Today I’m so excited to introduce Jason Schultz, a self described serial entrepreneur who started off as a hacker in his bedroom in high school. Since then, he’s gone on to be a part of over 50 companies, and he is continuing to tinker online.
I think you’re really going to enjoy Jason’s story because he’s done it all. He started in high school. He experienced failure. But he still went on to enjoy success. Today he shares his story of hard work and perseverance, and his knack for diving into projects head on. You can learn more about Jason on Twitter @JasonDOTme or at his new blog www.Jason.me.
Remember, our young millionaire interview series is designed to inspire and educate. Hopefully you find something here that inspires you to reach for the top early on!
Let’s get started…
1. Tell me about yourself and how you got started?
Ever since as far back as I can remember I wanted to build big things.
I was the kid with trash cans filled with Legos, destroying my parents house by turning the rooms into my own constructed worlds. When I was 8 years old I would write letters to the Lego company and explain the grandiose things I was building, hoping one day they would use one of my designs for a product.
As soon as I learned about computers I became fascinated. My family didn’t have much money and couldn’t afford to buy one at first. My neighbors dad was an aerospace designer and had a company computer in his den, which is where I got a lot of my initial experience. After a couple years my parents realized my passion and bought me a cheap Tandy, which sucked. Then after another friends dad broke his Commodore 64, I got a hold of it, fixed it, and ended up keeping it. The C64 didn’t suck, I loved it. I taught myself how to program on all of these computers.
When the internet started to take shape with BBS’s in the 1990′s I knew “connected computers” were the future. After years of tinkering with these early services I got hooked on the web. Then, when I was barely a teenager, I formed my first startup building websites for people. I had no idea what I was doing, business wise. I figured I would need all sorts of permits and things, though when I asked my high school guidance counselor about this he was clueless. I asked everyone I knew and no one could tell me how to properly start a company. So I just did it. I claimed, “I’m in business”, and let the rest work itself out.
The internet advertising space started getting interesting in the late 1990′s and there was all sorts of creative programs being advertised on the internet. Remember the old services that paid you to click on banner advertisements or to watch ads? I hacked those things like crazy, building all sorts of programs and automation to perform these tasks and earn me money. My family didn’t have much, I was in high school, and could use every extra dollar I could get. After my hacked programs started to bring in a little money, to my parents dismay, I had the phone company install more phone lines in our house so I could setup more computer bots to earn me money. Those machines were all next to my bed and ran 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
After a couple years of building websites for people I knew that I wanted to tinker with building other business. The next business was joint venture with a hedge fund which had over one billion dollars in management. I reached out to them after I heard their nationally syndicated radio talk show they hosted on investing. It was literally an unsolicited anonymous email I sent to the senior partner. I pointed out that the internet was growing and that I knew exactly how to take their business into the future with it. We corresponded back and forth via email because I didn’t want to talk on the phone and tip them off that I was just a kid. I put together a plan to build a web destination for their hedge fund which would allow people to get real time stock information, crunch numbers with online formulas and automatic calculators, as well as a host of services that might attract new investors. It sounds trivial today, however in the late 90′s this was quite novel and a unique service that attracted a lot of visitors. My work on this was ripped off by all of the big financial companies that were playing catch up to our website. Beyond this I co-created a monthly financial newsletter which is still in existence today, well over a decade after formation.
Shortly after that, I co-founded a nationwide dial-up internet service provider. We wrote our own software portal similar to AOL, where people could use chat rooms, do online shopping, and a host of other nerdy things. We grew this business for a couple years and eventually failed after the proliferation of high speed internet access.
While building the internet service provider I started creating little startups to bring in passive income and support my investments in other internet ventures. These consisted of content websites, advertising networks, affiliate websites, and small ecommerce sites. This lead me to explore all of the new innovations in internet advertising. I was also one of the first people to sign up for and get to use Google’s new service, AdWords.
In building all of these companies I got first hand experience with ways to promote businesses online to gain new customers. So after the internet service provider I co-founded a full service internet marketing company. We focused on SEO, PPC, PPM, branding, email marketing, and similar services. It was a lot of work, dealing with clients, and I didn’t like how slow things moved. The projects we built in house at this firm were always the most fun.
Following this, in 2006, I created a more formal platform for launching web startups. This was a small incubator of sorts and we were mostly creating companies that we came up with the ideas for in house, thought we also created a number of joint ventures with other business too. There were no mega successes however the startups I founded through Ambistia, combined, went on to do more than $20,000,000. Some of these companies are still operating today.
