This is...500 Startups

8:59 AM

5th March 2018

San Francisco, CA

The accelerator that invested in Canva, Udemy, and many more famous start-ups. It is 500 Startups.

For those who have not heard of 500 Startups before, they are a venture capital firm. They run an accelerator program that runs for 3-4 months a cycle. You may visit their website here. In this post I want to focus more on the experience I lived during visiting their firm in Silicon Valley.

I had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with Marvin Liao, a partner at the firm, Christine Tsai who is a founding partner, as well as Sharif El-Badawi who is a partner in the MENA region. Each of the speakers had a unique story to share.

It was admiring to see how Marvin, who is a History major, learned on his own and became an expert in what he does by gaining knowledge from the resources at his disposal. He stressed on the value of 'self-learning'. You don't have to have a degree in a particular subject to know about it. Everyone nowadays can access books, e-books, online courses, or even just search the subject on the web.

Sharif gave us one of the most valuable, and practical career advises I have heard in a while. His advice was that go find a job (at a good place), stick with it for couple of years, then later you can move on and do something else (a start-up). His reasoning behind that is that if things go wrong with your start-up, you will have your resume to back you up. To be honest I like that advice because it ends the constant battle I have within me. I am always confused whether I should seek a job that I like at a good company (and earn the privileges and the prestige that come with it) or to follow an idea that I have and have my own start-up (and all the freedom that comes with it).

Another very important point that he mentioned was the fact that not everyone has to be the founder. You can still work with start-ups, but in the team under the founder. That is really smart as you will have less to be stressed about when not being the 'big boss'.

Speaking about the venue itself, it was very casual. No trace of the traditional offices/cubicles that we are used to see. Many open spaces and cheerful offices, which from my point of view makes people more inclined to be productive (they don't have to be bound by dull disks).