future blogging

I have not really blogged that much in 2021, likely simply becauuse I no longer have the habit of regular writing down my thoughts. I think I will blog more this summer, as it serves as a good catalyst for putting my thoughts together and for reviewing my general life progress.

dvhs

Doing startups had always seemed to be a somewhat distant pipe dream for most of my life: I grew up hearing stories about Zuckerberg from my mom, when I was considering studying physics, startups was “selling out” to me, early in freshman year I could barely get interviews from startups, let alone consider creating one myself.

I think I am pretty fortunate to have gone to DVHS. There are definite cons to being in a hypercompetitive environment, and I have spent years trying to unlearn certain negative mindsets that I developed in high school. But, the one thing that I value more than anything atm is people—the person I am/strive to become, and the people I have met in life and will meet in the future.

At its core, I think this sort of hypothesis drives most people’s lives, whether or not they realize it. After leaving high school, people chase after specific colleges because of the types of people that will also be there. At the Ivy League, perhaps there is value in slightly better classes/professors, a bump in prestige might smooth certain career paths, but in my experience, the biggest value that Columbia provided me was the opportunity to be around incredible people. It seems like adults also go to incredible lengths to be around other people they hold in high regard. The Bay Area is a good example—people come here because it seems like all the top tech people are here, parents raise children here because there’s the promise that they’ll be in schools surrounded by capable teachers and peers, people seem to really enjoy clubs/hobbies largely due to the communities that they’re introduced to. Also, consider the recent social phenomenom of people moving to Miami—sure, Miami has nice beaches, but this sudden migration is almost solely because people think other cool people are moving there as well.

That’s why I am grateful to have went to DVHS. I met a lot of awesome people, not just at DVHS but in the surrounding area, the list of whom is too long to go through in this post. I will spotlight one friend in particular though since it’s relevant to this post—we amusingly talk about his high school self (he rather hated his DVHS experience). I’m not really sure how we became such close friends in senior year—there were plenty of other smart people at the school, but I think what really drew us together was a certain realness/brutal honesty that I appreciated—I guess this is a long winded way of saying that I trusted him.

DVHS had this weird phenomenom where kids are split into two camps: stem kids and humanities kids. I guess I mentally silo’d myself into the nerd archetype—I figured that if we ever built a startup together, my friend, who fit the “humanities” mold, would “handle the business side” as the joke goes. I think my high school self would be extremely shocked to learn how far in the middle we’ve met. Growing up, such camps felt exclusive to one another and perhaps in certain disciplines they are, but in the realm of tech entrepreneurship, both are not only possible, but incredibly essential.

startups

We joke that my friend has a habit of radicalizing his friends towards tech entrepreneurship—I’m admittedly one such example. Prior to getting close to him, I once wanted to be a physics professor. Our entire startup team at this point has been infected by his energy—I think there’s a reason why he would be a great CEO for us. I don’t envy him at all—CEO is a rather terrible job in many aspects, and I’m glad that he has the conviction and skillset to handle such responsibility.

In college, I’ve been steadily doing classes, recruiting, and random extracurriculars. Sometimes I wonder that, since my life has just been a series of striving for greater goals, if my current desire to do a startup is just the next step in such a journey. I’ll haveta keep monitoring this, but I really think that this is finally not the case for the first time in my life and that’s why I’m so excited for the prospect of entrepreneurship—I don’t know if it’s just quarantine, but lately, even major accomplishments don’t bring me that much happiness anymore. I think feeling like I’m doing something important in the world will fix that.

yc

Around January, my cofounders and I video called and discussed the prospect of launching a serious startup together. We had built many projects together over the years, but we felt that it was time to take a project seriously for the first time. We started doing daily calls and regular engineering work, and over time we built the website: joinvillage.app.

I think we randomly applied to YC because like, why not, and it became an afterthought as the YC application season came and went. But, on the final day of when we would hear back, we got an interview request. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s said that ~40% of the companies in the interview stage are accepted—this is in comparison to their overall acceptance rate of under 1%. Needless to say, this was super exciting—we’d grown up listening to podcasts about the legendary YCombinator, and the prospect of it becoming reality was finally hitting us.

We spent quite a lot of time doing mock interviews with past YC alums, at which point I realized that wow these are really impressive individuals. There is a certain clarity of thought that makes you feel like they have insights about the world that you are unaware of. After an absurd amount of prep, we finally did the interview, which went really well—they accepted that the problem space itself had huge potential, but they seemed to be hung up on the fact that no housing startup had successfully solved the problem that we were tackling.

We got an invite for a second call in around a week and a half (this call happened yesterday), where they wanted to call regarding whether or not we could validate if the problem could indeed be solved/our solution could work. I think that there truthfully is no real good answer—we just have to try our solution to see if it’ll work, and this sort of lack of validation meant it might not be worth the time to work on this.

takeaways

Honestly, I have no regrets. We all learned a ton through this process, and this just gives us more time to iterate on our product/develop as entrepreneurs for next batch. One more concrete takeaway is that clarity of thought/being concise seems to be a key trait in most of the impressive individuals I’ve encountered through this process—if my blog posts are any indication, I have a lot of room to grow in this regard and I really want to work on improving it (hence more blogging this summer). Above all, I feel a new drive in me as this world of tech entrepreneurship truly excites me, something that I don’t know if I can say about any other career path.

I am super excited to see how I develop over the course of this summer, and, of course, the future beyond that!