Acting on your ideas

(peaceful music) - I often have a lot of ideas running through my head, a lot of things that I want to do. And one of the things that my mentor really encouraged me to do was to put those ideas into action. It's great to have ideas. It's great to think about things, but you learn a lot by actually doing it. And so even my interest to this day in automation and in how to use automation to explore the product can be traced back to his encouragement and need to go ahead, try it. You don't have a lot of coding experience. That's okay. And so he really encouraged me to take those ideas and put some feet on them and actually do something with them. And I found that's a wonderful way to learn, wonderful way to grow in new ideas as well. - When you start your own business, you're basically applying for two different jobs. You have to have a job of a boss and you have to have the job of an employee. And the workload can be a little overwhelming. - I made the choice to be a business. I noticed that there was a very big difference between the individuals I was working with, the colleagues I was working with, that treated themselves like a business and those that treated themselves like employees or freelancers. And that meant that I had to set myself up for success as a business. And that meant I needed to learn about how to incorporate my business. What does that mean? How to taxes work? What are the tax advantages of being a corporation? How do I put myself on payroll? How do I ensure my own health insurance and my own retirement plan? That sort of thing. And that changes how you think about working with clients, working with other companies, because the relationship becomes a business to business relationship, and that allows you to position yourself in a certain way, as a certain specialist, as a certain specialty, to provide us very specific service. - Basically you have to learn to manage yourself and to be disciplined and have a very strong work ethic to be able to not only complete things on time, but to have accurate record keeping, have accurate source control of all the work that you're doing, to have task lists of everything that needs to be done, and to be able to manage schedules and get things out to clients on time. - Startup required a different frame of mind altogether. Right, there are going to be aggressive timelines. You're going to have to work late nights. You're going to have to give it your, probably more than, 100%. If you are going to join a startup, then you have to give it 100% and pickup everything you possibly can pick up from it and learn a lot. - So one advice that I like to give is only start a business if you really care about that particular purpose. And that purpose needs to be way bigger than yourself. - What I really discovered was that computers were a way that I could solve people's problems. I could make it so that if you had to do something repeatable, I could make it easy and remove this frustrate from the world. - It's got to be altruistic. It's has to be about other people. It has to provide some serious value to humanity and it should not do any harm to anyone else. - You want to work at Amazon? You build a skill for the Alexa and all of a sudden you have demonstrated that you can actually work with the technologies and the passion for doing the work. I mean, you're not doing it because someone's paying you for it. You're doing it because it's what you want to do. - We used to work on things that nobody else has worked on before. So it was very challenging experience. But on the plus side, at the end of the day, you always had the satisfaction that you work on something you like, and you always know that the stuff you're doing actually matters. - It's an evolving journey. And you might come in at a time when there is a lot of enthusiasm around a particular technological hurdle and people are collaborating towards a solution. And then as the company grows, and it goes from 20, 30, 40, 50 people to 100 to 200 people, culture will change drastically, and you'll have to ask yourself, what do you want your role to be? You know, what do you want your legacy to be? - If you stick with all this, I think you're going to do very good at business because what you're trying to do is solve a problem for humanity. And if it is really solving that problem for a lot of people, there's a lot of people that are willing to pay for it. It has to be a genuine solution and it has to be a good solution. At the same time it has to be a solution that's actually cost effective. And then there's a lot of other challenges. You're going to have to create a team. You're going to have to find funds for it. You're going to have to work really hard. You may have no work-life balance left for another five to seven years whatsoever. But after that, the benefits are huge. The life is amazing. It's very fulfilling.