Andy Su

High school student alone in a summer afternoon.

What brought me into the world of entrepreneurship was one of those adolescent phases we all go through. What’s my purpose in life, what’s my future. No matter how I thought about it all I was left with was death or some miracle longevity medicine from stem cells (south park). So pretty much, make the best out of your life. Write a list of stuff to do before you die or something. Just don’t be stuck in your 80s without a single significant thing to tell your grandchildren other than you won a local halo tournament or something.

Several hours later.

A great way to do something awesome is through entrepreneurship! A great way to start your first project is to make a goal, tell everyone about your goal, and then maybe accomplish your goal with the pressure of everyone knowing about it. Finding cool equally bored people to work with is even better. You get to keep each other motivated it really helps to have a cofounder.

The next day with a bunch of other idiots.

Even the smallest projects could start off a entrepreneur roller-coaster. Just do something small and fun like a prank or funny movie and video tape it. Then somehow incorporate an ad like “drink Pepsi” or something. Let’s say that the video turned out well. If I were an advertising agency I’d love to have you work on a mini-project. I wouldn’t care less if you bombed your last math final.

Internshipin is the latest company that I’ve worked on. It got started quite fast and I learned a lot from it. Here’s practically how it started.

Two weeks after moving into Berkeley, I met Jessica Mah. After finishing our discrete mathematics howework that day, we started talking about making a company. Pretty soon, we drew out an outline for internshipin and got started.

Within a week, we had a rough search and employer posting page ready. We then rented a $160 server from Softlayer and pumped out more of the code. With midterms and homework bogging us down, we took a month to make the first beta and released it to employers.

The main thing is publicity. We had like 6 postings signed up and 1 paying internship. It wasn’t until the techcrunch post that we actually had people on our site. The moral here - know lots of people like Jessica and if you can get them to write a post about your site, great things will happen.

From School:
High school
1: Calculus (somewhat useful, easy concept people just don’t know how to teach.)
2: Chem, Physics, Bio - Oh yeah, very useful. Well, maybe Bio for chatting up about global warming.
3: 300 ways not to write an essay (haven’t found a way to write a good one yet).
4: How bad it feels when a know it all beats you on a test.

College (so far)
1: Multivariable Calculus - again, really impractical.
2: Memristors - really cool concept but not very great to learn about.
3: Scheme - interesting but outdated.
4: Proofs - you decide, a hobby or a nightmare.

Side Project
1: some below basic degree of unix.
2: installed apache, unfuddle, subversion, and enough stuff on the server.
3: Php
4: Some level of design.
5: Scalability.
6: Murphy’s Law - internshipin server went down as I type.

I need to go.

Well, so far I haven’t really gone far in tech. As an average Asian, I’m quite good at math and science. Placed a couple of time in math competitions like Mu Alpha Theta and stuff. ARML was lots of fun even if I sucked. Got a couple of medals in Science Olympiad. Oh ya, I pretty much single handedly defeated the winners of the Science Bowl 2008 competition in Washington. Why are they the winners? Cause it was double elimination and they crushed us 96 to 14 or something later - on stage.

Now I’m in berkeley. Dying this semester because I have English R1B - very painful.
A schedule I suppose:
English R1B - I’m terrible with essays.
Computer Science 61a - I suck at tests. Why?
Computer Science 70 - SIMUW pretty much taught me most of it.
Math 53 - eck, not too bad. Should probably attend lectures more often.
EE42 - NEVER TAKE IT WITH CHUA.

We’re currently learning probability in CS70 and random useless crap in EE. I’ll talk more about the useful stuff we learn in later posts.