About
I am a 19 year old entrepreneur, writer, philosopher, connector and change addict living in San Francisco.
I am the founder of Force For the Future, a Palomar5 resident, a Starting Bloc fellow, a Sandbox Ambassador and a Stanford Student.
If you know someone’s motivations, where they allocate their time, the people they surround themselves with and the thoughts that go through their head you can totally understand a person. In practice, that’s impossible. You’d have to walk much more than a mile in their shoes and spend hours in hidden mental caverns. Having said that, here is my attempt to help you understand who I am:
The Connecting Thread: The Innovation Landscape
5 Stages of Entrepreneurial Growth
Narrative Evolution of my projects
You can download my CV here
More About Me
I pride myself on reading very broadly, thinking big, but most importantly being very pragmatic. I’m constantly thinking about new ways to reinvent many of society’s antiquated structures to create a better world suited for the 21st century and seeking out the information, people and opportunities to carry out my ideas. You will see entrepreneurship written over a lot that I do, because I believe it is the most effective methodology and mindset for creating change in the world.
I find entrepreneurship incredibly intriguing because of its ability to create tremendous global wealth with few resources, foster idiosyncratic lifestyles, individual freedom, and because of its broad applicability as a philosophy for approaching life.
A few years ago I learned that you become the people you surround yourself with, so I sought out amazing peers and mentors who I could learn from. I now embrace a role as a connector given I am meeting so many people and am very good at seeing how many people’s interests and projects fit into a bigger picture.
I believe if you get the right people together anything is possible. And if people can get connected to the right information and people at the right time their full potential can be realized. And people in pursuit of achieving their full potential is what makes the world go around.
What I’m Working On
Force For the Future— Force For the Future is a startup for startups working on creating new models and tools to enable entrepreneurs to more easily find what they need, collaborate, and share lessons learned. We’re working on creating a “post-accelerator” for the increasing number founders coming out of startup accelerators. Our pilot project, Founder’s First can be found here.
Palomar5 — Palomar5 launched its first project this fall, an innovation camp on the future of work for 30 people under 30 sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. We lived in a factory for 6 weeks, bonding, brainstorming, prototyping and storytelling. We’re now building hubs to continue or work in Berlin and San Francisco. I created the initial hub concept for our continued interaction at the conclusion of the camp. I am one of the project leaders for Palomar5 Hub San Francisco
Ambassador for the Sandbox Network — I am working on growing and strengthening the Sandbox community both globally and in San Francisco. With other Sandbox Ambassadors I organize frequent dinners in the Bay Area. I am also designing a few entrepreneurship specific initiatives to strengethen Sandbox’s ability to support the creation of projects. Sandbox is an exclusive community that selects the most inspiring young achievers and innovators under 30 worldwide and connects them to each other. Sandbox offers its members a trusted environment (online and offline) where they can build meaningful relationships, learn from each other and get access to resources that help them realize their next big idea. The ultimate goal is to bring together amazing people and push already impressive initiatives to the next level.
Seeds For Growth — Events, Books, Podcasts and Conversations
Here’s a list of many the events I’ve attended that represent the breeding ground of a lot of friendships, ideas, insights and projects. Most events fell into categories of Entrepreneurship or Foresight, matching my mission to think big, start small and scale fast.
Foresight: Singularity University Panel on Humanity’s Grand Challenges, Supernova’s The Big Shift, Millennium Project State of the Future Address, Convergence Café at Nasa Ames, IFTF’s Technology Horizons, Long Now Seminars, O’Reilly’s ETech, World Future Society, BIL, Singularity Summits, Future Salon, Convergence, Media X Lectures, Overcoming Bias Meetup, BioBarCamp.
Entrepreneurship: Tech Crunch 50, Hub SF Social Entrepreneurship Events, Crowdsourcing for Social Good, Craigslist NonProfit Bootcamp, Silicom Ventures, SFNewTech, Microsoft’s BizSpark Mixer, The Crunchies, Tech Crunch August Capital Mixer, DoSomething.org Social Bootcamp, Startup Weekend, SuperHappyDevHouse, Teens in Tech, Eben Pagan’s 5 Day Seminar on Business Leadership, Macworld Expo, Weekend Apps,
Other: Palomar5, Burning Man, Quantified Self, Maker Faire, Learning Irregulars, Focus Catalyst Brainstorming Salons, Unclasses.
