When Theres a Will Theres a Way
[Applause]
next month
it’ll be five years since i graduated
from bentley
and coming back here this weekend makes
me incredibly nostalgic
i’m not only nostalgic of how amazing
college life was here
i’m actually much more nostalgic when i
think back to the person i was
when i was sitting in your shoes as a
bentley student and i constantly notice
how much i’ve changed since then in
spirit and in mentality
if i had to summarize my five working
years out of bentley
in one phrase it would be this
when there’s a will there’s a way
i think that quote speaks to me and our
generation
because pursuing seemingly impossible or
unattainable goals
is both exhilarating and a real
challenge
it pushes us out of our comfort zone
to try to overcome adversity and achieve
something difficult
that you can be proud of i’ve also
learned
in painful depth that for every crazy
and ambitious goal that you have
there’s going to be a personal price you
have to pay
that price might be physical emotional
social
mental or similar but you have to pay it
i have three life stories i want to
share with you today from my past five
years
out of bentley and the lessons they’ve
taught me that i wish i knew when i was
sitting in your shoes
in this auditorium three stories that’s
all
my first story is about my time in
investment banking at one of the world’s
top five banks
investment banking is considered the
holy grail for entry-level jobs and
finance
everyone and i’m sure at bentley will
have heard that it’s the shiny industry
where everyone wants to break in because
it opens up tons of doors
it’s very high paying and it’s
prestigious
the problem is it’s very hard to break
in
it’s very hard to break into investment
banking because
they only want to recruit from the same
10 to 15 schools
unfortunately excluding bentley they
have a few hundred spots every year
for tens of thousands of applicants and
it’s very hard because the top banks
want to recruit from their own pool of
summer interns
and the competition for those
internships can start as early as your
freshman year when you don’t even know
what classes you want to choose
when i was a junior at bentley i knew
nothing about this industry and i had
just started learning about it
i kept hearing how shiny it was how
amazing it was
but i had none of the requirements that
they look for and to make things worse
i was an international student which
puts you at further disadvantage as
we’ve heard today
due to visa paperwork that employers
just don’t want to deal with
but somehow i had gotten obsessed that
investment banking was the right move
for me
so i created a plan and started reaching
out to people
like crazy i reached out to hundreds of
alumni
from bentley and other schools just to
ask them questions
how did you get your job how do i mold
my resume
how do you get noticed and how do i sell
myself
this process was the least glamorous
thing you can imagine and many of you
probably can relate
for every 100 messages i sent i’d only
get a handful of replies
some of which were rude or just not
helpful
but alas some of those replies did help
they led to introductions and those
introductions led to interviews
and slowly i started seeing results in
the end
like most of my stories today i got a
little bit lucky
my parents are indian but i grew up in
ecuador so i’m a native spanish speaker
and the latin america mergers and
acquisitions team at bank of america
merrill lynch
needed someone like me i still remember
the final round interviews for that
group
were eight ivy league candidates with
prior banking internships
and me luckily i was selected
i’m very proud of that experience
because i really obsessed over it was
the first time i achieved something of
that nature
the price that i paid to get the
investment banking job
was simply to hustle and be persistent
but the price i paid once i was on the
job
was unexpectedly brutal i’m sure many of
us
have read the stories about how
investment bankers work 100 hour weeks
and
and you know they’re living in the
office et cetera i don’t think the
stories
do any justice until you actually have
to live through some of this
until you your boss comes at 10 pm at
night and gives you work
where you know that means you’re not
gonna sleep tonight when that’s all
you’ve been dreaming about for the past
three weeks
sleeping three four hours a night
investment banking was a really hard
experience and it took a toll on me
but once i lived through it after 18
months i came up with the courage to
quit the job
i realized it wasn’t the right place for
me
my big lesson from the story i want to
leave you with is that you have to learn
to separate appearances
from reality investment banking was the
shiny thing
that seemed amazing from the outside but
i got swayed by it and i didn’t realize
if it was really the right place
for me as you pursue professional
opportunities experiences
i wish for you the wisdom to separate
appearances from reality
so you can find the places that are the
best for you and allow you to be your
best selves
my second story is about my time making
a 180 degree shift
from investment banking and finance into
the world of technology and
entrepreneurship
when i was sitting in your shoes between
2010 and 2014
companies like snapchat uber instagram
were bursting seemingly out of nowhere
reaching multi-billion dollar valuations
overnight and some of those were founded
by young men and women
in their 20s how hard could it really be
i remember my naive self thinking so i
took my banking savings
and i took an eight month sabbatical
where the goal was to try new things
and ultimately come up with the startup
idea
i still remember the fall of 2016 is
when i officially ended the sabbatical
and came up with my big idea i knew i
was going to be
the next mark zuckerberg
six months later i painfully realized
this idea would not get me to zuckerberg
levels
and that this was going to be really
hard i had to let that idea go and shift
courses radically to a new one
that leads me to the lobby the lobby was
a simple startup idea
what if you could buy a 30-minute
coaching call
with someone who worked inside the
company that you were dying to work for
but had no connections in i felt it was
a powerful idea
i was incredibly passionate about it i
felt it was simple and it was connected
to
a personal problem i had had for myself
and dozens of my friends
after the initial glamour of coming up
with the idea faded
i started telling my friends working on
the idea and interacting with people
i respected in all honesty this period
was quite depressing
if any of you have tried to do something
new or risky
you will know you will get pushback from
everyone around you or at least
most i still remember nights where i
would come home
and not be able to sleep because of an
innocent comment or joke a friend made
about my startup idea or that i was
spending my time and savings on stupid
things that would never work
little did they know that my identity
