NOTE: VOTING HAS ENDED – THANKS!

It’s been one hell of a hectic Christmas week as the video applications I asked you for have come rolling in. I’ve been honestly overwhelmed, impressed, and moved by your submissions and reactions to the Digital Nomad Academy scholarship opportunity! I really didn’t expect such a resounding response.

It was clear to me that there were people who wanted to be a part of this, who could benefit from being part of the ambitious community we’re building, but who aren’t necessarily in the same socio-economic situation as others or who have hit tough financial times in this economy, that might not otherwise have a chance to be involved.

But WOW you guys have truly blown me away and proven to me how many incredible, ambitious individuals there are out there with lofty goals, big dreams, and visions for building an improved, more connected, whole, healed, better society through entrepreneurship.

To those of you who applied, thank you all SO much for your creative and heartfelt videos and presentations.

In the end, we received 24 amazing videos, pouring in from Germany, Canada, the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Argentina, Japan, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, and many more… Narrowing the selections down to even ten or five of our favorites was exceptionally difficult, and picking just two winners is near impossible (this made me want to hand out like 15 scholarships!), so I wanted to include you—existing DNA students, faculty, and dedicated readers here at Thrilling Heroics—to help me make the final decision about which two should be awarded the full-ride scholarship.

We tried our hardest to select the finalists based on a balance of who had the most compelling story or vision, who seemed to bring the most specific value to the table for the other students and the Academy, and who seemed to have the most genuine need for this. Again, it was incredibly hard to choose, and I can’t say with certainty that we were absolutely right (which is why I need your help), but please find below our six favorite applicants for the 2 scholarship spots at Digital Nomad Academy.
So here’s what help I need from you and a few important notes on how this will work:

1) There are six contenders, listed in no particular order. Please watch the videos and vote on your single favorite at the bottom of this post. Please use your real name & email in the form sections of the comment box. If you want to write a very short explanation for why you think they deserve to win, great, but not necessary. I do especially want to hear from you students already inside DNA though as to you think would add the most to the group.

2) If you are in the running below, feel free to ask your friends and family to come watch your video and add a comment to vote for you.

3) But so that nobody games the system, you may only vote once, and only for one person. DNA students may vote for their top 2 (but believe me guys, I know who my students are so anybody else who writes down 2 names, only the first will count). If you appear below then please DO leave me a comment and be sure to use a valid email address (it won’t appear publicly) so I can contact you at in case you are chosen as a scholarship recipient, and please consider voting for one of the other good folks in the running.

4) Voting ends Monday, January 2, at 11pm EST.

5) Once tallied, your votes will decide the 2 final scholarship winners.

Because there were so many outstanding videos, I’m working to see if I can put something special together for runners-up as well (you each deserve major thanks). No promises yet, but I may pick a “wild card” third scholarship at the very least. That’s right—another $1,500 spot in the program.

I will be in touch with all the winning applicants to discuss the specifics of how you can measurably give something of value back to our existing students and our community…

To those of you who applied, thank you all SO much for your creative and heartfelt videos and presentations. Many more are worth watching and can be found here. I watched them all, there are some amazing people with some amazing projects and passions in there and I can only hope you will get a little extra visibility by stepping out of your comfort zone and putting yourself out there.

I hope you love watching these as much as I did… They make me so thankful that you come here, read what I have to say, and participate in the communities we’re creating. You’ve made my 2011.

I am truly excited to have some of you join us very soon, so best of luck to all, and stay tuned as we announce the scholarship winners.

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s to creating a new reality for 2012 and beyond!

NOTE: VOTING HAS ENDED – THANKS!

Big thanks to ALL of you who applied and to everyone who helped contribute to our decision for the final scholarship recipients. We’ll announce the winners soon.

Jeff Kimes – Germany

Tim Juliussen – California

Eileen Campos – Philippines

Peter Griffin – Oregon

Janet Brent – Philippines

Rodrigo Flamenco – El Salvador

Photo credit: JD Hancock

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Help Me Spread the Holiday Cheer: I Need Your Help to Decide the 2 Most Deserving Scholarship Recipients!

Hey Jun, so give us a little professional background on how you got to be where you are and what your role is with Future Delivery.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, I got a taste for entrepreneurship by founding Bruin Consulting, the UCLA Undergraduate Case Competition, and the Veridical Group. Each experience taught me something new about myself and really amplified my abilities as a leader and consultant, and my business sense.

After I graduated from UCLA, I worked at an international consulting firm for about three months. At the three month mark, I realized that the corporate life was just not for me. I mean, the pay was good, the job was steady, it was around 55 hours a week (not bad for consulting), and we even had an amazing Flavia machine in the kitchen! What drove me to step aside from the corporate world was that I felt unchallenged, and that I was in cruise control. You go to work, come back home, eat dinner, you might have time for the gym, and then you sleep. It became an endless routine!! From my experiences as an entrepreneur, I knew that my passion was in having my own baby (company).

I stepped aside from my corporate job and teamed up with Yu-kai Chou, my Delta Sig pledge brother who co-founded Bruin Consulting and the Veridical Group with me. Together, we founded Future Delivery. This is a startup company; therefore, I wear at least twenty different hats. My main responsibility is that of Chief Marketing Officer. I am in charge of everything having to do with our branding, advertising, lead generation, conversion, and client fulfillment. I am the face of Future Delivery, so I must always make sure I look my best!

What is the new FDCareer roleplaying game all about? Give our readers a run-down of the community and why it’s such a great benefit.

Many of you play video games and watch TV all day. Many undergraduates go to class, play and party all night, and ignore their careers until right before they graduate—which in many cases, may be too late. We created the FD RPG so that undergraduates and young professionals can have fun while developing themselves professionally.

