I’m a serial entrepreneur.
In elementary school I created a virtual currency for me and my classmates that was backed by candy. My locker acted as a bank and had dozens upon dozens of Twix’s, Baby Ruths, Warheads, and orange TicTacs.
I wrote a letter to Bill Gates in the 3rd grade asking him if I could have a sitdown to get advice on how to run a great company. His secretary politely declined me. The letter is framed and is one of my most treasured items.
My first startup was a pay-per-click brokerage firm in highschool. I had an idea for a dynamic ad network that would serve text based ads in between search results. Two dudes named Gilad Elbaz and Adam Weissman beat me to it, created a company called Applied Semantics, sold it to Google and is now known as “Adsense”. I learned that creating medium-sized business just wasn’t for me.
I used to video blog in highschool. I had a camcorder that I would take with me everywhere, edit the footage at home, then upload it onto my website. In one of my more popular videos, we convinced a substitute that we had no work to do and had a classwide tournament of Slime Volleyball on the giant projection screen. I had a pretty strong fan following and even profited from branded headbands, t-shirts, and sweatshirts I made. I had an idea for creating an easy-to-submit video hosting platform. Three guys named Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim beat me to the idea and started Youtube. In my defense this was in 2003 and the technology really wasn’t there to facilitate the idea. I learned a lot about how the internet affects people’s narcissistic and voyeuristic behaviors.
When I first started college I started a company that sold online gaming currency. Popular multiplayer games like World of Warcraft have in-game currency which you can accumulate through accomplishing objectives in the game. There was a market for people that would pay real-world money for in-game currency so they didn’t have to spend time on the missions and preferred to just “shortcut” their characters. I learned how internal company philosophy (superior customer service) and branding can really make you stand out in a crowded market place.
I work hard so that maybe one day I can know what this feels like.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood, who at best knows achievement, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt