Mehtaphysics ॐ

I was asked by The Exonian to write an op-ed piece reflecting on life since graduating from Exeter in 2010, and any tips I have for this year's graduating seniors. The following is what I came up with. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Very strong PG and James Altucher influences. Thanks to my friends Dan, Hanif, and Caroline for reading it. 

I dropped out of college to start FamilyLeaf, a Y Combinator-funded startup. More info here. 

I have always been one to take risks, but they've never seemed very risky to me. I came to Exeter from Seattle just for senior year, against my parents' best judgment. I picked my college program just for the three required semesters of study abroad. I gave up a killer summer internship to work on my own web projects. I took a leave of absence after my first year-and-a-half at NYU to run a funded startup. I don't plan on going back anytime soon.

Here I'll share a few lessons I've learned since leaving Exeter two years ago. As a graduating senior, you're blessed with unusual wisdom for your age. You're in for decades of learning. You're one of the only high school audiences in the world who reads that last sentence and smiles knowingly. 

Your Harkness skill set might make it easy to coast along and get good grades. Resist the urge to just go with the flow, academically or socially. If most of your friends are doing something, it's probably too easy and you should do something different. 

The most important goal in college is simple: find out what you want to do with your life. This might happen much more outside the classroom than in it. Indulge your interests.

Live in an exciting city, but don't let it make you edgy or jaded. Live in a beautiful suburban town, but don't become complacent. 

There are no certainties. You'll grow to define yourself less by how well you adhered to the status quo and more by how you defied it, majestically and with permanence.

Most people wait for the right opportunity to present itself. The adventurer, the inventor, the entrepreneur, the artist is always on the lookout. They know their limitations, and purposefully defy them.

Take the time to self-reflect. Understand what you want to accomplish, even if vaguely. Learn from how others got there, and recognize that your path will be different. Try to hit a perfect mix of floating down life's river, and decisively aiming for something. 

Work forward from promising situations. Look at your available options, and choose those that will give you the most possible freedom moving forward. Don't shoehorn yourself. 

Make things. Please, make things. Extrapolate "make" as broadly as you'd like. Just don't lead a life of pure consumption. It's easy to mistake consuming as growing -- the more you know about cultural touchstones or esoteric subjects, the smarter you'll feel. It's nice to feel smart. But when you wake up each day, do things. Write something, run somewhere, sketch out an idea. Do something new every day. It will make the days pass more slowly. It might bring you love and contentment. 

Be in awe of the infinite beauty of the world around you. Take public transportation.

Your qualifications don't matter; your books don't matter; your body doesn't matter; your friends don't matter; your successes don't matter. Your conversation with yourself matters. Your choices matter. Remember that you are going to die.

And when you recognize a moment approaching its natural ending -- seize it. Don't look back.

We've had a good amount of press for launching FamilyLeaf lately, but I never thought it would be picked up by Exeter's newspaper, The Exonian. Unfortunately, they've hidden it behind a login screen -- so I thought I'd republish it here. The headline is omitted, because it's embarassingly bad.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Ajay Mehta ’10, the co-founder of a new social media site FamilyLeaf, has been put on the spotlight for the site’s innovative way that allows families to connect. FamilyLeaf was founded nine weeks ago, and has already been mentioned in The New York Times, The Times of India, Gawker, Forbes and TechCrunch.

FamilyLeaf is designed to allow relatives to privately share photos and other information.

“We came up with the idea for FamilyLeaf from our own global families,” Mehta said. “We grew up with Facebook and were very used to using it with our friends, but as we left for college or Exeter and Facebook became more open, our parents and then random family members started adding us. We realized that family is so important to us, but also is such a separate part of our lives from friends and acquaintances.”

FamilyLeaf is a solution to the problem of finding relatives online. “The Internet has done a lot to bring together friends, work colleagues, even strangers—but it surprisingly hasn't done much to bring families closer together,” Mehta said. “So FamilyLeaf lets you share photos, contact information and updates with your whole family in one central place, and fully privately. FamilyLeaf is already operable in over 10 languages, and we have users in 95-plus countries.”

Mehta hopes that the site will continue to help families interact, even when they are thousands of miles apart. “Future goals for FamilyLeaf are simple: bring families around the world closer together online.”

Mehta, a one-year senior, graduated cum laude and entered the NYU Stern Business School with a dream to start an Internet company. Science instructor Townley Chisholm said he enjoyed getting to know Mehta as a member of the Williams House dorm. “As a student, he drank deeply from the Exeter well in the one year that he was here,” Chisholm said. “He also had a wonderful sense of humor and was a superb student.”

At the Academy, Mehta participated in the Boston Fed Challenge, and Economics competition. “Given what I saw then of his knowledge, interests and passion, I was deeply impressed when I heard the news that he had founded a new social network which caught the attention of The New York Times,” Mehta’s teammate senior Evan Soltas said.