In the FD RPG, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up on the site. As you level-up, you gain prestige, new abilities, access to new areas of the site, and will be able to recruit with more prestigious firms. We’ve also implemented Quests that help you develop career-wise. For example, a Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis case. You will have to solve a company’s problem—could be profitability or an acquisition—and you will submit your solutions online to be reviewed by our expert panel. A Marketing Quest could be to gain social influence on Twitter by gaining more followers.

Monster.com is about helping people apply for a job.

Vault.com is about helping people research companies.

FD Career is about getting students and young professionals prepared for their careers. It helps you discover what you want to be, and how to get there.

You’ve got a great blog where you share your journey with entrepreneurship. Can you share some of your thoughts on the startup life and your opinions on work-life balance?

Hahaha… there is no work life balance. To be a successful entrepreneur (not that I’m successful yet), your work and life have to be one thing. That is the key. My personal relationships, family relationships, and girlfriend relationships have suffered because of the path that I have chosen. But these are the sacrifices that you have to make in order to put yourself in the position to be successful.

For example, I probably have time to hang out with my friends from UCLA or high school once or twice a month. I do see my girlfriend a lot during the week, but this is how we spend time together: her sitting in front of the TV watching a show or movie, me sitting by her side with my laptop and earphones on so that I can concentrate and meet my project deadlines.

This life is NOT for everyone. Cody, I chat with you all the time at 3am because we’re both still up doing work. We don’t even complain about it because we know this is the life that we have chosen, so all we can do is laugh. Though the road is tough, you will love what you do.

I keep pushing because I truly believe in the idea, I love my baby, and I love my team. If we fail, I would gladly start another company will all of them.

I’ve heard some rumblings about a sort of reality show that you guys are putting together to showcase your experience starting up a company?

Glad you brought it up! Our first video will launch this week! Hopefully it’ll launch before this is posted so you can link to the first episode. [See Episode 1, Part 1 here, and Part 2 here, also see below. —Ed.]

The Living the Startup Life video series is for all of those people who have a great idea but don’t know where to start, for everyone stuck in their corporate job afraid to leave their company to pursue their dream career, and for everyone who just wants to watch some guys have a lot of fun while succeeding or failing.

Lastly, would you mind sharing a bit about your education and how your experience has helped you become an avid entrepreneur. I’m interested if you have any good tips for students or twentysomethings that want to start their own businesses and really exercise their entrepreneurial muscles!

Why yes I do. My major at UCLA did NOT prepare me for my entrepreneurial quest. The three main things that prepared me to pursue the entrepreneurial life were:

1. Finding a mentor who guided me on my path to become an entrepreneur
2. Getting a taste of it while starting an orginzation and a company as an undergrad
3. Reading business books in class instead of paying attention to the teacher

• The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

If you do these three things, then you will be prepared to become an entrepreneur.

Thanks for your willingness to share your wisdom with the Thrilling Heroics community, Jun.

If you have any questions about entrepreneurship, Jun is genuinely interested in helping you guys out and making new friends on this great online web community of ours, so please feel welcome to contact him at Jun.Loayza (at) FDcareer (dot) com or on his blog Living the Startup Life. If you are interested in the FDcareer RPG, I highly recommend it! In my experience on the community site, I’ve already reached level 25 (currently #7 on the leaderboard!) so feel free to connect with me if you have questions about blogging, WordPress, or web development, and keep an eye out, because I will be creating some web design and blogging-related quests for you guys in the next few weeks! (Check out a little more about the FDCareer RPG in this intro video below.)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Young Entrepreneur Jun Loayza Reveals the Interactive Web Game That Will Rock Your Career!

David Anderson is a young guy who wanted to make a difference, so he founded the company Green Options upon graduating from the University of California at San Diego! (And funny enough – he’s our second David Anderson interviewed here at Thrilling Heroics!) Green Options’ online media portal, GreenOptions.com, serves as your home on the web for “Greening the Good Life,” which sorts through the information overload to bring you the best quality green news and tips for green living. David studied political science, sociology, biology and law in school, and now focuses on sustainability issues and renewable energy policy. He lives in Berkeley, California. [Photo credit to David...he described it as exhibiting "a little wackiness" =) ]

David took the time to chat with me about founding his company, working with people around the globe, about fossil fuels, and solar power, and he had some fantastic thoughts to share, drawing from his experiences.

You attended UC San Diego. Tell me about your education and how you got involved in sustainability. What made you go green?

I was interested in all kinds of things when I entered UCSD, but I defaulted to political science. I always had an amateur interest in renewable energy, but the chance to connect it to policy during an internship in Washington DC really drove me to immerse myself in the green movement. At the same time, the ineffectiveness of the non-profit I worked at (despite the best efforts of many very talented people) convinced me that I had to look to market solutions — the business world — to really be effective at creating change.

That’s a pretty interesting insight. So when and where did the idea for Green Options come about? What was REConn?

After I graduated, I still didn’t know how to fulfill my desire to help bring the green movement mainstream. In the meantime, I took a job as a technical writer at a firm that aggregated RFPs [Request for Proposal] for architecture and engineering firms. Immediately, I thought “why isn’t there anything like this for renewable energy?” A few weeks later, I quit and began planning “The Renewable Energy Connection” (REConn), which turned into Green Options. Although our first 6 months has focused on our green media portal, GreenOptions.com, this summer we’ll be launching the tools that are based on that original concept.

How did you connect with your primary team and get Green Options off the ground? Were there much in the way of startup costs, dealing with VCs, etc?

I was lucky through persistence. As a recent graduate, I had very few business contacts to lean on for advice. I ended up starting a blog that examined the nexus of energy and environmental issues (citizengreen.com, which I have now passed on to one of our interns), through which I met Shea Gunther, a fellow blogger and self-styled eco-entrepreneur, and Jeff-McIntire-Strasburg of Sustainablog. Shea had the entrepreneurial experience to help me get funding and get the company off the ground, while Jeff (also an English professor and southern gentleman) made a perfect editor for the media portal we were building. We found an angel investor almost immediately, so I never went through the VC rigmarole.

