Here I Come!
It's official... I have joined YouNoodle and I'm moving to San Francisco to work, and boy, am I excited!
I'm taking a gap year (or 10 hehe) from university to join the founding team of YouNoodle, a startup in San Francisco. I heard some advice the other day from Max Levchin on the GigaOm Show about how VCs invest their money. VCs don't invest in ideas, they invest in people. I feel the same way about the people I choose to work alongside; YouNoodle has put together a team of superstars who can execute like no one's business (think PayPal). I would do anything to work with these guys -- heck, I'd even work for free just to be around them (wouldn't be possible in SF though hehe). I will be starting as a Ruby on Rails engineer. I've had to learn Rails these last few weeks and let go of Django, but it has been so hard! I will also have a lot of input on the product and hopefully dabble in whatever else I can so I can learn everything possible.
So I'm 18 years old, moving to San Francisco... crazy, right? I know I'm not ready for everything that is going to happen in these next few months/years. Good -- you have to step outside of your comfort zone to do amazing things. It's sort of like what people says about having children -- there is never a "right" time to have kids, the best time is to start having them now. The same goes for startups; I would venture to say that there are no people in the world who are ready and prepared to start a startup, and that's the beauty of it -- you learn as you go, adapting to the situations and opportunities that arise. Though I am not one of the two co-founders of YouNoodle, I am already very attached with the product and the team behind it (my second startup family, MonVia counts as first :p).
I still intend on attending university after this, even though I don't know exactly how many months/years that will be. I have confirmed my deferment at Santa Clara, and I heard that I can be held on deferment there for up to five years. Please don't ask me when I am going to university or try to make me feel guilty for not being "normal". I'm not normal, get used to it. I also intend on trying to get into Stanford again (after being rejected last year), and will be applying to other schools (Oxford and MIT so far) for the Fall of 2009, but who knows what is going to happen from now until then. Maybe I'll end up going to Harvard in 10 years and then getting my MBA from Stanford right after, but seriously, I have no idea what my future holds at this point.
To all the friends I will make, the people I will meet, the experiences I will take with me, the knowledge I will attain, the good judgment that I will gain through the bad judgment that I will make, the amazing city of San Francisco, and everything else that I will get out of this journey... Here I come!
There are many ways to die, you have to find the one way to live.