1- Because I got my Masters' in San Francisco, there was always this undercurrent of entrepreneurial thinking, with many professors encouraging not only applicable skills that can be presented to any employer, but also thinking about how we could nurture and grow our skills to support our own ideas, be they independent projects or ideas or something larger that we could build a business from.
2 - If an entrepreneur is evaluated solely at one phase of the process, it can skew the process in one direction, which can result in overconfident funding with little oversight into other aspects of the company, such as management. We've seen that with companies such as WeWork, where the company was evaluated and received extremely lavish amounts of funding, but a blind eye was turned to the behavior of CEO Adam Neumann or even to WeWork's ability to deliver on the real deliverables of these funding deals.
On the other hand, an investor or partner could evaluate a company too harshly early on and pass on a great idea because they're looking at it through a lens that could be disrupted by the company. A great example of this is Katrina Lake and Stitch Fix, who was passed on by dozens of early investors for both her supposed lack of experience and their conviction that an online clothing retail store could never be profitable because people would hate the experience. Ten years later and Stitch Fix is a billion dollar company with millions of users and growing each month.
3-The Business classes I'm taking at BSC will dovetail with a Graduate Certificate in Adventure Tourism at Colorado State University that I will begin pursuing in the Summer. Upon completing this certificate, I plan to:
- Network and connect with high industry-level mentors and contacts
- Complete freelance and consultant projects to build a body of work, as well as a referral network
- Leverage these referrals into higher-impact industry work
- Branch out into other mediums (Video, VR/AR development) to bring new, innovative solutions to the industry
- Continue to grow my business, using my referral network to link to other industry connections
- Pitch work to Patagonia and National Geographic
4- Personality traits and competencies:
- Communicative - I'm able to distill and explain technical/complex topics to just about anyone
- Innovative . Open-mindedness - I always search for new and better ways to accomplish the same tasks or goals
- Strong work ethic - I don't like leaving work undone
- Open to new experiences
- Strategic - I like to plot out goals so that they can be measured and accomplished as efficiently as possible.