Failure to Launch
My Story
Most basically, we aspired to facilitate agreements between students and socially conscious investors, where investors would pay a portion of the student’s tuition in exchange for a percentage of the student’s income for an arbitrary number of years after graduation. The idea was excitedly received by the entrepreneurial ecosystem we networked in and success appeared imminent. I half-heartedly looked for post-graduation jobs because I thought this couldn’t fail. I carried myself with an unjustified cockiness. In a moment combining naivety and douchiness to an epic degree, I once exclaimed to a co-founder, “First hundred thou we get invested in us, I’m poppin’ a thousand of it in champagne!” I actually said that!!
Well we didn’t even get $1 invested in us. And my priorities were never properly set on my company’s success so I’ve popped a fair amount of champagne anyway. Long story short, UpGrade failed. Pretty quickly too. By November, even though I kept limping along through February, it was evident that I had absolutely no idea how to found my own company, regardless of the fact I was trying to do so in a complex legal, financial, and ethical environment.
Today, I still have no idea how to start a business, but I certainly know how NOT to. On this website, you'll find four tips that I wish I had known before attempting to found UpGrade. I can't guarantee that heeding my words will lead to success, but they will teach you how not to be like me: A Failed Entrepreneur.
<- This is me. My name's Max and last summer I became obsessed with entrepreneurship. Whenever my brain wandered, I was thinking of ideas to work on during my final year of college. My corporate internship was unexciting and I desperately wanted to create something of my own. I kept a running list on my phone of new ideas potentially worth pursuing.
On July 19th, something as beautiful and serendipitous as this happened and the idea finally came to me. I was going to create an alternative to student loans.
The setting was not very special - actually, it kinda sucked. It was my great uncle’s 90th birthday party and my uncle was blabbing on and on about this new peer-to-peer investing platform that he’s been making a killing on. About ten minutes later, my cousin mentioned that he’s getting close to paying off his student loans. My startup-hungry mind shoved the content of these two below-average conversations together and thought, “What if there was a way to invest in a student’s education?” As far as I knew, there wasn’t, and I became hell bent on making sure that would no longer be the case. I assembled a team of friends and UpGrade was born.
