Blog

2015 Fellow Nathan Roberston reflects on the significance of choosing a career path that will create value for himself and for those around him.  After Training Camp Nathan is headed to Colorado where he’ll be working for Indigo Project, a company that seeks to measure and cultivate non-academic skills that were previously considered untestable. 
 Visit apply.ventureforamerica.org for more information on becoming a VFA Fellow.
Name: Nathan Robertson
College or University: University of Oklahoma
Major: Public Relations 
Hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma
Fellow Class: 2015
I remember the first time I read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The book tells the story of a man who lives his entire life dutifully following the societal norms of 19^th century Russia. He realizes at the end of his life that he made so little impact on the world he lived in that he’s not even sure of his own identity. It’s no fun read, but it is an alarmingly accurate depiction of the road many young graduates choose—a path of stability and acceptance that leads to a life unremarkable.
I felt like I was placed on a career track early in my undergraduate years. It was as simple as checking all the right boxes, shaking a few hands and grabbing a decent internship before landing safely at an advertising or PR agency. Many of the alumni from my journalism school came back yearly to woo students with stories of high-profile clients, a metropolitan lifestyle and what sounded like a gratuitous amount of booze.
But I dug beneath all the anecdotes and recruiting tactics and never met someone that could look me in the face and say their job fulfilled them. Most of the people I met just pushed papers without being aware of the big picture. Their ability to impact the world was marginalized, and following them felt like choosing a road eerily similar to Ivan Ilyich’s.
I stumbled into co-founding my first startup during my junior year of college. I still remember filing the LLC with my friends at the state capitol in Oklahoma City thinking, “What the heck am I doing?” A summer spent in a local accelerator quickly socialized me to the modern entrepreneurial community. I met people who’d confidently tell their mechanical wheelchair lift or in-car mechanics analytics system would change the world. They were on a mad journey, but it fulfilled them.
Startups are unique organizations in any society—they gather a series of unrelated resources and re-organize them into something new that didn’t previously exist. In the United States today, capitalism and individual celebrities regularly catapult new startups with young tech people– Ping-Pong tables and the next big thing to the top. But they aren’t doing anything revolutionary, they are doing what new companies have done since the beginning of civilized trade: gathering resources and re-organizing them to solve a problem and create new value.
What drew me to VFA (and what still affirms that original choice) is the desire to create value in the world in which I live. The idea is attractive to the young and idealistic, but it will come with certain sacrifices as I continue down the road. Many of my more risk-averse friends and colleagues are skeptical about my choice, and not without good reason. I could pursue this desire for 50 years and make no tangible impact. I could consistently shuffle resources trying to create something that solves a problem without ever reaching my goal.
But consider these words from Theodore Roosevelt:
“It is not the critic who counts…The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…who comes short again and again…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Using value creation as the metric by which you judge your professional impact is scary. It promises no reward for your risk and no comfort if you fall short. But I would rather be Teddy’s man in the arena who spends his life trying. I would rather be an entrepreneur whose standard of excellence is adding value to the world.
I would rather be a Venture for America Fellow. Wouldn’t you?