welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host at the new look today we're going to get some insight on entrepreneurial ship so my guest today is kim and he's the co founder and director of marketing for ninety nine robots and w banking to high school ok where did you go to high school and when did you start thinking about going to college ok i went to high school at riverdale regional high school that is up in we were township so riveredge and or del actually shared a high school so the middle school was in riveredge at the high school was an ordeal and there was just one street kind of separating the two so when i started thinking about to make a lot more financial sense so now you're in high school you're in the right grade and when you start thinking of going through the process of college hazy by junior year seniors or freshman when you really start thinking about it i actually probably put it off for as long as possible ok i started thinking about it in sophomore year but the applications polly i started from the applications my junior year but you know we did ally did a lot of city perhaps so that started in probably eighth the eighth grade going into my freshman year of high school and now was it just rutgers or did you apply to a lot of different all the scholarship offers started coming through representatives in the most money is close by and i guess my mom didn't really want me to go anywhere else at that point so it was really her decision not mine so you wanted to be close to home but far away from home yeah yeah so it was enough space where i was so that the whole experience i was on campus but you know far enough or close enough for other record at least go visit so what would you what was your process was your mom and dad involved deeply in the whole process of counselors as well as my guidance counselor other teachers other students and older students whenever i got the chance to do that because my parents never went to school here so they the amount of insight they were built to provide them the support they will provide was really based on what they could ask from other people and my dad was pretty good about it in terms of if i want to go visit any campuses so we did go to boston and visit as many year or is it senior year when when does this all start share so i would say that i had my first bout with entrepreneurship probably in high school and it was interesting how it came up because i was actually  aspirations in high school would be a professional gamer so about time i got into college you know that was my top priority as far as my senior goes said hey you know if there's anything i want to do want to be a professional gamer so the gaming community had this  its own self contained ecosystem as far as all these different small niche companies are kind of supported it and the community itself wasn't small by any means either so i guess that's really when i first got exposed to  and i was sixteen and that when actually you know we had a few clients from ford i actually got some websites delivered and the stopping that but yeah so in high school actually also you know one big thing was you know back then we were still was kind of rebellious in that sense and i always constantly lied about my age so i had a made up thursday in the back of my mind made up year i just memorize a birthday that way has put me at least twenty three twenty four even though probably at the time i  industry sponsorships coming from many many different types of companies and you know they're about to get a spot on e s p n for gaming so so this gaming we really pioneered all of gaming right so that was  the cyber athlete amateur league and so i was the division manager for the openly which is really where everyone can kind of come in and this is a kick seen from juniors and this is what seventeen again i did lie about my age has you had to be eighteen but right so that's that's really when i started and then i think when i got into college or really made the decision hey you know because that at this time all the interactions that i've ever had was really through a computer screen with other people  you know when i first got to college i said you know i could be this other person that i know i can be as far as this outgoing person i want to just go and make new friends and really get to know people or i can you know stay on this gaming track and i decided you know the former as i just kind of dropped gaming altogether and was cold turkey over and i went to college and yeah i didn't even think about i don't really think about business for a while until i drop back into my part of the summer going into my sophomore year and that was probably the i met up with him he was twenty eight about to turn twenty one i was eighteen just turned nineteen and i distinctly remember that he had this journal where he wrote a lot of his ideas and you know i was kind of flipping you know my nineteen year old self said wow how can someone think this big sure and how can someone think of problems this big like who who are we at this age should be able to do anything and again you know age would say such a common factor right because it didn't matter it didn't matter how young we were but kind of you know i put that limiting belief on myself and i couldn't do it and i was just kind of in all of the fact that he was able to think like that so that played a pretty tremendous you know influence on my earlier early entrepreneurial career has we have this really dumb idea that we we want to work on and he almost followed me blindly into it right so you know he's like oh you know zion you're so good at this and this and this and at the time there was really nothing to substantiate and it was really great because it's such a massive confidence booster where the right for myself and you know that's that's that's kind of