Growing Up Into Entrepreneurship

thank you so much

um i’ve just been introduced but i want

to add one little thing

it’s that a few months ago i turned 18.

i wholeheartedly believe that it is an

accomplishment

in and of itself but the reason why this

is important is because in the picture

you can see

i’m just 12 years old now this was my

first

interaction with business and

entrepreneurship and

it was at a place called camp bismarck

this is basically what it was

six to seven kids would group up and we

would take over the c-level positions in

a company so ceo cto all the executives

it was a very very attractive camp and

very attractive program for all of us

and the idea was that we would study

this company

any company and we would look at their

existing technology their

existing products their mission and kind

of where they want to go with the

company

and then we would build a pitch a pitch

deck

and a business plan around something new

using something that they already had

so at the very end of this two-week

boot camp we would basically go to

microsoft

and pitch in front of real life

investors

so it was very exciting however growing

up very shy

it made new things and talking in front

of people and meeting new people

really really challenging for me so this

business camp campus mart

was not at all my idea of fun and i’m

pretty sure i didn’t want to do it

however it was a place that started a

kind of new passion for me and it

allowed me an opportunity to grow

and beco it is a really big part of who

i am today

so knowing all of this theoretically

i’ve been at it for six years now this

entrepreneurship

and this whole mindset thing which is a

little off-putting but

as i’ve grown i know that a lot of

people and a lot of adults

want you know for me and my peers to

create something more tangible with the

mindset

and the skill sets that we have and we

get a lot of advice which is all really

helpful

you know the usual work hard

persist after these after your goals you

know be passionate about the things that

you want to achieve

and if you ever fall you know get back

up and try something else

and i think that it’s all really good

advice and it’s all

um something that i had to grow into and

to teach myself

to you know do and actively think about

when i do fail

but i think that the most important part

for me has been

my environment and the resources that

i’ve had access to

so let’s talk about environment what you

can see here is an industrial building

industrial building turns school

district building

then a car repair shop if you look

really closely you can see the car still

in the wall

and finally a high school rollins road

and this industrial building was my

garage school it is the first campus

that i went to of my high school and it

is the beginning of my fastest growing

four years and landed me

every opportunity and happiness that i

have

now at the end of the day i still stand

by the fact that environment is very

important

and so let’s talk about rollins why did

i choose design tech high school

full transparency here i chose rollins

because

i would not have to do pe i would give

and do anything to avoid the mile

and the pacer and followed very very

shortly

by not having to do homework

now in my four years i’ve obviously

grown out of that

and here’s what i’ve discovered dteg

gives a lot of free time

we have access to oracle lots of

external and community

resources and really really great people

now in my environment i’ve grown to join

things

start things and obviously that’s a

pretty big character growth from

you know being shy and not liking to

meet new people

and i found that the best resources are

my friends

now i’m going to switch gears and we’re

going to talk about something

that is not school which is a stanford

clinical anatomy program that i went to

when i was 16. so we’ve jumped a couple

of years now

i was very very much dead set on working

in medicine to be a surgeon very

specifically

and i was very tunnel vision it was all

that i cared about

and so you know my parents and i decided

we were going to try it out to see if i

was really

passionate if i really cared about all

of this stuff and so i went

and you know i obviously learned about

like the human body and all the systems

that are in the body but here’s my

biggest takeaway from this program

i met like-minded people who are still

my friends to this day

um and it molded my work ethic um

and you know naturally being around

people who are competitive and care

about the topic that we’re

you know learning about is very helpful

and it built my mindset

about passion and like really caring

about

a product or um a topic

um so that was when i was 16 and soon

after as the school year started again

i started doing internships through

the intercession program at my school

and there i met

adults which is very anticlimactic but

it meant a lot to me to interact with

people in industries that i had really

considered interacting with

and i met adults that were not my

parents were not my family friends and

were not my friends

parents and what i learned was

just career direction and advice and

being around people who had a multitude

of life experiences was incredibly

helpful

i want to note that one of my favorite

internships

was with a scholarship program and

another with

a college resource program for

underprivileged students

and those mentors have become my life

mentors and have taught me a lot about

what i want to do with my time as we

become

as i become an adult and as i figure out

my own career direction

finally i’d like to talk about my school

activities that

kind of were enabled by my school

environment

activities like koi stream and being on

leadership

have taught me a lot about you know

expanding

and diversifying my portfolio which

sounds like

a lot of buzzwords but it’s really just

about learning about my interests and

where i want to go from here on out

and come senior year which is this year

i had a really

really unique opportunity to give back

so my best friend and i michael were

able to teach

a d lab wherein we recreated the kind of

environment

and the lesson and the learning of camp

biz smart

and it was essentially a culmination of

everything that i learned throughout the

years

and it was an opportunity for me to

share

the things that i was passionate about

and the things that i know that i love

with somebody else so here i am here are

my

key takeaways in my 18 years of life and

six years of this entrepreneurship thing

is this is something i told my students

and something i’m trying to live

and it’s try everything literally

everything

you’ll learn something from each

experience and if what you learned

was that you absolutely hated it that’s

okay you tried it you know that you hate

it and it’s time to get up and move on

and try something else

going back to environment and resources

something that i’ve learned

from school which is like a huge

constant environment for me was that

great growth comes from the environment

and the people that you’re around

mine taught me to navigate a bureaucracy

and to

communicate and to take every

opportunity

um in stride and it was an opportunity

to be

in the real real world at a really low

risk

you know growing up in the bay area

something that i keep hearing is that

nine out of ten startups and

entrepreneurs fail

and you know with a statistic like that

you’ve got to think there’s some kind of

higher power or something out there

that’s really stopping you

and it’s often times that the thing

that’s stopping you

is right in front of your face and very

much not a higher power

i’m very lucky to have learned that in

high school at such a young age where

the impact of my work is not so high and

that i learned to work harder

to become more independent and to pursue

the thing that i want

finally the thing that i would like

everyone to take away today

is that there’s a time to push for your

wants and a time to move on to the next

thing

and that the most important part of all

of this is to move with your environment

and to move with your resources

thank you

you