Hello Again
A Speaker Series, A Pivot, and an "if I were in college..."
Well, I promised that signing up for this newsletter wouldn’t blow up your inbox, and I’ve delivered on that, if nothing else. It’s been 51 days since the last note, and though I’m still working on the next post, I wanted to update with a mix of 3 exciting things + ideas.
1. You’re Cordially Invited to... The Hustle Presents; Kobi Wu - Friday @ 4pm EST.
Last year me and my awesome roommate Brit started an after school entrepreneurship club at KIPP NYC in the Bronx. Brit aka Ms. Wrightson is a teacher at KIPP who cares more about her students than anyone has ever cared about me, and I’ve always thought that one of the biggest things missing from a high school education is real life practical business skills. So we teamed up and started The Hustle, an after school club where students learn real-life skills (ie how to draft a cold email, or interview potential customers), by working on and building their own business ideas. It was a really fun year, and then a global pandemic closed down schools.
To continue offering real-life knowledge to the student’s we’ve started THE HUSTLE PRESENTS, a weekly speaker series, where each Friday we interview a different entrepreneur in an effort to expose students to different career paths, and the hustle it takes to turn an idea into reality. (flyer from our last speaker) It’s been a blast, and this Friday we will be hosting our 4th speaker, Kobi Wu. Two fun facts about Kobi: at one point in her career she managed MACY GRAY, and is now the founder and CEO of VisuWall. The interview will be geared primarily towards high school students and the early steps of building your career, but if you’d like to join the Zoom Webinar because you love me and/or are just curious (or know anyone else that might be interested), you can register here. The talk will be fireside chat style, and its a webinar, so you don’t need to show your face.
We will continue to do one of these each week, so there will be more if you cannot make it this Friday.
2. Office Hours at Home, available NOW (sign up for a haircut in NYC here)
Shameless Promotion #2. Last Summer my barber/friend Cody Ricks and I founded Office Hours, providing in-office haircuts in New York on a weekly recurring basis. Cody is the best hairstylist (objectively), a hustler, and had the vision for this years ago. Fridges full of La Croix is 2016, and I stand by the fact that there is no better in-office perk than being able to get your hair cut 15 steps from your desk. Just as things were really heating up the pandemic put the kibosh on that too, and in the short term we have pivoted and launched Office Hours at Home, delivering haircuts to people in their homes (only in New York, for now 😎). We scheduled 11 appointments on the first day live, and even got our first #influencer mention.
If you or someone you love might be interested in getting your haircut at home (in New York), you can learn more and/or sign up here.
This is a pretty interesting initiative given current circumstances, so I’ll keep this up to date on new happenings here.
Wish us luck.
3. Finally, some thoughts on why I think some college students should take a gap year.
For the record, I understand this is not for everyone, and that there are certain circumstances where this might not hold true (ie if you were to lose your financial aid by deferring a year). But here is where I’m coming from:
When you are 18-21 years old, the idea of pushing graduation/your “career” out by a year is blasphemy. What if everyone else gets ahead of you? You need to enter the workforce now! Etc etc etc. Now that I am ripe and 30, it’s more obvious that putting things on hold by a year makes no difference in the long term. tl/dr - punting college graduation a year down the line has very little downsides.
College this year is going to be very different, in a bad way. College is a once in a lifetime experience (shoutout UCSB), and going to classes via Zoom from your parent’s living room is not worth the tuition, whatever the amount. Even if your college does reopen physically, the chances that a tenured professor decides to spend time in a classroom with a bunch of twenty-somethings is… low. If you assume that you will be able to eventually get something closer to the “original” experience later on, why pay $15K (or $40K?) to take Zoom classes and miss out on the networking, clubs, and $@&%$ of a college experience. Do that a year from now, once things (fingers crossed) go back to normal. Tuition is ridiculously expensive… wait, and get what you are actually paying for.
So what would I do?
Learn something. Try something. Start a business and fail. Volunteer. Get your real estate license. Do a poorly paid internship and see what you hate/love. Offer to do marketing/sales for a local small business and ask if they will pay you per client you send their way. Learn Chinese. Even if you make zero money, you will be net-zero instead of paying thousands of dollars to learn from a professor on Zoom.
Gap years used to be about travel, but fuck travel. Now you can watch Youtube videos that teach you how to build an online store, or start a Zoom-based tutoring service for high school students, or offer to do free intern work for a company in your neighborhood and learn sales skills or handiwork or literally anything more useful than whatever your major is. Try your hand at sales and offer to only make money on commission. If I were in college, I would use this next year to either bolster the F out of my resume, or try starting a business, basically risk-free (if you fail, you go back to college in a year when you can actually sit in classes IRL).
Best case scenario? Whatever you are doing turns into something real. And you never go back. College degrees are overrated, and great businesses are caring less and less about degrees. Make shit happen.