In the last few years I founded and invested in more than 50 internet companies. After years of angel investing and working with venture capitalists I also helped fund the first web based venture capital company, which today is experiencing outstanding growth and it’s predicted return rate (IRR) is ranked amongst the highest rated venture capital firms in silicon valley.
I enjoy investing because it’s consistently been my greatest educator. I learn more from working with new tech startups than I could ever hope to learn on my own. It’s true, you never really know something until you can teach it to others.
2. What was it like to start a company in high school?
Bewildering and exciting. I didn’t know how to do it though didn’t let ‘not knowing’ stand in my way. This was circa 1994 and there were no blogs or websites on technology startups. We didn’t even call them “startups” back then. It was lonely in that sense. Unless you were starting a tech company in the early and mid nineties you have absolutely no idea how insanely difficult it was to get answers to things that are common knowledge now. I actually went to the library, with a library card, and tried to find information that way. I came across a couple books that were helpful, though these books were more about the psychology of entrepreneurship:
Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins
Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill
7 Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen Covey
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
Management Challenges for the 21st Century by Peter F. Drucker
3. You’ve focused most of your time and energy on the Internet – what do you think is the future for the Internet and technology?
Business is a game that can be played to change things in the world. Sometimes it’s altruistic in nature and other times it might be for something like money or power. Whatever your reasoning is, I think it helps to be in line with the actual business environment, which increasingly will involve technology. And as far as technology goes, it’s important to better understand what it is and where it might be heading.
The other day I heard some really smart people talking about how Newspapers might make a comeback and make blogs irrelevant. The thinking was this technology thing was a fad and eventually things would go back to how they were. It blows my mind that people still think like this, though it’s only because they still do that there’s such opportunity out there for entrepreneurs and businesspeople.
You see, technology will continue to disrupt older systems and processes, then it will disrupt itself, perpetually, to the point where no one really knows how it will play out. I think that in many ways the evolution of technology resembles much of the evolution life on earth. I don’t actually think of technology and evolution being totally different.
Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated by things like Moore’s Law. It seemed so obvious to me that technological advances would happen irregardless of companies or countries participation. Technology in fact tends towards certain things. Maybe it’s because our minds work more like nature than we think and that our invented tools evolve similarly as a result. Whatever the case it’s always been helpful for me to think about technology like a force of nature.
Pretend you’re on a spaceship looking back at the earth. Now pretend you can rewind and fast forward through time. Go back a few billion years. The earth is just rocks and gas. Now hit fast forward to 2014 AD. You’ll see that all sorts of things come out of the earth, walking creatures, flying creatures, mechanical creatures, satellite creatures. During your fast playback it will look like cities and satellites are blooming from this rock ball. Think about this moving playing in fast forward and reverse a few times. Everything you have ever seen with your own eyes, touched, loved or hated, came from within the earth. It’s the same for technology.
Now when you can see this you’ll have a major advantage over people who see technology as a sort of weird artificial thing. You’ll start to notice different forces at work with the evolution of technology. This perspective has been particularly helpful for me in aligning myself with the future. When I start a company or invest in a business I tend to think in these terms, identifying the forces and evolutionary nature of the various technologies.
However, this needs to be balanced with the constraints of the day, things such as society and capitalism. For example if you go out and invent new stem cell technology, you might be at odds with society in some places of the world. As such, your venture might be an uphill battle until society embraces stem cell research. On the other hand if you go build new technologies for a more leisurely life on Mars, you won’t be aligned with the current market and probably won’t be successful. Human created constraints also affect how technology evolves, just like how rocks and gases affected how bacteria evolved.
As crazy as all this might or might not seem, this type of thinking about technology can help you to see that it’s a relentless force moving in pretty specific directions. Again, I you also have to know the various human constraints that will also influence how it might grow and evolve in our societies. If you can do this you’ll be able to position yourself and your company in such a way that it’s in line with the forces and constraints at play. You’ll feel more like a sailboat that’s using the wind to tack and go in the direction you want to, with less effort, versus not understanding the environment and having your sailboat tossed about while you toil and fight to stay above water.
Children are keen to the future, especially those who haven’t been dumbed down by being told what’s possible and what’s not. They can naturally see how broken the world is, how inferior some technologies are, and they instinctively know how things will probably operate in the future. It’s not easy for them to communicate it, though make no mistake it’s there. I try to pay a lot of attention to what kids say about technologies, more so than adults.
