Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

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?

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.

having spent most of the past 15 startup months not being lean, when i was introduced to the #leanstartup philosophy by friend, mentor and blank label advisor, dan marques, my entire view of the world changed. dan first introduced me to 37 signal‘s getting real: the smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, and i was later referred to eric ries‘s startup blog . i used to think that bootstrapping was the most undertaught startup lesson, but i now realize it’s the ability to be lean that will make or break a startup in it’s infancy.

my interpretation of a lean startup philosophy is the ability to identify and differentiate, both strategically and tactically, what is essentially important and what can be deferred to later. one of the most underrated milestones in a startup is the ability to launch. it’s obviously on the mind of all startups, but it should be driving every decision pre-launch. is this task going to help us launch, or is it merely a distraction, and can we do it later? eric ries has this minimum viable product stipulation that helps determine this: the mvp = version of new product which allows startup to collect maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. another way i look at it, within the various components of the startup, what are the 20% effort – 80% reward sweet spots. the very title of getting real is titled, build less: underdo your competition.

how has this helped blank label? the fact that after f***ing around for quite a few months until late last month when we outlined a roadmap for a stripped down, lean launch, and that we’re on target to launch october 31, is an exciting change in company mood. we’re not looking to make a big deal about october 31. it’ll be important to us, but we know the exciting stuff happens after october 31. we’ll be iterating and building every week. we’ve even held back on reaching out to too many relationships in the blogosphere as we’ll have a much better product two weeks into november, and then two weeks after that, and we want to be uniques growth to be stimulated along the way, rather than putting all our eggs in one basket. instead of trying to predict the market, we’re going to keep a close eye on analytics and let the market tell us. people ask about whether we’re going to have this feature, or that idea they think would be great for us. we take it down, and it goes onto the ‘ideas board’.

in such a hot space as ‘mass-customization’ where the barriers to entry are fairly low, we didn’t have the billion dollar idea. like many other ideas, it was spawned from context, and a context that was not unique to me. the money is really to be made in the execution, and execution is really valuable when you’re actually in the marketplace. so this isn’t even about first mover advantage, but rather about making life easier and better for you and your startup. there are too many founders trying to predict exactly what the market will want. it’s all in research reports and opinions and being mostly computed in heads. i have a terrible habit of doing this. now i just say, it’s close enough, let the market tell us. being in the marketplace and making real sales, getting real feedback is the best research you can do. also, the momentum and excitement level your team works at when it can see getting to market, or when it’s in market, is completely different to something that you’re hacking away at with no identifiable time of people ever using it.

this is fundamentally important to most first-time student entrepreneurs. if you’re stagnant and not making much progress, the risk tolerance starts wearing. being young, we may not have patience or experience to do the long-haul kind of deal. i see so many student founded startups fail because they aren’t excited about the progress they’re making, and that’s in large part because they are day one trying to attack something that is so broad. this gets compounded by other school distractions which creep in and the killer of all startups, internship season. the ability to be lean, determine what is important, make traction towards it, get to market, is probably the most critical thing to overcome the first-time risk hurdles.  i keep telling the team, the most important lesson for us to keep in mind is fix time, fix budget, flex scope.

*you’ve probably noticed that i wrote this article exclusively in lower case. i’ve started doing that of late b/c i couldn’t figure out why we still use capitalization.

**listening to pandora radio station ‘i’ve got a feeling’ by black eyed peas

Paul Graham, Founder of Viaweb and Y-Combinator, assimilates the life of startup founder as one who is punched in the face on a daily basis, but being a foreign, student entrepreneur, I’ve got it perhaps even a little bit worse than that. On a day like last Thursday, all those hurdles, all those challenges, they just melt away. I’ve been in a world, Sydney, where thinking differently about creating jobs rather than looking for jobs is looked at with some confusion. Then there are the other international students, not just the ones on exchange, but also on a four-year program, who look at me with bewilderment when I tell them I think I’ve found a home in Boston and I want to create wealth here. The fact that I’m a 21 year old also puts some people off.  But last Thursday, that didn’t matter.

It was taken for granted that if you came through the Sun Microsystem doors, by the Terrafugia car with wings, you were smart, interesting, definitely worth having a conversation with, and probably worth helping. How often do you go to an event where you genuinely feel everyone, experienced/ unexperienced, young/ old, foreign/ local, would be intellectually stimulating, conversationally enjoyable and probably very useful.  The most concise I could put my experience of the day is in a timeline, otherwise I will continue to go on about how good it was in forty other ways.

