Hello!
My name according to all of my nerdy friends, is Kylo Ren...because my actual name, which sounds a lot less cool, is Kyle.
When I was a child, growing up in Sunnyvale, California, I took technology for granted. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hung out in a pizza parlor half a mile away from my house, and both had graduated from my school district.
I had my own computer by the time I was four years old. No...I was not born in 2010. I was actually born around the time the very first website was published to the world wide web.
In elementary school, because of the blossoming tech culture that was gaining speed quickly, we were offered intro programming and HTML web design classes. Yes...in 1998, an elementary school was offering programming/coding to 7 year olds.
By the time I was a junior in high school, technology and its culture (including the influence that the tech bubble had on the Silicon Valley) had saturated...literally everything that I experienced and knew.
Here's me at graduation, getting my photo taken by my school's executive administrator.
I had great grades, I soared through my math, chemistry, U.S. Government, Econ, U.S. History, and Japanese AP tests, I obtained tens of thousands of dollars worth of scholarships. All through the public education system, in a town where gang violence had been prevalent for much of my childhood.
It was at this point that I went off to college to study engineering and start my extremely successful and lucrative career as a software engineer..
I basically did the opposite.
I moved to Boston. Studied economics. Changed my mind about economics. Transferred into a business school to study finance and accounting, and just lived out my college life, studying, fawning over this crush, and that crush, and that other crush... I watched The Office, and felt very out of place.
Half-way through college, I met someone who would change my life forever.
Believe it or not, that's @Jasonmcz just a couple years before he started his first company.
We became fast friends, in different years at our school, but studying the same subject. When I wasn't studying, I would go over to his apartment, and we'd play League of Legends while talking about investing and stocks.
This turned to discussions about entrepreneurship, and the desire to break out of normalcy. In my mind, my -- as I then thought it -- dream career on Wall Street was already a predetermined destiny for myself. While the idea of solving a major problem or even minimizing an inconvenience (and making a boatload of money because of it) sounded like something I wanted to struggle for...
...I knew in my mind that I would never make it.
I graduated from school, ending up in an Accounting role (a far cry from the career I thought I'd have as a fairly studious kid). Well at least I was at a Fortune 100 company. It couldn't be that bad, right? ...right?
This part of my life is probably a post on its own, but to spare you from the details I will express it in a few bullet points:
- On my first week, I was flown 2,000 miles, without any training, told to learn this woman's job from her, and immediately after the 3 days she had spent teaching me this job, she was fired, and I had to do everything that she had been doing for a couple years...based on learning her whole job in 3 days.
- I was pressured into working 17 hour days because I didn't know any better. My manager was a bully, and made me think that I would be fired in my second month for not performing the job which I was "dutifully trained on" just a few weeks earlier.
- That manager was demoted a several months later, replaced by a pleasant-sounding woman.
- That woman ended up being a sociopath, and penalized me during my second performance review because I "spent too much time helping [my] peers, and they should have been allowed to fail if they needed help so badly" (as an aside.....WHAT KIND OF LOGIC IS THAT). My reward for helping others: 0% Raise and 1/4 of the average bonus given to those at my level until the next performance review 365 days later.
I was depressed, the love of my life left me, I gained weight (mmmm smexy), and best of all, not a day would pass where I didn't contemplate ending my life. Here's a great picture of me for reference:
Thanks for that dad-bod shot, @Jasonmcz
Most likely you right now: So....WTF did I just waste time reading? Why are you telling me this story?
This story is for every single person who ever held so much self-doubt that they allowed themselves to sink to such a self-deprecating level.
I don't want to tell you a Hollywood-style story where the protagonist goes from having everything going for them, to losing it all, to overcoming the odds. And all that jazz about geting the job, and getting the girl (or guy...no judgment), and blah blah blah... That doesn't do ANYTHING for you or me.
In fact, this isn't about me. All you really have to know is that I'm alive, breathing, writing this story right now...for you.
Life can be really shitty. It can seem especially shitty when you realize that half of the problems you have pale in comparison to problems like finding your next meal, or clean drinking water. This is what I want you to do.
I want you to think of the opportunities you've been afforded in life. If you have none right now, then at the very least, think of a time when you did have good opportunities.
Those opportunities came about, why?
In my experience, typically when an opportunity comes around, there are two factors: chance and your "willingness to see" the opportunity.
I'm not telling you to stop working hard and stop trying because something will magically come along and change your life forever. What I'm saying is that you should keep working as hard as you're working, because when you literally least expect it, opportunity will come along. Go to networking events, take a chance on an idea that has a slim shot of success, try to do what you know will make you happy. You can never give up hope, because the second you do, you're going to miss every chance life might have afforded you, because you were too busy moping about your flabby dad bod. I know I was.
I did end up pulling myself out of that slump. I came to this realization after an out-of-body experience while seriously considering taking several dozen painkillers.
I have a new lease on life now. I pulled my bootstraps up and found a new job, bought myself a motorcycle, and am working closely with @Jasonmcz, (who is now my roommate) on a startup idea I was too afraid to pursue before.
Finally, that first picture at the top of this post is me a few weeks ago. Life has changed for sure.
I hope you enjoyed my story! My goal is to one day share lessons I've learned as a way of giving back to the community. This is me, starting my journey of supporting the people and places that brought me up.
I might actually go do a less self-deprecating Self-Introduction now... if you have any questions, please let me know, I'm here to answer!