Mentoring Those on the Way Up

AZEC10 is the place where entrepreneurs gather to Connect,  Share ideas, and Be Inspired.

Each year, entrepreneurs who can’t attend themselves have the opportunity to sponsor a student.

(Simply click REGISTER) and select “Sponsor a Student”.

Each student is asked to complete a short essay after the event on their Three Best Take Aways from AZEC10 and share it with their sponsor.

Here’s what one student said:

Today was great!!! I had such an amazing time. Meant plenty of people and learned plenty of things. I took 10 pages of notes throughout the day and I am still processing all the rest of the information.

Three best takeaways from last year’s conference:

1. Pam Slim stood out to me as the biggest influence of the conference. For the last year I have been following her blog as well as her communications with a few other of my favorite bloggers. While watching her presentation I asked her the question,”How should I go about deciding which passion I am going to brand? I have narrowed it down to three passions and I am not sure which one would lead me down the strongest path”. She told me to evaluate what my final goal is as well as what my ideal self is. Those are two things that I really haven’t done, but will be working on as soon as I can. I am going to stay in contact with her and hopefully she continue to be a mentor for me.
2. Ever since freshman year of high school I have been following Merlin Mann‘s blog 43folders in which he demonstrated ways to streamline or optimize your workflow. I ran into him in the bathroom and we sparked off after that. Over a 10 minute conversation with him I learned more about optimizing specific things than I could ever learned in an hour long presentation. As a matter of fact the conversation I had with him gave him the idea to setup a system for the type of optimization we were talking about. It was real impressive.
3. Finally, I would like to say that I met the CEO’s of the actual company that I was applying for. redPear, a local software development company in the valley is looking to train a college student such as myself to experience what it is actually like to be an entrepreneur. All three of the gentlemen were really nice. I hope the connection that I made at the conference will plant a good seed in the application process. :)
   If i do get the position I will work my heart out.

Once again, I want to thank you  for putting on such an influential event for me.
–name withheld pending permission