Guest Speaker: Derek Young

On Thursday, January14 we had Derek Young, our guest speaker, come and talk to our class about his time as an experienced entrepreneur. He told us that he started out his career on the path to politics and biology. But soon got more into the field of IT. He worked in a corporate office for 10 years and then moved up the ladder throughout that time. He said one thing that happened during and after that time was he changed friendships. He surrounded himself with people that thought like him and who would look to move up the ladder in the corporate world or start their own businesses.

One quality he has is the ability to take risks. He said “he is that type of guy who would jump off a cliff and then check to see if he had a parachute.” He does consider it important to look for certain risks before getting into any type of businesses. He says sometimes he spends time with his friends going over what could go wrong about a business before getting going with it. He says he only pursues businesses that he feels will have some kind of future, and an easy way to get them off the ground. He seems to know when to walk off something that he just doesn’t feel its working.

When asked about what strategy he uses to name a business, he responded by saying he likes to use big white boards and the mind mapping strategy. This strategy consist of drawing a bubble at the center of the board and then writing a word in the middle, then connecting more words to that bubble. Once there are many word on the board people are able to connect certain words that will lead to a good catchy name.

When asked about how his political views have changed after all his experience, he said that they have not changed very drastically.  He considers himself a left-wing centrist. He said when he grew up in a very conservative environment which lead him to shape his current views of today in a little bit of an opposite direction, but he said that he is all pro for giving help back to the community. However as an entrepreneur when he is faced with ways to minimize costs he looks for ways to reduce the burden on him.