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