Did you have any previous entrepreneurial experience before starting Green Options?

Nope. For why, see above. But I’d always been interested to find out how the corporate world works… and this is one way to find out!

What sets Green Options apart from other green media centers like TreeHugger.com?

Jeff was (until very very recently) actually a writer at Treehugger. Truthfully, there’s a lot of overlap. Treehugger has been the leading multi-author blog in the green blogosphere since shortly after its launch, and our content has to date been focused on building a base of readers who already hold green values. The difference is that there is a large majority of people that don’t consider themselves tree-huggers, and would be unlikely to visit a site with that name, even though they might be open to a lot of the same information. Over the next few months, Green Options will be focusing on breaking down the barriers that keep people from opening up to this kind of information.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome in running a company with consultants that report to you from all over the country?

You said it. The simple fact that there’s no easy way to poke your head over the cubicle wall to ask a quick question does cut down on the efficient flow of information to some extent. As we’ve grown in terms of staff, we’ve increasingly adopted specialized collaboration tools that attempt to replicate a shared physical workspace. When it was just 3 of us, most of those tools weren’t necessary. They are now.

I know you’ve done a lot of research specifically on energy. What are a few major steps you think we need to take with that infrastructure?

Thank you for asking this! We’re going to face a huge challenge in the coming years. At some point, the question of “what’s next” after centralized coal electricity production and a gas-based transportation infrastructure is going to demand an answer (probably through some shock to the system), but the more we can do now to create the solutions we’re going to need, the more prepared we’ll be when pop quiz day comes. Even though our electric grid is an antiquated patchwork in desperate need of shoring up, it currently looks like the best bet we have to decouple energy consumption and generation from specific fuels. Unless some breakthrough algae or cellulosic ethanol technology provides some amazing bounty, biofuels are never going to provide a full answer to the oil problem. Electric and plugin hybrid vehicles look like the most efficient investment on a macro scale when combined with massive deployment of grid-connected, distributed renewables and major investment in the national electric grid. To me, that is the only ‘new energy economy’ scenario that solves the distribution problem inherent to renewable resources without relying on some amazing storage technology that hasn’t been perfected yet. For example, although hydrogen will undoubtedly play a role, California could replace its “hydrogen highway” pipe dream — ahem, initiative — with thousands of cheap electric 10-minute charging stations fueled by on-site renewables and backed up by natural gas, with a much greater immediate effect.

What are the best green business and energy conferences that you’ve attended?

Without a doubt, GreenFest. I attended the one in SF last fall solo, vowing to be back with a booth someday, and sure enough, the GreenOptions.com booth was bustling at GreenFest Chicago this April. I’m also very interested by the seminars put on by various groups to explain the complexities of the California Solar Initiative to solar installers, but maybe that’s just the solar geek in me.

Do you have any words of advice for college students who, similarly to you, are interested in starting up their own green companies when they graduate?

Stay away! Just kidding. The one piece of advice I can give unequivocally is this: only work with people smarter than yourself. Also, find out what it is about yourself that adds value to others’ activities, and offer it freely.

Great advice, David! Thanks for taking the time to share with us about your startup. I look forward to seeing you guys develop the service provider side of GO in the coming months.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: An Interview with David Anderson, Founder and CEO of Green Options

With such an accomplished list of entrepreneurial pursuits, I thought Rajesh would make the perfect contender for my second business interview. He has had many successes and failures, and has a lot of solid knowledge to share from that experience. I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with him in person on my recent trip to Silicon Valley, and he was kind enough to let me interview him by email.

Rajesh, you are a founder, president, chairman, author, and blogger. Please tell us about the many business projects you are currently involved with.

Cody, first of all thank you for inviting me for this interview. Now, to answer your question, currently I am involved in five different companies. I will go with the latest one first:

• iPolipo – I am one of the founders and serve as the executive chairman. We think that people want to spend more time “meeting” people rather than “scheduling those meetings” with them. We have a solution that will help in doing just that.
• Suggestica – I am one of the founders and serve as the president. We think that there is a non-information overload on the web. By bringing trusted content, we not only hope to save time and money, we truly want to bring joy into people’s lives.
• Compassites – This is a company in India and I serve on their board. Compassites is totally focused on helping entrepreneurs with their product development needs. Their claim to fame is that they can take an idea from concept to launch in record time.
• Foresight Plus – This is a management consulting firm where I partner with some select businesses and individuals to bring them an unfair and sustainable competitive advantage. I am no longer accepting new clients with this business for the near future.
• CIGNEX – I was one of the founders and served as the CEO for the first five years. While I am no longer operationally involved in the company, I help in some business development activities when appropriate.

I am involved in a few more projects but those are all in stealth mode. I am an entrepreneur at heart but I am also an author and a teacher. On the business side, I act as a catalyst to speed up multiple projects simultaneously. On the personal side, I love to help already high-performing people reach greater heights.

What sort of background do you come from? And what was your experience like living and working in different countries around the globe and finally coming to reside here in California?

I was born and brought up in Southern India. I come from a middle-class family. My father was a civil engineer working for the state government. That meant that we would move from one place to another place every few years. It seemed like a pain at that time but it taught us to adapt to new situations.

That family background helped me to adjust easily when I lived and worked in five different countries–India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and France. I am generally a happy person so I enjoyed living and working in all those countries. These experiences have helped me tremendously in the following ways:

• Increased my respect for diversity: Every country was different and we had to get used to the diversity. Now, it is more fun than a problem.
• Enhanced my ability to adapt: Each country was also different in terms of how we live and work and basically how to get things done.
• Expanded my network globally: Relationships in different countries help tremendously with globalization in full force.

Where did you get your formal education and what did you study?

I completed my Bachelor of Engineering at Mysore University in India, in Electronics and Communication. Of course, I didn’t use much of what I studied in my engineering at my work.

Do you have a word of advice for college students and other young people who would like to become successful leaders or entrepreneurs?

