#this is the benefit of having premed friends | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

teshknowledgenotes · 3 years

Text

HOW I BUILT THIS - GUY RAZ

What I love most about starting your own business is the journey of coming up with a big idea and turning it into something tangible, though it would take me until my late thirties to start to feel even a tinge of confidence about some of my ideas or my ability to execute them. For most of my career before then, I struggled with the kinds of worries I thought charismatic entrepreneurs never confronted: anxiety, fear, imposter syndrome, even depression. But over the course of my time doing deep-dive interview with hundreds of busienss founders and CEO's for my shows, I've come to understand that, for the most part, they are just like you and me. Which is to say, they're human. They all have sleepless nights and midnight terrors. Most of them, at some point, feel like omposters. They are not natural superheroes, they are all Clark Kents. The only difference between them and you, at this moment, is that when opportunity presented itself, they went into the phone booth and put on the cape. They took the leap. That's basically it.

PART I: THE CALL

1) BE OPEN TO IDEAS People start businesses for all kinds of reasons. They do it to satisfy a dream or so solve a problem or to fill a void in the market. Some people want to improve on something that seems obsolete, and others want to reinvent an entire industry. There are literally dozens of on ramps to the entrepreneurial journey. But no matter which one you take, at some point you are to need an idea. Something specific. Something concrete and unique and new. An idea that makes life better or more intersting and delivers on the reason you wanted to start a business in the first place.

Sounds simple enough right? After all, ideas are a dime a dozen. Or atleast that's what many of us are led to believe. That ideas are easy and abundant. That what matters is execution. And all of that is true to some extent. It's just not the whole truth, because coming up with a good idea is hard. Good ideas are hard to find and hard to get right. But once you find one, they are also very hard to turn away from. That what makes good ideas so initimidating. Not that you won't ever find one, but that one day you will, and when you do, it's very possible that your life will never be the same again.

So where do you find one of these good ideas? Where do you look? Can you look? Or do you have to wait for the angels to sing in your ear and the light bulb to go on over your head? Some people are lucky, and this epiphany happens for them early. An idea hits them out of the blue and sends them on their way. For most of us, though, it isn't so simple. We have to look for a good idea, or at least be open to receiving it.

It's one of the eternal entrepreneurial questions: Can you actually find a good idea, or does it have to find you? The answer it the same for both option: yes. The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of start up ideas, it's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself, It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. - Paul Graham There is a name for a person who creates something purely out of passion: hobbyist. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that solves a problem only they have: tinkerer. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that also solves a problem they share with lots of other people: entrepreneur.

2) IS IS DANGEROUS OR JUST SCARY?

Michael Dell the creator of Dell at the age of 19, was told by his parents not to start a business and to focus on school. For Michael's parents coming from a family of well-educated people at a time when personal computing was mostly a curiosity that was often dismissed as a fag, leaving school to tinker with computers and resell them must have felt like their son was in danger of throwing his life away. What is more dangerous to a parent than a child taking their first steps out onto the high wire act of adulthood and doing so without a net?

But for Michael, there was nothing at all dangerous about his idea. He loved working on computers. He knew them well enough as a teenager that professional adults with even more to lose than he did trusted his insight and his work. He was solving their problems. Moreover, having found early success and having seen what was on the other side of this big leap, it was impossible to go back and see the world in the same way again, to ever again see it as his parents had. He knew the rules of this new world, and becaues of that, any last vestiges of danger melted away. And, hey if it didn't work out for whatever reason, he could always just go back to school and slot right back into the premed program. He was nineteen years old, he had his entire life ahead of him. The reality was the scariest part of starting Dell Computer Corportaion was the same thing that is scary about starting any business: it's the unknown. What did a teenage Michael Dell know about running a business? About hiring? About leading people? About find and leasing office space? About corportate taxes?

What do any of us know about that stuff before we confront it? Nothing. That is truly terrifying to the first-time entrepreneur. But it is also eminently knowable, if you choose to learn it. Even though it comes from an old French word "entrepreneurship" is a fairly new term in the vocabulary of business. Founders today self-identify as entrepreneurs in a way that the generations who came before them struggle to understand, mostly because they didn't have the language back then to describe what they were doing as they built their businesses. Fundamentally though they were doing the same thing. They were taking the detour, taking the leap away from the type of professional life they didn't want, and toward something new and exciting and their own.

As a group they have made entrepreneurship both less scary and less dangerous. By developing a lexicon for the process of starting a business, by giving it a name, many of the modern founders whom you will meet in this book have helped to demystify the prospect of taking the leap. By breaking new ground, the older generation of foudners of which Jim and Mike are a part have made taking the leap seem almost normal.

They are why you can trust the rope threaded through your harness by experts and counterweighted by mentors, and have fait that the anchors hammered into the cliff face by those who came before you will hold, as you take that first big step backward off the cliff and into the unknown. Because they know what it means to take you fate into your own hands and to feel that you've got a real grip on this idea that has it's own grip on your soul.

3)LEAVE YOUR SAFETY ZONE... BUT DO IT SAFELY

There is something romantic about the struggle to do something new, isn't there? About taking the leap. At one point or another, all of us who are enamored of the pursuit of big ideas have ourselves enthralled by the origin story of a successful enterprise: the marathon coding sessions, the all-nighters that stretch across an entire week, the four friends stacked on top of one another inside a one bedroom apartment, meeting every evening at the kitchen table in the "boardroom". In commencement addresses and keynote speeches, famous founders talk wistfully about these memorable and crucial moments. Being down to their last dollar, maxing out their credit cards, eating nothing but ramen noodles and drinking nothing but Mountain Dew for months on end.

Those were the good old days.

There are some people who find those stories exhilarating, others, terrifying. For the longest time, I would have counted myself as one of the latter. And to an extent, I still do. I mean, what kind of maniac would just throw caution to the wind as Reid described? Who in their right mind would ever take such a huge risk? If building a company or creating something big and new is like jumping off a cliff and hoping to put enough pieces together before it, and you, die a horrible death, the question I always want to ask founders and creators is, Why do it?

What are you thinking? Why whould you ever jump? Most of the successful entrepreneurs I've met left the comfort of their previous lives as safely and smartly as possible. And they did this in one of two ways: either they stayed in their "real jobs" until their startups demanded more time than they could spare, or they went for it with a fallback plan in their hip pocket, which made the risks inherent in entrepreneurship manageable enought for them to be able to sleep at night.

Having a fallback plan does not mean you are building an escape hatch from your dream. It's not an excuse not to try hard, nor is it a ready made reason to quit. It just means you've give yourself a cushion at the bottom of your entrepreneurial leap of faith that if you do crash, you can bounce back to fight another day.

4) DO YOUR RESEARCH

5) FIND YOUR CO-FOUNDER Many of the same founders I talked about at the beginning of this chapter, whom we have now elevated to godlike status in our culture, have talked openly about the importance of the partners they had in their early fight to bring their ideas to fruition, many of them while the fight was still happening.

"My best business decisions really have to do with picking people" Bill Gates said in a 1998 conversation with Warren Buffett on the campus of the University Of Washington. "Deciding to go into partnership with Paul Allen is probably at the top of the list, having somedboy who you totally trust, who's totally committed, who shares your vision and yet has a little big different set of skills, and also acts as a check on you, and just the benefit of sparking off of somebody who's got that kind of brilliance, it'snot only made it fun, but it's really led to a lot of success"

In a 1985 Playboy interview, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs talked about the importance of both his partner Steve Wozniak's differing interests and their shared lack of a vision. "Neither of us had any idead that this would go anywhere, Woz was motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brillian pieces of work, which was the disk drive that made the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company, I don't think it would have happened without Woz and I don't think it would have happened without me" Jobs said.

The power of partnership is not just a modern tech phenomenon. Partnerships are a hallmark in the history of innovation, regardless of the industry. Many of them are cultural icons we know by the name on the door: Ben and Jerry. Hewlett and Packard. Harley and Davidson. Wells and Fargo. Procter and Gamblr. Aso for Warren Buffett and his part in that conversation with Bill Gates in 1998, he was in complete agreement about the importance of picking people: "I've had a partner like that, Charlie Munger, for a lot of years, and it does for me exactly what Bill is talking about."

6) FUND THE BUSINESS, PART 1: BOOTSTRAPPING

7) GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT Telling your story is a more cost-effective way to take your advertiseing beyond usefulness and effiacacy and efficiency as topics of conversation. It's like a growth hack that enables consumers to connect to your brand in a deeper, more personal way, which is a big part of how you differentiate and de-commodify your product, create brand loyalty, and set yourself up for long term success. While many legacy companies struggle to see the innovation and origin stories right under their noses, it is nevertheless as true for them as it is for young upstart brands that their busienss is a story, that every business is astory. The store, more than anything else, is what connects you and me and everyone out there to the thing you're building. And every defining element of that thing you're building, of that business, helps to tell its story. This goes from the name and the logo, to the function of the product or the style of the service to the partners that founded it, all the way to the customers who partronize it. The purpose of that story changes with time and with whom it is being told to, but fundamentally its goal is to answer a hundred different variations on the simple question: Why?

Why should i buy your product? Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I invest in this company?

These are just a few of the variations identified by Ben Horowitz the brilliant tech entrepreneur, best selling author, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He describe in 2010 how his company evaluates CEO's, whose main job, he contends it to be "the keeper of the vision and the story" A few years later, in talking to Forbes, Horowitz put the role of the company's story even more succinctly: "The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist." It is a story you have to tell to you customers, to investors, to employees, and ultimately to yourself. Kind of in that order, in fact, from the bottom up, like the old food pyramid or Maslow's legendary hierarchy of needs.

One of the reasons for this approach seem prettty obvious: in most markets there are already plenty of options to choose from, so you need to give us a really compelling reason why we should choose yours. And in the cases where you're making something no on has ever seen before, when you're creating an entirely new market, it's not always immediately clear what we have been missing. As such, you need to tell us why we need to choose anything new at all. The other, slightly more complicated reason you need a terrific story is that there are so many other questions one could ask in an effort to understand why you exist, and your current answers don't reveal very much: what you do, where you dot it, how you do it, whom you do it for. Those are just discoverable facts. I can search for them on Google. I can buy market research reports. I can hire someone to reverse engineer your product or go through your process. I can read books and articles about all of it.

But the key here is: Why do you do what you do? Or, Why should we care? I can't know the answers to those questions until you, as the founder want me to know them, because they exist first in your mind. And like most concepts that are unquantifiable, the answers to these basic questions are suually best understood and best shared with the world through a story.