how that influence of inspiration really really came about so so as an entrepreneur what type of classes are you taking in school you just take a business type classes yeah funny funny story i got kicked out of the business school my freshman year because i guess i didn't really have that balance it was too much social not enough for the academics so the some time to get back into it but at the time i knew that i did want to stay in the marketing realm of things so but i had already started my first company when i was in my second year of school so i said you know what can i really take right now with the course load is light enough well still earn enough so that's how i picked communications and had a few really great classes and a few not so great classes but again we were kind of be the guinea pigs of the actual program so they were just starting out in the school with entrepreneur trip exactly ok so now you get well it was i was in an interesting situation because i had been running two companies at the time and then i decided to kind of close down one because it's just extremely stressful i didn't feel like scaling it i think i thought that i learned enough from it and learned what i want to take away from that and then you know where we might juice tank invest a person a significant amount of time but i thought it was about time to part ways with that as well and then i went into a new venture which was more on the services side of things and it really ended up not being for me and it really ended up not being something that i excelled in but you know there's a lot of back story to that as well so that didn't necessarily do as well as i thought it so by the time that i was about to graduate i played a lot of my cards where the reason why i took certain classes was because i knew that i had this business running so i took twelve credits that's why i  did end up extending my actual college career so the time i graduated where i was going to graduate i actually started talking to other companies so i sat myself down i thought to myself you know what do i really want to do and i said you know i'm kind of burned out  i'm kind of burned out i might as well just take a break and it be good to get a paycheck so might as well just work for another company i don't want to work for another startup you know get paid to learn and just you know go into one of these companies to be inside and you know really work with i guess a really great mentor was really my criteria so i built out this checklist of what i wanted to see inside the company if i want to join it and i was very very particular about who i was working with and who i surround myself around so that's how some some very interesting companies you know typical larger tech companies like yahoo and microsoft yodel talk to the to position manager sequoia capital and that was really exciting because they're the ones that put some pretty heavy funding into instagram a while back so they were just coming off of the instagram sale to facebook and you know  was really good at so they you know they had a lot of money in their profile yo and the type was ition person's job was really can i fit into any of their other profile of companies so they said you know someone they were looking for someone for this grocery delivery company in new york to really you know spearhead things and you know same thing with yahoo they wanted me to write my own ticket and when they said hey you know we don't we're not really recruiting out of pakistan's right now the really great if you want i will if you are interested you want  together i'll forward this to the v p of h r of yahoo and you know maybe you can lead the program here and he did give me some fair warning though as far as you know hey if you really want to do this then make sure this is really what you want to do because and isn't really a business development as much as it is now you're just going to be in the recruiting and you don't oh you know me anything you know us anything so really take your time to really weigh out all your decisions and think through what it is that you want to do so i actually did take a step back so you know i was getting pretty excited to talk to all these companies and that grocery delivery company actually ended up being insta cart which again now is valuate d a few billion dollars so looking back it was you know i had a lot of options in terms of what i could do but i guess it is a blessing in disguise that you know there was a gentleman that you know ms david who wanted to come launch a maker space here in new jersey and i was and he came to me because i kind of had that community building background and really want to me to help help him operationalize as well as build is really great community here in new jersey visual hardware piece goes so know how does ninety nine robots come about yes so so that's that's actually a great segue into it is i so because of because i company was so we said hey you know why don't we just you know come together and start consulting and for the sake of even tax purposes as was created i'll see this push everything through it and we start testing a couple business models one being the support m are really webmaster that you can have except you have to put them on payroll you just pay someone subscription will take care of it so we experimented with that and it and it was a lot of learning so that's kind of what not robots first became and that was in december of last year and then a few weeks after that right before going to the new year i had a conversation with charlie who was the cofounder of jews tank and you know one of the more influential mentors in my life so i was just checking in with him and said hey you know working on this company that i robot's and were interested in the word press space and said oh really that's interesting i'm also