7:00am – turn up and get registered, deliberate over who I want to sign-up with

7:20am – meet Will Herman (Innoveda and Viewlogic Systems) who reached out to me before the conference (crazy, yes) and chat about Blank Label and basic technology issues

8:00am – sit in on what we’re going to do for the day, and how everything runs

8:30am – try to grab a couple of bites to eat, look at the topic board and frantically trying to plan my day

9:00am – one-on-one with Mike Grandinetti of South Boro Capital (and four previous start ups) to talk about Blank Label and spending time in Canada due to visa restrictions, tells me he’s going up to Toronto for meetings in a few weeks and I should join him

10:00am – short conversations with Scott Friend (Bain Capital Ventures) to give Blank Label update, James Geshwiler (Common Angels and Mass TLC) to talk about student entrepreneurship, finally meet Jer Levine (Star Street) after tweeting many times

11:00am – quick chat with Brad Feld (Foundry Group and Tech Stars) about situation and #startupvisa, try to get the inside scoop

11:30am – check emails, tell Profs that I’m not going to class that day, try and shovel food down

12:00am – one-on-one with George Bell (General Catalyst and awesome dude) about his crazy youth traveling around Australia, my background and how he could help me as an entrepreneur

12:30am – interesting chats with Luda Kopeikina, Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc and Software Garden) and Bill Warner (Avid Technologies and Tech Stars)

1:00pm – attend my first session of the day by Richard Dale (Sigma Partners and Phase Forward) on ‘All the Bad Things VCs Want to Do with You’

1:45pm- one-on-one with David Beisel (another great guy) to talk about mass-customization space and how we’re trying to attack it at Blank Label, wanted to help out, stay tapped in and find a spot for us on Web Inno

2:30pm – short talks with Jon Pierce of Beta House, Wade Roush of Xconomy, James Rienhart of ThredUp, the guys from MassChallenge and the guys from Dart Boston

3:30pm – sit down with Don Dodge of Microsoft (and four previous start ups)

4:00pm – attend Bill Warner’s session on ‘How to Launch Your Idea with No Money’

4:30pm – wrap up, say good-byes, and begin the drive back in preparation for live-stream interview on Dart Boston a couple of hours later

After two days of engaging with excited founders, networking with west coast investors, speaking with passionate entrepreneurs, hash-tagging dozens of #tc50, I’m inspired, curious and frankly bloody tired! I guess I’ll mention a few things in this post, what I thought of the general west coast vibe, my impressions of the conference, and a couple of my favorite demoing companies.

The stereotype of west coast startup founders of being web consumer focused, young and brash, and web consumer focused was definitely evident at TC50. In Boston, I discovered two buckets of entrepreneurs. You have the ones who are truly passionate about a particular pain, who want to dedicate themselves for the greater cause, and for the most part have already identified the specific destination. There is the other bucket who creates for market opportunity, targets it with a broad vision, is flexible and mobile and attacks the ever-changing vertical. At TC50, I discovered another startup founder. The one who did it, just because. There were quite a few sub-27 founders who would be working on several different web app products, with no really desire to solve some deeply felt-pain, had not over-whelming interest to target a niche beach-head and scale with funding. They did it because they enjoyed building web apps with their friends. Check out Lissn, their team falls into that exact description.

First kudos to TC50 for giving away 100 free student volunteer tickets, and as a result of having so many volunteers, ‘work’ for me was assigned to an afternoon of speaking with demoing companies, especially the ones receiving less attention, to boost their spirits. Most enjoyable conversation talking to deeply passionate founders of Vid School, travelling all the way in from Dublin, Ireland. Now that’s pretty cool ‘work’ – speaking with startup founders about their newly launched product, and them desperately seeking feedback because you’re the only one talking to them. We’ve all been there, and it was a lot of fun. The conference itself seemed fairly tame in terms of startups demoing, experts judging and general activity. There lacked a sustained energy level, e.g. it would have been cool for the judges to have more engaging and passionate debate among themselves or the startup founders. It just felt very reserved and never really shifted into the higher gears. Nothing about the conference itself really seemed that news worthy, that TechCrunch worthy, except when big Mike walked off-stage. Even the after-parties seemed really tame. The first night the club had less than 100 people at its peak, and the second night the after party was a burlesque show which received some weird reactions, but the after-after party was cool, with some of the big guns including Jason and Tony Hsieh mingling with the crowd.

What was the coolest demo I saw over the two days? In terms of what I thought was most ‘high-potential’, it actually wasn’t a TC50 company, rather a startup missing that cut-off and being thrown in the demopit. The feedback I hear consistently from venture firms is i) idea has to be strong, ii) market opportunity has to be compelling, iii) team has to be able to bring it to market. Pip.io was all three of those things for me. They describe themselves as a ‘social operating system that aims to give people the ability to share in communicate in real-time’. Now there are a few different aggregators out there, but they really differentiated on their front-end development being super sleek and their AJAX platform had amazing performance. They also were able to maintain a really clean and intuitive user interface on the demo, especially given the collation of features they were trying to propagate. The founders, whose names I actually can no longer remember because they only had promo cards and not personal cards, were also crazy dudes. They were so freakin’ ambitious, and even though at times where over the top, had the craziest vision, and you just had the sense they would be able to pull off something big.