I think every college student should try to pursue a life of leadership. If you are a college student, you can learn that by taking some initiative to do what I call “filling in the blanks.” Wherever you are, you can always find something that everyone thinks someone else will take care of–blanks–and rather than thinking that someone else will take care of it, you can take the initiative to take care of it. If you make this a habit, you would have laid a good foundation to become a leader.

Are there any specific skill sets that don’t get taught in school that are invaluable in the business world? What do you recommend to get over those hurdles?

This question is very interesting to me. There are many skills that are not taught in schools, but if you don’t learn them you are at a serious competitive disadvantage. It will take me a while to list all of them, but here are a few for starters:

1. Building long-term relationships: Long-term relationships can be a huge competitive advantage just because of the sheer fact that it takes a long-time to build them. Everyone knows that, but the schools don’t teach it. You have to learn it on your own initiative.
2. Improving your likability: When I tell people that likable people have an easier time getting ahead, people usually agree. When I tell people that unlikeable people have a hard time getting things done, people agree to that too. However, when I ask them if they have done anything in the last one year to improve their likability factor, they look at me as if I am from a different world. Likability is a key skill and you have to learn it on your own.
3. Learning how to learn: Schools teach you stuff but rarely teach you the concept of “learning how to learn.” It is your responsibility to learn the best way to learn new things. Many of your current skills won’t help you to succeed in the future. So while you are delivering your current projects with your current skill sets, you have to also learn new skills. Unlike the times when you were a student, you have less time to learn a lot more. This means you have to learn how to learn.
4. Leveraging your time: Every one of us has only 24 hours, but successful people get more out of those 24 hours. How can you too get more out of your time? For starters, start designing your activities to yield multiple rewards. For example: you come across a very interesting service on the web, you can see who among your friends will be interested in it and why. Remember that even if only two people are interested, the reasons for their interest may be different. Your job is to send both of them a note explaining the relevance of that service to them. This is an example that you are caring for what they care about.
5. Building your personal brand: Every person has a personal brand, whether they like it or not. It is “who they are to the world.” So, you have a personal brand too. The real question therefore is: “Is your personal brand effective?” Like likability, personal brands provide a powerful shortcut to many things. It takes a while to build a powerful personal brand and it takes a lot of effort to maintain and grow it, but the rewards are long-term and sweet.

What values would you say have provided you with the greatest motivation to be continually successful? What do you care about most?

If I could pick one value, it would be the ability to touch the lives of people in a positive way. I like to have a magic touch–meaning when someone is already magical (high-performing), I would like to touch them!

As an entrepreneur and executive businessman, what experiences have left the most lasting impression or have been the most memorable in your work experience?

It is hard to single out any one experience during the last decade, Cody. However, every time I see a smile on one or more of our clients’ faces, I feel blessed that we were able to solve a problem for them or open up a significant opportunity with our products or services.

So, you’ve just unveiled your newest venture iPolipo just days ago. Please tell us all about it.

We launched iPolipo in the “controlled beta” mode on Monday, December 11. We hit 90% of our beta customer count by Friday of the same week. This was an overwhelmingly positive response for something that was built over the last one year.

iPolipo solves the everyday scheduling problem for business executives. It is common for two people to exchange multiple emails or voicemails to schedule one meeting. It is also frustrating to hold a particular slot on your calendar open waiting for a confirmation from the other party. iPolipo solves this problem by allowing people to share their free slots on the calendar effectively on the web.

And what motivated you to start writing? Tell us about some of your written work.

I started reading early. By the time I was nine, I must have read close to 700 books–mostly novels and other fiction. When I was nine, I had an idea–you can say a crazy idea–to write my own novel. At that age, you don’t have a lot of logic in your head. So I didn’t think much, but wrote a 200-page novel. My parents thought I was mentally ill, as it was odd for a 9-year old kid to write 200 pages of anything. But my craziness continued. I thought, “writing is the hard work; publishing should be easy.” I immediately took action and started searching for a publisher. Long story short, after more than a hundred rejections and four long years, I found a publisher to get my book published. After that there was no looking back, and I have thoroughly enjoyed writing since then.

I have so far got seven books published. Four novels, one collection of poems, one book on mathematics and my latest book Beyond Code (with a foreword by Tom Peters) is a management book that’s focus is to help people distinguish themselves to raise above the commodity crowd. I talk about 9 things that people can do to distinguish themselves. It is available in many major bookstores and almost all online bookstores like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and 800-CEO-READ.

What kind of readers do you write your blog Life Beyond Code for?

My blog is targeted at knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and ambitious students who want to get something more out of their lives. It started off as an extension to the book, but has taken a life of its own. I write on topics that range from how to get more out of your life, the art of leverage, distinguishing yourself, leadership, entrepreneurship and some occasional mini sagas (a mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words).

How do you think web 2.0 technology is changing the way we do business? Is this a positive trend?

Web 2.0, Software as a Service, Open Source or any other thing in and within itself cannot make a significant change. What we do with them is what is causing the change. I just received a business plan to look at where the entrepreneur had explained the business model something like this: “We have a web 2.0 application delivered as a Software as a Service model in the healthcare vertical.” I was sad because the idea should not be to create a buzzword-laden business plan. The underlying magic is the power of the business model and the power of execution. Both idea and the team are important and then comes the “how” part where web 2.0, open source and SaaS models come into play. Sometimes people tend to put the cart before the horse because of all the hype surrounding these buzzwords.

Describe your vision of the future of business. How do you think things might change on an international level, and how might businesses anticipate those changes?

All I know is that the rate of change that is happening at a global level is mind-boggling. I think nobody can cope with this change all on their own. Everyone needs help and whoever realizes this early and builds powerful configurations that can withstand the change can survive and thrive. There aren’t any sure-fire ways or practices that can help any organization to guarantee success. What I tell people is to constantly build the capacity to:

• handle change
• relentlessly innovate
• read the markets
• anticipate mid to long-term needs and start planning to create offerings before someone else does
• execute better than the competition

Who do you think are 3 or 4 of the most authoritative experts in leadership, innovation, and business productivity currently, other than yourself?

