Sit back for an overdue reflection on Julian’s recent transition from college to Silicon Valley, where he recently moved to start his career at Facebook as a Software Engineer.
Julian graduated from college in December 2020 and took 7 months off before he started working at Facebook. During this 7 month journey, he started this podcast, worked relentlessly on his startup, Vize, traveled to South America for a month (and did Ayahuasca), and invested a significant amount of time into building systems, networking, and learning.
This episode is a reflection on his journey and his most valuable lessons from all of these experiences.
Julian co-founded his startup Vize almost four years ago and even though there have been minor wins, the team has struggled tremendously to get paying customers and find product-market fit. The entrepreneurial journey has been nothing short of incredibly challenging but he’s not willing to give up until his mission-driven team has tried everything they possibly can.
Six months into his podcast, Julian has been careful with measuring the right success metrics. Analogous to entrepreneurship, the initial results will be disproportionate to the amount of effort expended. Fortunately, he set a 100-episode goal before he would allow himself to consider giving up. Find out how he defines his core success metrics and hear about other valuable lessons Julian has learned from running the podcast for half a year.
In South America, Julian discovered his immense privilege. South America is filled with poverty and in some countries like Venezuela, the minimum wage is $5 / month. Julian’s most profound experience was his 3-day ayahuasca retreat. He shares the most important lesson he took from this mystical experience in this episode.
“The key to success is to demand more from yourself than anybody could possibly expect of you.” - Julian Alvarez
Top Value Bomb
With each ascending level of success, your ability to produce results will be increasingly contingent on “Whos” and now “Hows.” When doing anything, your first thought should be “Who can I ask to help me?” rather than “How can I do this?” Learning through traditional methods, such as books, is linear, while learning from others is nonlinear because you can get immediate answers to your specific problems and questions. Moreover, your network is your scope of opportunities.
Visit inventingthefuture.ai for the full show notes, which includes a full transcription of the conversation, a link to the YouTube Video interview, the top 3 value bombs, people & resources mentioned, and more!
This podcast is hosted by Julian Alvarez, the Co-Founder & CTO at Vize and a Software Engineer at Facebook.