Fireside Chat Entrepreneurship - Building a Start-up Business

In our Fireside Chat program, members of the community share their profession/career with students in a small group setting.  This month Uday Gupta discussed entrepreneurship and building a start-up business.

In Uday’s words… We are all just making up stories - every minute of the day, we are telling ourselves stories that drive our decisions. If you take a minute to think about it… We can tell ourselves whatever story we like, as long as we’re not hurting people.

From there, the sky is the limit in terms of what we can tell ourselves.  In life, we’re either living our own story or living out someone else’s.  What would you rather do?

Take the time to make up good stories for yourselves - they have such a huge impact on your life, your mental health, and your interaction with other people.

I spent the majority of my life telling a different story than most of the people around me… In a lot of ways, I was an outsider, or at least an outlier from the typical people in my life.  That was okay, though, since I, like all of us, got to live with the consequences of those choices and, for the most part, I was pretty happy with how those turned out.

I started little projects or businesses around the age of 14 - I mainly did them as a way of making some pocket money or being able to buy something.

I started out selling greeting cards door to door where we earned $1 for every set sold and then I organized my friends to do the same so we could save up to buy a tent.

That felt like a huge deal to be able to get something simply for going around and basically talking to people.

From there, I started different projects like a clothing company, because I enjoyed designing stuff, and that led to me creating a marketing and advertising business to promote the clothing and that turned out to be the start of social media marketing.

I grew that business to include campuses all over the country and then internationally as well as doing work for local and national companies like the movie studios and several large non-profits.

The story I kept telling myself was that I could do all this stuff, even though I had no background or real experience other than the fact that I was really interested in whatever I was doing.

The things I didn’t know, I learned to figure out.  I was pretty naive in that I believed everything would work out and didn’t really focus on failing.

I think failing is probably the worst story we can tell ourselves - I take that back…. The worst story we can tell ourselves is that failing is a bad thing or that we should be afraid of failing.

The fact is, we learn a ton from failing and there really isn’t anything such as a mistake - it’s all just good experience.

It seems hard to believe that because I think we make failing seem like such a big deal

but the truth is, the things that seem like they’re a big deal now will most likely not impact you anywhere near as much as you think.

If I could do it all over, I would try to make as many mistakes as possible and learn from them quickly because there are so many things I probably didn’t try to do because I was afraid of failing.

Another thing I was always curious about was stocks and I basically taught myself how to invest in the stock market.  I made a TON of mistakes - again, I had no real idea what I was doing when I started.

But I kept at it and eventually I was able to retire pretty early because of the money I made through investing.  It wasn’t how I expected that to happen but it proved to me the value of staying curious and trying lots of things - in many ways, stocks were the last thing I expected would be my biggest financial success.

I only share with you that story because it’s a reminder to me that not everything works out as planned - I would have loved to have been a big success from one of the businesses I started and even though I did well in those, they never quite lived up to the high ideals I had for those projects.

And, I would have never guessed that something else would provide me with the money to be able to do the things I really wanted to do like helping people and non-profits.  That took a long time for me to come to grips with.

And, it wasn’t always smooth sailing - as I was starting up these projects in college, I was diagnosed with bipolar and learned to deal with mania as part of my life.

That ended up having a huge impact on me and my family as I grew up and it took a long time for me to rewrite that story as not being a huge failure but a gift that helped me become a lot more sensitive to other people and something I could use to help others going through mental health issues.

I also started a project to help people naturally deal with things like mania and depression rather than just rely on medication.  (the secret - almost everyone goes through stress and anxiety…it’s not just a disorder).

One last story I wanted to share with you…

I once wanted to start a project with a friend and we decided we would contact the biggest people in the world to share their stories with other young people.  It was a crazy idea - we had no contacts, we didn’t know any of these people.

We just had a dream or a story we were telling ourselves that we wanted to try something and were willing to get started.  So we did.  We literally just started researching people and cold calling to get in touch with them.  We were able to contact lots of them, and several said no.

But far less than you’d expect.  Some even gave us projects to work on.  I’m amazed at how much people are willing to help each other if you ask sincerely.

Which brings me to my third point - find a mentor.  It’s the ultimate cheat code.

What I mean by that is that anything you’ve ever wanted to do in your life, someone else has probably already done it or something pretty close to it and would happily help you do the same.

I’ve never met anyone that’s turned down a request to be a mentor and help another person out, if that’s really all you’re asking for.

People love to share their stories and experience of how they got to do something and almost everyone would love to save another person from making the mistakes they did along the way.

You just have to ask.

I could go on and on and keep telling you stories from my life but I’ll save you from that for now.

I’m here mainly to be a resource to you and share whatever I can that will help your dreams come true, because everyone deserves to dream big and see those dreams become a reality.

And, learn a lot in the process.

A lot of times, people worry that they don’t have money to start up a project or business idea.  I’d honestly say that isn’t the biggest hurdle but to help with that, we are setting up a small fund to help you get started through Robyne’s Nest so you can get funding for your ideas to get off the ground.

You have your whole life to work for someone else and, ultimately, if that’s what you want to do, there is nothing wrong with that at all.

I would just encourage you to really dig in and figure out what you love to do and either work for someone doing that or start your own project in something you love.

It may require that you do something part-time to pay the bills while you get started in your dream story but that’s okay - you’ll know why you’re doing it and that makes the hard work and sacrifice all worth it.

If there is anything I can ever do to help you in your journey of writing the best story of your life, please don’t hesitate to ask.

I’m happy to help you however I can and it gives me a lot of pleasure to see others succeed, so I’m glad to help.

And, if I can’t help you, I’d love to help you get in touch with others who might - there are a lot of people out there, a lot smarter than me, who would love to help make your dreams come true.

Yes, it’s up to you to do the heavy lifting, but finding people along the way to assist you can make things a whole lot easier.

Thank you.