REWIND TIME. Last year, in May 2011, I wrote a detailed blog post that laid out the specific steps I took to land my dream internship with Hashable in New York City. Emily Hickey, the CMO of Hashable (at the time) added a paragraph to the beginning of my post and then published it to [...]
Let’s set the stage. On February 12, 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned as President of Egypt. Just one month prior, on January 17th, a man lit himself on fire in front of Egypt’s parliament building in downtown Cairo – propelling the country’s people on a mission to overthrow Mubarak and his regime. Beginning on January 25th, the [...]
I started hearing the buzz just two weeks ago. Rachel Sklar was making a music video (see it towards the end of this post) for the Raise Cache fashion show, to benefit hackNY. Unfortunately, I was far away at Clarkson University… studying hard for a Fluid Mechanics exam I had the same day of the [...]
I never expected to find a mentor for my career when the cashier randomly included a magazine with my order of textbooks. It was September 2008, and I had just bought my textbooks for Clarkson University. It was in that very magazine that I first read about student entrepreneur Matt Ackerson. Digging around, I found him on Facebook and decided to [...]
Collin Yarbrough has been my roommate and my main man at Clarkson University since freshman year. Almost straight away, he introduced me to the Steve Jobs keynotes (or, “Stevenotes“) and made each one a scheduled, required viewing in Cubley Hall 108. In no time, I was hooked. Today, he found an email that I sent to him on June 4, 2010 [...]
Right now, a movement is taking place. A Party revolution. It all started with Gary Lachance throwing some pretty insane parties. Today, the parties have grown to tens of thousands of people. In a few weeks, they are bringing the ridiculous fun to the US for the ‘Strictly Business Tour‘. Along with his co-founder and fellow Canadian, Tom (pictured on the left), [...]
My mentor/friend Larry Chiang inspired me to write this story. It is a story from personal experience of building genuine friendships with mentors, and the value of learning from them. Last year at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City, I was unexpectedly introduced (via text message) to the famed man of [...]
Sports fanatics: may I have your attention, please. Have you ever thought ‘if there was a Wall Street for sports, I know I’d be the Gordon Gekko of that stock market‘…? If you’re as passionate as my boy Dave West professes to be, then I may have found your dream-come-true. Meet StarStreet: the stock market [...]
Do you know how much energy I have right now? One post certainly won’t do justice to how pumped I am about the redesign Matt Ackerson, Paolo Roa and the PetoVera team did for my blog, ‘The X Factor’. I am fired up. Motivated. This is only the beginning. Thank you, thank you, thank you. [...]
Welcome to The X Factor’s brand new illmatic redesign! Let’s just say….thanks a MILLION to Petovera Design. As an aspiring entrepreneur myself, I think one of the best ways to learn is to go directly to the source and study the stories of founders building startups. Wait ’til you read Natalie’s interview. Natalie Kaminski was [...]