No Longer a College Dropout

Happy to inform you all that I have graduated from the University of Hawaii with a BBA in Business Management! I am excited to finish up as I recently dropped out of college for 2 years to pursue my virtual reality startup in Silicon Valley. This has been a long time coming, but we made it!

I took pride in being a college dropout. It was a badge of honor in Silicon Valley and it surprisingly helped me make a ton of awesome bad-ass friends. I still do not regret my decision to drop out in the first place. The experience I gained during those 2 years was the best education I could have ever received. I feel like I should have my MBA after all the learning and stressful situations I went through. Nevertheless, I am glad I came back to finish college.

I think there are 2 key areas of college that impacted me the most. Community and curriculum. The University of Hawaii community helped me a ton. Coming into college as freshmen, I knew nothing about entrepreneurship. I first got interested in entrepreneurship when I had dinner with the former Executive Director of PACE (Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship) Susan Yamada. Susan is very good at helping people realize what they really want. As a freshman, I had no idea in the world what I wanted. Somehow after hours of picking Susan’s brain, we ended up on giving entrepreneurship a shot. From then on, I attended almost every PACE event and local startup event in the community. Many people in the community were just like Susan and willing let me pick their brain for hours on end until something in me clicked. If it were not for the smart and helpful people in the startup community, I would have not started 2 companies, gained the necessary skills to grow those companies, or graduated from college. Community was key for me.

Curriculum was not as impactful for me. Sad to say that the business management courses was mostly a waste of time (an entrepreneur’s greatest asset). The two most important classes in my opinion were Business Law and Business Statistics. Those two classes taught me skills that I use (and wish I knew more about) in my job as an entrepreneur. I also took Chinese as one my language requirements. Chinese was the hardest class I ever took in college. (Thank you to all those who dragged me through 7:30am Chinese class, you know who you are!) I definitely wish I knew more Chinese. That would have helped me immensely as we have looked to expand business to 5+ cities in China in the past year.

I have spoken with the Dean of the business school regarding the rest of the classes I took that were not as useful as the ones mentioned above. He is working with the rest of his staff to improve the curriculum of the business management program. Although this may be difficult to improve as business management is a soft skill. Most soft skills I am finding are very hard to teach in a classroom setting. My best soft skills were learned in the real world with real consequences. I am not sure if a soft skill like business management can be learned at all in the classroom. “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz is a resource that I think should be in every business management class. The book references a ton of real world situations that Ben went through as CEO of Opsware. The real world feelings, stress, and consequences are something that I feel is not focused on in business management classes.

This does not mean that my Business Management major was a waste. I made lifelong friends and built a valuable network that I would not have gained outside of the University. The degree alone however, would not qualify me for most jobs. As a Management major, if you have no experience managing people, you will have to work your way up to an executive level position. You could have possibly reached the same management position if you had spent 4 years gaining work experience instead of majoring in management. This is an issue that I think you should think about if you are considering majoring in Business Management. The opportunity cost could be lower if you choose to not do the Business Management major and focused on engineering instead. You could then move over to business and product management in the future.

Going forward, I have a college degree, 4 years of startup experience under my belt and a kick-ass network across the world. The future is bright. Let’s see what 2018 has in store!