Jan
11
2009

Putting It In Perspective…

I was at a house party last night, surrounded by people my age that are in college. A few times the same question was asked of me, “What is it like being your age and the CEO of an internet startup?” I obviously answered with my same cocky response, “It’s fun as hell”, but this morning I realized that I needed to give them more. I needed to find a way to put the pressure, stress, and rewards of a job like this, in a context that a college student may understand. Below is how from now on I will try to explain to a person in college what my life is like.

 

  • Everyday you have final exams, and everyday after that.
  • Your girlfriend, friends, etc. are all on summer vacation and wanting to go out and have fun while you are in the middle of final exams. 
  • You are hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and you are crazy enough to be meeting with new credit card companies to ask for more money.
  • You have gone to the race track and put your entire life savings, reputation and college career on one horse that runs really well in the muck, and the weather is completely out of your control.
  • Your family wants a quarterly report, which includes your grades, how many friends you have, what you have spent, what you have made and they also have the right to ask you for anything else they want to know. Also don’t think about lying to them, the government can now throw you in jail for lying to your parents.
  • Every purchase you make (textbooks, housing, food, entertainment) is all being scrutinized by your parents and has to be justified.
  • Every new friend you want to make, you have to get your teachers approval, you have to find a way to pay for that new friend’s college tuition and everyday expenses. To make matters worse, their parents want them to stick to the current friends they already have.
  • You have the press, your parents, family, friends, teachers, administrators, etc. watching every move you make.
  • You are majoring in some obscure study, that everyone around you has no clue what you are doing, they can’t help, they can’t sympathize with what you are doing and some of them keep asking you why you just didn’t choose an easier major.
  • You do well on a test, everyone knows and you may even be lucky enough to have an article published in a newspaper, blog or be interviewed on the radio about your success.
  • You borrowed money from your family, friends and even people you don’t even know and told them in a few years you will return to them with 20X what they gave you.
  • You have to make a presentation a few times a week to 30-40 teachers, who will determine wether you graduate or fail (Angel investment pitches).
  • When you are studying for a final exam, there is no real textbook to reference, because the course you are studying is so new, that the questions and answers change almost weekly.
  • The first day of a new class in which you have never taken before, the school decides to make you the teacher. To make matters worse, there is a final at the end of the semester and if everyone doesn’t learn the material by then, you all fail.
  • You have to answer your parents calls and emails every few minutes while you are taking a final exam.

 

* Even with all this said, being the CEO of an internet startup is FUN AS HELL!

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