100stories

By Roxie Hentz, as told to Violet Jinqi Wang When I was in 5th grade, my parents transferred me to a school in the suburbs. The first time I walked into the classroom, I was stunned by the sea of white faces staring back at me. Tentatively walking to my desk and sitting down on…

By Kyle Freund, as told to Violet Jinqi Wang If there is one thing I hope people take away from knowing me, it’s that you should think about where your food comes from. And how it got there. Sometimes, when people hear that I work with Fairtrade America, they question me. “Oh yeah? How do…

By Sandra Bradley, as told to Violet Jinqi Wang I like to call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I fell into my first entrepreneurial journey because I knew how to do something that was in hot demand — web development. Growing to meet that demand and forming a company just made sense. It was in the…

By Sid Ramesh, as told to Olivia Barrow There’s something about blockchain to me that’s way addictive. But I wasn’t that excited about it when I first heard of it. Five years ago, I would never have expected that I would take a leave of absence from college to pursue a career in blockchain. I…

By Jess Bahr, as told to Violet Jinqi Wang I love when Facebook changes its algorithm. Figuring out how algorithms work and how to exploit them is what I do for a living. Ok, exploit might be a strong word. But I see it as a scientific process that involves observing, asking questions, proposing hypotheses…

By Christopher Patterson, as told to Violet Jinqi Wang There’s one big difference between the corporate world and the startup world. Meetings. In the corporate world, meetings are often something you just do — boring, could have been summed up in an email, bleh. In the startup world, you only take a meeting when you…

By Danny Livermore, as told to Violet Jinqi Wang I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the following response when I tell people I’m working on a startup. “That’s so cool! Awesome! Good Luck?” There is always this nuanced hesitation in their tone. It’s as if they are saying, “We’re all rooting for…