Toronto Entrepreneur

Today I started my blog as a way to communicate my experience as a Torontonian entrepreneur. My goal is to share what I go through so other entrepreneurs know it is easy to follow their dreams.

A couple months before graduation, I had to decide whether I’d like a comfy, well paid job with benefits or to start my startup, which I had been dwelling over for a year by then.

In order to make the decision process easier for myself (in reality it made things harder for me) I decided to look for jobs, while I had 3 courses and two part-time jobs (I had just picked up a part time position at UofT at OISE alongside IBM). So putting the right resume together took around a week and a half.

I really tried to pass my resume to as many professionals as I could and tried to incorporate their suggestions.The outcome was great and the resume looked great I think. I started sending out resumes (to pretty much anywhere I could think of). A couple days later I was in trouble.

I was getting 5-10 calls every day from all these head hunters for jobs all over Canada and US. A lot of these jobs didn’t have much with what I was looking for so I ignored them. So I ended up getting 5 interviews all together in 3-4 weeks (the market was doing really well back then). 4 job offers came out of these 5 interviews (I told you the market was doing well). Now with these offers on the table, it was a lot harder to make a decision.

I ended up consulting with anyone I could think of. My profs, my manager at IBM, my boss at UofT, my friends, parents…etc. Bottom line everyone gave me one answer. Do what you really want to do. That didn’t seem like much help back then but now I realize it was the right answer.

Anyway, one morning I woke up at 8 am and realized I wasn’t really happy being in my comfort zone. I’ve always been the kind of guy who needs things to go up and down in his life (as long as I can predict those ups and downs). So that was the first step in starting my startup. It’s been a year since then and I’ve loved every day so far.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Tags: graduation, startup, toronto

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.