Nat Chat

“If your child needed to have brain surgery, you would not take them to the hospital that makes other people think highly of you. You would take them to the best hospital you could find. Well, education is brain surgery. It rewires your brain.” In this episode of Nat Chat, I’m joined by Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva and Minerva Schools at KGI. I’ve been excited to have Ben on the show from the beginning, since Minerva is one of the few education startups out there that’s truly changing and competing with the existing university system. They’ve taken a completely fresh look at how to run a university in the 21st century, and their results have been incredible, which we get into right as the episode starts. If I were in high school, Minerva would be more appealing than Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, or any prestigious university you typically think of. To find out why, you’ll have to hear Ben explain their process. We covered a wide range of topics, including: How we learn and how we can improve it Making educ

“It’s never going to be easier to just learn and to make little money, than when you’re young and in the beginning.” In this episode of Nat Chat, I’m joined again by Neil Soni to do another one of our book deep dives, this time on Mastery by Robert Greene. Mastery is the best book that either of us have found at becoming a master of your craft, getting mentors, learning through experience, and reaching the top of your field. If you’re serious about self education and becoming known for your work, there are few better books that you could read to help get you there, and we covered many of the key lessons in this episode. This is also an exciting episode because it’s the launch of mine and Neil’s new podcast: “Made You Think,” which is dedicated to exploring books, articles, topics, and anything that set our minds on fire. The past episode on Antifragile was extremely popular, and this episode was a ton of fun recording, so we decided to run with it. Be sure to check out Made You Think to hear our episode on Le

“Having many hobbies and interests can help because you end up developing a variety of talents which helps in always having something going on or always having some way to make money.” In this episode I’m joined by Shelcy Joseph. I found Shelcy through an article about her and her sister and how they’ve been building a lifestyle and fashion brand while living in NYC. Fashion does not seem like an easy business to get into, so it was interesting to hear about how she got into it and is building it up. She’s also an intense hustler. At one point she was juggling 6 gigs at once in order to fund her pursuit of this work, and I think she’s a perfect example of how you don’t have to make the money work right away. You can pick up side gigs and other work to make the finances work until your own thing takes off, without having to give up the passion project just to get a paycheck. We covered: How Shelcy managed six jobs at once Starting a fashion and lifestyle business in New York Finding the confidence to pursue n

“The most value you can get at this moment in time that’s such an easy reach, is to find someone that’s doing the exact same thing as you right now and that’s in a different company and just ask them ‘What are the problems you’re facing?’” In this episode I’m joined by Matthew Barby. Matt leads the global Growth and SEO strategy for HubSpot, a public company with thousands of employees, and has one of the best marketing and startup growth blogs on the Internet. He got that job when he was just a few years out of school because he worked relentlessly to master the kinds of marketing work that ended up getting him noticed there. He was working with a small agency, out of a shed as he puts it, and hammering away at trying to get sites more traffic day and night and learning everything he could along the way. For anyone who wants to know how they can quickly develop a valuable skillset and reach the top of their field… Matt is a great guy to emulate. We covered: Advice for improving your search engine rankings H

“If something doesn’t fit or feel right, it is ultimately not what we want to do or want it to be. It’s okay to say ‘I’m going to do something else." In this episode of Nat Chat I’m joined by Chris Chaney. He currently runs Chaney holdings, which is a combination of sports marketing and financing for sports related companies and teams. It all started when he graduated from college. He’d dreamed of working in the NBA, but when he got there, didn’t feel like it was the right fit, and quickly left to start his own sports marketing agency. He’s continued pursuing his interests, working with all kinds of athletes from basketball players to competitive video games, and followed his interests out into seemingly unrelated fields like startup investing and dinner experiences, which we start the episode by discussing. If you feel like you have a hard time picking one thing and sticking to it, like I do, Chris is a perfect example of someone who has taken that extremely diverse set of interests and built it into a compa