The non-fiction books I’ve read the last few years are listed below. I mostly read non fiction. I’ll explain why soon. All the books I’ve ever read since 5th grade are on my Shelfari here:
The Dip, Writing Tools, How to Change the World, LifeManual, Turning Learning Right Side Up, Never Eat Alone, Tribes, You Call the Shots, Authentic Happiness, The Magic of Thinking Big, Outliers, Nudge, Four Hour Workweek, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Finding Flow, Black Swan, Blink, Fab, Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Letter to a Christian Nation, Getting Things Done, On Intelligence, I Am A Strange Loop, Freakonomics, The Art Of Social Networking, I Am a Strange Loop, The Power of Full Engagement, Get There Early, Presentation Zen, Valley Boy, A Whole New Mind, Discover Your Inner Economist, Blink, Jack: Straight from the Gut, Personal Power II, My Startup Life, What We Believe But Cannot Prove, Tao of Physics, Stumbling on Happiness, Think and Grow Rich, The Singularity is Near, The Power of Now, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Philip K. Dick Reader, Metamorphosis, How to Win Friends & Influence People, Decoding the Universe, Programming the Universe, How the Universe Got It’s Spots, How the Mind Works, The Psychology of Achievement, iWoz, Johnny Bunko, The Pentagon’s New Map.
I’m also a huge fan of audio and video podcasts.
I’ve watched over 300 TEDTalks & Pop!Tech Popcasts and listened to over 60 talks from Accelerating Change 2004 & 2005
I’ve also had more than a hundred meetings over lunch and coffee with big thinkers and entrepreneurs young and old, as peers and mentors, discussing ideas big and small.
The Connecting Thread: The Innovation Landscape
The primary engine driving economic growth is innovation. And we are in the midst of transitioning to a new innovation landscape as corporations are dying and the startup ecosystem matures. The innovation landscape is the overlapping theme for most of what I’m thinking about and working on. I’m interested in how we can increase collaboration, access more capital, push the interconnectivity and support systems a step further and increase the overall size of the ecosystem by getting more aspiring entrepreneurs across the chasm of commitment.
The innovation landscape is intimately related to what I believe is the world’s biggest problem and the approach we need to solve it. I discuss that below.
A few of my frameworks for thinking about the innovation space: (Posts will soon be written for all of these)
Pre-Accelerator. Accelerator. Post Accelerator.
5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey
Startups engaging collaboratively in complex value chains to achieve the scale of corporations, called the Lego Model and described here.
The 4 Pillars of Innovation Landscape: Community, Information, Tools, Capital. Most projects are different proportions of these 4 elements.
The innovation space is incredibly complex requiring a variety of different perspectives and knowledge on a wide array of subjects. This overarching theme connects my many interests: (I find the “I, it, we, its” a helpful organizing framework) I: talent development, psychology, learning, education, mental technologies; It: Personal productivity, food, athletic, health, energy management; We: community, social interaction, culture, collaboration; Its: geopolitics, interconnectedness, foresight, accelerating technological change, startups, behavioral economics, environmental sustainability, systems thinking;
5 Steps of Entrepreneurial Growth
I defined 5 steps in the entrepreneurial journey that I think most people go through. The distribution is a pyramid and only a small percentage of people make it through each stage.
(1) No Desire —intrinsic motivation suppressed (usually by the school system) (2) Desire to make an impact and be entrepreneurial, but uncertainty about how to channel that desire (3) Possess an idea for a project but lack the knowledge and ability to know how to begin (4) A prototype has been built but need help gaining traction (5) The project has succeeded on a small scale but needs support going mainstream.
I believe the world’s biggest problem is not one of the many challenges we face, but that we have too few people working on implementing solutions for issues they care about. The root of this problem stems from the ineffectiveness of the world’s institutions to support people in finding their passions, and their inability to help people align their work with these passions. Entrepreneurship in its broadest sense can give people the intrinsic motivation to solve these problems. And the way to solve the world’s biggest problem is to support a greater percentage of the population through each of these 5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey.