See you next year!

My parents are first-generation immigrants so I’ve been brought up on conservative spending. I’m Chinese by background and culture, i.e. I’m cheap or thrifty depending on how P.C. you want to be. And I’m a moderately poor college student, who still tries to get bang for his buck. So naturally bootstrapping comes fairly naturally for me. Now I’ve got quite a few nice stories about bootstrapping, but a topical one right now is bootstrapping this year’s Techcrunch50.

I don’t need to go into any detail, I’m just going to state the facts. It’s a two day $2,995 conference. I’m volunteering co-ordinating foot traffic and answering questions for eight hours the first day, and attending the conference as a regular guest the second day. Free. Eight hours of work and a day free at TC50. On both days equally, I expect to be giving rocket pitches and exchanging business cards. And it’s amazing how much easier meetings are to setup when you mention you’re flying in from Boston for TC50. All of a sudden, you’re taking things ‘seriously’.

The faciliation of me going to TC50 is just as good, because flights and accom can really be killers. I found flights from Boston to San Francisco for $250 on Kayak by getting some awkward flights and getting to SF a day earlier. Something I’ve been doing since I was 18 and first traveled by myself, I’m hostelling for $35 a night. It’s right by Union Square, and right by the conference. And so the total bill for conference, flight and accom will come to around $400, and the best part about it is that Babson is willing to underwrite it in the spirit of student’s taking initiative. Big kudos!

Writing this in the common area of Adelaide Hostel in downtown SF

P.S. A quick aside because I found it amusing; a lot of people where blown away by me going to TC50, yet were more blown away when I told them how I was doing it by the fact I was staying in a Hostel. Is it like in the movie Hostel? There doesn’t seem to be a very big backpacking/ hostelling culture which is a shame for two reasons; i) accom otherwise can be really expensive, ii) you meet the most interesting people in hostels.

Now I’m sure when I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, I was the only person in my room of eight that was meeting with Venture firms during the day, and again it’s probably safe to assume I’m the only one in my room of six who is going to a cost-exclusive tech conference. But it sure does keep things interesting.

Meant to be a week of part work, part leisure, in New York, my one week off for the summer, before getting into a very busy Fall semester leading Blank Label into a new frontier, kicking off Open Gate Intiative, trying to get the most out of four interesting and well-recommended classes, empowering a new batch of Freshmen at E-Tower, it’s actually been chaotically busy and hasn’t yet been the mental break that I was hoping for and perhaps needed. I guess it was unrealistic to expect that I might go part-time on Blank Label, but Blank Label wasn’t going part-time on me. What I’ve been doing for ‘leisure’ which has kept me running up and down Manhatten has been meeting young upstart entrepreneurs, the people I get super passionate about meeting at the litany of startup events in Boston.

There were a couple of events that were of particular interest that I’ll drop a line for. Entrepreneurs Roundtable was a small audience of mostly first time entrepreneurs either just having started their venture or looking for opportunities. The framework was a networking event of around 30 people, with the meat being five pitches of five minutes in front of a VC, in this instance, Mark Mackenzie from Alliance Bernstein, who has a small 200 million fund (relative to their 500 billion assets under management) that invests mostly around later stage, i.e. Round C and D and later. It was interesting that only one of the five companies pitching was a scaleable, high-potential startup. That’s not to say they weren’t all pitched by great, passionate entrepreneurs. But the business model just wasn’t a venture investment, e.g. service/ consulting company, small market size, nonprofit.

The next evening I went to Sprout Up NYC, where I probably spoke to a dozen passionate startup entrepreneurs, heard Gary Vaynerchuk, give a really passionate and energetic talk on Social Media and Entrepreneurship, but throughout the whole three hours I was at the event, the notion of raising venture money never came up a single time.  Mostly people were passionate about new media, the possibilities that came with it. They wanted to create sticky unique content. They loved the ability to attack a super niche vertical, with no interest of going into a broader platform down the track, or at least pitching it as such. Is it perhaps that NYC is so corporate in so many large areas, Advertising, Fashion, Old Media, Financial Services, that for startup entrepreneurs who are trying to stick it to ‘the Man’, the idea of raising money, growing a company, and natural bureaucracy, just goes straight back to the dilemmas of ‘the Man’, and instead the preference is to stay small and love what they do with no compromise for growth.