4. What was the biggest risk you ever took? Do you regret it?
The biggest risk I took was probably dropping out of college. For me, at the time, I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was.
My father did drywall construction at USC for over 30 years so that my brother and I could attend the school tuition free. Growing up there was always this notion that we had to take advantage of this opportunity.
When it came time to start college I had my hand in a few startups and was still an active partner with the hedge fund. There was a lot of uncertainty about which direction to go.
One of the things I didn’t like about college at the time, was how far behind computer programming classes were with what I was creating in the real world. Almost everything being taught at the time was years behind what I was using with my companies. I thought about it a lot and for a number of reasons ultimately decided that I’d continue with business and forgo college. My parents were supportive.
5. What about a failure – tell us about a time you failed at something.
There’s so many times I could tell you about. Truth is I fail all the time. I’ve even been working on a book about failure, which I hope to complete this year. Let me tell you about one of the times I tried to change the world.
Back around 2010, a group of scientists I knew had developed a breakthrough technology that they claimed could desalinate salt water using resonance and harmonics. Not only that, it could be done at a fraction of the cost of the desalination technologies used today. The desalination industry is huge and clean water is increasingly becoming a hot topic around the world.
After seeing a glimpse of this technology I saw this as an opportunity to do something that could really change the world. So I partnered with the scientists and formed a startup to bring this to fruition. I said that I would act as temporary CEO to get things moving. I went like a bat-out-of-hell to build the business side of it. I reached out through all of my connections and started building an advisory board of politicians and business people in the clean tech space. A well known patent firm I had a history with saw what I was working on and got involved as a partner, devoting their firms services to the project in exchange for a small piece of equity.
One of the first questions everyone asked was to see a demo of the desalination. The scientists had a lot of trouble with repeating their results and said that they were 100% confident they will get it working, just need to get the mathematics and frequencies fine tuned. The experienced scholars and partners at the patent firm understood what they were saying and said that it made sense. I took that as a notion that this was a small hiccup and that the tech would soon be ready to demo for all.
Everyone I brought in was moving fast. Venture capitalist friends were helping me with politicians, who came on board and were talking with the California state and federal governments about upcoming desalination projects and how we might be able to save them money on their new large scale initiatives. I was flying all over the country getting the foundation of this venture setup.
We connected with a government in the middle east who wanted to use this in place of an osmosis plant they were building. The patent firm was writing patents as fast as they could. There was a torrent of work being done by brilliant and well connected people. I went ahead and purchased a six figure domain name (with my own money) that everyone thought represented this large scale venture perfectly, Desalinate.com.
All of us involved had put our names and reputations on the line in various ways, and the lack of a working demo was causing serious concern. Months had gone by and still there was no working demo.
The patent firm got to a place where they couldn’t move forward without the precise data the demo would yield. Then all of a sudden, almost overnight, everyone turned their focus towards the scientists and demanded they produce a repeatable demo. To say the pressure came down hard at this point is quite an understatement. The scientists kept saying that it was close.
I started to question the technology. Was it vapor ware? What have I done? At the time I was living at the beach in Southern California. Overwhelmed with frustration I walked out to the ocean and filled up a big 10 gallon tank of polluted seawater. I then had a friend help me load it onto an SUV, then drove it to the scientists a few hundred miles away. I explained that if they couldn’t desalinate it, or another one of the buckets of salt water they were testing, that I was going to wind down the whole venture.
For three days they worked on it and it failed every time. I felt like #$%^. I came back home and called every single person involved, even the people who were just connecting me with others, and informed everyone of the truth. It was all my fault, not the scientists. And anyone who hears this story knows, it was all my fault. I failed, big time.
After people cooled down I went back and tried to make it right with them. I reimbursed everyone for any expense they attributed to this venture. I paid the patent firm for all of their work and all of the other businesses that were paying their services forward for us. I tried to compensate everyone for their time, though I had no way to compensate them for any damage to their reputations or trust. I did my best and made it right in every place I could.
In the end all I had to show for the spectacular failure was the domain name and a pretty injured bank account. Of course there were quite a few learning lessons here too. And those learning lessons paid off on future ventures. It’s funny it’s so cliche, almost every spectacular failure I’ve gone through eventually comes back as a truly great thing in some way. Usually through knowledge that when used properly lets me achieve more than I could have without it.
Entrepreneurship is far more about psychology than business.
6. If you could make one change, what would it be?
The first thing that comes to mind is documenting and taking more photos through the process of building companies. There’s so many great moments that go into building a company, and many of these are lost in the ether.