Whitney Wolfe has a story. She knows it well. To hear her tell it is to get to know her and the history of her dating app, Bumble. It is to know what she is trying to do with her app, why we should all care about it, and how it has managed to succeed despite the fact that by the end of 2014, when Bumble was launched, if there was one thing the world didn't need any more of, it was dating apps. There was already Match.com, Plenty Of Fish, IkCupid, eHarmony, and Hinge, along with all the niches sites, such as Jdate, BlackPlanet, Christian Mingle, and way on the other end of the spectrum. SeekingArrangment and Ashley Madinson.

And then there was Tinder, the behemoth, which Whitney founded in 2012 and had recently left under some of the worst possible circumstances not just for a co-founder but for a woman and a human being. There was both a professinoal and a romantic split with one of her co-founders, there was a very public sexual harassment lawsuit, and there was an avalanche of despicably hurtful online vitriol aimed directly at her. By the time she left Tinder in early 2014, Whitney wasn't just done with the dating business, she was done, period.

The stories of Bumble & AirBnB are unique to themselves, but what is true across industries and across time is that all businesses are stories, and all stories are a process. They are a mechanism for thinking deeply about yourself, your product or service, your employees, your customers, your market and the world. They explain each to all the others in a way that facts and figures never can.

Ben Horowitz is right knowing your story and being able to clearly articulate to the world why you exist is one of your most important challenges as an entrepreneur. Not because it helps you sell more product, or build a cooler brand, or make your money through all those things are true.

Rather the basic story that answers the big "why" questions is the one that creates loyal customers, find the best investors, builds an employee culture that keeps them committed to the venture and keeps you committed and grinding away when things get really hard and you want to give (and you will). There are a millions reasons for any one of these groups to quit or to say no. Your job is to give them one of the few reasons to them the story, that gets them to keep listening and to say yes.

8) FUND THE BUSINESS, PART 2: OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY(OPM)

Some people have distinct, tangible advantages that make it easier for them to pull together enough OPM to get their businesses on solid footing and pointed in the right direction. Recognition of this fact, especially for the entrepreneurs who enjoyed some of those advntages going in, is why I always ask my podcast guests how much they attribute their success to both luck and hark work.

Acknowledging privilege and recognizing advantage are essential to understanding the nature of success, both yours and others. That does not mean privilege should define or predertermine success, any more than lack of privilege should preclude it. While not everyone has the same privilege of circumstance, everyone has intangible advantages of one kind or another that they can leverage in pursuit of success. Personality is an advantage. Will is an advantage. Likability, unflappability, resilience, having a good memory, those are all advantages that anyone who possesses them can use much the way anyone who possesses privilege uses theirs.

But where does that really leave those of us who may not be lucky enough to have a parent who can write a $10,000 check compared with those whose parents casually carry around $10,000 in cash? It doesn't leave us in the same place, but it does put us in the same race on the same track. Although out access to money differs, the process for securing it is the same, no matter who we are, where we live, how we grew up, or what we're trying to build. In every case, a conversation takes place in which a founder has to describe what they're trying to do and then ask another person for some amount of money, in the form of investment, loan, gift, whatever, to help them get there.

Here's where those early fundraising stories from the priviledged and the less-than-privileged start to sound surprisingly alike. To a person, all of these entrepreneurs will tell you that fundraising is brutally hard at every level. It taxes your time, your energy, your ego, and sometimes your relationships. You will have hundreds of conversations. You will have to tell your story hundreds of times and answer ten times as many questions, a lot of them the same, some of them invredibly frustrating, especially form people who think are supposed to support you or whom you have always called a friend. You are going to need a thick skin, like the heat shield on a space shuttle trinyg to punch through the incredible resistance of the surrounding atmosphere and not break apart. This is true whether you are blue blooded or blue-collar, just as it is true that this process starts the same way for everyone, with a conversation, with the people you know.

First a parent, then an uncle, then a family friend, then a mentor, then maybe a kid you went to high school with who also started their own business, and on and on from there, until you've exhausted your total personal network and have, by then hopefully, raised all the money you need. I think about it like a series of concentric circles. You start with the circle of people who are closest to you, the people who names you don't have to dig to the bottom of your contacts to find, because they're right there in your text messages and the call log on your phone. Maybe you start with a best friend and as to borrow a few hundred dollars. Does your friend know someone, a relative, possibly whom you can call for a little more, maybe $500? Does that relative know of someone interested in helping out a startup like yours?

The lesson here is that despite the sometimes daunting advantages that privilege can cofer, this process for raising early money really is available to anyone. Everyone exists at the centre of their own set of concentric circles. The built-in advantages or privilege do not change their shape, they only reduce the number of outer circles one might need to explore to reach one's fundraising goals. And that, comes to OPM and entrepreneurship, whic which I mean, once someone has raised money, even if it was easy for them and there is more where that came from, they still have to do something with it. I can't point to a single example of an entrepreneur I've profiled who raised a bunch of friends and family money early on and then merely sat back, resting on their privilege, to watch their business grow organically with no effort.

9) ITERATE, ITERATE, ITERATE

Take a look around you right now. At the seat you're sitting on. The shirt you're wearing. The light bulbs illuminating the space you're in. The phone in your pocket. Maybe the earbuds in your ears. Even the cover of this book you're reading or listening to.

If these items have anything in common, it is that none of them looked like they do now when they were first conceived by the people who invented or designed them. And that' because a lot happens between conception and first production for nearly every idea that gets turned into a business. Shape changes. Materials change. Offerings change. Names change. Process changes. Construction methods change. Look and feel and tast change.

Typically there are two phases to the iterative process prior to launch. The first involves tinkering with your idea until it works and you, as its creator, are satisfied with what you have. The second entails exposing the working idea to the public and tweaking the product based o ntheir feedback until it catches on, either with a buyer, a major investor, a retail partner, or a critical mass of your customers.

As the creator of AllBirds, Time made clear was that it's important to spend enough time in this first phase to really get comfortable with your product and your story and really get to know the business you're trying to build. Tim, arguably, spent five productive years there. Whitney Wolfe, in contrast, took less than a year to get the version of Bumble out into the world and onto people's phones, in part because she already knew the busienss from her time at Tinder and she'd lived every moment of the Bumble story from the day she left Tinder for good. The exact amount of time you spend in the first phase of development isn't as important as making sure you don't get stuck there for too long. Every idea, no matter how great, has a shelf life. If you don't get it off that shelf and out into the world in time, no amount of feedback you get during the second phase of the iterative process can overcome a lack of insterest or mitigate first mover advantage if someone beats you to the punch.

Moving to phase two can be tough for people who don't handle criticism well, or who are dogged by that familiar yet unattainable form of perfectionsism that has trapped the next great American novel on the desks or hard drives of countless aspiring writers since forever. Like asking friends and family for money, exposing your idea and all your hard work to feedback can be very uncomfortable, which can make the first phase of internal development feel like a safe space out of which you would rather not poke your head until you're absolutely sure. Except "absolutely sure" doesn't exist.

I would love to tell you a story about an entrepreneur who suceeded in spite of the paralysis of their perfectionism, but I don't have one, because such people generally don't create companies. The creators and innovators who I meet, if they do struggle with criticism and perfectionism, also understand the importance of allowing their product to be judged by the marketplace, and the opportunity that users' feedback presents to make the product better as a result. They know that they need an abundance of feedback to dial in their product. They actively seek it out, in fact. Because while they know what they want to do, and they know why and how they want to do it, they also know that they have no idea if anyone will actually like what they're making. And that's always essential to keep in mind.

PART II THE TESTS

Most of the entrepreneurs I've interviewed have a healthy fear of failure. They konw it's possible at any moment. Even likely. When it happens, and believe me it will happen they certainly don't like it. It's not comfortable, and it's definetely not fun. But that never stops them.

Good entrepreneurs, succesful ones, have a way of not letting their fear of failure slow them down. They are defined instead by a seemingly inextinguishable belief in their idea, the idea that has pulled them out of their comfort zone and driven them across the unknown to explore new possiblities.

They are convinced that, if they can just get there (where "there" is), if they can just get their idea off the ground, it will succeed. If. That's really what entrepreneurs fear at this stage. The uncertainty of whether they wil be able to cross that vast space between inspiration and execution, full of tests and traps, twists and turns. A gauntlet that every entrepreneur must pass through, with challenges that are generally the same for everyone, but that take different forms and present in a different order with each trip across the unknown territory of starting a business.

Indeed, every entrepreneurial journey is a new and different story. No two paths are the same. Everyone will proceed through many of the same pivotal points, but your path will inevitably be unique to you, to your idea, and to the time and place through which it passes.

Fortunately, it's never been easier to make this journey than it is right now. So many entrepreneurs have done what you are about to do. You have the chance to prepare for what's coming your way, if you are willing to learn from these unwitting helpers. They've made every mistake. They've falled into every trap. They've taken every wrong turn. And the good ones, the successful one, only made those mistakes, fell into those traps, took those wrong turns, once.

Because they borrowed from the entrepreneurs who came before them as well. They heard the stories and learned the lessons. Now it's your turn.

10) GO IN THROUGH THE SIDE DOOR

Most new businesses aren't doing something completely novel or aren't doing it in a totally new way or new place, you should be thinking long and hard about how else you might enter your market besides knocking on the front door and asking for permission to come in. This is something that female and minority entrepreneurs have long had to contend with, whether it means breaking through glass ceilings or breaking down walls built by prejudice. All of which is to say, figuring out how to sneak in through the side door is not new ground you will have to break. A legion of resourceful geniuses have come before you. And what many of them have discovered is that the side door isn't just less heavily guarded, it's often bigger. Or as Peter Thiel put it in a 2014 lecture at the Standford Center for Professional Development titles "Competition is for losers" "Don't always go through the tiny little door that everyone's trying to rush through. Go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one's taking"

For Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-hour Energy, his side door into the energy drink market did not take the shape of a small niche, but rather of a small product. In early 2003, a few years removed from his retirement from a plastics business he'd turned around and profitable, Manoj was attending a natural products trade show outside Los Angeles looking for inventions he might acquire or license in an efford to create a business that would generate an ongoing residual income stream for him in his post plastic years.

Walking the floor of the show, he stumbled upon a new sixteen ounce energy drink that produced long-lasting effects he'd never experienced with other energy drinks "Well this is amazing", he said to himself, exhausted from a long morning of meetings and now energized enough to continue walking the trade show floor. "I could sell this" He thought. The drink's creators disagreed. They were "science guys with PhDs" while he was "just a lowly business guy". They refused to sell their invention to him or even offer him a license on their formula. When they effectively told him to hit the road, Manoj decided to hit the lab instead and to create his own version of the energy drink that had fueled him up and blown him away.

"I looked at their label and said, I can do better than this. How hard can it be? I'll figure it out." Manoj said. With the help of scientists from a company he'd founded for the express purpose of finding inventions just like this one, he had a comparable energy drink formula in a matter of months. It would turn out to be the easiest part of the process.

