During my time at the early college program I went to, I was surrounded by 400 other students who were equally as passionate as I am. And it was upsetting to see that one of the biggest problems among the student body was simply paying for tuition. Many of my friends took out massive loans to pay off their private school tuition, and many more who were never able to attend the early college program because of its steep costs.

Yes – paying for college tuition is obviously a widespread problem. But when we’re talking about accelerated students who are highly likely to take leading roles in improving science, education, and society in ways we can’t even predict, I think we need to funnel more resources into seeing their dreams take shape. It’s not to say that I don’t care about students who come from poorer backgrounds, because I do. And so does pretty much every non-profit organization that aids education. But when the vast majority of the world’s leading thinkers and doers come from such a narrow margin of people, I think it’s a shame that we’re not providing them with more educational and monetary resources. From the non-profit perspective, these already smart students seemingly need help the least, when in fact they’re in a position that deserves resources the most.

During my first week attending Simon’s Rock, the Early College, I sat beside representatives from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They were curious about the mission of the college, but also on why and how the students ended up there. All of my peers and I would tell them a similar message: we went to college early because we felt educationally neglected in high school; not because we were rocket scientists or baby geniuses.

Having a “good” educational system doesn’t seem acceptable to me, because it’s settling for mediocrity while not accounting for crucial edge cases. Highly intelligent individuals are being screwed over when placed in decent yet boring academic environment among not-so-motivated peers. It’s an insanely high opportunity cost to leave America’s brightest students behind in standard high schools. And as I mentioned earlier, transferring to a private school is rarely an option for the typical accelerated student. Many of my peers at Simon’s Rock wouldn’t have been able to come if it hadn’t been for scholarships, including my first roommate. That scholarship money is seen as a way to help her fund her education when in reality, it’s an investment in her ability to do amazing things for the world. While we’re yet to see the extent of her contributions to the world, I’m pretty certain that we’ll one day realize how incredibly efficient and effective her scholarship money was spent.

The underlying problem, however, is much deeper. “Investing” into the education of accelerated students isn’t particularly complex, but identifying worthy individuals is a non-trivial problem, because they don’t even realize their own potential. There are plenty of smart and accelerated students in high school, but having them realize that there’s an opportunity for more has been a a huge struggle for Simon’s Rock. Truly smart individuals are humble and tend to underrate their own abilities. The parents also underrate their abilities, and I think this is partly because their parental attitude is what led to their child being able to excel in the first place. Many capable students don’t ultimately go into early college because they don’t think they’re smart enough, and those who do often have trouble getting the necessary financial support to go: thus leaving them behind in half-assed “accelerated” high school programs. Pity.

I suppose that it makes sense that most educational non-profits are focusing their energy on poor public schools: the problems are clear, many of the solutions are evident, and it’s a cause that’s easy to gather support for. Yet it’s these smart and already accelerated students who are usually creating the solutions to these problems. Treating these accelerated students as “bonus points” in our pursuit to reform education simply doesn’t make sense because they’re the long-term solution to our world’s problems. Hopefully one day, we’ll see more and more early college programs forming that provide their students with theoretically infinite resources and support to help them achieve their goals and dreams.

I hate education, and I always have. School has never been a fun place for me. In elementary school, I was bored out of my mind. My 5th grade teacher discouraged me from my entrepreneurial pursuits. High school was more about dealing with girl drama than it was about learning meaningful things. By having spent more than 80% of my life suffering through these traumatic experiences, I’ve become interested in something that I’ve forever dreaded. While I’m yet to do anything super innovative to help the world of education, my past project internshipIN.com was a start in that direction. I realized that most of my learning came from working at a company, and so I spent my limited free time on helping students find real world internships.

More recently, I decided that I hated accounting, I hated finance, and I hated money (although I enjoy the idea of having it). Managing finances is the one thing I despise most in building a company, and nothing stresses me out more than thinking about money. It’s the root of all evil, it causes people to kill, it leads to people going to jail (think Madoff), and yet it’s the biggest driving force behind every person’s life aspirations. So I built a startup, Indinero.com, around the idea of making money suck less for businesses. It’s something I plan on dedicating my career to.

One of my friends in the investment world recently asked me why I’m building Indinero. After all, why would any young college student want to work on a finance startup? I think about my life as doing two primary things: Minimizing my risk, and minimizing my dissatisfaction with the world. This is an odd way to think about things, because most people think about their life in the opposite way. But I’ve come to realize that minus the shitty things that happen in life, I’m an optimally happy person. If I can remove the things that crush my soul, I’d be a happier person, and the world would theoretically be a better place.

