welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony and today we're going to get some insight in entrepreneurial ship and what kids should do from high school college my guest today is alberto molina he's the president of shore tech and welcome to the show thank you so much thanks for having me yeah great to be here so usually i start i guess where they went to college so when you go to school i went to yale university in new haven connecticut which is a big move for me from california where i was prior  o let's go back into high school when you start thinking about college was a freshman year senior year how did all your thoughts of going to yell all start out it was all a big mistake it started eighth grade  i started doing theater in eighth grade and i eventually became a professional actor in high school and i went to performing arts high school and i heard oh you know you know has this great drama department and so i decided in eighth grade i'd like to go there and i really didn't know anything about it and then i discovered that you can actually participate in the drama school as an undergraduate but by then i thought going to a good school would be a good idea for a fantastic so you graduate from high school you go to yale go across the  country when you get there what's your thoughts i was in heaven is just amazing it was all of the you know all these resources and all the best people it you know there's a great candice there's a great violinist there's a great juggler there's a great singer and you're in this group of people you know and it's the time in your life whenever he has all these passions and ideals and dreams and everything and and then there's so many resources you know there to explore you know anything that interests you you know as far as you can possibly go right now so you you know you're graduating from university what what's your thoughts about the becoming an entrepreneur or is this something that you had a soon as you got there or was it just theater and you were going to become an actor and stay in acting for the rest of the life well i didn't really know but it was one thousand nine hundred three and i went back to california but i had all of these contacts and friends that were graduating a lot went to new york and so new york seemed very appealing and at that time it just seemed like anything was possible you know there was peace in the world and there was this idea that that you could talk things out you know in politics and it was the beginning of just this you know through two thousand and one i would say that it was it was almost this magical time where almost anything was possible and so i got to new york and it was very easy to find part time work and to explore things so i started a theater company and started a theater company yale and five or six of us came to new york and said oh let's do theater and see what that's like and so we ran that for five years and in the meantime i did part time work and learned about technology and so i found that was the best way to apply some of my sort of science skills to doing this art interesting and then did you do  any plays or anything while you did this theater yes so we did a couple shows on the lower east side in new york when you know i was brand new and all like you know no one was there and it was you know we was an old public school you know we like went through construction drapes to put on the show and and we got people to go there and now it's like this booming theater you know with five different theater theaters in it and you know lots and lots of theater companies that use it down there so it was fun to be you know just exploring and you know finding the way to do what we wanted to do and to have our passion and then noticing after five years that the cash was kind of going the wrong direction and you know seeing people that it did it for thirty and saying oh you know maybe starting to do this for thirty years just wasn't what i wanted to do but i love being able to do it and so that's you know a lot of that learning and opportunity happen for those years so so what happened to to migrate you back into tech technology what was going on with your thoughts there well in the in the early ninety's computers in companies were still somewhat new so if i don't remember when the first leveraged buyout happened using excel but it was like around there and one of the big thing was k k are like to use excel to do calculations for a buyout so in big companies computers were still you know they're still there a established everywhere but you know learning how to use them in every day said oh young people they must know how to use computers and they must not a program web pages and so i was a young person and i liked i liked science even though i was you know passionate about the arts and so i would get asked to do things and i would say yes and then i'd run to the you know back when i had bookstores and i'd get a book and i'd read it and as i was trying to figure out what to do that might be you know bring me some stability career  wise you know tech was obviously an option and then in the later ninety's one thousand nine hundred seven one thousand nine hundred eight when the internet at first bubble started to take off was like oh wow you know you could starve or you could do something really fun that supposedly would make millions and millions of dollars and and so that became attractive to try wow interesting so now with the students that that are in high school what did what kind of  information you want to give those students that maybe are looking into theater dance that kind of stuff or into technology is there any information you want to give to those students that have something similar to what you're going that you went through i think that the i mean so you got you know the arts technology then you got you know lots of go be a doctor go be a lawyer go be a professional or an entrepreneur and i would say the most amazing thing that i see with my little bit of perspective is just it's all of it's great you know and the ability to see what fills you with joy and allows you to be useful to others i think that's really the magic alchemy is you know if you're feeling useful and and it makes you happy you know you're doing the right thing and there's some sadness if what you love to do doesn't seem to be serving people right you know and  that's a tough thing to work out but if you can be open enough to find something that you like that does serve other people i think it