The hard part would be getting his invention into stores "If I made another drink" Manoj said of his thinking at the time, "I've got to fight for space in the cooler against Red Bull and Monster Energy. I've also got to fight Coke, Pepsi, and Budweiser for space. So you're pretty much dead if you want to try that. He was dead because he would be fighting for a finite amount of space in brick and mortar stores, against the compeition not just in his own niche but in the entire beverage industry, which is dominated by some of the biggest companies in the world. If you own a 7-Eleven or you're the gneral manager of a grocery chain like Kroger or Tesco, are you really going to turn over a Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, or Snapple rack to a new energy drink that on one has every heard of? Especially when, in 2003, in energy drink sales had yet to really spike and there were already two major players, Red Bull and Monster energy, in the nascent market. Even if you were inclined to give a little guy like Manoj Bhargava a shot, once the regional sales reps and distributors from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo got wind of your decision, they would likely wield their Microsoftesque price discretion against you like a baseball bat, or just pull their products from your store altogether.

Those were the barriers to entry that Manoj was looking at. If he was going to get into this market, he'd have to find some other way. That's when it dawned on him. "If I'm tired why am I thirsty also?" By which he meant, why should we have to chug ten to sixteen ounces of a cloyingly sweet liquid in order to get an energy boost? "It would be like Tylenol selling sixteen-ounce bottles", Manoj explained by way of analogy. "I just want to do it quick. I don't want to drink this whole thing", he thought. This is how Manoj arrived at the idea of shrinking his product down from the standard sixteen-ounce drink to a two-ounce shot.

Quickly, everything changed. In less than six months, he'd hired a designer to make his distinctive label, and he'd found a bottler who could produce two ounce versions of his energy formula. "And at two ounces, it's really not a drink, it's a delivery system"

This was 5-hour Energy's side door. It wasn't a drink, so it wasn't an immediate threat to Red Bull or Monster Energy. At two ounces, it also didn't need to be refigerated or given a large, dedicated shelf, so retailers didn't have to worry about space. They understood that the perfect spot for it would be at the cash register, right next to the Slim Jims and pickled eggs!

"It just belonged there" Manoj said "You could tell it just looked that way that it should be there" Moreover because the ingredients that way, that it should be there." Moreover, because the ingredients that went into 5-hour Energy were actually less about energy and more about focus, "vitamins for the brain". He could position his product beyond the beverage verticals and outside the grocery or convenience store channels. In fact, the very first place he went with 5-hour Energy in 2004 was the largest vitamin store, GNC, which decided to put the product in a thousand of its stores.

GNC turned out to be a genius side door into the energy "drink" market for a couple reasons. The first is obvious, there was much less competition compared with grocery and convenience stores, but the second is more interesting. "It turns out GNC is always looking for new products, because once a product gets mass distribution, GNC is sort of out of it, if it's in Walmart, nobody's going to buy it at GNC" Essentially, GNC was an easier route to retail distribution than a place like 7-Eleven or Safeway, and thankfully the tolerance for a slow start was higher as well, because in the first week they sold only 200 bottles. "Which was horrible" Manoj admitted. But they waited it out, manufacturer and retailer together, "and at the end of six months it was selling 10,000 bottles a week"

From there Manoj went to drugstores like Walgreens and Rite Aid, which snapped it up, now a 5-hour Energy is near the cash register in most stores basically everywhere.

This is the great irony of circumventing the barriers to entry that your competitions's apparent monopoly power constructs and then fighting you way in through the side door. If you're successful, you stand a very good chance of achieving market domination of your own. Of digging and widening your own moat and building the toll that bridge that crosses it. Of massive, unbelievable success. For many entrepreneurs, that is the goal.

11) IT'S ALL ABOUT LOCATION

12) GET ATTENTION, PART 1: BUILDING BUZZ If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I think there is a business analog to that: If a company opens it's doors and no one hears about it, does it ever really exist? Or is it just one of the 170,000 new businesses that year that didn't make it to its first birthday and whose existence you can only infer from a table of numbers in a Bureaur of Labor Statistics Report?

The answer, I believe, is of course it existed! If you took that leap off the cliff while attempting to build your own airplane on the way down, you deserve to be known. But as the builder of that plane, it's also your job to be the creator of the buzz from that plane's engines.

It's your job to make sure that the sound of your doors opening reaches past your front steps and far enough out into the world for potential customers to hear it. It's your job to get attention for the product or the service you are bringing to the market.

It's usually not easy, and you are going to need help from all forms of media to make it happen, because like Jen Rubio said, nobody wants to hear you talk about yourself. But it's doable, particularly when you are able to build buzz among many possible customers while at the same time engineering work of mouth among your ideal customers.

Take one look around you at all the things you observed at the start of this chapter. The people who made these products were sending a version of their idea out into the world that they could stand behind and that could itself stand up to the criticism they were inviting. That is the real recipe for success in the iterative process, and one every creator needs to get right if they want to turn their idea not just into a product, but into a business that is poised for real, sustained growth.

13) GET ATTENTION PART 2: ENGINEERING WORD OF MOUTH

14) SURVIVE THE CRUCIBLE

15) FUND THE BUSINESS, PART 3: PROFESSIONAL MONEY

The first thing to understand is that raising venture capital is about making a promise. A promise that you have a product or a service that people will pay money for, that you have a plan to reach as many of those people as possible, and that in exchange for lots of moeny, you will bust your butt to reach them. The next thing to understand is that good investors know the promise you are making to them is just that, a promise. They know you can't make any guarantees. You can do everything right, but if the world shifts under your feet, there's nothing you can do about it. Venture capital is by its nature a gamble, it's right there in the name, and every gamble comes with the risk of heavy losses. Professional investors know and accept this fact, which is why the also do everything they can to mitigate the risk before writing very large checks.

One of the principal ways they do this, especially if they are unfamiliar with your industry, is to ask lots of questions:

How do you expect to scale this? Where is the growth going to come from? Who is the customer for this? Doesn't something like this already exist? How will you get costs down? Where will you manufacture? Where will you be based? What's your marketing strategy? Why does anyone need this? Why would anyone do this?

16) PROTECT WHAT YOU'VE BUILT

17) WHEN CATASTROPHE STRIKES

18) THE ART OF THE PIVOT

PART III THE DESTINATION In many ways, the scariest part of entrepreneurship is success. It's reaching your destination, your objective. Because that's when the work really starts. Why you've got to decide: What now? What next? Do you keep moving and do it again? Do you stick around? Do you build? What do you build? How big? With what? And why? Getting here was difficult enough. The anxiety that comes with the responsibility of continue success isn't making things any easier. Why continue to put yourself through all this?

These questions are difficult to answer. And the answers are often hard to get exactly right. Because in the beginning, all you're worried about is trying to survive. You're not aiming for perfection, you're just hoping to avoid pitfalls. You're not thinking about legacy, you're just focused on lasting one more day in your quest across the unknown.

Eventually, though, these questions will become paramount if you want to ubild a business that stands the test of time. Something more than just a vessel for the idea that drove you in the beginning. Something that reflects you mission and your values, that honors all the work you put in, and that treats the people who helped you get here well.

Figuring out your answers to these questions is also what will make you feel successful, no matter what your next move is: whether you stay and build and lead, whether you go, whether you move on and try to repeat your success in another area. If you're not doing it for reasons that are authentically yours, if you've lost sight of what inspired you from those very first days, then the long, arduous entrepreneurial journey you just endured might very well fill you with regret. Like promise unfulfilled.

Forget feeling successful. You can feel like a downright failure when you get to the right place for the wrong reasons, no matter how much money you have. That's because the path to true entrepreneurial success is not strictly about profit, it's also about finding and fulfilling a deeper purpose. That has been the destination all along. Knowing that, and recognizing when you've reached it, is when the rewards truly begin to accrue.

19) IT CAN'T BE ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

The Beatles told us that money can't buy you love. Rousseau taught us that money doesn't buy you happiness. The Bible warns us that the love of money is the root of all evil. And these casualities of the subprime mortgage crisis showed us that money can't be the primary motivating force behind our businesses. A company that is successful and resilient and that acts as a force for good in the world long after you're gone has a larger purpose, a mission at it's center. One that you as founder are responsible for indentifying and articulating from the very beginning, then guarding during times of plenty and leaning on during times of difficulty.

Founders who approach their business with a “mission first” focus tend to be better equipped to handle the lure of unrestrained and manic growth that has damaged or even sunk so many companies with early potential. But having a defined mission is even more valubale when money is scarce or growh is anemic, especially for younger companies, because it gives them a reason to keep on fighting. In contrast, if they are operating with a “money first” mind-set, money's absence makes it so much easier to abandon what they're doing and to pivot before they should, to give up on their original idea at the first sign of trouble, or just plain old quit.

More than just stoking the flames of a fighting spirit when things aren't going your way, the mission is what gives your business, and you, direction. It helps you identify opportunities. It helps you categorize and prioritize the field of choices in any situation, from those that advance the intersts of the business to those that subvert it or hold it back. This is perhaps the most important thing that a mission does for a young company, because with everything swirling around you, whether it's product development, funding, hiring, or marketing, it's very easy to lose your sense of direction both individually as a founder and collectively as the business. Once you lose your sense of direction, the chances of keeping hold of any sense of mission become slim. After all, if you don't know where you're going, it's hard to know why you're going there.

Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk from the southwest of England, had a mission to demystify meditation and make it accessible to as many people as possible. The first step on the journey once he was back in the United Kingdom was to figure out the how and the why of this whole experience and then to find a plae where he could teach clients one on one. The goal he said was to give people just enough to be inspired or to get excited to try mediation, because a lot of people had heard and read about it, but it's only really in the experience of it that you can get them to make that leap in terms of actually getting the benefit. So he started to use a lot more storytelling in his practice. He took a lot of metaphors and analogies from the Tibetan tradition, but he changed them just enough to make them “more approachable and accessible.”

At his first teaching space, a clinic room in a London integrative health center fun by a doctor who had heard a lot of good things about “mindfulness”. Before too long, Andy was seeing six to ten people every day, all with very mainstream problems. They were struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia, stress, mirgraines, many of the things that we all suffer with now in a life of just sheer overload. He'd see each person for an hour a week for ten weeks, gradually developing in the process a ten week long modular course from which everyone can benefit. Any by everyone I mean everyone, because everything you hear in the Headspace app is now is build built on the content and the language that was developed during that time. It was a really important trainign ground in terms of understanding what worked and what didn', what language connected and what didn't.

