4-ish Reasons I’d succeed at PM

 1) I love (a) learning, (b) thinking about new ideas, and (c) solving problems. 

(a) My life is dedicated to growth. I collect observations, thoughts, notes, and quotes on all kinds of ideas and experiences; I turn them into essays to think longwise through particular topics. I’ve written on: the psychology of disgust in politics, self-improvement, backflipping on a snowboard, and my startup philosophy. I’m always improving my life with new ideas and self-reflection.

(b) My love for new ideas extends into relevant domains– I‘m the first to get to UCSB New Venture Competition events and the last to leave. I can talk for hours about startup ideas, strategies, and visions. I surround myself with people with similar burning interests. Every new project I work on, I apply new ideas from: my experience, the wisdom of Y-Combinator, and the books I read.

(c) I’m entrepreneurial–  my projects are all attempts to define and solve problems. Essay writing solves a personal problem of foggy thinking; my philosophy is, “If I can’t explain it well, I don’t really know it.” My wall poster business came from a personal problem of finding inexpensive and quality wall art. Allthenticate is solving the problems of passwords and keys with digital identities. Unicornalumni.com came from a personal problem of finding startups with experienced founders. Leadercove came from a personal problem of getting into tech entrepreneurship without being able to code.

2) I’ve proven myself as a self-aware thinker and someone who can effectively listen to customers. Last year, for the UCSB New Venture Competition on the Allthenticate team, I demonstrated my ability to learn a complex market (cybersecurity) and translate customer problems into technical solutions. I went from simply learning buzzwords to understanding the problem enough to test our assumptions. In market validation interviews, 80% of my time is spent trying to understand the person and their problems at a deeper level. The other 20% is exploring possible solutions. Both tasks require self-awareness, careful thought, and good listening skills.

3) I have a good mix of right brain creativity and left brain analytics. I had a vision to make my website a creative writing space. But beyond creativity, I took action to improve the site with qualitative user testing/interview data and quantitative google analytics data. I’ve also played professional online poker for 3 years, and used data analytics software to gain an edge over my opponents over a large sample size (>400,000 hands). My proudest example of this balance is when I used a 13,000 hand sample of opponent population statistics to create my own profitable strategy in a specific type of poker game. In laymen’s terms, I looked at the data from every hand my opponents played against me to create my own baseline strategy to exploit the most common average mistakes I saw.

4) I’m motivated to make a large positive impact creating tech products. I want the skills to be a successful startup CEO– I want to learn exactly how to take a 12-24 month vision and translate it into to-dos for a team of engineers, designers, and marketers. I want to: learn skills from bosses and mentors, prove myself, find new problems to solve, surround myself with awesome people, talk through side-projects like Allthenticate and Leadercove, and grow personally and professionally. I want to learn ways to turn an idea into something valuable. I’m motivated to learn.