pretty much always works out and you know at least that's what i've learned so it doesn't matter what field it is it just matters if you're passionate enough to drive that field and listening to you know the opportunities in the world right like you know if you really want to be a carpenter and nobody's building anything you know you've got you know you're going to be lonely and maybe not compensated and sometimes you've got to do that like if it's that strong some and you've got to do it and and who knows what drives you and amazing things happen when you listen so i think it's the most important thing but when you're making it's not compromises but adjusting to the world it's nice to notice where your passion does overlap with someone who's interested where with people or a place where you feel appreciated i think it's maybe second in importance is being appreciated for whatever it is that you're doing and in trying to listen to that a little bit so so what do you what do you tell some of those students that you might meet along the way you know from high school or college what what do you tell some of those students what are they going to be looking at i think the biggest thing i would say is  relax it's you know now college is all built up and there's so much opportunity you know and for like intrapreneur yo you know if you want to be an entrepreneur like a lot of the successful ones dropped out of college  college isn't any specific college isn't really as important as finding the place that you fit so you know again there's sadness if you feel like you fit somewhere that you're not invited yeah right and you got acknowledge ok you know what i need to do to get invited and then either adjust or recognize that there's probably other things that you would be invited to and all of us are invited somewhere and it's such a huge world with so many opportunities that you know i'd really say you know focus primarily on what inspires you and where your passion is but also listen and doesn't mean you have to follow what you hear yeah but you need to be aware of where you're being successful and useful now with with college you know you said that you started a theater company with some friends from college is that usually what tends to happen because you see it with facebook he started with some people from college bill gates with microsoft the story were people from college is that we usually find your friends they usually start something i think it happens a lot and it goes back i would say to my advice to relax in that one of the main things that college gives certainly an opportunity learn specific things but it's also a culture and in choosing college i would say that the most important thing is going to a place where you feel invited and that  because other people that are like you will feel the same and that's one of the reasons that that those even for people who drop out they make lifelong friends in college because your choose you know it selects for a type of culture and types of interest and you know if you go to mit you know or a technical school or you go to you know a business school you're going to get different types of characters there and there's a good chance that you'll find lifelong partners in that way interesting interesting take on things yeah so let's talk a little bit about the company that you use started short tacked so what does the company do how does it all work if you can explain it in simple terms to the parents i think it's a great example of what i've been sort of describing i moved to princeton my wife grew up here and our daughter was one and we lived in new york city and my company at that time had some contracts with the media companies like you know the disney company building software products and i didn't want to keep going into new york because it was just so exciting to be able to be here you know in a home with and the kids were growing in and so we thought it would be easy to start an i t services company and this has so many interesting lessons for people so i had experience in software which is a subtle distinction from i t but it's a it's a big difference in the way we think about it and i thought to be really easy to apply the software discipline and processes that we had to i t because actually at that time there was so much that would break in business corporate networks like ok we'll just figure out how to solve all that well it turns out and it took us like three years to really figure out that there are very different very different types of skills and everything else and so what we thought would be kind of an easy thing ended up being a lot more challenging but we were learning a lot so i started with my wife and two other partners and but we found we were very useful right so it wasn't exactly what we thought it was but our customers were very happy with our ability to provide standard reliable solutions in our dedication and so we just kept growing with it and growing with it and even as different as it was you know now we have a company that has some really innovative ways of doing things that has like succeeded in you know putting these two ways of thinking together and develop innovative solutions but it's always driven by like what is it that customers ultimately want and appreciate rather than some idea that we had which it wasn't that idea and we had to adjust to fit kind of the realities of what was going on and i would say that process you know as i've grown feels really great you know it's not always the sunflowers and daisies that you think it will be but it's still a learning experience and in the most important thing i've learned in my life is that being of service to others and listening to what is of service which might not be what you thought ends up always being the most fulfilling thing most excited when i'm building things that are software where you're figuring out how to take a process a human process and make it a code base dealing with helpdesk people is a lot about dealing with help with emotions and people can't figure out where the plug is and why this does and connect to different kind of business so short tech is not actually a software business in its customer delivery but it is a software business and what we build on the back end to support the things that we support and i really actually enjoy that business the most that part the back and part and so you know we've built up a really great help desk and and solutions for that but that's not necessarily what i thought i was you know going