Before he got to the Headspace app, which by mid 2018, had more thatn 30 million users and a million paying subscribers, Andy first had to figure out how to move beyond the one on one clinic experience. Not to make more money, though he certainly could have used it, but to reach more people more quickly. ”I wanted to get meditation out. I wanted to get more people meditating. I just didn't know how to do it outside of the clinic” he said.

20) BUILD A CULTURE, NOT A CULT

At Reed Hastings first company Pure Software, the "culture first" approach he used at Netflix didn't come naturally. He did things another way which was "me first". Not that he was selfish, just the opposite was true. He did everything or at least he tried to do everything, himself. "I thought if I could just do more sales calls, more travel, write more code, do more interviews, that somehow it would work out better," he said. In his mind, if there was a problem to be solved or a bug in the code to be fixed, as the founder and CEO of the company, which was his brainchild, he was the obvious and best choice for doing what needed to get done. Eventually, wearing all those hats got to be too much. "I was coding all night, trying to be CEO in the day, and once in a while, I'd squeeze in a shower" he said. It wasn't working Hastings had to figure out a better way. This is when he made the mistake from which the culture deck would eventually be born. Now whenever they had a problem at Pure Software, instead of tring to fix it himself, he tried to implement a process that would prevent the problem from ever happening again. The real problem was that he was trying to dummy-proof the system, and then eventually only dummies wanted to work there. Then, of course the market shifted and the company was unable to adapt.

Pure Software was eventually acquired by its largest competitor, and Reed Hastings used the financial windfall from that sale to co-founder Netflix, where he made sure not to repeat his process-obsessed, founder-centric mistakes. He was fortunate. Many founders have not been so lucky. Any successful founder will tell you that the impulse to do everything yourself, to believe that only you know best and then to build processes that reflect that belief, is endemic to entrepreneurship and has the potential to be incredibly destructive. When the processes don't work and your conclusions continually prove wrong, your assumption is that if you just take on a little more and work a little harder, everything will be fine. But that approach can wear you down physically and mentally. Plus, as Reid Hoffman put it in his episode with Hastings, "more work is never the real answer. To succeed as you scale, you have to leverage every person in the organization. And to do that, you have to be very intentional about how you craft the culture." This may sound like common sense, because it is! But I've been surprised at how often entrepreneurs I've encountered make the mistake of trying to do everything themselves as the company begins to grow. What happens in the end is that everything about the business starts to be about the founder rather than the business.

This is one of the hardest traps for even the most well-intentioned entrepreneur to avoid, let alone spot. For the longest time in the beginning, it can feel like it's just you and your idea. The seed gets planted in your mind, you water it with inspiration until it germinates into an idea, you feed it with research until it pokes up through the soil and sees the light of day as a product, which is when it first finds the warmth of attention from an audience, and then if you're lucky, it starts to blossom into a full fledged business.

Getting to that point is an all-consuming process. It takes all your time, energy and focus. It's all you think about, and after a while the line between you and your idea can start to blur. It becomes difficult to know where you end and the company begins. It becomes impossible, especially in the leaner, trying times, to fathom that anyone could understand the business or its problems in the way that you can. So when someone on your team levels the charge that you're making everything about yourself, it almost doesn't compute. Everything you do, you do for the business. You've given everything have to it. If you could give more, you would. But when you and the business are indistinguishable, when you've allowed your identity to merge with the company's how does it not appear to be the case, from outside at least, that your singular focus on the business is also a singular focus on yourself?

It turns out there is a name for founders who fall into this trap. They're called "monarch CEO's" according to Professor Jeffery Sonnenfeld, who stuides CEOs at the Yale School of Management. "Their business is defined around them and their life is defined around the business", he told the Washington Post. The most notorious of these figures in recent years was Dov Charney, the controversial founder of the now-defunct clothing retailer American Apparel.

American Apparel was a juggernaut in the clothing business and in the culture during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Their advertisements were edgy and sexually provocative. Their retail stores were on the best streets in all the right cities. They manufactured their clothes out of a large, old factory building in downtown Los Angeles. Their clothes were everywhere and on everyone the entire decade. I still own a couple American Apparel T-shirts and hoodies that I wear in regular rotation.

American' Apparel's rise from a domestic clothing manufacturer and wholesaler into an international retail brand was as fast as its fall. They moved into their famous downtown LA factory in 2000. By 2005, they were one of the fastest growing companies in America. By 2011, the company had more than 250 stores with revenue well north of $500 million. And then, by 2014 amidst a tangle of sexual harassment lawsuits and bad financial deals, Dov was kicked off the board of the company he founded. By 2015, American Apparel was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By 2017, the company as Dov Charney knew it was gone, all ties to the founder severed, it's intellectual property sold at auction to a competitor, Gildan Activewear for less than $100 million, it's retail stores shuttered. It's a sad cautionary tale. Dov Charney was American Apparel. American Apparel was Dov Charney. And that was the whole problem. Everyone saw it. The New York Times said, "Charney himself had no other interests ouside his company. He viewed himself as indeispensable" The Financial Times said "It is almost as if Mr.Charney believes that the scandalous behaviour he has so often been accused if is inextricably tied up with the image of his often lauded but deeply unconventional fashion label" It's a sentiment Charney would not reject. He told the Financial Times reporter "I am a deep part of the brand".

The depth of their synchronicity is where the trouble for American Apparel started. At various points well into the history of the company. Charney was the CEO, the designer, the main photographer, the male fit model, a centerpiece of their advertising and their biggest liability. Not just legally either. As often happens when a founder loses themselves inside their business, he became a control freak. He had store managers calling him directly. He famously moved into a warehouse that was having some problems and had a shower installed so he could live there twenty four hours a day monitoring the work. Once when there was a traffic jam in the parking lot of American Apparel's LA headquarters, Charney went downstairs and personally directed traffic until it cleared.

These might be humble, romantic gestures of a leader willing to do whatever it takes if they weren't actually a reflection of a founder who had turned into a relentless micromanager as the company grew. "A lot of founders have difficulty making this transition" said Professor Sydney Finkelstein of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in the wake of Charney's ouster from the board. "When you're a smaller company, micromanagment is not necessarily a terrible thing. It's when you cross the line and have to grow, you've got to have management talent around you.

"If the cultural roots are strong, then new leadership is developed in that model, and will often continue the culture" - Reed Hastings If the roots are unstable however and the leadership is constantly changing, the culture will be, too. By consistently firing or driving away talented leaders, Charney managed to yank out by the roots whatever culture there was to speak of at American Apparell, and in filling the vacuum with himself, the culture of American Apparel became the Cult of Dov. As Dov imploded, so did American Apparell.

Tristan the owner of a skincare brand. If he hadn't been careful, Tristan could have very easily found himself on a self absorbed Dov Charney style trajectory. Instead, he found a problem to solve "for people who lookied like me", as he put it. He developed a set of solutions that could become a business that employed a lot of people, if he just cultivated the seed of the idea and tended to the soil with enough care to make sure the idea blossomed and flourished. Almost immediately, Tristan's goals changed. Instead of being singular and self-focuesed, they were multiple and communal. He recongnized that for a business to last 100 years, which was one of his new goals, it can't be about you, because "you don't scale". Only your idea, and your story, and your values do. As long as you know them and share them.

"Knowing your values gets you on the same page with your employees. They get you on the same page in this noisy world with your consumers, but more importantly they give you your purpose," Tristan said "Without knowing your values, you're going to make decisions that are inconsistent and you have to have consistency to inspire your sanity."

I would argue that you also need consistency to inspire your people. And there is nothing more consistent than a set of clear values written down on the page for everyone to see. Just ask Reed Hastings or better yet, ask his 7000 employees.

21) THINK SMALL TO GET BIG

22) MANAGE PARTNERSHIP TENSIONS

23) KNOW THYSELF

When I started podcasts my friends thought I'd lost my mind. they were right to be skeptical. We were still a few years away from the podcast boom that began to swallow traditional radio.

Podcasting let me be the most genuine version of my personal and professional self, and it unexpectedly put my career into ascendancy as a result. Embracing my storytelling sensibilities helped put my production ecompany on the same track. It guided me to, and through, every decision in every phase of our growth, whom to hire, who to profile on the show, what to say no to, and it also kep us from falling off the righ track.

When growth begins to accelerate, it's even more critical to know who you are as a founder and who you are as a company. That understanding helps point you in the right direction when you have opportunities to pursure lots of different things. It's a constant reminder of what business you're actually in, which is something that is surprisingly easy to forget or lose sight of once your business starts to expand, evolve, and change shape. Believe me, I've been there, and so have most of the founder I've interviewed.

Andy, one of the co-founders of Bonobos was dealing with problems in the workplace. "I was a confused person, I got depressed, and I kind of had to fake it at work that I was doing okay. It was super tough to navigate." He also struggled with direct conflict and confrontation. "I valued harmoney over the difficult conversations until the situation became really difficult", he said, "and then I'd take it on" Compbined with the normal stress and insecurity that come with running a succesful startup, one that wasn't even his idea to begin with, these personal issues started to steer Andy toward poor decisions, including fighting with his co-founder in front of the team, which exacerbated the company's identity crisis.

24) WHEN TO SELL AND WHEN TO STAY

Now entrepreneurs don't have to raise professional money if they don't want to. They don't have to accept it in the amounts or at the valuation that may be available to them. They don't have to realize the potential idling within their ideas as quickly as others may want either. They can take it slow. They can defer compensation. They can wait to make a lot of money and let the company grow at a more natural pace. It wouldn't be an unfamiliar place from which to operate for most entrepreneurs, since founders typically pay themselves about as much as they could make if they were employees, and much less on average than a CEO would make coming into the company. Fundamentally it comes down to what a founder thinks is best for the company and best for themselves. Neither choice is by definition better than the other. It all depends on what a founder's goals were when they started their company, and where theose goals have evolved in light of their success.

Except I don't think money and control are your only choices when you are wrangling with a growing and successful busines. I don't believe they are the only two major forces that motivate an entrepreneur's decision making either. I think there is a third. A consider that tends to play a lesser role during the fundraising part of growth, but is especially active once a founder has grown their business beyond what they ever imagined possible and the opportunity to sell presents itself. I'm talking about happiness. Contentment. Making a decision that feels right.

25) BE KIND

26) WHAT YOU DO WITH YOUR LUCK

Every successful entrepreneur I've met has a story about working eighteen hour days for months on end or eating ramen and cereal and rice to get by, but none of them has ever worked harder in their capacity as a founder than a dishwasher or a gardener or a construction worker or a waitress works every single day. Every founders stories has a strong strain of luck running through it. But I'm not talking about luck in this context as any sort of admonition against these founders being proud of all the hard work they put in. I mention it in order to, I hope, help aspring entrepreneurs understadn that the luck these founders experienced was not some desembodied magical force. It didn't happen in a vacuum. It didn't happen to them. Luck when it comes right down to it, is really just an opportunity waiting to be taken advatage of, and they took advantage of it.

