Why I left Wall Street to figure it out.
And what it led me to
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“I may have to let you go,” he said.
“Uhmm,” I just sat there, and after a few minutes, I walked back to my cubicle.
The place reeked of greed, desire, and unjust passion. The restroom was taken up by the smell of weed. I didn't’ like it.
“Give me 90 days, and if I don’t multiply your money, we are done!” My coworker in the next cubicle told a potential investor on the phone about an investment he was recommending.
I just sat there, listened, and kept punching the numbers to dial — that was my job. I was told to just call the numbers and just read the script in front of me. I had no problem with that. So I did, and the ‘veterans’ in the office listened.
“I like your tone,” they’d say. “ Keep at it.” I heard them but said nothing.
But often, throughout the day, I would think to myself, “What am I doing here?” And the thought will not leave.
This was my time at a Wall Street firm that had hired me after I applied for their Junior Stockbroker position, a little while after I graduated from college. The company was right on the famed Wall Street,110 Wall Street, towards the end of the street opposite the Subway station.
As the days went by, I started to just wait for the clock to hit 6:00 pm, walk to the Subway station, catch the 4 train and be gone.
This went for a week, two weeks, and I honestly tried to come to terms with it. I’d think to myself that this could be a great career, despite this beginning. But one thing never changed through it all — my spirit. My spirit will not relent. It insisted, “ You don’t belong here.”
My train ride from home started in the Bronx, 21 stops on the 4 train to Wall Street —this meant I had a good amount of time to study for the Series 7 license exam. That was not a problem because I had studied much of this in college, Fordham University. “But do I really want to do this?” I asked myself countless times on my train ride to and from the office.
Eventually, my boss called me into his office. It was the beginning of the end.
He gestured me to sit in one of the chairs in his office. After I sat down, he made a point about noticing that maybe this was not for me. He went on about the need to instead find something that I can really put all of my heart into — how, from his own experience, he had burned every bridge as a young man and how this was the only thing he had left and decided to make the most of it. So, if this was not for me, it’s a waste of time for both of us to pursue it.
He was right. It lasted for 6 weeks. We parted ways after that. He let me go.
Walking out of the office that day, after going through a short moment of sadness, I felt like I was myself again. I could breathe again, I felt “uncooped,” out in the open, free.
Now all that was left was telling my family. Sure enough, they did not like it.
“What are you going to do now?” They asked. I didn’t have answers, but I knew there was something out there, something more.
Austin, TX
Fast forward a few years later, here I am working for a startup at the South By South West Tech & Music festival in Austin, TX. SXSW brings a huge chunk of the music and tech world together in one city every year in March, and most startups launch their products there every year. Twitter, which was then made up of Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, & Ev Williams, got off the ground at SXSW. The Foursquare guys came all the way from NYC and literally drew squares on the ground and invited people to play the actual school playground foursquare game while showing people what their app does.
I was a member of a brand ambassador team for a young startup at that year’s festival, and I was fired up when it started. On the first day, I knew there was no way of getting free parking in Downtown Austin, so I had my roommate drive my car to the festival, drop me off and drive back. I got into gear, a yellow startup t-shirt, and joined the group to take instructions on how we were going to help this startup get the word out.
The startup was launching its product there, and as part of the promotion plan, we were to go into bars in the evenings and sign people up to use their service.
How did I get the gig? The manager of the promotion knew me from having worked on another promotion at the previous year’s SXSW festival for State Farm, and she liked my work.
I really loved the opportunity to work this gig, but I realized after day one that something was wrong. I hated going into bars and engaging with people there in the evenings. I didn’t mind interacting with people during the day, outside, on the streets, anywhere else — I had done door to door marketing, neighborhood window replacement appointment setting, street sign-ups, etc. So I knew what I had to do, but the bars reeked of alcohol, and most of the people there were not on their best behavior. That was when I decided I had to make a change, sadly — I talked to the manager about this problem and called it off.
But funny enough, that very moment, right after I spoke to the boss, I met Tony Hsieh (of Zappos) right outside on the curb. I introduced myself and how I’d followed his work and all. I didn’t say much after that, but I thought of what that encounter meant, or could mean. I remember enjoying reading his book “Delivering Happiness,” the story behind how he led Zappos and drove it to a billion dollars in revenue before Amazon bought it.
Scratching an itch
One day I was lying in my apartment, and a craving hit me — I wanted a Ghanaian delicacy that I had grown up on ( I was born in Ghana), and that meant getting up and going to the only African shop in the city. I didn’t feel like it — getting up and going. This quickly turned into a thought, and then into a question.