working on something in the world when our space so that's so we had a conversation and very open transparent conversation about what our intentions were what our goals were and what we really want to do and from there we said hey no four heads are better than one so why don't we just merge so next you know almost overnight we adopted a tire products arm and tonight robots and the reason why we went with the name was we all agreed that the name sounded a lot better than the one that they were working with at the time so so what are some of the services that are so right now our core offering is mostly paid acquisition that is from it so we are managing digital advertising campaigns on behalf of companies mostly for lead generation so a lot of our clients have sales teams where we're really fueling feeling there still seems getting these qualified leads for them through search engines like google ad words or facebook advertising or even the ahu big networks and yes that's that's the core services and then we have the whole product side where we have a library about thirty plugins now and they're really for publishers and bloggers so it's a big difference from gaming always to where you know i think my ambitions have changed my priorities have changed and how i've just gone through life in the influences i've had in the opportunity of access to really open my eyes to what it is that i can do  d and i think that i'm really driven by the sense of the film it rather than just you know what can i do that's really fun for me in the moment where you know if that was the case and i would absolutely go back to g so that brings up a question coming from immigrant parents if there were different mindset of looking at colleges compared to you know parents that have gone through the u s process to do you do you see any difference and i would say that the biggest difference is that you know my parents didn't really has lessons that they could share as far as their own college experiences whether it was the application process or just going through college and that it was the same thing just going through school i felt that i was kind of just trying to figure things out on my own as they could only really help me so much and then after the third grade they can really help with homework either it's so  but my parents were also always very supportive of you know that i had to go to school right that college is kind of outlet to many more opportunities and you know my what's interesting enough my my parents both small business owners but they never wanted me to go down that route they never wanted me to i didn't even know what they were entrepreneurship was until i got to college and honest but they really wanted me to go to college and then go get a cushy job afterwards and be comfortable with the rest of my life and that's really what a lot of the decisions and i made that were really mine to make right and i think that a lot of immigrant parents are in that same boat where they're constantly making decisions on behalf of their  and everything but i would say you know for them i know that they came from a space of you know they were really wanted me to have security and they wanted me to live a good life but y intentions were in the right place but i think that you know both my parents a lot of immigrant parents in terms of how they convey it might not have been the best there so it's understandable and that's why i asked the question because a lot of a lot of kids that that go through that and they are on their own you know that there are there are actually depending on friends and other people to give them those learning experiences just like yourself did you have a lot of that did you have a lot of friends and a lot of family members that were from the u s that that actually gave you some of those experiences no we don't have any family members here in the u s as can just you know my younger brother who is going to help me through that process and my mom do and i was kind of here in the hallways where people talk about in terms of lying and do you utilize your guidance counselor yeah yeah i would say the guidance counselor helped the most in terms of just really helping me not to get the process here's how to choose different schools here's what makes sense for you and then he was just keeping track of all the deadlines and getting everything out but again i was terrible pretty terrible with it i was very lucky that rockers had a rolling rolling admission process and it was to the point where especially good new brunswick that's a big school so that you get a good experience from school i would say that rutgers has a lot of opportunities that people can take advantage of so it's really what you make of it and then there's no one to really hold your hands it's a lot of that seem exploratory just find what you want to do and you know the biggest lesson that i think i learned from college was  away with so we're coming to the end of our show i usually ask my guests what advice you want to give to parents that their kids you know their sons and daughters want to go into college and take entrepreneurial ship what advice do you want to give  them i think getting you know getting kids involved exposed to different opportunities and to really open up those models and those paradigms for how the world works and show hey you know college and getting getting a jobs only one option but here all these people that did something else so that's that's number one and the number two would be let you know let people kind of make their own mistakes and let sins make th to explore different interests because you know kind of limiting and setting it for yourself doesn't really let the kid ever buy into it intrinsically and i think you know his students a lot more motivated to do what they want that they're going to you know be way more