“mum- i’m quitting my job and moving to Bali…to unlearn”

y most accounts, life seemed to be going well. I had a pretty cool job working at the BBC in their Strategy team and had just got on one of these Young Leaders Scheme (aka no payrise, promotion, responsibility but a pat on the back), buzzing around London town with my pals and having enough time for my many a side-project which ranged from tennis, netball, yoga, art, bollywood dance, talks at schools (see other post) and cooking. No boyf but its London so that figures and no wonder I didn’t have time to start a business on the side.

I was obsessed with success and achievement, all my peers were on top 30 under 30 as it’s the way the system programmed us and I’m also a tad competitive. So much so that I wrote (and performed) a spoken word at an open mic night!

I tried a whole host of options over the period of c. 2 years to better my situation including:

I embarked on a 2 week roadshow around the US AS PART OF MY ANNUAL LEAVE to stalk cool companies in New York and San Francisco and learn about their strategies (wrote it up). I got ins at Buzzfeed, HuffPo, TED, GoogleX, Survey Monkey to learn about viral content.

I rapidly ruled out an MBA after visiting Harvard and Stanford – it just wasn’t for me. I‘m at a stage of my life where I want to learn in less formal environments as I witnessed the beauty of this at the BBC. Further, I felt that it is most suited to those either looking for 360 career transition or looking to fill an entrepreneur core skills gap e.g. marketing, finance, etc but my Strategy experience had covered the majority of it. The intake wasn’t necessarily what I thought it would be with on average 2–3 years work experience, predominantly in investment banking or management consultancy. I had thought about doing one for a couple of years but it was only until I actually visited, I could safely rule it out.

My reading list included all the classics e.g. Lean In (Sheryl Sandberg), How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie), The 4 Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss), Creativity Inc (Ed Catmull), How to Create Products Customers Love (Marty Cagan), Linchpin (Seth Godin), Outliers (Malcolm Gadwell), Velocity (Ajaz Ahmed and Stefan Orlander).

I set up a feed on Feedly to get updates from the following blogs: Paul Graham (founder of YCombinator), Andrew Chen, Ben Milne, Frederic Destin and Wired Top Stories.

I would recommend Stanford’s free How to Start a Startup Course as it has incredible speakers and can easily fit into a weekly routine whilst still working full time. I also tried the one day course at Decoded- an immersion into coding a customer facing online product.

On the side, I was stalking Venture Capital firms (Atomico, Index Ventures, MMC) and any London based startup that I thought was doing something purposeful including Osper, Kano, Memrise and State.

Founders of startups are busy people so this often would entail me pitching ideas to them which required a whole bunch of work to even get a meeting… I wangled my way onto the Seedcamp mentoring panel too to get the best view of what startups were out there, pitched to be the CodeFirst leader as part of EF and even thought about setting up my own incubator. I pitched a job I wanted for myself at Buzzfeed which didn’t materialise and even stooped to interviewing at Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox(!)

What happened? You ask. In Craig David’s Seven Days style:

• On Monday: the BBC are not launching an SVOD service in the US and hence there was no New York promise on the agenda
• On Tuesday: my flatmate asked me to move out — we’d been having the usual inane issues about bedsheets and kitchen sinks but her sister was moving in soon (fair enough)
• On Wednesday: they thought my father had a life threatening illness (turns out he doesn’t)
• On Thursday: I had injured my hip previously training for the marathon which started to flare up.
• …On Sunday: There was no making love.

I would burst out crying on the tube on the way to work (people on the Tube in London don’t respond well to that)— you can deal when one pillars of your life are out of balance but when your health, your family, your work and your home is… BANG- you really start to ask yourself what is it all for?!

I’ve spent the last 4 months traveling alone and had the TIME OF MY LIFE. I said to myself ‘THE GOAL WAS NO GOALS’ and to JUST FLOW. And boyyy I did it. From living in a beach shack cut off from everyone, a 10 day silent meditation retreat, ecstatic dance, hiking mountains, learning about self love and cuddle puddles. Next post to follow soon on the full diary- WHAT AN ADVENTURE!

The outcome: I’m re-energised, unleashed and ready to get Samira Stalks up and my own business off the ground!

My first foray into entrepreneurship is a podcast called Samira Stalks which is essentially me stalking wreckless dreamers and their stories of entrepreneurship (its all getting very meta). Why am I doing this? Well it turns out I’m good at stalking people and everyone secretly stalks- its what LinkedIn and Facebook base their business models on so wouldn’t it be funny to know who founders have stalked to get to where they are and some fail stories.

CALL TO ACTION! If you’re interested in this story, please do whatever it is people do on social media and tag/ share it and join my Facebook group Samira Stalks as my beta listeners as I’m looking for a safe space to test out some podcast format ideas, tone of voice and what not and to get feedback on my first interviews that I’ve been recording…