and one current Babson student, Chris Jacobs, who in the past three years have all been in BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs under 25. Catch up with Matt and Lin afterward. Chris lives in E-Tower with me.
5:00pm; Do a little more networking, catch-up with John Harthorne from MassChallenge, listen to Alan Webber give a keynote, catch-up with him briefly afterward.
6:00pm; Attend a Babson Hall of Fame Dinner which is nice, but I start falling asleep during dinner, even though there are talks given by Carl Schramm, CEO of Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and insanely wealthy alumni, Matt Coffin. Have interesting chats with Babson alumni, especially IdeaPaint founders.
10:00pm; Go to pub with Francesco DeParis who is also at dinner and a few other Babson students. See Jeff Katz, producer of Freddy vs Jason, Snakes on a Plane, X-Men Originals: Wolverine, there drinking at the bar, he comes up to E-Tower, we drink and smoke, and I get inebriated with a young Hollywood producer.
3:00am; Pass the fuck out.
Saturday
10:00am; Wake up to a hangover, check through work emails, feel bad for the team, especially our CTO who was working till early AM.
11:00am; Walk out to E-Tower lounge to an awesome champagne breakfast for Babson Parents Weekend. This helps the hangover.
12:00pm; Go to work to make sure we’re still on target for launch on October 31, reviewing web designs, examining photorealistic rendering of our shirts, touching base with a few prominent bloggers in our space.
5:00pm; Get news from SP, code name for wicked smart, founder of one of Boston’s most exciting, venture-backed startups, that he’ll be hanging out with me for the night, talking about Blank Label, and then partying at one of Olin College’s biggest parties of the year. Clap my hands. Keep working.
8:00pm; SP comes around, we chill and talk, I introduce him to a few E-Tower folk. He gives me a major mind fuck about how I’m running Blank Label, walk away with some really honest and priceless advice. ‘Mistakes are good, just don’t make catastrophic ones’.
10:30pm; SP, a couple of E-Tower crew, and I rock over to Olin. Close friend, Evan, runs up to me and asks, is SP really here. Holy fark! SP is amazed he can have beer in solo cup, and yet still have deep conversation with party goers on why Python is awesome. Welcome to Olin.
2:30am; Many drinks later, me having ‘met’ a really nice Wellesley girl, and the both of us generally having had a really great time, SP and I walk back.
3:30am; After some late night chatter, we both pass out. Yes, SP is crashing at my place. Ridiculous.
Sunday
8:00am; SP wakes up almost in panic. ‘When I woke up to silence, with no humming sound of servers, I thought, holy shit, our servers have crashed. And then I realized I was here. I usually sleep at work in the server room.’
9:30am; A little more chatter later, SP leaves E-Tower after a bit of a whirlwind visit.
10:30am; Weather sucks balls in Boston, but we need to do a photoshoot. Scramble to think of somewhere where we have good lighting. Manage to scrap something together. Models, product and photographer ready to go. Have a great time.
2:00pm; Smash out some work, follow up with contacts I met on Friday, still thinking about the mind fuck SP gave me the night before about how I was running Blank Label.
4:00pm; Spend two hours and three times too long on a six page paper on a ‘Managing a Growing Business’ case for class.
6:00pm; Catch up with Samuel about crazy weekend, and pretty much promise each other that there’s no way we’re going back to Australia. Us ending up here has been fateful and it’s up to us to fulfill our ‘destiny’, coincidentally both our designated religions on Facebook.
8:00pm; Have weekly Sunday evening call with folks at home, typical conversation where Mum and I do most of the talking and Dad just chimes in really matter-of-fact questions.
9:30pm; Great back and tris workout.
11:00pm; Shower up and get ready for long night between work and studying Brand Management mid-term.