Here’s the question: I don’t feel like going out today, plus I don’t have money right now to travel there. But surely I’d love a Ghanaian meal right now. How can I use my phone to get that delivered to me?
This developed into another question: Even more, since there’s so much that goes on within the community, how can I know in one place, on my phone, what’s going on — in terms of events, parties, gatherings — in the African communities around me? I let it sit with me for a while, but it never left me.
At the time, I had an after-school job — working with kids in grades 2–5 — which was located on the East side of Austin, right next to a public library. And since the idea will not let me go, I decided to try creating something at the library before work starts. So one day — I think it was a Tuesday — I decided to build the first prototype of the product I had in mind. Nothing crazy or elaborate — just a bare-bones minimum design that made sense to me.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good — William Faulkner
I left the apartment earlier that day and stopped by the library. With each click, I started putting it together. With the insistence the idea had on my mind, I had actually started on paper at home because I remembered reading an article online somewhere by David Heinemeier Hannson of 37 Signals (Now Basecamp). He recommended using a pencil to draw out the idea as the first step to building any tech product. “Start on paper, ” he said. So I drew it out first.
But in the library that day I began to see something coming together. Something that looked decent enough but not usable. I kept at it the next day and started seeing something that was just okay. Okay in the sense of “I could use it.” Remember, I was using my own need to built this out — scratching my own itch.
“At a minimum, I should be able to use this myself,” I thought.
The screens were coming together and the color scheme I was using (using the primary African colors of Yellow, Green, and Red) was not bad. I thought of a name and settled on Kilimanjaro, after the highest mountain in Africa. I like the visual image it evokes of being on top of the mountain and seeing everything around you.
I shared my first design with my developer friend Ethiopian friend Eyesodike, who was then working for VISA as a developer.
He loved it! He thought his family in Maryland could use it to know what’s going within Ethiopian circles in Maryland.
“Okay,” I thought — maybe there’s something here.
On Sunday after church, I showed it to my Kenyan friend Jane who also loved it. Having just moved to Austin from Boston, she thought adding African car sales could help, maybe thinking Africans looking for used cars can use it to find car deals.
So after the prototype, I took my rideshare & delivery earnings (I had taken up driving on the side before and after my after-school job to fill in my income with extra money) and threw it into product development to get something truly functional, a test version. After that, we had something much better — it was now clickable!
The next thing was to launch it. That’s when I began to think of New York. Having gone to Fordham University in NYC, I knew it was the perfect city to launch it since it had the greatest number of Africans and African Diasporans in the country, people there will understand what I was doing and find it useful.
After confirming it in prayer, I was off to New York City.
New York City
Not long after arriving in NY, I threw myself into learning about as much as I can about startups and how it all works. One day, I watched a Y Combinator video about how to incorporate a startup through Clerky. A keen researcher, I looked up the best states to incorporate a company — Nevada and Delaware were tops. I chose Delaware, signed up with Clerky and paid for my incorporation.
In 3 days, my articles of incorporation as a Delaware C-Corp came by email. I looked at it, and felt a little different. Wow, I just incorporated a company!
Okay, back to work, and work meant validating the idea in NYC. With my MVP, I did 4–5 months of talking to thousands of people from all over the world about their thoughts of the product, had them try it out, give me feedback, and that’s when my confidence went to the next level. There’s something here — people will use this!
Drinking from a fire hose
But in the midst of all of this was one constant: learning.
Other people have said this, and I have found that to be absolutely true. As a young person, when you just get out of college, there’s almost always one route laid in front of you — get a job and start building a career. And that’s fine, but to learn the most as possble as a young person and in the shortest amount of time, and to actually grow up and truly understand the way things are built, working on a startup is the best way.
As the founder, I learned about incorporation, building a team, validating a product, fundraising documents (convertible notes, safe notes), company valuations, hiring documents, creating option pools, working with contractors, working with lawyers, marketing, working with interns, filing SEC Form D documents ( which we did when we raised a 25K pre-seed), 83 B elections, paying franchise taxes, foreign qualifications (to do business outside your state of incorporation), creating investor spreadsheets, writing job descriptions, doing employee background checks, writing contractor agreements, etc.
Also, when I first came back to NYC, I realized I needed to get some kind of office space for the team. So I started looking at different places in the city that we could work out of, for free —NYC office spaces run in the thousands of dollars per month. But one day, at night, I decided to just Google NYC incubators. That led to a pleasant discovery — my alma mater Fordham University happened to have opened a small business office space that was open to students and alums working on companies. I went to the office the next day, talked to the director, and started working out of there, for free.