to be great at in the beginning now  that brings up another point with today's day and age a lot of a lot of students that are out there they they are now doing the coding classes these camps coding camps they're saying  what do you tell families about those kind of things great question i think the most important thing around coding well when it's a group it's a useful skill and it's a language so it's just like learning french or swahili or something but it applies to computers and boy you know there's going to be a lot of work in computing for a long time while there's something really important i want articulate well around that too because i hire coding people time and one of the things is that i guess surprise what i was going to say you really need to think a lot about the team that you're with and what you're trying to build as a team because just coding is becoming more and more of a vocational thing you know like you can so the market so competitive because you can hire a coder in bulgaria you know or poland or india or south america more and more so the actual act of writing something is not you know or knowing the language just like if you knew french isn't nearly as important as who who you're with and what you're doing as a group and so you know pretty quick this is about college like finding people that you like working with you know at college or then looking for a job i would say the most important thing when you're looking for a job with the skills that are valuable skills is paying attention to where you're going to go and if it has the same ask as the college is the culture a fit because if you think of any of these things in this day and age with change being so ramp so fast and globalization where you can get talent all over the world but you can't get a team it's much harder to get a team that's doing something and making sure that you're with people that are inspiring you and that that team is doing something that is of value to others as now teamwork is really important in business and because of the globalization of everyone everywhere to do companies tend to just start hiring these people from other countries and let them do whatever they're doing or is there some kind of tracking that they do how do they keep everybody together as a as a team at this so many different places well i think goes back to the same thing i was saying about college which is culture right so just doing things doesn't achieve results in the long run like you can say hey you know build me a shoe box as a company if you have somebody who says build me a shoe box build me a tree house build me a birdhouse that's not alternately what builds value in a company what builds value a company is it is an organized group of people continually building on something that continually improves where all the pieces of the company are moving something much bigger than any one person forward and so what i see you know with globalization and all that stuff is building that culture and teaching values so because i'm the head of my company i've discovered that my job is to be the at the service of the wider company trying to  teach what the company's trying to do what the values in the culture are in trying to promote that across all the groups whether they're overseas or here and how do you keep them all connected though with tools with technology so slack is taken over the corporate world in the last year email is largely dead and everybody watching this show will tell you they never look at email which is good you know and and it's neat to see the younger you know a younger generation being more skilled at these things than older than you know an older ways of doing things and then you know in my world i see lots of big companies doing things tolly backwards you know because they haven't gotten the memo but it's technology there are so many ways of communicate video voice text and using the right tools and channels to keep people connected but again underlying it all you have to have the passion and the love for each other and what you're doing and the sense that you're doing something together now that you find would know a lot of these big companies that are out  there they're so far back in the times that they're trying to catch up with everybody else well you know that's the amazing thing about a company is once you figure out something that makes money you know there's a tendency to just keep doing it and as long as they're making money owe be fine but there will always be younger companies trying to do it better and cheaper or not even just cheaper but just doing it better and more adopted and so that's the rule of the universe now is change and that's where the opportunities come up so that you find the you find that there are any businesses out there that have a group of people in the same place well the idea of everybody going to work in an office like the same place like that i haven't seen for a while now so i think that might be well dead i don't know might not be but surely in the where i go i don't see that happening too much so there's just selected amount of people in different places and i think i heard i b m like five years ago again i'm not up on this but i think they had like twenty percent as much office space as they had employees so you know all their employees could never sit more than one in five of them at a desk at any one interesting very interesting so they're back to high school or college so if someone's there that wants to be an entrepreneur or what type of school should they be looking for is it the elves in the harvard's of the world or is it to you know the art of of noticing what's possible and figuring out what's in the way of that becoming a reality and you know you know for example for me for sure i can say i really like reading philosophy and literature and i like doing math and physics and i liked academics i had a very good friend who went to the u c san diego and i remember going out there to visit and just being amazed at how much fun th know unlike how much more bright and friendly and happy and they like when out in the afternoon to play tennis i was like wow gayle didn't have that same culture like it was a lot more gritty and serious and obviously i loved it and my friends but it was by no means the right place for for any specific thing my sister went to swarthmore and just loved it you know and i was just there this weekend beautiful place and just a great cultural fit for her but i would have not felt comfortable there and you know