After graduating from high school in 2010, I enrolled at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. I grew up in an environment where I was told that college was the only path to success, so I didn't even consider taking a different route. I quickly realized, though, that college was not the right fit for me: I struggled to balance school and my social life while working part-time jobs, and it was weighing on my mental health.
When I went to college in 2017, I already knew I wanted to work in startups and make a difference in the world. After my freshman year at the University of Michigan, I switched majors from business to computer science, which I felt would be more useful for running an early-stage company. But in late 2018, at age 19, I dropped out of college for a full-time job.
Before going to college, I lived in the Bay Area. I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and founders, so building a company didn't seem incredibly novel to me. But in 2018, I started a company of my own called Injective. We're a blockchain network that provides infrastructure for finance applications. We've raised over $50 million in funding and got Mark Cuban to invest in our vision.