“If you talked about class, you’d have to acknowledge that most of these students are in an extremely privileged class position, and then they would have to see themselves as being part of the problem and not part of the solution.” In this episode I’m joined by William (Bill) Deresiewicz. I reached out to Bill because I loved his book, Excellent Sheep, and thought it provided a fantastic heuristic for college students to evaluate whether or not they’re thinking for themselves. It’s especially relevant now, since the concept of not thinking for oneself and following the flock has spilled over into a lot of the social justice warrior and bigoteering behavior, where students lambast and assault people for their beliefs without taking the time to understand them. We cover a wide range of topics, including: Improving your ability to think for yourself and why you should Tackling the issues with rallying and free speech on campuses How and why certain aspects of college have changed over the years Improvising mor

“If you don’t ask, you’ll never know. If you err on the side of asking, more opportunities will come your way.” - Kevin Miller In this episode of Nat Chat I’m joined by Kevin Miller. Kevin was the director of marketing for Spire when we had this conversation, and I wanted to bring him on for the interesting series of jobs and experiences that led him there. Kevin attended Georgetown University, and while everyone else there was focusing on the big typical careers, he was much more interested in getting into tech. He became a master at cold emailing people to try to learn from them and work with them, which led to conversations with Evan Spiegel, Mark Cuban, and getting the opportunity to sit in and shadow people doing marketing and other jobs in order to learn from them. He eventually ended up working at Google on their ads team, and after mastering how the ads system works, left to apply it to his own projects, including, among other things, getting thousands of dollars in free uber rides and food. If you ne

“When you stop taking college seriously, treat it as a game, and treat everything you do while you’re there as exploring and trying new things. You get so much more out of it.” In this episode of Nat Chat, I’m joined again by Josh Lilien. As I mentioned last time, Josh reached out with a few questions for me around self-education, entrepreneurship, and breaking out of the traditional college path, and when it became obvious that he was thinking deeply about these issues, I suggested he interview me as another episode. We covered: How to maximize your exposure to positive opportunities and people Practical advice on how to take advantage of being a student The benefits from majoring in philosophy The impact of top tier schools on success and lifestyle Why you should prioritize foundational skills instead of trade skills Advice on how to reach out to others more effectively If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out my first podcast episode with Josh Lilien where I interviewed him: Find Josh Online: T

“Study something where you approach problems in different and interesting ways.” - Josh Lilien In this episode of Nat Chat, I’m joined by Josh Lilien. Josh reached out to me after I started the podcast, sharing a few ideas of his own for how students can hack college, work on their own projects, and learn outside the classroom. After a few emails, I heard more about his story and wanted to bring him on the show. We covered a lot in this episode, including: Self-educating yourself when traditional education isn’t useful How to land an apprenticeship to obtain necessary skills Minimizing the time you spend in class to devote to other projects Harnessing the pressure of needing a good GPA to pursue difficult subjects Book recommendations from Josh to others interested in similar work Please enjoy, and reach out to Josh on Twitter! Find Josh Online: Twitter LinkedIn Mentioned in the show: CEGEP Founder Fuel Real Ventures Hubspot Nat Chat Episode with Adil How To Grow Blog Traffic From 0 to 10k Visitors Buff

“Perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb This is a new, experimental format for Nat Chat. Normally, I’m interviewing someone who broke out of the traditional college and post graduate career mold, but for this episode, I wanted to do something different. Neil Soni, who came on for Episode 7, rejoined me to do an in-depth breakdown of the book “Antifragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a book that has come up repeatedly as having a huge impact on people’s thinking and is one of both of our favorite books. For me, Antifragile completely changed how I thought about work and life, and I use the concepts from it daily. It highlighted why the education system is so broken, how recent grads can get caught by “silent risks,” why we need to stop being so soft on ourselves and others, and a lot more. Neil and I tried to cover many of the major themes of the book and how to apply them. You’ll learn a lot from our discussi

