A few days ago someone asked me:

What did you do growing up to become an entrepreneur?

It’s a funny question because I certainly didn’t grow up planning to be a tech entrepreneur. But in retrospect, all I really did was build a lot of things, which eventually made me want to build a tech company.

I think that’s true for most entrepreneurs.

Being an entrepreneur is really just a never-ending cycle of building and learning.

I can’t quite explain what compels people to build their first thing, but what happens after is common.

You build your first thing – it might be a toy, a project or an organization. And from that experience, you learn things – new skills, attitudes, perspectives. And these learnings impact the next thing you choose to build and how you build it.

Those learnings compound. You learn to love building and at some point you can’t imagine doing anything else.

When something fails or you lose interest, you might take some time off. But eventually you get hooked on a new idea. You build the next thing faster and better.

One day you wake up, and you’re still building – but this time it’s a company.

My first thing

I consider the Internet to be the technological advancement that has had the most impact on my career. A lot of my success has come from being at the right place at the right time with regards to the Internet.

And that certainly holds true when I think about the experiences that led me to entrepreneurship. In fact, the Internet is what enabled me to build my first thing.

Everyone’s first thing is different. Most people don’t know this, but for me it was a website.

I was 11 years old and my family had just gotten the Internet a year before. One of my best friends started building a personal website, and it seemed really cool, so I started building my own too. We would fill our pages with animated GIFs and an amount of javascript that would be considered a crime by web developers today.

Now this was back in the day when there were no CMS’s like WordPress. I grew up building websites on the ad-laden Angelfire and Geocities in the middle of the dot com boom. Because we didn’t have fancy templates, and our only alternatives were Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia Dreamweaver (remember those?), if you wanted to build anything decent you had to learn HTML & CSS.

But of course, it wasn’t enough to be able to write code – it had to look good too. So it became natural to learn Photoshop to create static images/designs. And then, of course, I had to learn Flash because this was still a time when animated banners were awesome.

At some point, just having a personal website wasn’t good enough. I wanted to build something more significant. I shut down my personal website and started a focused anime website.

I didn’t even like anime more than the average kid in my class, but I just really loved building something. I hated writing anime content, but I would do research and write pages of content because I wanted to build something great. I would scour the web for anime galleries, save images, and then use them to build the largest galleries possible.

Eventually, it wasn’t enough to just build a big website. I wanted the numbers to match the work I put in. Traffic and winning over the Internet began to matter.

The most popular anime websites were getting traffic by becoming highly ranked on “top site lists”. In order to get to the top of these lists, you needed visitors with unique IP addresses to vote for you each week.

The term “growth hacking” wouldn’t be coined for another 10 years, but I figured out a way to get votes on a predictable basis. At one point, I reached the top of several top site lists, generating 5,000+ unique visitors on a daily basis.

At some point I lost interest and I just stopped working on the website. It wasn’t obvious at the time, but this first experience is what got me hooked on building things.

Skills & experience compound

I tell the previous story not because I think there is something particularly compelling about building anime websites. It’s important because building that first website ended up laying the foundation for the next major things I would build. If I didn’t build that first thing, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

When I launched the SMARTS youth science network in high school, it started as just a website with Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) program listings and reviews. But it was a website that would never have existed if not for that first anime website.

In my last year of undergrad, I would start MedHopeful, which took off as a popular blog for students. I picked up building a blog very quickly, and it’s unlikely that would have happened if not for my web development skills which further improved in high school.

Because of that blog, I began to write. A lot. It also helped that I started the blog just before my university went on strike for 3 months, which allowed me to write a lot in a short period of time. I’m a much better writer now because of it. And the personal blog you are reading this on now would likely not have existed if not for that first blog.

As I learned to build a successful blog, I would often come across blogs about startups. So sure, blogging gave me early exposure to the startup culture, but that couldn’t possibly lead to building an actual startup, right?

Actually, if you ask Reza Satchu, he would tell you I almost didn’t make it as a finalist for The Next 36 – the program where I would eventually co-found my startup SeamlessMD.

Most people think I made The Next 36 because of my unique background in medicine. As it turned out, the selection committee only put me through because they were astounded by what I built with MedHopeful. So I guess I wouldn’t be building a tech company today if not for that first blog.

Who would’ve guessed?

Entrepreneurship is about following your curiosity

While I think learning to code is one of the most important skills students should learn today, this post isn’t about coding or building websites.

It’s about entrepreneurship, and the idea that entrepreneurship is about a certain attitude and approach to life. It’s about falling in love with building, and then learning, and then building again.

What should you build?

Easy – whatever makes you curious. Whatever gets you excited and obsessed. Whatever you can’t wait to start working on again after you get home.

It doesn’t matter what it is – it’s the attitude and the process that counts. If you build enough, you will develop the skills to build increasingly meaningful things over time.

I wouldn’t be working on healthcare technology today if I didn’t start an anime website 15 years ago.

Oh by the way, what about that thing we never talk about called failure?

Sounds like I had this perfect narrative, where one success led to the next.

NOPE. Guess again.

I didn’t want to clog up my narrative with all my failures, but there are just as many of those too.

After starting a successful blog for premeds, I tried starting an online premed community with some friends. That didn’t take off.

Oh, and there was that healthcare startup I tried building with some med school friends before I got into The Next 36. That didn’t work out either.

I could list a ton more failures. Everyone has those skeletons, we just don’t talk about them enough.

But without a doubt, my failures are as much a part of the building and learning process as my successes.

Because at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is not simply a title or activity. It’s an ongoing process of building and learning.

And it starts with building that first thing.