Stanford junior Kai Cuspa, who started ventures at 14, joined Tim Draper's DraperU program despite initial skepticism about its unconventional style. He found a community of people driven to explore wild ideas, which he now sees as essential training for entrepreneurship's unpredictable reality.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Kai Cuspa. I'm going to be a junior next year at Stanford University studying computer science and electrical engineering. As soon as I heard about it, I knew that I wanted to be involved with it. It was exactly what I was interested in. I had been doing ventures since I was 14. Technology, I knew who Tim Draper was, of course, and I saw the application. And that kind of gave me pause. I just said, what the hell is going on with this? It's a picture of some superheroes and then say, you know, answer any questions you want. And I'm not really the kind of guy to leave space blank on an application, so I just answered all of them. And I got here and it was very zany. I think zany is a pretty good word to describe the first couple of days. That being said, a couple days into it, I just sort of really came around and I realized that the people that, you know, came here because of that and the people who are attracted to DraperU as mentors, as teachers, and that sort of thing, All sort of had the same general vector of their life. It was just this random collection of things where people were just trying to figure out what they're doing. And I realized that in this business, you know, trying to do new things which have never been thought of before or never been attempted, that's really the perfect framework for it. And, you know, I've actually become to be a big believer in exactly What Tim was trying to do, I think, which is to completely get people out of their comfort zone, have them exposed to a million different things, even if you think it's the most random thing that will never apply to you. And just be crazy, because the further you are from thinking what reality should be, the closer you are to, you know, new things. And being in that mindset with 40 other people with the same mindset, along with speakers who truly not only believe that but have lived that throughout their lives. I think that's really a winning combination. So, you know, at first I was a little skeptical, but now I see that it has to be exactly what it is. If it was anything else, he'd never achieve the goal. And living entrepreneurship is really not having a 9-to-5 schedule, not knowing what you're doing next, not feeling that you're on an organized schedule, you know. That just living and being okay with not knowing what's gonna happen next is the closest thing I've actually felt to my work with NeuroVigil or any of the other startups I've been involved with. I'm going to try as hard as I can to not just, you know, think up some new crazy ideas, which would be fun to think about. I'm really about taking those ideas and then implementing them. So whatever I do in the next 5 years, it's going to be Trying to regal these 2 ideas of living in this, you know, reality distorted zone where you can see what everything's going to be in the next 5 years, and then, you know, doing the implementation part. I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the next 4 or 5 years. I'll tell you, you know, when I know what I'm doing next week.