Here are my current picks, in no particular order:

Leadership

• Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes
• Marshall Goldsmith
• Tom Peters
• John Maxwell

Innovation

• Gary Hamel
• Clayton Christensen
• Tom Kelley (IDEO)
• W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy)

Productivity

• Stephen Covey
• Tim Sanders
• David Allen

What one life tip would you like to leave us with, Rajesh?

Focus on ROII. ROII stands for Return On Investment for an Interaction. Everyone is busy and running around to take care of many of their concerns.
People say time is money, but most people really don’t mean it or at least they don’t behave as if time was money. In fact, they do something that is shocking–they treat money as if they can never get it back, and they squander time as if they can easily refill it at a gas station or something like that. In reality, we all know that time lost is gone forever and money invested in the right things will yield multiple returns. Imagine for a second that you did subscribe to the “time is money” philosophy. This would mean that when someone interacts with you, they are investing their time and that means they are investing money in you. Like any business person, they are interested in getting the right return on their investment (in this case, this happens to be time) and it is your duty to provide that return for them.

If you don’t care about providing a decent ROII, you become a liability for that person. Worse, if someone else who is in the same role provides a better ROII for the same job, you have a serious competitive disadvantage.

I wish to thank Rajesh so much for giving me a few hours of his time and sharing his valuable thoughts and experiences! As is fitting, he is the king of ensuring he delivers the highest return-on-investment to everyone he interacts with!

Rajesh Setty currently lives in Silicon Valley with his wife Kavitha and their son Sumukh. You can learn more about him on his website Life Beyond Code, or from his book Beyond Code.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How To Get A Life Beyond Code: An Interview with Rajesh Setty

Now, part of my own personal mission is to start interviewing people who are doing what I want to do, or people who are experts in their fields–in business, finance, environment, technology… So, here is the first of what I hope to be many.

Ramit was kind enough to sit down with me (outside on a freezing Sacramento morning no less!) for a cup of coffee on a recent trip home to visit his family. I am so grateful for the time and thoughtful answers he gave me! We had such an amazing discussion, but here are the highlights.

Ramit, how would you say your essential self differs from your social self? In other words, if you could be living your dream, independent of how others might perceive you for it, what would that look like? Do you identify yourself more as the IWillTeachYouToBeRich teacher, or as something else?

Actually I think I’m lucky enough to be able to do whatever I want right now, and I’m doing it! Some of that involves trying to build a great company with some other guys, some of that involves writing a great blog that’s completely my own, and I can say whatever I want–no editorial control or anything. I don’t think there’s much of a difference between what people see on my site versus my personality. What my readers see me talking about day-in and day-out though is personal finance and entrepreneurship, and really there’s a lot of other stuff that I’m interested in–I don’t talk about college recruitment, and I don’t talk about my travel that I do on a personal basis. And if there’s one thing my friends would say about me that’s a little different from what’s on the site is that maybe I’m a little bit louder, a little bit more vulgar in real life, but pretty much what you see is what you get. The biggest compliment people give me is that they say, “When I read that I can actually hear your voice!”

It’s hard to put me in a bucket though–like, personal finance over here, wiki over there, college recruiting over here. That may be a little confounding, but my general goal here is to find what I’m really interested in, get really good at it, and then turn around and teach other people. That’s what happened with personal finance, that’s what happened with the musical instrument I play–the tabla… Teaching it absolutely helps me learn it better, because people challenge me all the time when I’m teaching things. That to me is pretty exciting, because I can read all the blog posts and all the books, but there’s nothing like having somebody with an individual question I don’t know challenge me, so I really appreciate that.

What sort of background do you come from and how did your childhood influence the person you’ve become?

We’re sitting here right now in Sacramento–we’re about a five minute walk from my house. I grew up very middle class here, my parents were very modest. They were immigrants from India, and what they taught me were things like “just ask”–ask for a discount, or ask to get published, just write it up and send it in to the newspaper! They taught me the scrappiness of “just ask–there’s nothing wrong with asking”, and not to fear failure. I manage most of my life through my email, and I have a folder in my inbox called “failures.” And for me, I say if I’m not getting 4 or 5 failures in there a month, then I’m not trying hard enough. When I was in high school it would be like applying for scholarships, in college it was applying for grants or projects, now it’s applying for jobs, etc. Learning from your failures is like: what did you do wrong? And what could you do better?

What was your experience like studying at Stanford University? How do you apply what you learned about psychology and technology to the business world?

I loved it! I had a great time there. I did my undergrad and graduate work there. I studied technology and psychology. It was about the people. The way I prioritized my work was: number one was my friends, two was my own business stuff, then third comes my academics. I don’t know if parents will like hearing this, but if it came down to me working on an essay that was due next week or going out with my friends, I would almost always choose going out with my friends. I don’t know if that’s for everyone, but it worked great for me, because I spent all this time meeting all these different people that are now all over the country that I can visit anytime, and they taught me more than any book could teach.

I studied a lot of bargaining and persuasion, and combined that with technology. In general I think it helps me understand things like, “Why are my friends saying this or acting like this?” In business, what are the levers that would motivate people? I’ll give you an example: Some people are really, really motivated by money, and that’s okay–they’re open about it. Other people are more motivated by ego, while some people–a lot of engineers, for example–are motivated by a challenge, like “How difficult is this problem? How big is the impact?” So, it’s like, you figure out those motivational things, and you work with the person to get what they really want. If someone came to me and they offered me a lot of money, it probably wouldn’t be the most motivational thing, because money is not as important as other things to me right now. So, it’s really important to understand people’s motivation and then turn around and apply it.

What would you say are the most valuable lessons you learned from your education that have helped you become successful since?