You meet people, you get yourself out there and you constantly try to get better. Because every time you do that, you expose yourself to potential lucky opportunities.” - Thomas Frank In this episode of Nat Chat I’m joined by Thomas Frank. Thomas was one of the people I’ve really wanted to have on since the beginning. While he was a student, he started “College Info Geek” which has become the most popular blog on practical tips for college students, whether they want to do better in school or go out and learn on their own. Since then, he’s also started two popular podcasts and a YouTube channel, and we dig into that whole evolution during the episode. We also covered: How Thomas paid off his $15,000 college debt before graduating Methods you can use to help find work that you’re passionate about Thomas’ methods for reaching out to others more effectively How Thomas taught himself design and got started with entrepreneurship Thomas and Nat’s thoughts for people who are interested in digital nomading And a to

“In the real world, people don’t care about a piece of paper. They care about the results you can generate for them.” - Connor Grooms In this episode of Nat Chat I’m joined by Connor Grooms. Connor is a master of learning things quickly. When he moved to Medellin a couple years ago, he set out to learn Spanish in One Month, which he filmed and turned into a documentary which has nearly a million views on YouTube. He took what he learned from that endeavor and started a Spanish tutoring company called BaseLang, which combines the system he came up with and unlimited one on one tutoring with native speakers. He’s been entirely self taught for everything he’s working on, and now his company employs 6 people full time with him and over 100 freelancers. Connor is also pretty interesting because he dropped out of school almost as soon as he started. Once he landed his first design client he dropped out, moved to Asia, and hasn’t been living full time in the U.S. since. We covered a lot in this episode, including:

“I think that it’s more important in college to go after things that you truly love, have fun, and just to experience the most that you can.” - Angela Ma In this episode we have Angela Ma. Angela and I connected over an article she wrote titled “I Have a Problem with the Nation’s #1 High School.” In it, she discusses the issues of hyper competition and focusing on winning things that don’t matter that’s rampant at Thomas Jefferson high school, but also at elite high schools and colleges in general. We discussed the harmful effects of this extreme competition and how it’s led to students learning less and created a toxic learning environment, and what students who find themselves in it can do about it. But we also spent a lot of time discussing depression, Angela’s experience with it as a student, and her willingness to share her experiences publicly. She’s written about it publicly a number of times, and as a result, received a lot of inbound from other students experiencing similar emotions. We covered: The

“Figure out the basics of a skill, focus on a specific element, push out of your comfort zone, and get feedback.” - Lucas Miller In this episode of Nat Chat we have Lucas Miller. I found Lucas through Max Friedman, who came on for episode 5, since Lucas used Max’s platform GiveButter in order to crowdfund his book Beyond Brilliance. As a student, Lucas went deep on the science of learning and memorization to figure out how he could rapidly accelerate his learning and make college effortless. No small feat considering he was attending UC Berkeley. After realizing how useful his learning hacking tactics were for himself, he and a small team combined their knowledge on learning and productivity into Lucas’s book Beyond Brilliance which you can find on Amazon or on his site at beyondbrilliance.org. We covered: Practical strategies you can use to learn anything Effective techniques for memorization, and which ones you should discard The usefulness of adding variety while you’re training certain skills The scien

“When you put in the effort to make something exceptional, the value you put in keeps compounding.” - Justin Mares In this episode of Nat Chat we have Justin Mares. Justin has had a wild journey through the entrepreneurship and marketing world since his sophomore year of college when he started a company to help incoming students find better roommates. After that shut down, he collaborated with Gabriel Weinberg to write the best selling book Traction, he ran growth for Exceptional Cloud Services which was acquired by Rackspace, he became a mentor for companies going through 500 startups, and he’s the founder of three businesses right now: Perfect Keto, Fomo, and Kettle and Fire, his main focus and where he spends most of his time. Justin was also my first mentor in the marketing world. He and I ended up chatting while I was a junior in college, I worked for him for a few months, and then we started Programming for Marketers together which was later acquired by General Assembly. We cover a wide range of topic