What would you rather do: Make the world a better place, or prevent it from sucking as bad as it does? I’d pick the latter, because it embraces the fact that the world is far from its optimal state. As my friend Manu told me, “make sure you’re creating a painkiller instead of a vitamin.” As I write this article, I’m suffering from the worst cold I’ve had in years. I’d pay anything to make this go away, and no cold medication has worked. So thinking about life from my current unhappy perspective, I see the world as a crappy place to live, and I’d be 10X happier if I simply wasn’t unhappy. What a seemingly simple idea!

Because think about it: during the happiest moments of your life, you probably didn’t have anything special or unique that made you happy. But in each and every one of these happiest moments, you lacked the things that would otherwise drive you mad.

This past summer was the happiest time of my life. I lived on ramen (literally), I shared a tiny Berkeley home with my team members at Indinero, and I was at the peak of my happiness despite my having zero material assets and close to zero fulfillment in my career. But I didn’t have the two things that stress me out most: 1) school and 2) money issues. Between being on summer break and having $35k in the bank (and a startup that creates software that helped cure my finance concerns), I couldn’t be happier. Or in more meaningful terms, I couldn’t be happier with my life.

I’m going to suggest the inverse of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com preaches. He’s big on figuring out what makes you happy, and it was inspiring for me to see. But being honest with myself, I felt that it wasn’t very satisfying because it just seemed too idealistic for even my liking. If you gave someone a week to think about what makes them happy, they still won’t be able to give you the correct answer. People are generally bad at thinking of what makes them happy, so instead of focusing on happiness, I think it’s much more practical to focus on unhappiness because it’s much easier for us to identify and eliminate.

Identifying sources of unhappiness is the easy part. Eliminating them is the difficult part. but it’s what makes life seem more interesting. I think entrepreneurs are so fascinating because they first eliminate that point of dissatisfaction in their own life, then dedicate their remaining time to helping others eliminate it too. My mom is a prime example: growing up in a poor family, she had no choice but to wear her older brother’s hand-me-downs. There’s nothing more depressing than a teenage girl wearing her older brother’s ugly clothing. So as a 13 year old, my mom designed and sewed her own clothing. Soon later, she started doing this for others. Fast forward a few decades, and it’s the driving force behind her career and the jobs of hundreds of people.

As pessimistic as it sounds, I think that identifying your sources of unhappiness is the most effective and honest way for you to live a better life. (and find ideas for your next company) What do you hate? How can you turn it into helping yourself and ultimately helping others? And that’s the key to happiness.

Too many people have their happiness set on the future and on achieving an end goal, but life is all about enjoying the journey. So enjoy every moment while you can.

Back when I was just playing around with the idea for my startup, I decided to put together a quick executive summary and apply to the UC Berkeley Business Plan competition. And we got rejected from round one not only because our ideas were terrible, but one of the judges commented “you’re only looking to raise 30k?”

Yes. Only $30k. I actually felt a little insulted that the tiny amount we wanted was a critique of my executive summary. For the stage we were at (two weekends before my co-founder Andy and I built a prototype), $30k was far more than we needed to get something running. Fast forward two months, and we won a $35k grant after building a prototype for $0. Who needs to enter a business plan competition anyway! (I now advise the business plan competition)

Throughout the summer, we were burning through cash. Not going to college meant paying for our food and rent, so the $35k grant wouldn’t last long. We started talking to angel investors, and ultimately met this guy named Steve Blank. He’s best known for his writings on customer development, and wrote “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” – a book that I’d recommend to anyone and everyone who aspires to create a meaningful business. I told him about the problem we had raising money while still in school, and without that mystical hockey stick curve. He basically told me to not to raise money until I saw a hockey stick curve. “… but Steve, if we had a hockey stick curve, we probably wouldn’t have trouble raising money!” And that was the key lesson: To be in a position where we would never have to raise money.

He essentially told us what every angel investor who said “no” told us: go back to the drawing board, get more traction. But instead of just saying that we should do all of the above, he told me why: If we were to raise money now, we’d burn through it no matter what. The important thing is to spend that money wisely, and without a scalable sales model, we’d be spending money on the wrong things. We’d be scaling an ineffective sales and marketing strategy, we’d be prematurely growing out the engineering team, and we’d basically be burning through money as ineffectively as Paris Hilton. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but after thinking about it more, I realized that he was right.

Just this week, I was talking to some well-known venture capitalists about my company, told them about the idea, talked about the market, and one of the first questions they asked was “do you have a website yet?” Well… not only do we have a website up, but we have a product AND paying customers! And they were stunned because the majority of entrepreneurs who pitch them have nothing to show for but a nice powerpoint presentation. Not to mention, these “entrepreneurs” actually work full-time on their companies unlike Andy and I. And this got me thinking even more about the state of VC… people look at investment money as a means to an end, whereas people like Steve Blank see it as an accelerator for growing something that already functions.