I learned that being smart is not the most important thing–I’m a big proponent of that. There are people who are way smarter than I am; probably most of my friends are way smarter than I am. And that’s good if you want to, for example, get into law school. But for my path, being book smart is not the most important thing by any means; it’s about, “How do you get things done? With really limited resources?” If I wanted to write an e-book or start a website, I’m not too technical, so I would need to persuade people to help me, and I would need to create this passion in them. Or how would I go around the bureaucracy of a university and get what I want? That was the most important stuff I learned. For me, what I value more than anything when I’m hiring somebody, it’s not your GPA–I don’t give a damn! It’s “Show me some examples of where you’ve gotten something done.”

What experiences outside of your education would you say have been essential? What skills are there that you think business-minded individuals need that aren’t taught in school?

Number one is taking initiative. In school it’s so easy to get by if you do the papers, take the tests, and get an A or an A- or whatever. You’re done, you’re satisfied. And to me, that’s like the bare minimum. I would rather get the B or a B- in a class, and have done something really cool outside of class. So taking initiative to really find what you’re interested in, talking to the right people… Like you emailed me and here we are meeting up! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I do that all the time. I did that in college, I do it all the time with CEOs or anybody I think is interesting. Take them out to lunch, take them out to coffee. They teach you something, maybe introduce you to their friends. And that’s the way that I’ve been fortunate enough to really come further than I thought I would have been able to.

What motivated you to start blogging?

When I was a sophomore–this was around 2002 in college–I came up with this idea called IWillTeachYouToBeRich, and I came up with the framework for a one-hour class, which I still use. And I went around to my friends telling them, “Hey you guys have got to take this class! In one hour, I will teach you how to be rich!” People would be so excited but they would never show up. I was so frustrated, so finally I thought I’d just start a blog, and I’ll just write–I’m gonna make it funny, I’m gonna make it how I really talk in real life, and I’m not going to make it really pedantic and boring like the old white men at Wells Fargo and Fidelity. There’s really cool stuff to be taught here; there’s so many lessons! And I can learn as I teach. So I did that, and for the first six months there were very few comments–like maybe one or two comments per post. And I just kept writing because I liked it. After six months I had all this that I had written; I was like, “I’m on a roll.” People started commenting, and maybe about 8 or 12 months into it there was some sort of click and a lot of people started commenting. In the background I was also doing a lot of marketing to spread the word. I was covered in the Wall Street Journal and a lot of people started coming to the blog, and then it really started building into a community.

College students and recent college grads are my core audience, that’s who I go after. But what’s interesting is that I have all these people I had no idea about. I have a very large group of 30-40 year olds, and I have high schoolers, and I have people who write me that are senior VP at a Fortune 100 company and they’re reading my blog! And it just happened because the word spread.

How significant do you think blogs and podcasts are as a new medium of communication?

I think they give everybody the ability to write something interesting about what they do, or communicate something interesting. I always say, everybody has an X-man ability… everybody’s got at least one thing that they’re amazing at—-they’re an X-man! Somebody’s got the piano, somebody’s an entrepreneur, someone may be a Westinghouse Scholarship winner, whatever it is. Everyone’s got something. If everybody just put their one thing, or their passion, on a blog or a podcast… I’ll tell you IWillTeachYouToBeRich was probably the best business decision I ever made. Now I have a huge reach, and I feel very fortunate about that. Business opportunities have come my way that I never would have found. The ability to start a blog–which you can do in like ten seconds–is great. It’s letting the really passionate people come out and spread the word.

What was your first company and what was it like founding and running your own business for the first time?

First one was right out of high school, called Scholastic Advising, which still operates with the involvement of my parents. When I was in high school I got so frustrated because so many people would say, “Oh I’m not going to apply to Stanford, because even if I got in, I couldn’t afford it.” This is exactly the wrong way to think about it. The right way to think about it is “I’m going to apply everywhere. I’m going to do a great application, and if I get in, then I’ll think about the money.” And usually what happens is if you’re good enough to get in, then they’ll take care of you. I saw a lot of kids doing this and it made me sad. My parents were very middle class and there were four kids in the family. They told us, “You guys have got to get scholarships, otherwise you can’t go to college.” So we did! And there’s no secret, it’s the same things I talk about: take the initiative, be patient, learn from your mistakes, that sort of stuff. So Scholastic Advising was an advisory company, a consulting company. We helped high school students get scholarships and financial aid, and with admissions. That was what we worked on, and it’s still continuing through my parents.

You’ve done some consulting with Omidyar Network and Storm Ventures. What has that taught you? And what do you think of the whole “web 2.0” phenomenon?

Pierre Omidyar was the founder of eBay. He’s very wealthy now and he wants to give back to improve the world. I was brought on to do some social psychology consulting. I would evaluate deals and make suggestions–”I think this is good, I think you should invest this much…” Similar thing for Storm and I’ve also done some consulting for a capital firm called Gemini. Mostly they want to get in and learn about this web 2.0 stuff and what young people are doing these days.

I think one thing a lot of young people don’t realize is that they are experts at what young people are doing! If you use instant messenger, Facebook, Myspace…you are an expert, and older people have no idea what’s going on! And that is a marketable opportunity. So, I turned that around and I marketed it, and they hired me as a consultant to teach them about blogs, social networks, photos, music sharing, all that stuff. A lot of companies are stuck in the past and they’re just buying big billboards, and they don’t understand young people don’t care about that anymore. We care about personalized recommendations, we care about what our friends say, we see it on Myspace and blogs and YouTube. And these older folks are struggling to understand that, so I think there’s a humongous opportunity for young people, if they’re smart and they package it right, to say “Here’s the things you need to know, here’s what I’m getting on a daily basis, and here’s the things you should be doing.” Older companies are paying a lot of money to have market research firms come in and instruct them, and I always just say why not get together a group of 5 or 10 people and just talk to them?

You’re also a co-founder and VP of Marketing for PBwiki. Tell us about PBwiki and where you hope it might lead you in the next few years?

