He then told me that he was prepared to offer me two million dollars to buy the entire concept and the intellectual property right then. He suggested that I could finish my degree without any financial worries and that he would handle the scaling of the business from there.
It was an incredibly tempting offer that would have solved all of my immediate financial problems in a single moment. I could have paid off all of my mounting student loans and moved into a comfortable apartment without ever having to work a retail shift again.
However, something deep inside of me held me back from saying yes to the easy path. “I am incredibly honored by the offer, but I am not looking to sell my vision right now,” I heard myself say with a steady voice.
I continued by explaining that I believed in what I was building and that I wanted to be the one to see it through to the end. Christopher looked genuinely surprised by my refusal, but he did not seem at all displeased with my ambition.
“Most students in your position would have jumped at that amount of money,” he noted with a small smile. “I have never been like most students, and I think my history proves that,” I replied while looking him in the eye.
The very next afternoon, Christopher called me back with a completely different and much more interesting proposal for our partnership. He wanted to invest five hundred thousand dollars in exchange for a fifteen percent equity stake in ChainVault.
This was exactly the kind of deal I had been hoping for, and I accepted his offer immediately. With his significant investment, I was able to officially incorporate the company and hire a small team of talented developers.
The following months were easily the most challenging and exhilarating of my entire life thus far. I was still a full time student with a heavy course load, but I was now also the Chief Executive Officer of a growing tech startup.
I hired two brilliant computer science students to work as part time developers and a graduate student to help us with our branding and marketing. We worked out of a very cramped and windowless room in the innovation center, often coding until the early hours of the morning.
There were many moments when the weight of it all seemed almost impossible to carry. Three months after we officially started, we discovered a critical flaw in our primary security protocol that required us to rewrite half of our code.
I did not sleep for four days straight as we worked around the clock to fix the issue before our beta launch. Then, one of our lead developers quit unexpectedly to take a high paying job at a big tech firm, which left us incredibly short handed.
Our bank account was beginning to dwindle fast, and we were still several months away from having a product we could actually market. During one particularly dark and low point, I called Professor Jenkins and spoke to her while I was in tears.
“I think I have made a massive mistake and that we are going to run out of money before we even launch,” I confessed. “Every single successful entrepreneur in history has experienced moments exactly like this one,” she assured me with a calm voice.
She then asked me if I was the type of person who was going to push through the pain or simply give up and walk away. Her blunt words immediately steeled my resolve and reminded me of everything I had already overcome.
