Spending the summer as a Next36 Founder

I spent the summer in the Next36 program, building my first startup. I never could have imagined the ways it challenged me to grow.

A lot happened this summer. Here's a timeline of events to prime this conversation:

Key Learngings from Reza Satchu

  1. Judgement: You must exhibit more confidence than your capability. That gap between your confidence and capability is where you build your judgment.

  2. Commitment: Commit. Magic happens when you commit. You wll not make it unless you are 100% committed, but once you commit, you will unleash expansive potential.

  3. Impact: As a Founder, you have the ability to make decisions that have the power to have a large impact. With high power, comes high responsibility. Recognize the impact you may have and own your responsibility.

Program Learnings

As a Canadian entrepreneur, I want to give back to this society that's given me so much and I want to help grow the economic prosperity of this country. There are so many talented young people in this country, but sometimes the depth of ambition can feel metered up here. At the top universities in Canada, the brightest students say, "I want to go work at Google." In the US, the brightest students say, "I want to build the next google." With so much talent up here, I hope to challenge the perceived upwards limitations we set on ourselves as young people.

There are opportunities in every industry to solve problems and thereby build startups, but they are not easy to find, much less execute. If they were, everybody would be building startups. What makes a good founder is the unstoppable desire to be curious about a problem and relentlessly pursue learning about that problem. You can't be married to the solution, but you must be committed to the problem, resilient, and gritty enough to proceed, even when the path forward is unclear. When you hit roadblocks, you can. not. give. up. It's so easy to walk away and think that you've failed, but its amongst those failures where you learn the most. And if you walk away too easily from a problem space, you will not give yourself the opportunity to explore the potential rewards and learnings of being committed.

As someone who is a bit different than most people, I have learned to become comfortable with pursuing my passions alone. However, building a startup takes a village. You have to remember that the world revolves around relationships amongst people. The people around you are so critically important and you have to put the energy into nurture those relationships, by giving as much, if not more, than you are asking.

To my friends in Next, thank you for encouraging me to step outside of my bubble and work towards building stronger relationships with those around me. I have truly learned so much from my founder community, and I hope to be able to contribute back to this community in my day-to-day as an entrepreneur.

While it's easy for me to just list off a bunch of things I've learned from this experience, I want to acknowledge that I am still actively learning to develop and implement these learnings into my character as a founder. As I proceed into this next chapter of my life, I hope to proceed with confidence and conviction in my resolve, choosing the path to maximize learning everyday.