Remember back in your college days, when you flunked a test and thought “that test was stupid! I studied so hard, but I studied the wrong things!” Well, same thing applies to raising VC money too soon. You don’t have the kinks to your product settled, you don’t understand your market well enough to be marketing to them efficiently enough, and raising money buys you the time you want to scale an ineffective operation. So why bother?

Now the worst situation would be if you’re a “hot” startup that’s raised a few million dollars, you have no revenue, no hockey stick curve, and you’re trying to raise more money now that your first round is almost dried up. Not even Steve Blank could tell you to give your first VCs their money back and to get things right, because it’s too late. You just wasted $X million dollars building a scrappy product, you don’t have any revenue, so you’re practically at the mercy of your next VCs. Crappier valuation, more dilution for the team. Last time I checked, the vast majority of web startups do this.

So this is the second thing I’ve learned from my summer of entrepreneurship: plan that every round of financing is your last. With only $50k from grants, we’ll be fine. This means 100% ramen profitable for a 5 person team, and we’ll never have to raise VC money if we don’t want to, or if VCs don’t like us. And this is psychologically very good for us, because we know we won’t be any rush to appease the VC world, and because we can focus all of our time on the product. There’s nothing worse than spending time to raise money, because it effectively shuts down your company for the weeks (or months) that you go through the process. So I figured, if we’re ramen profitable, wouldn’t any smart investor want to come to us? And instead of it taking a few months to pitch a whole string of investors, we could focus on building a great business over the course of our senior year in college, then upon graduation it shouldn’t be too difficult to raise money. Yet again, we won’t need VC money since we’re already profitable… see how powerful this mental exercise is?

Being still a senior in college, I might just be overly idealistic. Everything I write is how I think the world should work rather than how things actually function. But I think there’s a lot to be said about Paul Graham’s view of college-aged entrepreneurs:

“Someone ignorant but smart will come along and reinvent everything, and in the process simply fail to reproduce certain existing ideas”

My translation of this is to trust your ignorant instincts, and do what seems to be ideal because many people don’t understand why they do things in the way that they do. This directly relates to the argument of why it’s not good to copy the work of others: because you don’t understand how and why people did things in the way they did. How do you know that they aren’t copying the work of someone else too? By looking at things from a fresh and original perspective, you have a complete grasp over your decision making power, and you significantly decrease your risk of making stupid and uninformed decisions.

I think of raising money in the same way that I think about getting married. It’s something I naturally feel inclined to do (since it’s something everyone seems to be doing these days), but I want to be honest with myself: why in the world would I want to get raise money (or get married) other than to be part of the norm? At the time of my writing this, I don’t have very good answers to either questions. My business isn’t operating at the level of efficiency needed to make good use of VC money, and I’m in no mood to give up my career for bearing children.

Until I can directly and honestly answer the questions to my own life pursuits, I won’t be raising money or getting married. But who knows, my views are likely to change over the next few months.

When I was recruiting our lead product person to join Indinero, he had already prepared himself to tell me he wasn’t interested. His reasoning had nothing to do with the idea, the team, or anything related to the business. He was just scared that our expectations of him would far exceed what he was capable of, when we were actually on the same page all along. Since then, he’s been tremendously helpful to the company.

How often do you hear of personal relationships not working out? In almost every case of a breakup, it’s that the expectations were off. The guy wanted a casual relationship, the girl wanted more. It’s very instinctual, but most people just don’t communicate these things. So when the guy starts talking about what he wants in his next girlfriend, the girl’s shocked to find out that he hadn’t even considered her for marriage. What a disaster…

Not only should expectations be set, but they should be higher than what you’re personally expecting. It’s like financial planning – you have your “ideal scenario”, but in the back of your mind, you know you’ll never hit those benchmarks.

Set high expectations, expect low results. Then you’ll never be disappointed again!

You’d be surprised, because many people don’t. Especially here at Berkeley. The debates between two sides of an issue aren’t because our students are open-minded, but rather because there’s diversity. With so many college-aged students on a single campus, it just so happens that there are multiple sides of the debate. But it doesn’t make any of them open-minded, educated, or enlightened in any way. You’re also probably thinking, “Isn’t a political discussion a good way to end a friendship?” My answer is absolutely, and that’s why I think it would make for an excellent interview question. Even if the candidate was a Zionist Jew, I would argue the Palestinian perspective just to put their pride in check.