When I do things I tend to really go all in with them. With startups, I would invest every waking hour in them, literally. I spent months and years on projects with little regard for much else. I use to sleep on a couch in the back of my office most nights. And when I look back now, there’s massive gaps of time in various periods of my life where I was working tirelessly on startups. I wish I had taken photos or kept a journal during those days.
7. When did you make your first million, and do you think it changed you?
Money in and of itself was never my motivation with business. I have always been far more interested in creating thing like websites, apps, communities, and businesses.
If my main goal was to make as much money as possible I wouldn’t have done many of the things I did in business, for example I wouldn’t have built side projects such as Eco-Safe.com for fun. I constantly spend money building things for the sake of building them.
Also, I’ve always invested a lot of my money into startups. When you invest in startups you typically don’t make a return on that money for many years.
That said, it was probably around 2006 when I first had around a million dollars liquid.
8. Being younger, how are you currently managing your money (investments, professional help, etc.)?
There are couple investment bankers who help give me some advice though for the most part I manage my money myself. Historically I’ve split my investments between internet startups and real estate.
I don’t invest in public stocks because the whole stock market system seems like it’s based far more on luck than anything else. I say that after having been business partners with an SEC attorney, being a partner at a hedge fund, and watching friends invest in the market. The more I learn the more I realize it’s a big slot machine, and the people who say they understand market dynamics to the finest details give me the impression they aren’t that wise, though they may be smart.
9. Entrepreneurship or college for today’s high school grads? Which do you think is more important?
This is totally dependent on the situation. There is no rule that fits to everyone.
First you need to get clear about what you want in life. Do you want to change something in the world? Do you want to earn money? Whatever your reasoning is you need to find clarity on what you want, and until you do it’s like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where Alice asks which road to take? Well, if you don’t know where you’re going, aka what you want, it really doesn’t matter which road you take. So get with it and figure out what you want.
Now that you know, you can look at college and entrepreneurship as being options to help get you where you want to go.
For some people college isn’t going to get them very far. It could be that the material they’re learning won’t be relevant for the real world, or that they’re getting into an industry that doesn’t have a bright future itself. There are absolutely valid reasons why someone might be honest with themselves and forgo college.
Other people use college to learn something that will give them leverage in the real world. An education can be very valuable, if you’re learning the right things at the right time.
And then for others, they might find that entrepreneurship gives them the best shot to accomplish their goals.
Some people say they want to start a company or work on an invention however don’t have the time to because of work or school. The thing is, if you’re honest with yourself, you can usually make the needed time to get things moving on a new venture. It’s usually just uncomfortable for someone to give up spending time with their friends or to write code instead of watching tv, or start the first chapter of their book on a saturday night.
Aside from truly extreme cases, you can probably make the time just choose not to because it’s too difficult. Which is to say your startup, invention, or project really isn’t as important as those other things taking your time. So get with it, stop making excuses and make it happen. Start committing to it and make little bits of progress regularly. You’ll build momentum and self control.
10. What advice do you have for young adults when it comes to money and entrepreneurship?
When you read the news you get the impression there are all these successful entrepreneurs out there that have super human powers. The media has a way of casting a certain type of light on successes that also seems to throw you in their shadows. It’s easy to loose your bearings with your own startup when it looks like everyone else is experiencing windfall successes.
Free yourself from having to think about this by eliminating media consumption that really doesn’t help you. Be mindful about how media affects you. Does it excite you? Does it get you down on yourself? Then cut out the unhealthy things and replace them with the things that help get you where you want to go.
Personally, I read very little news and don’t have cable TV. I found that it only did harm to me. There are certain books and blogs that I try to read a lot, though they’re pretty carefully selected. Lately I’ve been reading PaulGraham.com, MrMoneyMustache.com and Raptitude.com. I think if something in the news is important enough someone will probably mention it to me. Or maybe not and I die of an asteroid strike because I didn’t know to leave town sooner. All things considered I’d rather deal with the small rocky bodies heading towards earth.
I think of media like food, “Foods got nutrition facts and informations got none”. Each of them can completely affect your physical being pretty dramatically, especially over time. Are you sure you want to put those donuts, french fries, and candy in your brain? I even wrote a poem about this to help me remember it:
Work your mind like a muscle, if you want it to be one
No mention of the this anywhere, like it’s not real to some
How often do you eat a cake, before you go for a run
Foods got nutrition facts and informations got none
Always keep in mind, everything around you in your life was created by people just like yourself. Not some special breed of human. Not some magician. Another human creature, just as capable as you. And anything that they learned, you can learn. Understanding this leads to empowerment. True, long lasting empowerment.