It’s a scrappy startup that I love! We all co-founded this, there’s three of us, three Stanford grads. PBwiki means it’s as easy to make a wiki as it is to make a peanut butter sandwich. And a wiki is an easy-to-use website that lets a lot of people edit it together. You may have heard of Wikipedia; that’s a good example of using a wiki as an encyclopedia. So if you have a group project you might say “Hey Mike, you put the information about Thomas Jefferson, I’ll put the information about Susan B. Anthony.” Or if you’re taking a vacation, “You do the airfare, I’ll do the hotels, and we’ll put it all together and see what everyone has done.” And of course businesses are using it, educators are using it in the classroom… If you go to PBwiki.com it takes about ten seconds to set one up, we host it and manage it, and it’s free for you! And if you want to have more features or more space then you can pay us a small subscription fee. So we’ve hosted over 140,000 wikis in about a year, and it’s growing very quickly. We got offices a few months ago, which is a big step for us. And we just hired somebody else on, and have taken some funding. The goal here is: wikis for the masses. Most people still don’t know what a wiki is, and we want to share that, because if you’ve ever sent emails back and forth a hundred times editing this and that, why not just put it on the wiki where everyone can see the changes and everyone can go back in time to see past revisions?

You’ve co-authored a book on college recruiting coming out — Recruit or Die, scheduled for release July 5, 2007! And the big news is that you just signed your second book–this one to go along with your personal finance blog! What will be in your forthcoming IWillTeachYouToBeRich book that is unique from the online resources?

IWillTeachYouToBeRich, the book, won’t be coming out for a while. In fact, I’m just starting to write it. But if you’ve read my blog, you know that I have a no-nonsense style. I’m not about platitude, I’m not about being bought by any corporate interests, I’m just about telling people the best things to do. And I offer some different ways of thinking about things: for example one thing that I encourage some people to do is buy a new car instead of a used car. And that’s different than a lot of personal finance people, and I explain why. If you like my reasoning or not, at least you understand it. IWillTeachYouToBeRich the book will have a combination of personal finance and entrepreneurship, and you’ll be able to pick it up and finish it and say “Man, I know what to do tomorrow, I know what to do next week, and I know what to do for the next 30 years.” You can never finish learning, and I’m not saying this should be your only book, because of course it shouldn’t. But in terms of getting your strategy together and getting started, in the one or two hours it takes you to read it you will know exactly what you need to do. That’s the difference–I am very tactical. I could give you a lot of generalities like “start early” and “diversify,” but that doesn’t mean anything if you think “Shit! What bank account should I get?” Or, “What do I do with this debt?” I’ll be saying: here’s the steps, here’s what you do, and here’s what to look out for.

You’ll be able to see excerpts of the book on my site. And it’s not going to be just a book. I’ll be letting my readers contribute to it and actually add some of those stories to the book, and I’ll be asking people to actually help me shape the way the book looks, give me links, tell me what you think should be in this book. So it’s going to be a pretty collaborative effort. And there will be some fun stuff that I won’t announce yet, but stay tuned.

In your opinion, who are 4 of the most authoritative experts (other than yourself, of course) in the personal finance field today?

One I really admire is Suze Orman. I’m actually a big fan of hers. Some people are not a big fan of her style, but I don’t mind someone’s style so much if they have good things to say. Every time I watch her show I learn something. What I like about her is that she encourages people to manage their own finances. One of my core tenets is that almost everyone can manage their finances without a financial advisor. And she teaches you that you don’t want to be paying fees to these financial companies–you want to learn a little bit, and do it on your own.

Another guy I really admire is Jonathan Clemens at the Wall Street Journal. He’s saying “Think long term.” And a lot of young people are very stupid–they’ll say things like “I bought this stock and I sold it for a 20% profit.” And they don’t realize that–no they didn’t–they had to pay a huge amount in taxes on that, and they didn’t realize their gains as much as they could have, because if they just held it and read the research, long-term investing beats short-term almost every day of the week. He focuses on getting started, putting your money away and diversifying. It isn’t sexy, but there’s a difference between being sexy and being rich.

JLP at AllFinancialMatters is great. And J.D. Roth, who just started up a new blog called Get Rich Slowly, has just been around for a few months and he’s doing very well–he’s got great readership and great articles and it’s not a surprise. I think these guys are doing a phenomenal job. I think it’s interesting you have these experts like Suze Orman, but then you have just these regular guys doing everyday blogging, day-in and day-out.

To top this all off, do you have one financial tip you think everyone should know?

I don’t do that. It’s pretty sensationalistic to say I have one tip. IWillTeachYouToBeRich is a sensationalistic enough title! If you go to the site, you’ll be surprised because it’s not about any secrets. There are no secrets, but I’ll tell you a few things that I think work. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, you just have to get started early. And what I mean by that is you have to understand your financial accounts. You have to look at how much you are spending–most people don’t even do that!–and I will teach you to do that. And then you say “Alright I have one credit card; I need a few other sources of credit and I need to use them effectively.” And then you can get a free E*trade account and you can start trading a little bit and investing in index funds, which are a pretty good bet. And don’t be stupid! A lot of people just watch MSNBC and read CNN Money, which are some of the most hyped-up, unbelievable things, and they buy stocks that they read about in Smart Money. Big mistake! Because those magazines and those TV shows have to sell something. And I’m not out to sell anything, it’s just about picking something that you know and you love, and you use. Finally you need to learn to track these things, whether you use a pen and paper, or Excel. Tracking exactly what you’re making and what you’re spending is a way that you can get rich over a long period of time.

I have a very boring investment strategy: evaluate my diversification strategy, understand that I can take a lot of risk because I’m young, buy stocks or index funds and let it ride. If I think there’s a good value, buy some more. I’ve hardly ever sold. That’s not sexy, but at the end of the day the question is: do you want to be sexy or do you want to be rich? My basic message here is you don’t have to be the smartest person in the world, you just have to get started. And taking that first step will put you above 99% of other people your age. If you do start early and you are sensible, I think long-term you will be rich. That’s it, it’s as simple as that.

