Fresh Out of College: Lessons Learned From Monthly's Co-Founder
It’s no surprise that some of the most successful companies have been built out of dorm rooms (Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, etc). With access to world-class professors, funding programs, and a coexisting market of college-students, universities are becoming hubs for innovation. And even if you don’t end up launching a venture during college, there are so many ways to gain applicable startup experience.
To learn more about how founders are leveraging their college experience to build startups, we decided to chat with recent Brown graduate (‘18) Valentin Perez. Valentin has built several startups out of his dorm room, pursued internships at some of the fastest-growing tech companies, and was also a fellow at Kleiner Perkins and Rough Draft Ventures. He shares key learnings across his extensive experiences in and out of college, and how they’ve led him to launch Monthly: immersive, month-long classes taught by top creators and experts.
What was your experience like during college at Brown? Did you have a career path in mind?
I loved my experience at Brown. Brown was paradise for me. A dedicated, gorgeous place for learning, exploring, growing, and creating, with endless opportunities, friendships, resources, adventures, and challenges. I really enjoyed it.
I did come in knowing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur — I already considered myself one, so I just wanted to continue doing that. I also knew that I wanted to major in Computer Science and I wanted to combine it with something else. Since at Brown you could create your own major, at some point I was looking into also majoring in “Innovation”. Turns out that because you could take any class you want regardless of your major, that really wasn’t necessary. So I ended up majoring in Computer Science and Applied Math, and also took classes from 16 different departments and RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). But there’s no need to have a career path in mind coming in. I think it’s great to explore.
You’ve worked on so many interesting projects in and out of school (Daycation, Join, etc), can you tell us about some of them and any lessons you learned along the way?
There’s a lot of things you can learn from books and listening to the stories of others, but when you’re in the arena actually doing something and a situation gives you a learning experience, that’s when you most internalize things and can make the most connections and understand the subtleties, because the information isn’t filtered and reduced to some text or story.
That being said, here are some things I learned from Daycation and Join:
With Daycation, we allowed people to enjoy hotel amenities like the pools for the day, without having to pay for a full night. Something I learned: For making sales (like onboarding hotels to the platform), it’s important to find who is the key decision-maker (sometimes it’s not obvious or it changes per case).
With Join, you could share all your social profiles (instagram, snapchat, twitter, email, soundcloud, etc.) with just one profile and find Join profiles of your college friends. Something I learned: an idea can sound great and people can react like “wow, why didn’t this exist before”, but it matters more if they actually end up using it for a while / incorporate it into their daily lives.
What are some of your key takeaways from interning at places like Uber (as a KPCB fellow) and Snap so early in your career? How did being on the other side of the table, as an investor at Rough Draft Ventures, shape your perspective as a founder?
A key takeaway is that everyone is just figuring things out as they go. And it’s cool to see the systems that other people came up with to deal with things because then you can adopt what you see is working well. Interning at places of different company sizes and cultures is also a great way to see what kind of environment and work you like to be doing.
Being on the other side of the table at Rough Draft Ventures was awesome. You hear so many pitches that you better see what are the main mistakes or strengths for startups, which helps for knowing what to keep in mind when starting one.
Can you tell us about your unique approach to learning, and how that’s translated to what you’re building at Monthly?
With the internet, the bottleneck for learning is no more extended access to information — it's commitment and a structure to follow through that commitment. So it has been immensely helpful for me to commit myself to the things I want to learn and create a system that helps me learn those things (like in my Re Human project). At Monthly, we craft effective and engaging learning experiences that help you do precisely this: commit to what you've wanted to learn but haven't had the time and energy to follow through. We create a space, a curriculum, and a community that helps you commit to your creativity.
Lastly, what’s your best piece of advice for aspiring founders in college?
Use college as a platform for practicing entrepreneurship. Create clubs, create events, create products, create parties, create really cool class projects, create conferences, go to hackathons and continue working on projects after the hackathons.
Enjoy your time in college! There are so many things to do. Explore widely and make the most out of it!
Valentin Perez is a Co-Founder at Monthly, a platform for immersive month-long classes that are taught by experts and celebrities — the instructors often have hundreds of thousands or millions of YouTube subscribers. Monthly is currently profitable and has raised an undisclosed amount from Floodgate Ventures, Intuit founder Scott Cook, and OVO Fund’s Eric Chen. Before building Monthly, Valentin was a fellow at Kleiner Perkins and Rough Draft Ventures and graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.