“It’s not about how many times you get knocked down; it’s about how many times you get back up.” – Richard Tait, co-creator of Cranium
An entrepreneur turns down McKinsey to start a tech company; now his startup has Hearst, Gannett, Time Warner Cable, and AOL as customers
It’s when you take that leave of absence or quit your job to focus on the startup full-time that it becomes real. – Roger Lee, president at PaperG
How a former Peace Corps volunteer addressed criticisms of “selling out” to Wall Street, and now leverages his finance and consulting experience to serve as a mayor
“One of the important messages Harvard imparted on all of its graduates was that you should focus on tri-sector competence.” – Yiaway Yeh, Palo Alto mayor
How this White House intern landed a job in the West Wing as Deputy Associate Director of the National Economic Council, and then founded a venture-backed company worth millions
“If you make a line from the Oval Office to people’s offices in the West Wing, and you measure that distance, there is definitely a correlation with IQ.” – Jonathan Swanson, former White House staffer
How this liberal arts major found a finance trading job by networking with female traders on Facebook, then left the industry to shoot a documentary and start a company in microfinance
“I think I felt I had to do certain things coming out of school, but quickly realized that wasn’t the life I wanted to live.” – Rachel Cook, Microlending Film Project
What an engineer, Stanford MBA, and pro photographer (who did a photo shoot with Barack Obama) has learned about careers and relationships (oh, he also founded a VC-backed social gifting startup)
“We’re building a social gifting framework that allows me to get a gift for you by crowdsourcing the creativity of our common friends.” – Dana Underwood, The Muse Factory
What this state school graduate learned about cold e-mail subject lines that helped him get into finance (he’s now founder of a venture-backed Bitcoin startup)
“One small trick I learned involved e-mail subject lines.” – Avish Bhama, founder of Vaurum