I keep a private notebook with a page of “universal truths”, which are just a collection of the few things that continue to ring true to me after years of thinking about them. One of these reads “setbacks are universal”. What it means is, I’m not the only one with painful setbacks. Sounds obvious right now, though it’s not so obvious when you’re in the thick of something. When I was younger, sometimes I would think that my competitors didn’t have setbacks. I would think that I was the only one in the world with some type of personal problem or whatever that was holding me back from making things happen.
Here’s an example, and keep in mind everything I talk about here all occurred during about a six month period of time.
A few years ago I was building a startup and it started consuming a lot of my time and energy. I self funded the company and invested a lot of my money into it.
As I was getting ready to go live with the product a very similar service was launched by Apple. Immediately I knew that we had to change direction. Almost everything I had been working on had to be scrapped. We took what could be reused for the new product we were going to develop and left thousands of hours of work in the trash.
As I moved forward in the new direction my father told me he needed a hip replacement. Being that he was older and lived alone, I knew I would need to go help him with things around the house from time to time. Unfortunately he lives over 100 miles away from me and that meant a long car ride a few times a week, which cut out precious time from work. I knew that I could listen to audiobooks and schedule some conference calls during the drive, though I would still loose some productivity. Nonetheless I drove out to his house at least 4 times a week, sometimes multiple trips in the same day for various reasons.
During one of my drives to my dads house I got a call from the manager at one of my other companies – an ecommerce company manufacturing automotive parts. He told me that the manufacturing plant we partnered with had lost a large money wire. What? How do you loose a wire?
We began an investigation with my domestic bank and another bank based out of Hong Kong. It turned out my domestic bank had made a typo on the account number and no one caught it, until now. Reversing it was possible, though it would take time. Meanwhile my manufacturing plant was sitting idle. So I sent another wire and tried to stay focused on my startup.
One night while I was working late at the office, before making the long drive to my dads house, and a filling in my tooth came out. It just popped right out while typing on my computer. The next day I went in to the dentist for a quick fix, when he informed me that he could do no such thing. An X-ray he took showed that there was an issue from dental work I had done when I was a kid.
You see, when I was younger we couldn’t afford great dental coverage, and one time I had fillings and root canals (plural) done in pretty seedy place. Now I was learning that all that work was shoddy and had to be replaced. 10 teeth needed to be redone, several of them being root canals where the previous dentist failed to clear the roots fully or left instruments in the canals and what not. My calendar quickly filled up with a series of expensive surgeries, not covered by insurance, that would start immediately and last the entire year. That’s okay I thought, just stay focused on the startup.
The pain from the surgeries would take me out of commission for a day or two usually, and in this time I tried to catch up on things I was putting off while trying to work on my new company. This time I was digging through some old mail that I set aside and never opened. It was then I realized there was a letter stating that someone had sued me. I was confused because I didn’t recognize the names or anything. Worse, they had apparently already won the case because I “failed to respond”. It said I was “served” and never appeared, so judgment was awarded for six figures to the plaintiff whom I had never heard of.
Immediately I got an attorney involved. He said that it was because I “co-signed” on an auto loan for a friend years ago that had defaulted due to a stipulation on who was allowed to drive the cars. It was a complicated loan with multiple vehicles. In any case, I was personally liable. A quick check revealed my wonderful credit now had multiple repossessions listed. I asked my attorney to handle it because I had to stay focused on my startup. He said they wouldn’t settle because they knew I had funds to pay it. Well, given that I was missing money from my bank wire I had to go into savings to come up with this dough. FML and now back to work on my startup.
Or so I thought. A few days after I settled the court situation I was at the gym trying to relieve some stress and I pulled a stomach muscle. It hurt like hell. A quick trip to the doctor revealed I needed to rest. Well, I didn’t really have that luxury. There was a startup company demanding more time than I had available, as well as my dad who was depending on me for things. I decided to go against the doctors orders and do everything the same, except for taking a break from the gym.
A few weeks later as I was starting to make some progress on my startup I was informed by my banker that all of my assets had been frozen by the US government. What?! For what reason?! I was frustrated and confused. My banker said he had no idea as to the reasoning and that he had a phone number for me to call. I called immediately, even though I knew I should have called my attorney first. I was just appalled and couldn’t believe this happened. The woman that answered was a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission. She explained that 3 people I know had been involved in a business that was unfair to consumers. She said they had been making millions by selling a product that wasn’t delivered to the customers.