Maybe you were lucky enough to have a good network, or a stable home, or a good education, or maybe you were lucky enough to be born with the kind of personality that makes you more resilient, more willing to accept rejection, more willing to do whatever it takes, without the massive ego that prevents so many from sticking with it during hard times. A personality like Daymond John's with the drive to work hard and the resilience to push forward through all the nos until he got to a yes.

Whatever the case, the question you will need to answer for you self as an aspring entrepreneur isn't whether you will have any luck, you will, you probably already do. It's what you are going to do with the luck that you have. Are you doing to take advantage of it? Are you going to do the work? Are you going to take the leap? Are you going to write that twenty-fifth investor email? What about the twenty-sixth? Are you going to pay all the friends in your network to buy your product so the stores think its super popular right away, like Sara Blakely did with the first five stores she got Spanx into? Are you going to physically move your product in those stores to a more optimal location like she did, too? Those are choices you will have when you realize how lucky you are and you spot the opportunities that come with that luck.

You and I, we are both lucky. I had the opportunity to write this book, you had the money to buy it (or the patience to wait for it at the library) and the time and inclination to read it. I've had the privilege of meeting and interviewing some of the world's most succesful innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists in order to help them tell their stories, you somehow found you way here, where you can learn from the lessons their stories hold.

0 notes

sherlock-study · 7 years

Photo

Yes, from elementary school to college.

It’s been one heckuva wild ride so bear with me.

MY INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL DAYS

I went to an international/bilingual school the first eight years of my school years, from kindergarten to 7th grade. There I was classified as highly gifted (with an IQ three standard deviations above average) and sent to the new mathematically talented program and the biology Olympiad program. I did not yet realize what the gifted label would do to me, and the fact that it, while affirming, was hindering my development. I thought being smart meant that I could learn stuff faster and that I could put work off until the last minute. I was very wrong. The reason I decided to join these is, of course, for more stuff to learn.

But the biggest motivator for me and my family is the tuition discount we get for being in these classes. Private school is expensive, and the tuition for this particular school is getting ridiculous. It soon became too much for my upper-middle class parents (more than a few kids wear Ferragamo shoes to PE. I’m not even joking), the school decided to cancel the benefits we get from being in the programs, and I left along with several classmates.

I was happy there, to be honest. If I had stayed, I would’ve been able to continue triathlon and soccer training. I would’ve been a great Scout leader, and I think I could’ve gotten accepted at more than one of the Ivies. But all these changed when I left the international school to assimilate myself back into the “mainstream”.

THAT OTHER SCHOOL

So, in Taiwan you have to take exams not only to get into college but also into high school. In order to get my ass into one of the private prep schools known for sending loads of kids into a “star” high school, I had to take yet another exam. I got in. The tuition was significantly lower and kids less snobby, which was very nice, but there is literally nothing else I like about that place.

My homeroom teacher was one who publicly shamed me for being different (lending an eraser to a friend during study hall), kept telling me I couldn’t do it (getting into the best high school for people with XX chromosomes in Taipei) and to just go to this prep school’s high school because I “can’t do it”.

I was not cool with that, especially after learning that our homeroom teachers actually get money to convince kids with better grades to go to this high school. I studied my ass off for a few months, and guess what? I was in.

HIGH SCHOOL

I was in the low 98th-high 97th percentile when I took the exams. I messed up, but still narrowly managed to get into Taipei First Girls’ High School. Since the entire school is made up of the top 1-2% of Taiwanese kids, there was not a lot of room for me to shine academically.

In some ways I did. I made it to the CTBO semifinals (which is the Taiwanese version of the USABO but 5% instead of 10%). Ultimately I didn’t make the national team for IBO, and that was very hard on me. In Taiwan IBO gold medalists win a free ticket to any university and any major they want (with rare exceptions) so I was actually counting on that to get me into med school.

I also was the senior patrol leader/club president for my Scout troop at school, and won quite a few other competitions. But at the same time I was rubbish in every other aspect of my academics. I was an A+ student in Bio and English, but I have failed Math, Chinese, Physics. My other subjects also sucked. I ended up with a terrible GPA that comes from my ~vibrant~ extracurricular life, a general loathing of the educational system in Taiwan, and the top 2% student pool of my high school.

My college entrance exam scores were at the top 1/3 of my class, which is nice compared to what I have been in the past three years. But that wasn’t enough for medical school, so I took a gap year to retake the exams. I almost ended up at TMU’s pharmacy school, but ultimately got placed at NTU as an occupational therapy major.

COLLEGE

As a freshman I wanted to try something new. I have always wanted to go to med school in the United States, but one of the unspoken prerequisites is doing premed in the US or Canada. Took the SAT without any real prep, received a 1500/1600 (=34 ACT), got my application together to apply to 5 schools with need-blind FA for internationals…to receive 5 rejections. Oh well. I think it was my horrible GPA plus the fact that I am a international college student reapplying that got me rejected.

So I’m doing occupational therapy (which I don’t like tbh; it was decided for me by a computer, from a list of schools/majors I made in July 2016) at the world’s 68th best university while going through high school books to try and get into even the lowest-ranking MD program in Taiwan. It’s true. Taiwanese kids and parents are so infatuated with the idea of going to medical school, only those who score in the top ~0.5% can safely say they’ll pass the first round of selection.

Had I been born in the US (lots of schools I can apply to and not so insane a rat race), had a wealthy family (a friend who didn’t get into a Taiwanese medical school is now doing her MD in Italy), or actually studied a little harder to become a little better at the “boring” parts of school, I could’ve ended up in a different place. A better place.

And the only thing I’m able to change is that last one. My high school friends are halfway through medical school now, and I don’t even know I’ll make it in this Fall. But I have to try.

#mine #personal #studyblr #studyspo #studyspiration #medblr #story #text #lots of text so read this on the toilet

18 notes · View notes

hagiographically · 7 years

Note

Could you talk more about Stanford stereotypes regarding literally anything (idk majors?) bc they way how you explain them is literally so funny/good

lmao aw ily, you can always come to me if u want my opinion related to anything stanford (stereotypes about dorms, sports teams, greek life, a cappella ??) because i have A Lot Of It - i only wish i was more integrated with the school cuz most of my opinions are hearsay instead of personal experience

major stereotypes….hmm thats hard cuz there are So Many majors but i can just go with the most common ones and group some together, etc

engineering:

aero/astro - small department full of space nerds, most of them are in SSI, drones, i personally consider them very brainy and if i were better at engineering i would be aero/astro cuz i think it’s the next frontier. there should definitely be more women in it for sure

bioe - my ex was bioe, they’re a bunch of nerds but they have good enough hearts. they care about curing diseases and shit

CS - oh boy. ohhhhhh boy. here we fuckin go. honestly CS is barely even a sterotype at stanford cuz its such a dominant culture…..the people who decide what stereotypes even are, are probably CS. it’s gotten to the point where if i meet someone and they aren’t CS it’s worth noting. it’s gotten to the point where, in my psych/literature/communications/education classes, i expect the other people to be CS. i have so many Opinions on CS Boys because CS Boys are such!!!!a!!!type!!!! (and different from just, a boy who does CS). they worship the trinity of google, facebook, and microsoft. their junior summer internship is at least one of these. they buy into all silicon valley startup culture and they love elon musk and talk about venture capital when its really not welcome. they love talking about how much work they have and how little they sleep. all INTJs. probably virgos. there is also a subgenre of CS boy who didnt come into stanford wanting to do CS and ended up switching because its easier to be a CS Boy at stanford. they criticize the culture all the time. to this you can say, “it’s all right, craig, i know you just want to make money.”

CME - people major in this when they dont love themselves

design - i personally think this major is fuckin cool and considered it before i realized physics was a pre-req. the d school is thought to be d for douchey though because their whole shtick is so ~ideate~ ~prototype~ ~We Are Quirky and Put Post-Its On Walls~ but i dug it as a frosh. they can be kinda condescending, but theyre by far the most interdisciplinary dept in the engineering major (although its also full of white men who think theyre hot shit cuz they can use photoshop)

EE - again for people who lack self love, its supposed to be so fuckin hard

MS&E - white frat boys who glorify jordan belfort

ME - similar to design. live at the PRL. stay up till ungodly hours carving wood. somehow this is enjoyable. also white male heavy

who knows how the f to categorize this:

education - if i could do stanford over i would major in this. usually very diverse, woke, often come from underprivileged backgrounds so they want to make it better for other people and reach communities that arent currently benefited (unlike silicon valley or wall street :) ) i respect them because they do what they love and not to make $ although if educational engineering were a thing im certain people would jump ship. it’s also not in the humanities dept so i feel like theyre Above the stanford hegemony and i love that

earthsys - i considered a minor in this. usually sweet, earth-friendly people. white but woke. possibly queer. granola loving hippies and maybe some frathletes who want an “easy” major but not sure (im not shitting on easy majors. i have one. love ‘em)

generally i like girls in any of the engineering depts because they are dealing with sexism and doing it. the boys are oftentimes extremely self-congratulatory and will usually say something dumb about the humanities. even the girls will hit you with the “oh i wish i could study that!” about any non-engineering discipline, and it’s implied that what they’re really saying is “but i care about my future too much!”

humanities/sciences:

AAAS/chicanx studies/asian-american studies/CSRE - woke poc who use lots of buzzwords and say things like folx

art - the people who major in art are usually more quiet than you’d think. we have an Artsy Type at stanf that are kind of extra (theta chi/EBF types, also very woke QPOC) but i dont think theyre art majors for the most part. i barely know any actual art Majors. lots of engineers just do art on the side

bio - i love bio majors because they are sciency but also get shit on by engineers so we’re in solidarity. they are sweet and study all the time and just wanna make the world a better place. there’s also the pre-med kind of bio who i would hate if i were also pre med but since im not i just kind of admire and fear them

chem - i like chem people much more than i thought i would. again a very small major and they just live in lab and have varied non chem interests. this year i accidentally became friends with like 6 people from the chem fraternity and i was surprised how much i liked them

complit/english - i was this major! english in creative writing are usually chill, interesting people. complit and english in literature…….it’s a shakespeare circlejerk and they hit you with the Discourse. overly educated white people. avoid the boys specifically but the girls can also be incredibly self-satisfied. maybe 50/50. but if you take a creative writing class instead of a lit class, the CW kids are usually awesome

taps - our drama department. they’re nice, but extra and intimidating. (also stanford theater is…..okay….not really as good as they seem to think it is yikes that was mean but) however, like with english, take an introductory class and you’ll meet very cool non-taps majors.