was so wrapped up in that idea
that all these comments and jokes were
lethal to my peace of mind
the closest thing i had to a mentor or a
north star in the startup world
was the fact that i would spend
ridiculous amounts of my time
consuming content from one organization
called y combinator
for those of you who don’t know y
combinator is largely considered the
world’s best and most selective
startup accelerator they’ve been around
only over a decade and have launched
over 120 billion dollars
worth of startups and products that many
of you use today
such as airbnb dropbox coinbase quora
and many more they have tens of
thousands of applicants every year and
only fund a few hundred companies
the acceptance rate is rumored to be
around one percent
and is rumored to be five times harder
than getting into stanford or harvard
needless to say getting in was a dream
for me
but this time i was at an even worse
disadvantage
having read all of y combinator’s
content i knew they had a strong bias
against solo founders like me and an
even stronger bias
against startups where none of the
founders are programmers
so that one percent acceptance rate was
even lower for a company like mine
but this time my obsession was 10 times
stronger than when i wanted to be a
banker
so i created a plan and did the same
thing i started reaching out to anyone
who would speak with me
i think i spoke after hundreds of
outreach with 30 yc alumni
i consumed all their content and i knew
they were looking for businesses that
had launched
that were growing and that had a huge
market opportunity
i did everything i could and in the end
over a dozen of those alumni
ended up recommending us internally and
i was able to get in as a solo
non-technical founder
i think it’s the only time in my life i
can truly say one of my dreams came true
i still remember crying for 30 minutes
outside of the san francisco caltrain
station
when i got the call that they wanted to
fund me
this moment was pure and sheer joy
my biggest lesson from this story is
that daunting and crazy goals
seem impossible when you look at them
from day one
but if you just get started and count on
the fact that little wins every week and
every month
they will compound over time and get you
closer to the goal
as you guys chase your dreams just get
started
go bit by bit and persist because the
little wins eventually add up to the big
ones
at the end of y combinator we raised 1.2
million dollars from some of the world’s
best investors
we recovered on techcrunch bloomberg
tons of other publications
and i was being invited to panels and
conferences and my inbox was flooded
with people asking for advice
on how to build the next big startup we
had made it or had we
after we closed our seed round in the
lobby about one year ago
we did what most startups do we made a
list of ideas and
initiatives that we would have to
undergo to grow the business to achieve
its full potential
we started burning cash we grew our team
size to over 10 people
and we just started going after six
months
of trying every possible thing i could
think of
we realized it wasn’t working no matter
how many experiments we did
how many initiatives we tried the
numbers that mattered for the business
just would not go up and i knew it was
time to make some very tough decisions
i had to let go of all of those 10 team
members
including someone who moved from new
york just to join our itty bitty startup
a few months ago
and then i had to start telling my
investors
imagine having to tell people that you
admire who gave you money for your dream
to build your dream only six months
earlier and say
hey this isn’t going to work out and by
the way
i might take your money to do something
totally unrelated
for what you funded me for
this led to another one of the hardest
decisions i’ve ever had to make
i was not legally obliged to offer my
investors money back
but i realized we have to think long
term and i made the hard decision to
offer them that option
this entire process was one of the
darkest periods of my life
after spending all my savings after
spending a lot of time
killing myself to reach this point i
felt
i had let everyone down and that we were
starting all over again
this was the lowest point right the only
place we could go was up
so eventually things started taking an
interesting twist
my investors humbled me and about 60 of
them stayed
with a handful of them increasing
tripling their investment just a few
short months later
fast forward again only a few short
months we’re now building something in
the international logistics space
which is incredibly close to home for me
because it’s something my father worked
on for 30 years
and it’s creating jobs in the u.s and
latin america the two regions that have
molded my entire life
our team is again 10 people in a much
faster time span
our revenues this month will be five
times higher than the best month we ever
had at the lobby
and all of those numbers are set to
double or triple in the coming months
i have never been more excited since i
graduated from bentley
my biggest lesson from this story is
that if you’re going to try
big and audacious goals you have to
combine that with an intense sense of
reality
when things aren’t working
pivoting our business entirely and
offering money back were two of the most
anxiety inducing
and painful decisions i’ve ever had to
make but are now the things i’m most
proud of when i look back on my
experience
i wish for all of you when you try new
and bold things
the courage to shift course radically
when you deep down know
you’re not going down the wrong path
because that will happen
my three stories from today are the
reason i’ve become much more ambitious
than i was when i was a student here at
bentley
every time i set a crazy or goal that
seemed relatively impossible
some delusional part in my brain kept
telling me there was a way
it kept telling me when there’s a will
there’s a way
every time i i spent a lot of time
identifying the right goals for myself
and when i found them i ran towards them
and i did everything i could
accumulating those little wins until
they became a reality
when i realized things weren’t going
down the right path
i was willing to make bold and radical
changes whether that meant restarting my
career and quitting banking
or restarting our entire business
i wish for all of you the ability to
find the goals that make you
feel that they’re the right place for
you right goals the right experiences
to separate appearances from reality i
wish for you the courage to try bold and
new things
and persist accumulating those little
wins which will eventually turn into big
ones
and i hope you have the sense to change
course radically and have courage
when things aren’t working or are not
right for you
and if things get unbearable or you feel
hopeless or lost
please know that i’ve been there
everyone i admire has been there
and you can power through when there’s a
will
there’s a way thank you