Years before this, my assistant was dating someone who wanted to create a new social networks startup. She asked me to help her boyfriend and his 2 business partners because they weren’t savvy with “the internet”. Eventually I obliged and we formed a small company, tried to build a few things including a social app, which failed, and then subsequently closed the company. It never really did anything, at all. It was a favor for my assistant that turned into a massively time consuming failure.
Well, this failure was the failure that kept on failing. Apparently the company had never been fully “dissolved” because the California Secretary of State didn’t receive a final piece of paper, I was told. And so, as the woman from the FTC explained, it looked like I could possibly still be in business with these 3 people. So they wanted to be safe and freeze all of my assets until the investigation was clear.
You know the feeling when your stomach hits the floor? Mine was 6 feet deep. What was I going to do? I needed my capital to keep moving my startup forward. What about my other investments, which required me to invest more occasionally? What about my home and the bills I need to cover for it? What about my surgeries? And what about dinner? Where do I get money for living?
After I calmed down I started going through my online banking accounts. I noticed that one of my credit lines with a random bank was still open. I maxed it out with a cash advance and used that to live on and keep my startup moving forward while I worked to resolve the issue with the FTC.
Stay focused Jason, I would say. I postponed some surgeries and kept working on my startup. Money was tight. I cut expenses down to the bare minimum, not knowing how long this would last. Finally, I heard from the FTC. They said that after a careful investigation of my accounts and businesses I was 100% cleared and my assets would be unfrozen, which they were.
Eventually the startup had some moderate success and produced intellectual property that still has value today. I’ve been in talks with one of the big broadcasting companies to acquire it. In any case, it worked out alright.
Now, when I was younger I might have given up on it when the personal problems started to pile on. I might have thought, my competition doesn’t have to deal with this stuff, I don’t have a chance. It’s only through experience that I realized, this stuff happens to everyone, not just me. As I invested in companies I heard the same type of crazy personal stories from other founders too. You mean to tell me that all these companies are created by human beings that have a bunch of stupid side distractions too?! Knowledge is power.
11. Anything else?
I already consider myself lucky in a lot of ways, not in the cliche sense, just luckier than average with things. Luck contributed just as much, if not more, than anything else towards my business successes.
In fact, I fully believe that things like hard work, determination, good decision making, and so on, all only enhance your odds of getting lucky in business. Aside from some very special circumstances, luck is driving most of the successes you see around you. Just about every success story I read or hear about can be attributed to a huge amount of luck, though you’ll never know it when you’re reading these stories because “luck” doesn’t sell magazines.
Now once you understand that there’s a lot of luck that plays into these things, and that you can increase your odds of getting lucky with things such as hard work, you come to realize another critical fact. That is, you can’t get lucky if you’re not in the game.
More brilliant people are creating more brilliant startups than ever before. It’s one of the greatest times in history to be an entrepreneur. Just as in Pixar’s movie Ratatouille where Chef Gusteau famously touted “anyone can cook!” I believe anyone can be an entrepreneur. And a real entrepreneur goes out and makes stuff happen, so what are you waiting for?
Wishing everyone, including my most fierce competitors, all the best.
What An Amazing Interview!
There’s so much good stuff here, I wanted to thank Jason for providing so much insight! It’s so rare to find someone whose done this well willing to openly share all of their thoughts and insights – this is the stuff that people pay $1,000s for in masterminds and online courses.
First, it’s good to hear that Jason felt lonely at first (well, not good, but rather reassuring). I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially younger ones, feel lonely when they are starting out. Most don’t have a huge network of support, and many of their friends and peers just aren’t entrepreneurs. That’s tough, but it’s nice to be able to relate to Jason in that sense.
Second, it was interesting to hear Jason’s thoughts around dropping out of college. I think that’s a tough choice for many, but it can be incredibly lucrative. Given college costs, I don’t think that college has to be for everyone. You really need to have a defined purpose to go to college, and if your purpose is better served not going (like Jason’s case), then don’t go or stop going.
Finally, I like Jason’s thoughts on college or entrepreneurship – roads down the rabbit hole. I agree that you need to figure out your path, and it may be one or the other – or maybe neither! Either way, you have to figure it out.
What did you learn from this amazing interview with Jason Schultz?
The post From Hacker to Venture Capitalist with Jason Schultz appeared first on The College Investor.