I first thought about this when I was in a model United Nations session. I was watching my colleagues representing other nations debate among each other, argue about issues without a goal and without a premise. Had they never learned the tactics from “How to Win Friends and Influence People”? I saw from a first-hand perspective why the UN doesn’t seem to get anything done. People leave just as ignorant or educated as they were coming into the assembly. People argue their stances, boost their egos, claim victory, and do very little to actually help the situation. And it’s ironic too, because everyone coming into the model UN wonders why nothing useful ever gets done.

Which makes me think that it’s not so much an issue about policies and actions… it’s about the method by which we negotiate and resolve conflict with each other. The most important part of this being, “does the other side even attempt to listen to and understand my perspective?” Have you ever been in a situation where two people were in a political debate, and you could tell that the person who wasn’t talking was only thinking about what they would say next in rebuttal? It’s good entertainment, but no conflict resolution. This directly applies to the business world – if you’re negotiating something, even as simple as an employee’s salary, can you think about the other person’s feelings, needs, and concerns?

I’m not saying that talking politics is the best way to see if a candidate is any good, but I do think that it’s a great way to screen out people who aren’t open to learning and listening. I’ve started to run this test on friends too, because it tells me how good of a listener they are, and how much they care to understand alternative perspectives. Business gets very personal very fast, so put your people to the test before you bring them on your ship.

Everything I do for Indinero is about reducing its risk of failure. Everything. I hire people who are experts at what they do because their chance of doing a better job is higher than mine. I’m charging for the product upfront because it ensures that we’re spending time on something we will make money from. I helped win us a grant from Lightspeed Venture Partners to show my team that we thought things through well enough for institutional VCs to give us money (and, of course, to have money). But in order to get that money, I had to show Lightspeed that we already had an established team. So basically, in order to have one, I had to have the other. It’s an endless cycle of risk reduction. Team + Capital = Startup. No team = no capital = no startup.

Throughout my summer at Lightspeed Venture Partners’ office, I learned that investors were risk-averse too. Their entire business is based on investing in the least-riskiest companies, and that seemed counter-intuitive. But it makes sense. Investors have a finite amount of time to spend with their portfolio companies, a finite number of investments they can make each year, and their job is to ensure a decent payoff for their investors. (yes, can you believe it? institutional investors have investors too) And this means precisely one thing for the entrepreneur seeking venture financing: Everything you do pre-funding should attack the things VCs think about when determining the worth of your company.

Investors like traction. They like a seasoned team, they like paying customers, they like CEOs who come from technical backgrounds, they like young founders, and everything that means that their colleagues won’t criticize them for making a bad investment. Yes, your company probably won’t need money and probably won’t have trouble finding investors if it has all of the above, but it doesn’t matter. The fewer risks there are in your company, the more likely you are to get an investment. And this comes to prove my point that investors are for the most part risk-averse.

Lets take a step back. In order to reduce my risk in life (to maximize my personal happiness and fulfillment), I need to build a great company that makes money. And to achieve that, I need to reduce risk for myself, for my (possible future) investors, and obviously for the team members who execute on this dream. People who work at startups have an interesting mindset. They enjoy independence, they like the idea of being an entrepreneur, but they want to come in at a stage with significantly less risk. For example, telling people that Lightspeed Venture Partners gave us money immediately changes the way they look at us, because it sounds like we have our heads on straight. Which means that there’s a forever ending cycle of risk reduction: I have to reduce risk in my company enough for customers to signup at a rapid pace, which reduces the risk enough to bring on good investors, which therefore reduces the company’s risk enough to hire smart talent, and the sum of all of these things will hopefully make us a low-risk, successful company. Phew.

Don’t get me wrong. Starting a company is a risky endeavor, but succeeding comes down to mitigating all of your risks for failure. Instead of writing down a list of things that you should do, start a new list called “things that will lead to my company failing.” And on the top of that list will probably be “running out of money.” Then take each line-item, figure out how to address it, and then you know exactly what you should be focusing your time and energy on. It’s a different way of startup management, but it has completely transformed my company’s culture for the better. Remember – before your company has the chance to make billions, the CEO should eat and sleep risk reduction.

The first thing to keep in mind is that for most internet companies, competition is irrelevant. As our friends at Zoho.com say, “… if there’s anything I’ve learned from my years in the tech world is that companies don’t get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide.” Zoho is right, and we remind ourselves of that everyday here at Indinero. Chances are that your web startup will run out of funding, a co-founder will leave, or your inability to create a useful product will lead to the destruction of your own enterprise. And if you’re able to get past those first barriers to entry, then I’ll allow you to think a little about your competitors.