A couple of observations, don’t know what they mean, but definitely interested in exploring more of the startup scene in New York, and will keep you posted accordingly.

Was in super-chilled mood when writing this post, listening to Andrea Bocelli duets including Josh Groban, Sarah Brightman and Christina Augilera. I’m not usually that guy, but I am tonight.

As a student entrepreneur focused on self-development and personal growth, the question of “What am I bringing to the table” is always motivating. A strong advocater of the breadth and depth sprecturm of development, I like to be aware of, educated in, have applicable skills for, a broad range of applications. Especially as a young entrepreneur I know the value of having a wide range of skills, or at least problem solving techniques to address the multitude of issues that come up. At the same time, through this experiencial learning process, I also appreciate that I have to be really good at something. If I want to climb the entrepreneur value chain, I really have to bring something world-class to the table, that I can personally do better than anyone else. Currently that world-class, niche skill doesn’t exist for me. But it doesn’t have to, I’m young, I’m still expected to be well before the tipping point of my entrepreneurial education.

At the same time, it is something that is at the forefront of my mind. What do I want to be really good at? Not what kind of companies do I want to be creating, but what do I personally want to really excel in? That’s one of the problems of going to a business school for entrepreneurship. So many of the skills they teach you are intangible. I feel so weak saying I’m a consumer behavior or branding guy. I don’t know how valuable knowing my debits and credits apart are in a startup. There’s very little I can call on to say this is a qualified skill that is my competitive advantage. Many would argue that the really important skills to have are the intangible ones because they’re much harder to learn. However that still doesn’t help address my insecurities of having no qualified skills. For the most part, I’m a fairly objectively minded person when it comes to personal development. As a result, I’ve decided I’m going on the exploration of developing some skills. So I can finally say to someone, “I’m Fan Bi, and I’m really good at …”

Given the space I’m generally interested in, where Blank Label currently is, and what is most feasible (it’s not like I can just ‘pick-up’ an understanding of life sciences), I’m going to finally dig deeper into web tech. It’s starts pretty basic with the much acclaimed 37 Signals: Getting Real. There’s also going to be a real effort to go beyond just the Tech Crunch and Venture Beat and dive into the likes of Hacker News and Digital Inspiration.  Now for those paying attention, you’ll notice the inconsistency at calling on to be the best in the world, which simply cannot happen for me in web tech. The competition is rife. However the intersection of web tech, consumer marketing and entrepreneurship, is a far more narrow vertical, and something I may actually have a shot at being really good at.

Presenting to a public audience rule 101, know who they are. That doesn’t change with the internet. I know who my community is in the physical plane, those in Boston who share common interests, are like-minded in philosophy, intersect in areas of expertise. The web, and this blog, allows my community to not be limited to my physical geography. And it helps articulate my thoughts perhaps more thoroughly than 140 characters.

Most of my musings will be related to my core areas of interest; i) understanding Gen Y dynamics, ii) venture creation, and iii) networking with unreasonable people. It will be a candid perspective of what I see going on with the consumers of Blank Label, the startup I dedicate my life to, my exploration of what it means to be an entrepreneur especially at the early stages, and my interactions with various interesting people in my journeying, mostly in the active Boston tech, startup, VC arena.

It’s my firm belief that all three are undeniably linked, and mostly in relation to the increasing supply of student entrepreneurs entering the marketplace and looking for substantial meaning as a value system in life. As Gen Y starts to become more prominent in corporate America, we’re going to feel displaced and dissatisfied at what we do after the initial honeymoon period. We find the corporate world stuffy, uninspiring, and a far cry for the action-driven activities we were involved with at school. Although I’ve only experienced limited amounts of corporate industry, a quick read of my resume will highlight that I probably stayed there long enough to hate it. And turning to venture creation as an outlet for something more meaningful is becoming a popular choice.

The economy isn’t THE reason for it, rather acting more like a catalyst. Now I’m naive and irrational enough to think that a team of undergraduate students can build a high-potential company, but I’m not stupid enough to think I can do it without the help of others. This is where networking comes in. Something I’ve noticed, although slowly changing, is that not many undergraduate students are being confident and proactive on the Boston networking scene. This is unfortunate because Blank Label’s been able to benefit a lot, including Board Advisors and press.

I really want to use this as a medium to share my experiences and lessons learnt from all three areas of focus. Making unoriginal mistakes is a terrible shame, and I’m a big believer in this school of thought that knowledge is never wasted. I don’t know how many people will find this useful, but in any case what I do know is that this will be an honest, sometimes brutally so, perspective of one young Chinese Australian’s journey as an entrepreneur in Boston.

Viewing Entourage s5 ep5 Fore! whilst writing this blog.