econ - oftentimes wonderful people! outside of class that is

femgen - same people as the AAAS/CSRE crowd except whiter. queer girls with undercuts. upperclassmen are intimidating to many. everyone shares their opinion even when its not warranted. my honors is in this

film studies - this was almost my minor and if i werent CW i might have doubled in film and comm! i dont know any film majors but if they arent a cole sprouse im sure theyre fine (they are probably a cole sprouse)

german/italian/french/spanish language or studies - spot the person who studied abroad!

history - like english, can be cool, more likely pretentious

humbio - the other premeds! actually humbio gets shit on alllll the time for being easy or having a fluff major, bio majors think they’re soft. thus, i like them. their course catalog is awesome and its a huge major but all the scary pre meds are straight up bio and humbios are softer but in a good way its a lot of sweet girls

intl relations - one of my favorite majors. usually very down to earth, the best of the IR/poli-sci/pub-po trinity. however, they can also be self-congratulatory for being So Woke and also they love to educate you when You Didn’t Ask

linguistics - weird, diverse people. very small major. similar to anthro, my old major. i love small majors they always have cute dinners together

MCS - a hard fuckin major. not as “Look How Smart I Am” as a bad CS. mostly quiet and stay in and study their ass off

math - love to wax poetic about the beauty of math. fun when drunk. not when sober

philosophy/MTL/classics - avoid. classics can be okay if it overlaps with archaeology because theyre just a bunch of nerds and they get really excited and its cute. phil majors would rather just educate you about how free will is fake and youre like tim can you please just get out of the way we’re in the dining hall and you’re blocking the cornbread

physics - Avoid. they think all other sciences are lesser. women and POC are ok

poli-sci - hit or miss. generally pretty friendly. very talkative. fun to talk to about Not Politics

psych - the best major hehe. generally liberal and woke and often queer. however, non-psych people in psych classes can be a nightmare (unlike english, taps, etc) and problematic as fuck. also sometimes psych majors are extra (exhibit a: me)

pub policy - probably in student government. im biased against it, but go in with hesitation. student government is by and large not as effective as they seem to think (however, a “woke” person in pub po might be cool because they will campaign for sexual assault awareness and economic diversity and good stuff)

STS - ohhhhh man. probably the major that gets most shit on at stanford. i think engineers think it’s fake. (humbio, design, and STS get shit on the most i’d say, because they are interdisciplinary STEM majors, so engineers think that they’re for people who arent smart enough to do hard majors. whereas with english or IR, engineers know they couldnt do it because they havent written an essay since 2009, so they offer grudging respect) a frathlete major. i personally like it because i dig interdisciplinary shit, but i don’t dig frat boys or athletes so i avoid. some of their courses are great but it does seem kind of scrapped together as a major and i dont know how people outside of stan see it

sociology - a small major, seems cool. stigmatized but not by stanford because stanford students dont know it exists. “dont you mean psychology?” no

urban studies - skaters? who knows. i respect them tho. i think they care about….like….architecture? and city development? its a very niche thing and i feel like it’s pretty hip n happening

#stanford #stanford university #majors #college #advice #stereotypes #stan

99 notes · View notes

topbeautifulwomens · 5 years

Text

#The #Offspring #Biography #Photos #Wallpapers #friday #babe #bellydance #clothes #dj #fashiondiaries #makeover #punjabi #starlook #supermodel

By 1984, when what would have become the Offspring formed, the original Orange County punk scene had fractured. We used to go this dance club called Circle City, and there’d be 10 different cliques, ” says Kriesel.”In our high school there was a rockabilly scene, as well as a mod scene and a New Wave scene, as well as a punk scene,” Holland adds. But at Pacifica High, a large public school in Garden Grove, Calif. Holland wasn’t a member of any of those groups. The third of four children born to a hospital administator father and a schoolteacher mother, he kept busy being a “good kid” and hoped to be a doctor. sports were a really big thing,” Holland says, “I was on the cross-country team.” He also happened to be class valedictorian (thus his nickname, Dexter). His senior year, Holland’s older brother gave him a Rodney on the ROQ compilation album.

Before then, Holland was a casual listener. But soon after, he was devouring Flipside and Maximumrocknroll, fanzines out of Pasadena, Calif., and Berkeley, Calif., respecively, that are virtual how-to guides to punkdome. His favorite bands were T.S.O.L. (particulary 1981’s Dance With Me), the Adolescents and Agent Orange County bands that weren’t as hung up on politic as their Bay Area counterparts. Holland’s cross-country teammate Greg Kriesel located punk even later. His investment-banker father saw law school in his son’s future. And for most of high school, Kriesel was a sports fan and self-proclaimed jock (he also played baseball). The first punk checklists he ever heard were the ones the ones Holland played for him. “Music wasn’t something that meant a great deal to me,” he says. “But I started listening to it because it was around, and I got used to it.”

Holland and Krisel formed their first band, Manic Subsidal, with two other cross-country teammates one night in 1984 after failing to get in a Social Distortion show. At the time, the two didn’t even own instruments, much less know how to play them. “Bryan and I both learned together,” says Kriesel, “and he wasn’t even playing chords at the time, so he’d play on one string, and I tried to do the same thing. By the summer we were actually playing songs, but it took a while.” Kriesel’s house was the site of the band’s first gigs. “It truly is just always a hangout,” Kriesel says, “on any given weekend night up to 20 people could drop by. I had a big upstairs that was pretty much mine, and my mom was downstairs. But she’s always been really cool about it.

That fall, Holland began premed studies at USC (he’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in molecular biology). Kriesel was attending Golden West Junior College and later recieved a B.A. in finance from Long Beach State while working part time in a print shop (he’s planning to attend law school). Weekends were the only time the band could rehearse. Once Holland had written a handful of songs with self-explanitory titles like “Very Sarcastic” and “Sorority Bitch,” the fledgling band headed for a cheap studio. Momentarily waylaid when its guitarist jumped ship, the band recruited Kevin Wasserman, an older Pacifica grad who then worked as the school janitor. Pretty soon, Wasserman was “not doing a hell of a lot except practicing at Greg’s house on weekends and drinking excessively.” Being the only member of the band over 21, Wasserman was particularly useful when it came to buying beer.

“I remember being amazed by Bryan,” Wasserman says, “He was valedictorian, he was such a math geek. So when I first saw him with black hair and plaid bondage pants, I was like ‘What are you doing?’ But I thought it was cool, going beyond what I thought was society’s role for him.” Ron Welty moved to Garden Grove for part of high school, and it was there that his older stepsister introduced him to Holland. “My mom’s been through a few divorces,” Welty says. “She’d get remarried and we’d move, and then she’d get divorced, we’d move.” Welt was only 16 when he begged Holland to let him substitute for Manic Subsidal’s drummer who had started medical school and wads missing lots of gigs.

In 1987, the Offsping paid to release their own 7-inch single. Unable to afford the additional quarter per copy it cost to paste the front sleves to the backs, the band bought a case of beer and glue sticks and held a party for its friends. “To this day the covers don’t hold together too well,” says Holland. It took the band two and a half years to get rid of the 1,000 copies it printed. Two years and a pile of rejections later, the Offspring scored a contract with Nemesis, a small punk label distributed by Cargo.

After tracking down producer Thom Wilson, who had crafted their favorite albums by T.S.O.L., the Vandals and the Dead Kennedys, the Offspring recorded another 7-inch single, called Baghdad, and an album debut titled The Offspring. “All punk bands back in ’84 wrote about was police, death, religion and war,” says Holland. “So that’s what we did.” While recording a track for a Flipside compilation with Brett Gurewitz – owner of Epitaph records and then Southern California’s biggest punk success story, Bad Religion – the Offspring glimpsed a rosier future. “A little after that, I got a tape,” says Gurewitz. “But I have to admit I passed on it.”

A year later, when the Offspring began circulating demos for what would become their next album to every punk label they could think of, Gurewitz reconcidered. “It definitely had what people call the Epitaph sound,” he says. “High calories, rebelleous punk with amazing melodies and cool economical song structures. “In 1992 Epitaph released Ignition, 12 brief but energetic Offspring songs that summed up the previous decade of Orange County Punk. Other Epitaph bands include Rancid and NOFX.In 1994 their breakthough single Come out and Play and top hit Self Esteem helped push thier third album, Smash to the best selling independent record of all time (9 million plus), and heavy MTV rotation.

After the success of Smash, new fans discovered Ignition as it reappeared in stores. Due to the amount of overpriced, poor quality bootlegs, they rereleased their self titled The Offspring in 1995 with thier own label, Nitro. Nitro has released albums for several other bands, including The Vandals and Guttermouth. In 1996, the Offspring signed with Columbia records after disputes with Epitaph.Their next album, Ixnay on the Hombre, was released in February 1997. Dexter and Jello Biafra stared their own benefit foundation, FSU this year. They are currently on tour

THE OFFSPRING TIMELINE DISCOGRAPHY

The Offspring (Nemesis/Cargo 1989 reissued on Nitro 1995) Ignition (Epitaph 1992) Smash (Epitaph 1994) Ixnay on the Hombre (Columbia, 1997) Americana (Columbia, 1998) Conspiracy of One (Columbia, 2000) Splinter (Columbia, 2003)

HISTORY

1984: Orange County high school classmates Dexter Holland and Greg Kriesel are inspired to form a band after an Irvine concert by local punk-rock heroes Social Distortion. With Holland the vocalist, Kriesel takes to the bass.

1985: School custodian Noodles joins up, allegedly for his ability to legally procure alcohol for the underage trio. The threesome practice in Kriesel’s parents’ house and play their first shows in Santa Cruz and San Francisco.

1986: The band, originally called Manic Subsidal, changes its name to The Offpsring. They press up 1,000 copies of the debut vinyl single, “I’ll Be Waiting” b/w “Blackball,” on their own Black Label. The band pioneers its DIY method by glueing the sleeves together at Kriesel’s house.

Sixteen-year-old Ron Welty gets to be the fourth member of The Offspring after the original drummer leaves to devote more time to school.

1989: Band signs to independent label Nemesis/Cargo. With punk producer Thom Wilson (T.S.O.L., The Vandals and Dead Kennedys), they release The Offspring, their debut album, which sells 3,000 vinyl copies.

1991: The band put out a 7″ EP, Baghdad (Nemesis/Cargo) and records “Take It Like a Man” for a Flipside magazine compilation, The Big One, designed by Epitaph Records owner (and Bad Religion guitarist) Brett Gurewitz.

1992: The band signs to Epitaph and record their second album, Ignition. After a record release party in Fullerton, CA draws 25 diehard fans, the album goes on to sell more than 1 million albums worldwide.