“You gotta pick where you want to go, if you don’t, you’re going to go nowhere.” - Darwish Gani In this episode I’m joined by Darwish Gani. Darwish started down the investment banking path in college, but as he approached graduation, decided he wanted to work on something he was more passionate about. After starting one company and working as a product manager at another startup, he started an alternative education company focused on supplementing college students education with more programming training and experience. That company, Horizons, offers summer programs for students to get an intense hands-on programming bootcamp and apprenticeship over the summer. And their latest experiment, Horizons One, is a two year tuition free program to teach students everything they need to know to work in tech, and then set them up with a co-op program where they can apply those skills hands on. We talked all about how Darwish started this company, what the motivation was, how students learn during it, how students can

“There is such value while going through that period of uncertainty with your business to have someone there with you to help you overcome the insecurities and doubts that you have.” - Scott Britton In this episode of Nat Chat  we have Scott Britton. Scott is currently the co-founder and head of growth for Troops, a slackbot that helps sales teams integrate easier with Salesforce, and his path there was all but conventional. When Scott graduated, he went to work for an athlete management company to live out his dreams of being Jerry Maguire, but quit after just a few months. He then helped someone grow their startup, transitioned into starting his own company, and then when that shut down, started teaching professional skills in person, online, and making money through courses. He got looped into a community of other online educators pretty quickly, and ended up moving to Brazil with them for a while to work on his site, Life-Long Learner, as well as his podcast, The Competitive Edge. This episode is perfect

“Trust the process, follow your curiosity, and don’t get to wrapped up in what other people are doing.” - Neil Soni In this episode of Nat Chat we have Neil Soni. Neil and I originally connected over Twitter a few years ago as members of a startup incubator alumni network. While Neil was an undergrad, he started a company called “College Zen” to help prospective students get matched up with current students to get a real feel for the school. That startup didn’t work out, but the people he met and the experience he got from it turned into his next few roles, including his most recent work, as an “innovation consultant” for Estee Lauder. I wanted to talk to Neil for a few reasons: He’s had an extremely varied career during and after college, from starting that first company, to leading growth at another, to doing this innovation consulting, and now starting a beer company of all things. He is one of the more well read people I know, and draws deeply from history, philosophy, and science in his discussions. Thes

“Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re always going to fail.” - Helen Guo In this episode of Nat Chat we have Helen Guo. Helen attended Georgetown University and was on a pretty typical path until the last minute. She’d interned with and accepted a full time offer from the investment bank Morgan Stanley, and then right before she would have started working with them, she reneged on her offer and decided to work for herself instead. Since then, she started a company providing on the go phone charging around NYC, doing healthy food delivery, and now most recently, designing and selling a low calorie low carb pasta. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but she explains how she’s been able to make that work in the interview. We covered a lot in this episode, including: Helen’s experience during and after college working for herself How she started pursuing these kinds of projects How she’s been able to systematically meet accomplished people in her field How she’s maintained a good relationship wit

“Find the thing that gets you excited, because that’s the thing that’s going to drive you through the hard times and the good times.” - Max Friedman In this episode of Nat Chat we have Max Friedman. Max and I first got in touch three years ago when he was still in college, working on an app for finding local events called “Happening.” The app didn’t work out, but he’s worked on a number of startup related projects since then including his latest, GiveButter, which is a fundraising platform specifically targeted at engaging young people, a demographic normally inclined to donate. I wanted to have Max on for a few reasons: First, he was completely self taught at programming, which allowed him to build that first app as well as his subsequent projects, and we dive into how he taught himself that during the episode. Second, Max was relentless about experimenting and trying new projects as a student, which eventually led to GiveButter which he’s able to work full time on now as a graduate. Third, while many of the