Noah Graduates from Berkeley and takes a job with Intel as a marketing analyst:

Walking into the huge complex it just felt like death. No colors on the walls. Every person I walked by had a blue employee badge and carried a sad face. Most seemed like their favorite things were waiting for 5 pm when they could leave, and weekends when they could avoid being at work. I ALWAYS wanted to start my own company and ran many little businesses in college, but I expected to get a real job. It's what everyone was doing. Going against that, your peers, family, and expectations at that point seemed too daunting to me. Helps me appreciate people who do. So I figured I'd work at a big company to get experience, raise some capital, and then launch my own thing at night. Unfortunately, that's not the case. At big companies, you get complacent, meet others who are like that, and end up learning the skills you need to work at big companies.

How the hell did I end up playing with an Excel sheet as my full - time job ? You could say I wasn't in heaven working at Intel.

Intel was the place where parents with two kids, a mini-van and a mortgage spent the rest of their lives - not the place for someone hoping to start their own business.

On many days, I would bring my sleeping bag, strategically position it under my cubicle, block my door with a second chair, and get a good 2 - 3 hour nap. The rest of the time, I would take a two-hour lunch, work on my own businesses (a student discount card, Ninja Card; coordinate events called Entrepreneur27, and attempt to create a college Craigslist, CollegeUp) or go make out with my girlfriend who worked on the second floor. Hey, some nice perks of having so many conference rooms!

The best part of my job was with this master Excel sheet that I worked with. Everyone did it manually, but with macros and the solver function, you could automate a lot of repetitive tasks or guessing and checking numbers. So, I set that up after a month on the job and basically limited my actual amount of work to maybe one hour a day.

One of the biggest advantages of having a cushy day job was that it gave me a lot of time to work on my own projects. My mind had the freedom at night to work on whatever I wanted, and I had no risk if one of my side projects failed. To this day, I encourage people to not quit their day jobs until they have their side business going.

Starting at Facebook as employee #30:

It reminded me of when I was around Bill Gates. Awkward, very methodical in his speaking (he didn't talk right away), and spoke with a precision and brilliance that I hardly experience to this day. - In regards to Mark Zuckerberg.

This group of people didn't feel like the friends I would choose to hang out with outside of work. They were smarter than my current friends which intimidated me, and only now in retrospect, helped me grow so much further than I could ever imagine. Facebook hardly reacted to what other sites did. We created the features and things we wanted, not what the users wanted.

He taught me something I have never forgotten. On a white board, he wrote the word "growth" and nothing else. He said if any feature didn't help do that then he was not interested and the idea was crushed. That was the only priority that mattered and his singular focus on accomplishing something has stuck with me till today. We had to do maintenance to the site, but all the big changes and things we worked towards were catching up and surpassing Myspace and taking over the world for connecting people. Singular focus - it helped us all stay on track, all the time.

Hardly anybody used it, so we removed the feature. This was an amazing skill of Mark's - he let go of his ego. We'd spend weeks on a feature like this and then, if he felt it wasn't helpful, he'd just ask for it to be removed. No emotional attachment.

At that time, we never released products to the entire site. We always released them to specific college campuses to make sure the server load was okay and that the feature didn't have too many bugs.

It was through this experience that I learned from Mark the importance of sticking to one's guns. He taught us to wait and see how comments stacked up over time: if they faded and usage remained the same, then no course correction was smart. But if the complaints continued over a long period of time, changes might be warranted. This taught me a valuable lesson that many times the users didn't know what they wanted until we showed it to them.

He recognized early on (which I completely missed) that having a work environment you want to work at would appeal to potential employees and make the existing ones that much more proud to be there (and stay later at night).

Advice From Noah:

One thing that's stuck with me is to solve your own problems in starting a business. You understand the problems the customer (yourself) faces and the ideal solution versus having to do market research. Also, it is much easier to persist with that business when times are tough. Compare that to a fad or an opportunity where, as times get tough, you don't generally care for the outcome of that business besides the money it provides.

This is something I've learned for myself, and is valuable advice for all other burgeoning entrepreneurs. Don't quit your day job. If you hate your job, that should motivate you to stay up later or get up earlier. Work weekends if you are really serious. There's no point jeopardizing your livelihood until you are nearly certain that what you are working on is, indeed, working.

When a "bad" thing occurs, the key point is to process the pain, LEARN for the next experience, and know it will get better. It always does. Remember after you broke up with your first significant other and you never thought you'd meet someone better. You always do.