1993-’94: The band tours the U.S. once with Lunachicks and next with Pennywise. They also do a European jaunt supporting NOFX.

1994: Smash, their second album for Epitaph, is released. Featuring the mega-hits “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated),” “Self Esteem’ and “Gotta Get Away,” the album is a phenomenon. The disc sells more than 11 million copies worldwide, the most ever for a band on an indie label, after “Come Out and Play” becomes a gigantic MTV hit. The album peaks at #4 on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart.

1995: Dexter and Greg start Nitro Records. The Huntington Beach-based label forms a roster that includes such California stalwarts as the Vandals, AFI, Guttermouth and others. Nitro also reissues the band’s self-titled debut on CD for the first time. The Offspring’s cover of the Damned’s “Smash It Up” is featured on the best-selling Batman Forever soundtrack.

1997: The Offspring sign with Columbia Records, and release the Dave Jerden-produced Ixnay on the Hombre in February. The album sells more than 3 million worldwide and peaks at #9 on the Billboard 200, with singles “All I Want,” “Gone Away,” and “I Choose” all hitting the Modern Rock charts. Spin raved: “Punk-rock zealots can take their rage to the grave, but what this band cares about beyond everything else is what zealots can abide least: songs.” The L.A. Times praised the album as “richly varied and thoroughly smart.. a mature, sometimes daring and always enticing effort by a band that constantly offers far more than meets the ear.” Jello Biafra makes a cameo appearance on Ixnay and joins the band on-stage to perform version of Dead Kennedy classics “Chemical Warfare” and “Holiday in Cambodia.”

1998: An MP3 file of “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy),” from the band’s yet-to-be-released Americana album is downloaded a record 22 million times over a 10-week period, landing it the #1 spot on Rolling Stone’s Top Pirated Internet Songs chart. When Americana is released in November, worldwide sales climb past the 10 million mark, thanks to the catchy single and MTV video. Other singles include “Why Don’t You Get a Job?,” “The Kids Aren’t Alright” and “She’s Got Issues.” The band’s touring schedule takes them to Woodstock ’99 for an acclaimed performance captured on film and the 1999 Reading/Leads Festivals in the U.K. “We love what we do,” says Holland. “We require to make the best music we can and try to top what we did before.”

1999: The group follows its tour of the U.S. with shows in Australia and Japan. The Offspring makes a cameo appearance in the cult horror/comedy Idle Hands, playing a cover of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “Beheaded” from their self-titled debut before Dexter is killed after speaking his one line.

2000: The group is hit with a cease-and-desist order from file-sharing service Napster after offering T-shirts sporting the company’s famed logo for sale on the band’s website. The band defends its actions, claiming they were simply “sharing” the logo with fans.

The band spawns more controversy when they decide to offer their new album Conspiracy Of One free of charge via the Internet prior to its initial November release date. Fans downloading the record were automatically registered in a contest to be awarded $1,000,000 directly from the band (live on MTV) on the day of the album’s release. Fans who go on to buy the record are awarded membership in the Offspring Nation digital fan club, receiving exclusive downloads of unreleased material, advance ticket sales, guarded chats with the band and more. Sony Music doesn’t agree and threatens a lawsuit. The band avoids the lawsuit by making individual singles available on their official website and MTV Online. “The reality is this album will end up on the Internet whether we want it to or not,” Holland tells the L.A. Times. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we just do it ourselves?’ We’re not afraid of the Internet. We think it’s a very cool way to reach our fans.”

2001: The Offspring headline KROQ’s Inland Invasion at Blockbuster Pavilion in Devore with Incubus, Long Beach Dub Allstars, Pennywise, Social Distortion, Weezer, Mike D and Mixmaster Mike on July 18. In December, the band record “Defy You” with Brendan O’Brien for the soundtrack to Orange County, starring Colin Hanks and Jack Black. Dave Meyers directs the video.

2002: In March, The Offspring play the Las Vegas premiere of Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom Huck Jam, with an array of action sports champions like Hawk, Bob Burnquist, Dave Mirra, Mat Hoffman and Carey Hart, then go on for four more dates that fall. In July, they play a benefit concert with T.S.O.L. at the Anaheim House of Blues for They Will Surf Again and Life Rolls On, not-for-profit organizations formed by professional surfers dedicated to finding a cure for spinal cord injuries. In September, they open the Kerrang! Awards in London before being presented with the Classic Songwriter award by Garbage’s Shirley Manson. Said the venerable metal mag: “They have influenced and continue to influence new generations of K!-heads. Tonight’s award nails not only The Offspring’s glorious past, but their ongoing relevance.”

2003: The Offspring cover the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” which they first did for the film Idle Hands, on the tribute album We’re a Happy Family (Columbia), joining Metallica, Eddie Vedder, Marilyn Manson and KISS and among others.

The band lay down demos for the new album at Holland’s D-13 studios in his native Huntington Beach, then continue recording with producer Brendan O’Brien in Atlanta at Southern Tracks Recording and Henson Recording Studios in L.A. Drummer Ron Welty leaves the band. Former Vandals and A Perfect Circle drummer Josh Freese takes over duties for the recording process. The group is also joined in the studio by two old-school SoCal punk pals, Pennywise’s Jack Lindberg and T.S.O.L.’s Jack Grisham, who takes time off from his campaign for Governor of California to lay down some background vocals.

Holland announces the record will be called Chinese Democracy as an obvious tweak to Axl Rose, who had previously announced that was the title to the new Guns N Roses album he’s been working on for much of the past decade. “It was so damn funny,” says Dexter. “We felt like we had to do it. The idea of stealing the title of an album someone else has been working on for so long was very funny to us. You snooze, you lose. Axl ripped off my braids, so I ripped off his album title.” But ultimately, the band announced on their website that the decision to title the album Chinese Democracy had somehow caused production to come to a halt. “That album title jinxed us,” said Dexter.

The band visit Hawaii, where they film a surfing video with Da Hui, a notorious gang of native Islanders who welcome them to their North Shore turf. The footage will appear as extra footage on their upcoming CD.

The group decide to name the album, Splinter, which is now scheduled to come out Dec. 9 and select the first single, “Hit That.” In October, they bring in drummer Atom Willard, who was in Rocket From the Crypt for 10 years as well as playing with Moth and the Alkaline Trio.

Name The Offspring Height Naionality Amercian Date of Birth 15-Jun-1989 Place of Birth America Famous for

The post The Offspring Biography Photos Wallpapers appeared first on Beautiful Women.

source http://topbeautifulwomen.com/the-offspring-biography-photos-wallpapers/

0 notes

obsessiveshayme · 6 years

Note

K advice pls if you’re down: I’m in college & I’ve been talking to this guy on & off (mostly on) for the past 2+ months & we haven’t met in person yet. He’s 2 years older and is kinda like a stereotypical Fboy... A lot of the time the texting is super, super flirty but that’s not all it is...He’s asked me if I wanted to hangout a few times now & I do but I’m not sure if hangout = hookup. I don’t talk to a lot of guys since I’m super focused on school (premed) & I also don’t drink alcohol (1/?)

I’m not... experienced sexually and this guy is SUPER cute & plays high level hockey ... u know the type... So I’m 95% sure he just wants to hookup but like??? why text & Snapchat (at the same time) for most of the day for this long? like back to the me not talking to lots of guys thing.... it’s not that guys aren’t interested in me, mostly I don’t wanna waste so much time talking to them if I’m not interested from the get go, which is why the constant snapping & texting has me so confused (2/?)

So anyways pretty much I need advice on whether I should just go for the friends w benefits or no, even though I’m still a virgin.... he’s ridiculously cute & I’m mostly down. I feel like it’s a good chance to “just get it over with” which i do want to do & I’m sick of being the “mom friend” just bc I’m smart & I don’t drink. All of my friends have hooked up w guys & maybe it’s my turn? Also idk how I’d feel if he just wanted to f*** once & then never again.... but like FWB maybe??? (3/3) thx

First off: YES premed!!! WORK!!!! This is so awesome!!!

Ok, when you really think about it do you want to fuck? If he never calls again can you handle that? Like, you deserve good times and to have fun. You should if you want to, but make sure that you can handle any outcome. Like, I know that I get too attached to have casual sex with someone I know. How would you be if you lost this friendship?

I am not gonna tell you to not do it cause you should if you really want to, but please make sure that you will be able to take anything that may come after and let nothing fuck up that premed! You are gonna shine!

Lemme know if you need anything else!

#Shay answers anons

0 notes

realtalk-princeton · 7 years

Note

@mia what do u think are the strongest and weakest parts about woody woo major? I feel like I would benefit from a smaller department like soc, but I also like the broadness of woody woo

Response from Princess Mia:

Sure! I definitely don’t think Woody Woo is a perfect major by any means, but I couldn’t see myself majoring in anything else. I can lay out some of the pros and cons for you. These are just my opinions, so take them with a grain of salt!

Pros:

-Flexibility: It’s very easy to customize the major to what you’re personally interested in, and there are different tracks/clusters to accommodate different interests. Everyone has to take electives, and it is very easy to gear those to your own interests. Also, if you’re interested in certain certificates, there’s a lot of overlap, so it can make those more accessible as well.

-Interdisciplinary: It’s nice because you take courses from different departments, and you can take electives in basically anything, so if you’re interested in a bunch of different things, you can still pursue them all under the kind of umbrella of one major. For instance, if you’re choosing between econ and history, you can major in Woody Woo and still keep taking both for your major.

-“Prestige”: I put that in quotes because that’s not the right word but I didn’t know how else to describe that, but it’s a pretty well-known and well-respected department in the world of public policy. I was working for a pretty important government office, and when I met the head person there, they immediately said “Oh, you’re at Princeton? Are you at the Woodrow Wilson School?”. Kind of going along with that, the department has A LOT of money, and brings in cool people and has a decent amount of funding for summer stuff.

-International Emphasis: If you want to study abroad, it is really easy to do so through Woody Woo. There are three really cool opportunities each semester, and the department builds into the major in a way that allows you to complete your independent work abroad. You can also get funding to do research for your thesis abroad or intern abroad through the department.

-Independent Work: I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally had a great experience in my junior seminar. The methods lab is stupid though. There’s also a good sense of camaraderie in independent work, and I definitely met friends through those seminars.

-No comps!

-It’s really easy to go into a lot of different fields from Woody Woo. I know people who are premed, prelaw, pre-business, into finance, politics, entrepreneurship, and so much more

Cons:

-It’s kind of disorganized, and because there is so many options for core courses, a lot of people end up taking totally different things. This leads to some people knowing R/some people not, some people being good at quantitative research, some people not, etc. This is intensified by the fact that it’s such a large major.

-Some of the offerings for the core courses are pretty weak and boring. Definitely would not have taken them if I did not have to.

