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Initially published on Medium — May 9, 2016
As of last week, I have been at Ludlow full-time for a little over 3 months. I wrote a small post announcing that I was joining the team; however, I wanted to take the time to explain how I somehow ended up in the VC world as a 22 year-old from a relatively small suburb of Detroit, Michigan.
I’ve talked to a lot of people that want to get into VC, and they all ask me how I did it, so I figured I’d share my story, in case anyone finds it useful.
I’d like to think that I defied a lot of odds, but truthfully I was so heads down focused on achieving my dreams that I didn’t ever notice what the odds were.
My Twitter bio does a fair job of showing on a high-level what I’ve done to get to this point, but I’d like to think my story is much deeper than just a couple of @handles in a Twitter bio.
Below is a timeline of some major milestones, risks, etc. and how it all played a factor into where I am today.
Shortly after starting classes at Michigan State, I had decided that I was going to get an internship my freshman year. I don’t know why I was so determined or focused, but it probably stemmed from the fact that everyone said it was virtually impossible. Two months into my freshman year, I attended my first career fair. Unsurprisingly, I was shut down by every company I approached.
I knew that if I wanted an internship I had to get creative. I had always been interested in technology companies and quietly dreamed of working at Google one day. Naturally, that meant I frequently checked TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, etc.
One day, I decided to cold e-mail and tweet every startup company that piqued my interest on the front page of TechCrunch.
The top story was about a company called:Â Zaarly, which had just announced their Series A fundraising for $14.1M.
After researching Zaarly and their team extensively, I noticed that their first employee — Eric Jorgenson — had graduated from Michigan State. I remember being so excited to see someone else from Michigan State in the startup world. I immediately cold-tweeted Eric asking if I could e-mail him some questions.
Shockingly, he replied super fast and said:
Note: I used to be @blakeirobbins on Twitter, now I’m @blakeir
Out of sheer excitement, I wrote him one of the cringiest e-mails ever. It was just paragraphs full of questions.