Nick Tippmann – Startups, Marketing & Life

This marks the first post of my new blog. The reason I decided to create a whole new blog rather than continue to add to my old one is it signifies a new start, a new chapter in my life. When I wrote my first post ever last year on New Year’s night it was also the start of a new chapter in my life. I had just decided I was going to take a leave of absence from college to chase my entrepreneurial dreams.

In the post I wrote I probably didn’t know what I was doing and I was okay with that fact. Looking back, “not knowing what I was doing” was a bit of an understatement to say the least. I didn’t care though. I had more motivation and drive to do this than I had ever had in my life. I trusted myself and believed my drive could take me anywhere and my hard work could get me anything. As naive as that may sound, I am here to attest that it has been the best decision I’ve ever made and I’ve never doubted it once.

It wasn’t that Business School was bad or I wasn’t learning. I value every bit of knowledge I picked up in b-school and it laid the foundation for where I am today. I had just came to a point in my life where I found what I really wanted to do and I couldn’t force myself to sit around another day to get a piece of paper I wasn’t going to use.

Since I made that decision about ten months ago, I’ve been lucky enough to have some amazing experiences like getting a free trip to Silicon Valley to work at DEMO, meet extraordinary people like when I hosted the Shark Tank Season Premier party with Mark Cuban at the Super Bowl with the help of my mentor Larry Chiang, and do awesome things like pitching the likes of Steve Blank, Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, and Guy Kawasaki.

That brings me to where I am now. It was exactly one year ago to the day that I attended my first tech conference, The Combine. At the time I didn’t even know what the word “startup” meant. I was an entrepreneurship and marketing major that had always knew I wanted to start my own company but thought software was only for kids who had been coding since age ten. When I actually figured out what technology startups were and that you didn’t really need to know how to code (even though it helps a TON) I knew I had found what I wanted to do the rest of my life.

So here I am one year later, part of an amazing startup, Impulcity, that was accepted to a top ten nationally ranked accelerator, The Brandery, and preparing for our Demo Day pitch. It’s kind of surreal.

There are so many people I need to thank for making this possible; my parents for believing in me and not thinking (or at least telling me) that I’m absolutely nuts for dropping out of my senior, my girlfriend who’s had to put up with all the craziness that comes with startups, my mentors that have been there to guide me on my path and all the rest of my awesome friends and family that have been so supportive. There are tons of other people I could thank and can’t name you all but just know I am truly grateful.

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