Well, again I want to thank Ramit Sethi so much for taking the time to meet with me and discuss his successes and experiences. If you’d like to learn more about Ramit and what he does, check out his blog IWillTeachYouToBeRich, his company PBwiki, and his upcoming book Recruit or Die. Students who’d like to learn more about personal finance can start with this article on Thrilling Heroics, Six Simple Money Tips to Get You Back on the Financial Track.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Interview: Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Transforming the World, One Website at a Time

When Prosper Magazine asked me to take the lead on its student Perspectives blog event, I jumped at the chance to assemble a group of local students from UC Davis and Sac State to voice our opinions to the local community. The voice of the youth only transforms society very slowly, and is only taken seriously by some. But it is the voice of things to come.

So, when I was asked to step outside of my technical role, out of administrative duties and out of recruiting, and speak here about what issues I believe will shape the future of our country, I thought back to a recent incident when an acquaintance accused the students of my generation of being lazy and apathetic to our education and to the world around us. In a setting of “adults” who agreed with her, it was hard to argue my case. But now let me tell you how I believe we are slowly transforming society. And let this serve as both my answer to the question “What issue do I think will shape our future” and my answer to why you should pay attention to this student blog series.

I will begin my argument by admitting that our reliance on text chat, IMing, online dictionaries, calculators, SparkNotes, Napster, YouTube, MySpace, and other resources can indeed lead to some laziness, but my generation—the Gen-Yers or Millenials, as we are called—a generation which is currently becoming increasingly educated and entering the workforce—is not apathetic! My generation is simply utilizing technology and software to find new, and oftentimes more efficient, ways to solve the traditional problems that generations past have always had to solve.

I could tell you how the new millionaires are the 20- and 30-something programmers like Tom Anderson, Max Levchin, and Kevin Rose (see the recent issue of BusinessWeek). I could tell you how the internet is providing new ways for us to connect with each other through sites like MySpace, Facebook, and their business-oriented counterpart LinkedIn. I could tell you how I think we are slowly taking the corporate control out of consumerism with co-creation sites such as CafePress and Zazzle.com. I could talk about how blogs and podcasts are providing a new grassroots information outlet, and sites like Wikipedia, Digg.com and del.icio.us are empowering the everyman to have a say in which information, and which news issues, are most important—one of my personal favorites. But I will focus on three examples that are making real differences in the world.

There are many blogs I read every day. Several that are influencing the direction of the worldwide web—Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo for news and politics, Lifehacker for productivity solutions, and PFblog and I Will Teach You To Be Rich for finance and money matters. Ramit Sethi is the aggressive Stanford grad blogger who claims to be able to teach you to be rich. I find his mission to be the most interesting—because he combines his online presence with real-life financial seminars he gives (often for free), but mostly because he targets college students! Through stories of his own entrepreneurial experience, smart financial deals, and wise saving habits, he is undoubtedly transforming the lives of his readers.

To quote one of my favorite songs by Faithless, “Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.” While some of my classmates may tend to be physically inactive, spending their days on MySpace or playing Halo 2, inactivity does not equal inaction. I run my own weblog to get the word out about current issues I think will have an impact on our lives, and like me, there are many individuals across the globe using the internet and other technologies to promote social change. The net has supported many large ground-up social campaigns like Million Voices For Darfur, a campaign to send one million postcards to President Bush to ask Congress to support more aid to the genocide-stricken region in Sudan, started by the Save Darfur Coalition, which has spread like wildfire across the web and inspired several student-run groups like STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), the Genocide Intervention Network, and Students Against Genocide.

Also in the business of changing the way society interacts, Kiva.org is a brand new service that I recently came across. Its mission is to provide a link between American capitalists and third-world working poor, harnessing a new concept called microfinance. In the words of the organization’s president, Premal Shah, the company aims to “allow individuals to make small loans to low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world. In this way, people like you can help provide affordable working capital for the world’s poor—money to buy a sewing machine, livestock, etc.—empowering them to start a business and earn their way out of poverty.” Amounts as little as $25 can make a significant difference for someone in the developing world. It is not an investment—more of a charitable contribution, with the goal not being financial return, just the repayment of the principal. But, by putting capabilities like this in the public arena like they never have been before, organizations like Kiva and Omidyar Network could truly reshape the landscape of international business and economics.

So, while many of us doze off, text message, play video games, or visit MySpace in class, remember that our methods of consumption, news aggregation, communication, and finance are slowly making an impact on the world—one which I hope will be positive as we slowly learn to take the reigns of society. The challenges that will face us in this endeavor are to make sure that the lines of communication stay as open as possible (see: Net Neutrality) and to make sure that truly cutting-edge ideas like the ones I’ve mentioned above get the proper amount of financial support (in the form of venture capital investment, charity, and philanthropy). And remember, as you read these student blogs, that you are witnessing the transformation in the way information is communicated.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Transforming the World

I have become involved with a contest sponsored by Sacramento’s Prosper Business Magazine to enlist up to 20 local Northern California students to blog about the issues in the weeks leading up to the event and then live from the discussions on September 15th. The speakers for this year’s event will be the following:
Dave Barry (writer/humorist)
Tom Daschle (Senator)
Bob Dole
Lisa Ling (TV personality)
Cheech Marin (Comedian/Actor)
Tom Ridge (former Secretary of Homeland Security)

Prosper (who host a great series of business blogs by Sacramento business people) will sponsor the final 20 students to attend the event and hear the speakers live. It will be a student-led project, and they are looking for experienced student bloggers in the local Sacramento community and accross Northern California to participate. There will be cash prizes for the student blogs that generate the most traffic, not to mention some great exposure! If anyone is interested in participating, please get in touch with me.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Perspectives 2006