Blog #8

It’s been incredibly interesting to me to get involved in the community that my Project 2 is based around. My paper is going to be about student entrepreneurs, and explore the impact of their education, what they study, what types of businesses they choose to make, etc. I think entrepreneurs are incredibly interesting people because it takes such a wide skill set to be able to pull off getting lots of people to buy something you’re making. You have to be a great communicator to talk to your customers and truly understand what your customers need, you have to be empathetic in regards to putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, and these are only surface-level personality traits. It also requires all of the technical and industry skill that whatever product you seek to make involves, especially given the fact that most student entrepreneurs start on their own. I have had some experience in my life as a student entrepreneur, in high school I started a business which scraped Craigslist used car listings, analyzed them to figure out which ones were the most profitable, and then sold access to that data back to customers with a monthly subscription. It was mildly successful before it was shutdown by Craigslist, but the people I met, and the lessons I learned from interacting with those people and having to fight fire after fire in order to keep my website up, growing, and attracting new customers. All entrepreneurs have experiences along the same vein, having to solve an incredible number of important problems quickly in order to keep growing their company. I think Peter Thiel said that starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and trying to build a 747 on the way down. But seeing as how every entrepreneur is a different person with different traits, personality quirks, talents, hardships, experience, etc, everyone brings something different to the table, everyone learns different lessons because the problems their business encounters are different, because the very nature of each entrepreneurs’ business is different. I’ve been involved with the entrepreneurial community here at FSU via talks from local founders, networking events, etc. and I’ve found it to be a surprisingly vibrant community. The relationships I’ve fostered there have helped my current venture grow and succeed. I’ve recently had my interview and I cannot wait to continue being involved with FSU’s student entrepreneurs.