Over the Summer, we had Jermaine and Ayo, 2 brilliant developers, join our team. Quickly, I learned how to run daily team stand-ups, how to keep the team motivated and focused on the vision, managing & resolving team disputes on what the best route is for product design, maintaining team focus, keeping the team fast-moving, how to care for team members, and above all, managing my own mindset through the ups and downs.
And speaking of psychology, if you happen to work on a startup, be sure you will also go through the “valleys,” or the “troughs of sorrow,” as they are called, and there are lots of them.
One day, you feel like you are taking over the world, and the next day you will feel like you are in the dumps. This is where perseverance comes in. The vision takes hold of you so strongly, you are unfazed by present difficulties. But if you ever get to a point like this, it helps to listen to Reid Hoffman (his rallying cry for founders.)
So all in all, it will test you in ways you’ve never been — mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. No class, no community project, and certainly no job straight of college can teach you all this — or give you this experience — in one undertaking!
So I have embraced it fully, and though we are still in the early stages (seed stage), it’s the hardest thing I have ever done yet it’s the most fulfilling thing to me. Other founders say having a baby beats it in the degree of difficulty, but I’ll have to wait and see if that’s true.
Kick-start raise
Let me delve a little into our first raise. Before that raise, I had no idea exactly how we were going to raise money, but I just kept hope alive. I thought to myself, “With the insistence of this idea on my mind, and how it grabs me and never lets go, we’ve got to find a way to kick-start it. We just have to. And having prayed over it too, I just knew we will get a breakthrough somehow.
So one day in conversation with family, I decided to just share a full version of the idea with family, including the pitch deck and all, and that led to our kick-start amount of $25,000.
Having thrown everything I had into the project to get it to that point, it was a relief to raise that, and we put it to use right away. To make it official, we used a Y Combinator post-SAFE document with a pro-rata side letter to document it and put it into the company’s minute book. And we got back to work.
But before we got back to work, we had to hire a lawyer to help out with both the SAFE docs and to file our FORM D with the SEC so we can register our raise. Having raised it under Rule 504 of Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933, the law requires us to file with the SEC.
The lawyer’s rate was crazy — $575 per hour — and that’s with a discount! The regular rate, he told me, was $750 per hour. Better safe than sorry, so I paid it, including the cost of emails and phone conversations, even if I had a simple question that took a minute or two over the phone to answer. Going through this, I realized this is as a huge pain point for founders, and I hope someone (another founder) comes up with a better product to help startup founders with this — legal fees in the early stages. Those could help out a lot of founders.
After that, with the feedback we got from our users of the test version, we got to work on building the product from the ground up based on what they told us. We decided to slim it down and make it a UGC app (user-generated content) where’s it’s possible for users anywhere in the world to list events, experiences, and items wherever they are.
As we set up shop (office) in NYC and started working from the test version to a beta release, I knew we had to foreign qualify in New York State. As a startup, if you happen to do business ( in terms of having material/physical presence) in any other state besides your state of incorporation, you have to do what is called a “foreign qualification”, which is simply registering the company with the secretary of state as a duly recognized corporation in good standing within that state. And needless to say, we had to also pay New York State for this, and hire a registered agent to receive any service of process on our behalf.
I researched this and realized there was a way to avoid this registered agent’s fees in NY. If you happen to have a physical address where you can receive mail in any state that you foreign qualify to do business in, you can choose to be your own registered agent by using an address where you can receive mail through. You just have to make sure to keep an eye out for any official mail that’s material to the company and respond to it in good time. So I saved money from just looking this up.
Wrap up
So all in all, it’s been a great ride so far. We are still in the early stages (seed stage), but this should help anyone else out there looking to take the startup leap. If you feel strongly about your idea, do it! Even if you fail, at least you wouldn’t have to look back years down the road with regret, thinking of what could have been.
So although that day on Wall Street the boss had to let me go, which was not pleasant experience initially, it’s led me to this, something that I will not trade for anything else in the world. He told me about finding something that I could put my heart into, and this is it!
I could go for hours and hours, working on this and I forget the clock. I leave the office at 2:00 am with joy in my heart, knowing I put in good work that day and looking forward to getting up the next morning to do it again.
PS: If you have questions, simply want to reach out, or would like to learn more about what we are doing, you can reach me here: kingston@thekilimanjaroapp.com