Now lets say that your company has an infinite cash runway, your company is capable of building a product, and you know that it won’t commit suicide anytime soon. Even then, competition shouldn’t be your primary concern. If you created a list of all of your competitors, 90% of them could probably be crossed off your list of concern because of their inability to innovate quickly. And of the remaining 10%, plot them on two axes: who is innovating, and who are you losing potential business to. You’ll find that more often than not, no competitor is on the top right of the graph. It’s often a big company (in our case, Intuit) that we’re losing business to, and we know that they’re not innovating at the pace that we are. More nimble startups, on the other hand, often make for good inspiration! Their mere existence, even if they have a better product than you do, does not mean that they’ll be the reason for your failure. Keep in mind that your company will probably commit suicide in a creative way, and you’ll never have the opportunity to evade the startup competitors you fear.

One valuable lesson I learned back in my middle school days was that having lots of competition was a good thing: I was in the web hosting space, which was and still is notorious for having terrible service providers. The rules I listed above applied to web hosting 5 years ago in that 90% of the competition was irrelevant, and many of the big players weren’t doing anything particularly creative. There was an obvious pressure to do more than just provide diskspace and bandwidth to clients, which means that companies that couldn’t keep up were able to fail earlier in the process. If anything, these failed companies should thank the competition for having saved them time!

So the next time you think of a business idea, embrace your competition and build your offering around unique things that your “big rival” isn’t doing, and will likely never do. And if a friend or investor asks about your competition, you’ll know precisely how to respond.

1) When users pay, they’re more serious about using your product. Instead of just going in to take a look, they’ll take a more proactive stance on applying your product to everyday life. As a paying customer, they’re also more likely to offer you valuable feedback that will change the way they use your product.

2) The cost per user is high – it costs us money to download data from bank accounts and credit cards. Charging our users immediately addresses this problem.

3) When you charge money upfront, people are more likely to convert and pay for your service. We talked to a few companies that switched from “no credit card upfront” to requiring that you enter your credit card from day 1. They recommend that we charge upfront to increase our conversion rate.

4) We’re not sure if freemium is the right way to go. By charging money now, we can always implement a free plan later. If we started off as being a free service, it would turn people off if we ultimately changed our minds and went back to the premium-only model.

5) When raising angel/VC money, it helps to say that our company is earning money. Not having a freemium model got us closer to being able to make that claim.

But to be clear, these are just our preliminary thoughts. We may eventually have a freemium offering, but we’ll be focused on building our paying user base for the time being. Many businesses prosper on the freemium model, and we’re just not convinced that it’s fit for what Indinero wants to achieve.

For a little background, I founded Indinero back in March with co-founder Andy Su. In a nutshell, it’s software that helps entrepreneurs manage their finances easily. (Indinero is the Mint.com for Businesses) Our original mission was to make it easy for entrepreneurs to not only keep tabs on their expenses, but also to help them intuitively understand their finances. We got our first big break in April, when Lightspeed Venture Partners wrote us our first check. Getting the money wasn’t as “lucky” as I enjoy making it seem… it was a planned process, and we spent many hours trying to convince Lightspeed Venture Partners that we were worth funding for the summer. This included building a product, sending them our first screenshots, and having my connections reach out to lightspeed partners to give recommendations. I’ll repeat the most important thing again – they gave us money because we had built a functional prototype.

Fast forward a few months. In July, Indinero was chugging along with many alpha testers and promising feedback. Building a product for small businesses isn’t easy, and we knew that raising more money would help us grow. With the goal of more funding in mind, we decided that the smartest thing we could do to convince people of our worth was to sign up of our first paying users, with the goal of relaunching a paid product on August 1st. We missed the deadline by a few days (programming’s a bitch), but today we finally signed up several paying customers.

Having paid customers does way more than just prove investors that you’re onto something: It forces you to think about building a product that people will actually pay for. As a programmer, you’re forced to leave the confines of your comfy office to talk to prospective customers. You figure out what they want, what their pain points are, and you make it work. Something else changed, too: When we told people that we were planning on charging for our service (and that “free” wasn’t on the menu), we were taken more seriously. People treated us like a legitimate business, and it further pushed us to make something useful.

Working towards building an internet service with revenue is like an endless spiral of goodness: it makes you build a good product, which makes you money, which makes people treat you more seriously, which makes you want to work harder, which makes you build a better product. I highly recommend that more people try it.

In my selfish ploy to get your feedback on Indinero, I’m giving out 50% discounts to the first 100 entrepreneurs who are willing to be guinea pigs for new ideas and features. More info here.