Mehta also worked with History instructor Georgio Secondi in the competition. “He did a wonderful job: he loves a challenge, works very hard, learns very quickly and brings a lot of energy and a great sense of humor to everything he does,” Secondi said. “He has enormous potential as a tech-entrepreneur.”

Soltas was not very surprised by Mehta’s success. “I don't think I was surprised—maybe only to the extent that he had attained such a success so quickly—because this is very much in character for the Ajay I knew at Exeter and now continue to keep in touch with,” Soltas said. “I can only expect to hear of more achievements and read bigger headlines in the years to come.”

Starting last winter, Mehta began to work on web developments with co-founder Wesley Zhao. “We didn't know how to code at all, but we did weekend projects until we decided they were good enough to release to the public,” Mehta said. “They were simple, like a way to map out your Facebook friends around the world, but slowly they became more successful and spread virally.”

Mehta and Zhao soon attracted the attention of Y Combinator, a prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator provided Mehta and Zhao with the funds and direction they needed to launch FamilyLeaf.

 “We applied, interviewed and were accepted into the Winter 2012 batch of Y Combinator—they accept two batches a year,” Mehta said. “They interview thousands of teams and pick about 3 percent of them to fund.”

Mehta credits many different aspects of Exeter as inspiration for the development of FamilyLeaf.

“I think an important special thing about Exeter is the ingrained nature of its students to deviate from the norm, and the desire to build or accomplish something that will truly affect the world,” he said.

Specifically, Mehta credited Mark Zuckerberg ’02 as an inspiration to him, as well as “every other Internet entrepreneur.”

“Zuck was clearly motivated by that in his quest for Facebook world domination, and while I might not be quite that ambitious, I hope that FamilyLeaf will start to make families happier and more connected on a large scale,” Mehta said.

Lower Tyler Weitzman, who recently garnered recognition for his own app development, thinks that FamilyLeaf could be beneficial to families.

“Having an entirely separate, standalone website specifically for families has its pros and cons,” Weitzman said. “From one point, it's distinctively separate from the social network you use with your friends (Facebook). On the other hand, it might be tiresome to switch between the two.”

 

by Sarah Hannigan, staff writer.

Source

I managed to make it out to Morocco briefly last semester while studying in London, and among all the sights, sounds, and smells there's one indelible image I can't seem to get off my mind. I'll just let the story speak for itself:

A friend and I were winding down from a long day of exploring the souks, and we ended up and getting wrapped up in conversation with two English-speaking guys -- who I later found out made money as tourist guides, getting referral fees every time they brought an American lured by his or her home language to try out a favored restaurant or riad. We followed them to a nearby bar of theirs to just sit down and chill, and I noticed two of their friends on a padded bench, disinterested in the beautiful evening action around them and wrapped in a smartphone screen.

The main guy was looking down into his Samsung smartphone running Android, and the ubiquitous American top 10 pop song "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO was blasting from his phone. It seemed a little strange, because the music at these steamy Moroccan bars was all traditional and atmospheric, and the most American music I had heard on the trip was blasting out of used electronics stores. "Party Rock Anthem" didn't exactly fit within the ambiance.

But then I noticed his friend, a slightly lighter-skinned young man with curly hair but a similar leather jacket on, lean over and jab at the screen with his index finger sequentially in time with the beat. The video wasn't actually a music video, it was just images of the song's lyrics. The main watcher was trying to follow along. He already knew the lyrics from hearing the song dozens of times, but he matched sounds with the words he was seeing on screen. 

His friend spouted words of encouragement during the breaks in the song. First in Moroccan Arabic, but after he noticed I was watching intently he switched over to English: this apparently was how he himself learned English over the past year. And knowing English fluently was a major life upgrade for him. Now he was dating a Moroccan girl who was leaving to study and work in Canada. And he was able to converse flawlessly with tourists, leading to a new income source as a street guide.

The first lesson is one to app developers who want their new product to change the world in some material way: teaching English to Moroccans with an android app is a noble goal, but you really need to know (and might be surprised by) how people are solving the pressing need today. In this case it was something I would have never expected -- these young guys were literally learning through the YouTube app on their smartphones by following along with lyrics videos. Nothing can replace venturing out into the field and figuring out what users actually want.

The second takeaway is just pure amazement. I'm so surprised that people are using technology this way, and that Moroccan twenty-somethings are streaming American music videos on tiny handheld devices that almost all of them possess. And surprisingly, many of the guys we met didn't just have one mobile phone: they had two, three, or even more, with a whole suite of different SIM cards from different providers to save dirhams. The classy bros in LMFAO might be enabled more to help teach eager young Moroccan men than Khan Academy, Rosetta Stone, or even their own government. And that is a true revolution in education.