i think again it's finding the place that inspires you and so if you want to be an entrepreneur i would say the most important thing is to go to the place where you feel comfortable and inspired and inspired by the people around you and you can be an entrepreneur has nothing to do with college specially now like with online learning and everything like that like it's not about the learning it's about the life experience and what you can learn from the other people you're with so go find the people that you're inspired by so wherever they are would you say is that a lot of these parents should have their kids visit the schools and certain things that they should be looking for at the schools when they visit you know i think there are i think all colleges also have a brand and a way that they project themselves so that's important too because again not everyone will visit but they're attracted by whatever the images and the people are so i would say it's what is the school talking about how do they portray their message and who do you know that's the both faculty and and other students interesting and and b and being a person from california to come to the east coast was there was it just because you heard that the yeah it was the best school so i was just going to yell and that was it or was there any other factors they came into about because there are plenty of very good schools in california well i thought a little distance would be good to see something else you know and that to try to see another part of the world and i really liked academics i mean i wanted to study and because i went to performing arts high school i said you know i really want to get you know some more traditional academics in addition and they had a very strong theater and artistic you know emphasis even though it wasn't the drama school but there is so much vibrancy there and everything they communicated really involved diversity you know and i was attracted to you know diversity in academics diversity in academics and arts and a diverse student body and so that really spoke to me and then everyone that i met from there felt like their the way they spoke was attractive to me and so i to you know seem like a great fit and of course it's obviously a good school so i said well probably not going to go wrong with respect to that but only later did i realize like how unimportant i think that status bit is ultimately like you know i have plenty of friends who you know had tough lives having gone there or you know and people have gone other places that maybe aren't you know that have great lives and very successful you know so you know i found ultimately that was much less important and i thought the you see the did you see a lot of high school friends that stayed in california compared to going outside of the state yeah i think most was paradise you know like i always thought i would go by ak yeah i think most people are smart and stay out there their area so that's that's pretty good and i'm assuming they went to very good schools out there the you still keep in touch with those people as well of course yellow facebook is obviously a great you know connector now and so you have lots of high school friends sons and daughters are you know want to want to become a an entrepreneur or don't know what particular college they want to go to what advice you want to give to those those parents that are out there listen to relax because parents like really worry about their kids and but you know i think the kids should definitely relax as i think things work out and for parents push parents you have to pay for it so that's that's a little bit stressful but you know i would share what i've said this whole talk i think you know just being here which is you know i think there's so many ways to pursue life in being useful and valuable in society and the ways that we think will work and be successful now might not be tomorrow you know and so i think being open to what young people want and their own you know they're learning so much about how to communicate you know how to exist in the world and i think letting them do that and you know to me i think it's important to teach kids that they should just at least be aware of where the market is you know what opportunities are that are useful you know  to apply passion and that goes entrepreneurship i think that you know there's a lot of buzz now around startups and you know incubators and everybody and i think if someone's passionate about that you can do almost anything these days with tools but my humble experience is that you should never do it to get rich you know the vast majority of things that get started won't succeed and i mean like ninety you know you should guarantee that it won't succeed it's very very rare that it does but god bless you if you think you've got to do it do it you know just like i did theater for five years i don't regret it for a minute but i did have to notice that for me that wasn't the way that i was going to support a family  and that's just you know something i had to notice if i if if i'd been paid a ton of money to keep doing it i'm sure i would have done it and the same with entrepreneurship if you hit something go you know i found somebody the other day they were tell me a kid was buying and selling instagram profiles like you you know doing the seo and building a network and selling and buying over three hundred dollars selling it for five hundred if you find something that is making money and you have a head for that i would say go do it and support kids in doing that but my experience is definitely that starting a business is only worth it if you really see that payoff happening and you are trying to build something for a culture and you're trying to serve a group of people to do something not definitely to get rich or to not work for somebody i would strongly encourage everybody to again find a group of people in a company or somewhere that you feel inspired by and that you feel empowered by  and values what your talents are what your kid's talents are in courage to find those places and i think as a parent one of the things that i really try to do with my kids is is try to make that connection for them and see what they're great at and then with all the contacts and experience i have find where that greatness is appreciated and try to connect that and try to get out of the way other than that and let them make their choices well thank you for coming on the show yeah thank you very much for having me really appreciate it no