-There’s a lot of requirements, including an extra language requirement, which is not for everybody.

-The advising isn’t great. My advisor literally sucks, and I’ve heard a lot of other bad advisor stories from my friends. My advisor had no idea what counted for the basic requirements of the major, and basically scribbled all over my potential schedule crossing off classes in favor of other classes for requirements that I had already fulfilled, and wouldn’t really listen to me when I explained that I had already finished them. A different advisor also told my friend that she should stop studying Arabic because she was a woman.

-It’s kind of an all-over-the-place major. There are a lot of different classes that fall under the umbrella of Woody Woo, so you kind of end up getting exposure to a lot of different things but not feeling like a master of one thing, if that makes sense.

0 notes

endorsereviews · 7 years

Text

Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University Replay from 2014 Seminar in New York City

Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University Get Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University right now!

Dear Friend:

If you want to stop dreaming about starting and running a profitable Internet marketing business … and actually make it happen … Fred Gleeck and I are ready to roll up our sleeves and work with you – to help you start or jump-start your information marketing career like no one else can or will for you.

We first conducted this training in an intensive 2-day live training event we held in NYC in January.

We call it “Information Marketing University with Fred Gleeck and Bob Bly,”because it’s the most comprehensive training in information marketing Fred and I have ever done.

If you’re reading this page, I think you already know the tremendous benefits you can reap when you sell information products.

But it may help you make up your mind about spending a couple of days with us learning the info marketing business if I briefly hit the highlights here once again. And so….

** First, you can make a lot more money than you do right now. The money is really good in information marketing. We tell our students that it is realistic to reach a six-figure income, where you make $100,000 a year or more in your info marketing business, within 12 to 24 months of getting started. That compares very favorable with, say, a doctor, who has to go through 4 years of premed, another 4 years of med school, and then several years of residency before collecting a doctor’s six-figure salary. Fred and I both earn a handsome income selling information online.

Yes, there are plenty of people out there who try and try to get started in info marketing. But after attending Information Marketing University with Fred Gleeck and Bob Bly, you’ll be one of the few who actually DO it! And oh, what a great feeling that will be for you!

** Second, you’ll become financially independent and escape the 9 to 5 rat race forever.

Owning and operating your own information marketing business is absolutely life-transforming.

Think about it: When you earn a six-figure income “working” just a few hours a week (that’s a few hours a week, not a day) as I do online, you are freed from the necessity of ever having to work at a regular job, for ordinary wages, again.

The “Internet marketing lifestyle” gives you a degree of freedom and financial independence most Americans can only dream of. But after Information Marketing University, for you this dream can become a reality.

Imagine: No more commuting. No more wearing a suit and tie to work. No more office politics. No more working for a jerk of a boss. You will be able to do what you want, when you want to do it, where and with whom you want to do it. Now that’s my definition of success!

** Third, you’ll be one of those rare individuals who actually LOVES what he does for a living!

You already find Internet marketing and information publishing attractive, or you wouldn’t be reading this page.

Well, if you think you’d have a blast being an online info marketer like Fred and I are – you are right!

We love what we do, and as Les Paul has said, when you love what you do, you will never actually work a day in your life!

Noel Coward put it even better: “Work is more fun than fun.” Information publishing is enormous fun … and therefore, doing it really isn’t work at all!

OK, so which info marketing gurus are the right ones to help YOU get off your duff and start making money online this year?

Now, there are plenty of promoters out there putting on training events in information marketing and Internet marketing.

So why should you attend “Information Marketing University” with me and Fred vs. go to any of the other Internet marketing teachers out there?

Well, maybe you shouldn’t.

Get Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University on IMCLibrary.com right now!

Look, if you follow someone else online, and like their stuff, you might be better served taking their training instead of ours … or at least in addition to ours.

But on the other hand, if you follow either Fred Gleeck or me … and you like OUR stuff, read our e-newsletters, attend our webinars, go to our seminars, or buy our books, audios, and DVDs …

… then this is a unique opportunity to have Fred and I help you launch an online business that you’ll love – and that can make you financially independent!

Best of all, unlike our 50+ students, who had to spend a weekend in NYC to get this training, now you can take the workshop right at your PC, without the cost and time of travel.

That’s because we professionally recorded the entire 2 days of “Information Marketing University with Fred Gleeck and Bob Bly” – and have made it available as a video program you can watch on your computer – at a fraction of the cost of the tuition for the live seminar!

If you want to succeed in Internet marketing … and by succeed, I mean make so much money in your spare time that you can quit your 9 to 5 job and never work another day in your life … then I urge you to view this video training. So you can finally stop thinking, reading, studying, and dreaming about making money in an Internet marketing business of your own. And at last start DOING it.

It’s easy to make money packaging and selling information — when you follow these 7 simple steps to Internet marketing success!

In Information Marketing University with Fred Gleeck and Bob Bly , Fred and I show you how to duplicate the same steps we did to leave corporate life — and became completely financially independent–by showing you step-by-step how to start and run an easy, spare-time Internet marketing home business selling information products online.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. There is a battle-tested 7-step process Fred and I used to make your millions as information marketers. This process, and the details of how and why to do each step, are what we will teach you in this idea-packed video training program:

>> Step One: Planning for entrepreneurial success: The most important – and difficult – decision aspiring information marketers face is picking the right niche: what topic will all your info products teach … and what market or audience will you teach it to?

>> Step Two: Grow your e-list big and fast: In Internet marketing there is an old expression that happens to be true: “The money is in the list.” The faster you can build a large opt-in e-list, the more money you will make online. Even better is to build a large responsive list of prospects who eagerly buy the info products you are selling!

>> Step Three: Setting up your Internet infrastructure: Next, you have to get everything in place to run your Internet marketing business.

We show you where to get and how to implement: merchant accounts for taking credit card and PayPal orders … setting up your online shopping cart … managing your e-mail list … distributing your online newsletter and marketing e-mails …

Plus: Hosting your web sites … web analytics that track and measure your sales results … managing your participation on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google +, and other social networks … setting up and writing to your blog … and more.

In short, we show you how to put all your “systems” in place so your Internet marketing business runs like clockwork and hums like a well-oiled machine.

>> Step Four: Creating or sourcing information products. We show you how to create your own hot-selling information products – including research, writing, editing, graphic design, and packaging — as well as how to earn handsome commissions selling other people’s information products to your customers.

>> Step Five: Establishing your web presence: You will need a portal or “master” web site for your information marketing empire as well as individual micro sites or “landing pages” – one for every product you sell. Here’s how to create them and post them on the web for maximum results.

>> Step Six: Driving traffic to your sales sites: You learn how to drive traffic to your micro sites – and make sales – using e-mail marketing, online ads, search engine optimization, article writing, and other proven traffic-building methods.

>> Step Seven: Going beyond one-shot product sales: Once you have a solid info marketing business selling traditional “one-shot” products … including e-books, video, audio, and live events … you can multiply your income with additional revenue sources including affiliate sales … joint ventures … product licensing … membership web sites … recurring subscription products … coaching … consulting … and more.

Not only do we walk you through each step of our Internet profit-making system. We also teach you exactly either HOW to do the steps yourself … or, WHERE to find low-cost resources to get them done for you.

Here are just some of the tasks and skills you will master when you access the Info Marketing University videos over the Internet using the password we give you:

The only 3 things you need to make money selling information products online.

5 skills that all successful Internet marketers possess. The good news: you probably have 3 of them already. And the other 2 are easy either to learn or outsource.

The 7-step Self Assessment Inventory that can help you find the perfect information publishing niche – in about 5 minutes.

What Aristotle can teach you about choosing a market and topic for your fledgling info marketing business.

How to research your topic and acquire enormously valuable knowledge about it you can sell to others at a huge profit.

The “Agora Model” for doing business online … and how it helped Bill Bonner build a $475 billion a year info publishing empire.

Why you should publish an online newsletter … and how I write and distribute my e-newsletter in less than a half hour an issue.

7 incredibly effective techniques building your e-newsletter subscriber list – including one that got me 982 new subscribers at zero cost in just 48 hours.

The 90/90 rule of converting new e-zine subscribers immediately into paying customers.

Duplicate the “back-end” software and systems Fred and I use to run out million-dollar Internet marketing businesses – without buying a single software package or writing one line of code.

How to write and design compelling landing pages that increase conversion rates and sell more information products – without HTML, Front Page, or web site templates of any kind.

How to write and design an effective e-mail auto-responder series for converting more of your micro site visitors to buyers.

Are social media and blogging key components of the Internet marketing wealth-building system Fred and I use to make thousands of dollars a week of passive income online? The answer may surprise you.

How to write compelling, kick-butt copy for information products that grabs the reader by the lapels and won’t let go.

How to create irresistible offers that increase conversion rats and orders on all your landing page.

How to use web video to boost conversion rates and revenues from your landing pages by 10% to 18% — even though people keep telling you they hate video!

How to increase your annual online profits 10% to 25% or more this year through joint ventures, affiliate marketing, product licensing, and membership sites.

Shortcuts to creating e-books … forms kits … special reports … webinars … videos … audio programs … and other information products that are 10X better than those your competitors sell.

5 steps to becoming a master how-to writer – even if you hire other people to ghostwrite your info products for you.

An easy formula for coming up with killer titles that make your information products fly off the shelves and into your customers’ shopping carts.

How to protect your published information products against piracy and copyright violation.

How to become a published author: writing a book and selling it to a mainstream publishing house for a 4 or 5-figure advance plus royalties … and why this beats self-publishing your book hands down.

Make $5,000 a day or more as a paid professional speaker with keynotes … breakout sessions … corporate training … association speeches … webinars … workshops … presentations … and teleconferences.

Earn ancillary income of a thousand dollars a day or more teaching your info topic at college and university adult education programs.

How to become a recognized expert in your industry, niche, or topic – and why doing so should be every information marketer’s goal.

Get on network prime-time, cable TV, and national radio with these low-cost/no-cost public relations techniques from the author of “PR for Dummies.”

Build your information empire faster with “content aggregation.” Or: why you don’t have to be the author of every piece of information you publish or sell.

How to make more money by writing and giving away free special reports as bonus gifts.

Hire programmers to create useful software for peanuts and sell it for a small fortune again and again to your customers.

Growing richer with the years: how to run and manage a profitable information marketing empire.

Get Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University right now!

Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University Free Download, Information Marketing University Download, Information Marketing University Groupbuy, Information Marketing UniversityFree, Information Marketing University Torrent, Information Marketing University Course Free, Information Marketing University Course Download

Fred Gleeck & Bob Bly – Information Marketing University Replay from 2014 Seminar in New York City posted first on premiumwarezstore.blogspot.com

0 notes

sublimedeal · 7 years