- Are there things that you wish you had done
or learned or thought about when you were a student
that would have set the stage
for making things easier now?
- I can think of two.
One, I wish that I had thought a lot more about how
doing a start-up would affect my personal finances.
Yeah, 'cause my family lives in Texas,
I don't have any family in the area,
and I accrued a little bit of debt
when I was in graduate school,
and when we started the company we didn't really have
any money, and even when we got our first seed funding in
we needed to really pay a relatively modest salary
in order to hire people and really get the company going.
So it ended up being kind of a pretty high-stress
burden to have to worry about my own personal finances,
and I ended up having to really cut costs
pretty drastically, like I even moved into my car
for a few months to cut costs
and get ahead on my finances.
So I wish I had sort of thought about that
a couple years ago and had maybe saved more
or maybe did a job on the side or something
to really kind of reduce the stress with that.
Another thing that I've done that I wish I started earlier
was follow minimalism principles.
So, I have minimized the stuff that I have.
Anything that doesn't bring any value to my life
or has a functional purpose, I try to get rid of it.
I've also done the, and I feel like this is kind of cliche
in the valley, but the sort of work uniform
where I have 14 of the same black shirts
and I wear jeans, the same outfit to work every day
so I don't have to think about
what I'm gonna wear when I go into work.
I've also just tried to minimalize the number
of goals that I ascribe to any given week
or any given day, and even to minimize my thoughts.
When I'm in transit somewhere, instead of having
these random kind of dialogues going in my head,
I try to just focus on breathing
and really appreciate the outdoors and the sights around me.
And it has been huge in terms of reducing stress
and increasing happiness, and just the idea
that what you have and who you are is enough,
it's been such a valuable kind of mantra to ascribe to,
because I think so often, at least in my Facebook feed
you see kind of what everyone has,
and all these great things, and it can be easy
to kind of fall into that trap of always
thinking you can buy something that will make you happy.
And just realizing that what you have is good enough,
'cause yeah, that's all there is.
- Yeah, I think, when I graduated from Stanford
I went into a start-up, and then the whole dot com boom
sort of happened, and then I went to a couple
of mid-sized companies and then a very large
public traded company, and then now it's come
full circle back into start-up again.
And I think through that path, one thing that I wish
I had been more front-of-mind is,
think about entrepreneurism in a broad sense.
So I don't think entrepreneurship
is just to be found in start-ups,
just looking for boostrap and very small opportunities.
I think you can find entrepreneurism
in a lot of different places, and I certainly found
a lot of opportunity even in a very large company
where you can carve out and identify opportunities
to be entrepreneurial and to get
a lot of progress made and things accomplished.
It may not be as visible as kind of being at a start-up,
but you also have the power of a lot of resources
and different levers available within that environment,
and I think that finding entrepreneurial opportunities
even within larger organizations is something
that is very valuable to large companies.
And so, going back, I would think about the term
entrepreneurism in a much broader way.