SOUTHFIELD – Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University several years ago, Kollecto.com founder, Tara Reed, had no plan to enter the technology field in 2012. But an exciting internship profoundly changed her life’s mission. Diva Tech Talk’s podcast with her examines that, and her current journey into tech entrepreneurship.
“I fell into technology by accident,” Tara explains. “I was living in New York, and, of course, there was an emphasis on financial services.” She accepted an internship for the summer of 2012 at venerable brokerage, JP Morgan, only to (“on a whim”) apply simultaneously to GOOGLE, and get an offer that was too good to refuse. She was recruited to spend the summer on the “Google Offers” project, to help the industry giant compete with Groupon for an extended share of the small business retail market. There, Tara learned good lessons from that project’s failure, while experiencing an enlightening summer in Silicon Valley (“with free lunches!”)
That project’s failure “prepared me well for building my own company,” Tara said. “Lots of start-ups and creative projects don’t work. You learn, though, and take everything you learn and apply it somewhere else.”
Post-internship, Tara joined fast-growing Foursquare, a company dedicated to creating applications that help people keep up/meet up with friends, and discover great places. There she worked on the marketing team, monetizing their apps for small businesses. Most crucially, she met and cultivated life-changing mentors, advisers and great leaders in design and marketing, who helped Tara wander ‘outside the box’ in terms of her own trajectory, “forcing me to think about what a career inside of technology could look like.” Her lessons were to consistently learn to ask herself four hard questions, as she made decisions:
- “Are you taking enough risk in your career?”
- “Do you really want to do exactly what you are doing?”
- “What truly motivates you?”
- “How do you make an impact?”