Founders First, my current focus right now, is trying to support groups 4 and 5. In hindsight, I can see that what I’ve been working on has evolved through solving problems in each of these stages.
1- Technology Club — One major goal was to find exciting people, projects and companies and integrate into my uninspiring education
2- Youth Action Research Network — Bring together all the people inspired to do something more and actually start doing
3- Force For the Future stage 1 – targeting college students with ideas who are having trouble making waves
4, 5 – Force For the Future stage 2: Founders First — targeting founders who are alumni of start accelerators
I’m confident that the best way to approach solving the problem of liquidity through the 5 stages, is to start from stage 5 and work backwards.
It is actually the most doable, because by the time people are there, they are very motivated. And the ecosystem for people in that stage is the most developed, because enough people in this stage have been able to create profitable or impactful organizations.
Tackling the other stages is much more complicated, and requires a lot more infrastructure. To affect stages 1-3 where most of the world’s population resides, we requires resolving political conflicts, alleviating poverty, overhauling institutions, and overcoming pressures from peers, family and other lower level Maslovian needs. And while it’s important for work to be done there, I don’t think we can create any lasting change until the higher stages are more organized and developed, otherwise we’ll just have people temporarily reaching new levels and then falling back down to tell all their peers that it isn’t possible and isn’t worth trying.
I have a philosophy called the T Model - A framework for learning, work, personal growth and non-linear career progression that describes evolving through these stages from an individual perspective.
Narrative Evolution of My Projects
Since my early teenage years I’ve been inspired by big ideas and have been driven by a strong desire to make them happen. My first projects were focused on improving my education and pushing my private high school towards true 21st century education. As the vision grew I learned more about both social and technology entrepreneurship in order to move my ideas behind the bureaucratic confines of an educational institution. While social entrepreneurship and technology entrepreneurship are often separated I see increasing convergence between the two, especially if impact is the bottom line. Web 2.0 widgets that don’t solve a core problem aren’t that interesting, and well-intentioned social projects that can’t scale because they don’t understand how to utilize technology are equally frustrating.
Here’s a description of the 3 different projects I founded that naturally evolved into one another.
At the start of my sophomore year I founded a Technology Club as a vehicle to push my school into the 21st century, to organize like-minded peers, and to create a platform to visit and explore the vast network of people and ideas in the Bay Area.
I became frustrated with the rate of change inside the walls of an educational institution and when I got an internship at the Institute for the Future the summer after my junior year I tried to implement my vision for 21st century education with their support. The project was called the Youth Action Research Network and its goal was to accelerate the impact of young people by connecting them with like-minded peers and seasoned professionals interested in mentoring the next generation. It aimed to provide a tangible, action-oriented form of learning that most high schools, as of yet, do not.
I took the project as far as I could with the Institute for the Future’s support but found that it wasn’t a great fit. I needed to learn more about the entrepreneurship world to start a venture of my own.
This became Force For the Future, as I learned I could take what I was working on and make it into a startup company. Force For the Future’s goal was to be a decentralized, local support network for entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It aimed to serve 2 demographics 1) People usually around college age who are just moving into the startup world and have ideas and a lot of enthusiasm for entrepreneurship but don’t know how to turn their ideas into successful companies. 2) Founders who are coming out of incubators like YCombinator, Tech Stars, and Founder’s Institute, who have nearly everything they need while in the incubator program but the support network drops off at the conclusion of the program.
Due to the burn rate of people just in the idea stage it proved very hard to build a business around. Force For the Future shifted its focus exclusively to founders who are alumni of startup accelerators. I’d like to move back into the educational world, serving people at the idea stage, as I believe that’s the root of the world’s biggest problem (link to other place on the page), but an effective solution must start by working backwards from the 5 stages, which is why we’re targeting founders from startup accelerators first.
Our first project is called Founders First, which is a “post-accelerator” personalized learning program for founders who are alumni of startup accelerators.