Turning 30
At the cusp of turning 30, I went back through my Google Photos to November 19, 2010 to look through some professional highlights of the last 10 years.
On this day in 2010, after an amazing journey in Australia (thanks to Adam Smith and Philip Batterham), I found myself in New York City to help launch the United Nations Academic Impact (a joint initiative of 1000+ Universities) to support the SDGs with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I had the honor of helping to represent the youth and spearhead social media effort.
That platform helped to launch my first business, Kip Solutions with Kavya Shankar and Sonia Chokshi. We were twice recognized as a Top 50 College Start-up by the Kairos Society and Inc. Magazine’s Coolest College Start-up 2012. As a side tour, I had an opportunity to represent US Entrepreneurship through the United States State Department in Moscow for the Open Innovations Conference.
In 2013, Kip Solutions was acquired by Post + Beam (through Rowland Hobbs (Founder and friend I met at Opportunity Collaboration in Ixtapa Mexico through Topher Wilkins). As a nice cap stone to this chapter, I gave my first Tedx Talk (through Minerva Tantoco, first CTO of New York City) in Hong Kong and ran into fellow UChicago alum Peter B. Williams (author of Productive Accidents, get a copy).
In 2014, I took a step out of start-ups and accepted a role at Google (a dream I had since college). Word had spread that I had worked at the UN, and I was connected with Chade-Meng Tan (aka Jolly Good Fellow) to support Billion Acts (which eventually was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize).
While I was at Google, my Director Jonathan Berent, helped inspire me to start my second start-up and cut our first seed check ($50K), which we turned into a $1M pre-seed/pre-product round to start Catalog.
For the last several years of my twenties, I had the pleasure and honor of running Catalog. All in all, we raised $3.2M from amazing investors (Moonshots, Luma, Techstars to name a few) and were recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020.
There were so many other moments I didn’t capture in this sparknotes of my twenties (running 2x marathons and a 36 hour ultra race, Baller Dinners) and so many mentors and friends who made everything possible.
I look forward to doing a sparknotes in November 2030 to see what happens next.
