New Beginnings Are Often Reunions in Disguise: Surayya’s career journey
My entrepreneurial journey was not the fairytale I planned it to be.
Growing up, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I saw myself owning a fashion brand, having a magazine, doing something independent and creative. When I got into business school for my undergraduate degree in 2018, it was a clear path for me. I would go to business school, I would work for two to four years, build my credit and finances, and then start a business. I was oblivious to the game that needed to be played with internships, networking, and knowing the right people. I just followed my interests. I interned at startups, nonprofits, even education for a stint - while it gave me a plethora of professional experiences and an impressive portfolio of achievements, I graduated from college without that elusive job offer.
Graduating without a job offer shocked me open. I spent a lot of time thinking, pondering, and considering. Was I too adventurous during college? I was secretly mocking peers who interned at the same corporation or investment bank year and year. “Don’t they want variety?” - I would say to myself. I thrived in the ambiguity, the creativity, the messiness of doing something new and uncharted. Do I like being contrarian? Maybe I do. Was I the foolish one that glamorized the road less traveled? Yep, that’s me. After graduation, I had to sit long and hard with myself. My peers weren’t lacking excitement or spontaneity, they were practical. That practicality opened them up to a fulfilling post-college life, a life that was far more exciting than my homebound tendencies when facing the post-graduate blues.
I moved back home. Hey, I wish I had a choice in the matter. I was forced to. I love my parents, and I love my family, so moving back home wasn’t the worst of my circumstances. However, it was the angst that followed it. I felt that I was letting my parents down, upsetting them almost. Why could their daughter not do the right thing? Why was I so imperfect? We didn’t come from wealth at all - I should’ve been smarter in how I spent my time, networked more, and put myself on the righteous business path. My life started off high achieving- a supposedly “linear” trajectory. My college days, surprisingly, led me to question all of that. I was sitting in business school wondering what the “point” of all of this was. I romanticized a life of innovation, of entrepreneurship, of taking risks to build something greater than yourself. I felt odd that my peers - especially those who are minorities like myself - didn’t share this passion.
In my business school, I realized that a comfortable life scares me. A life well lived, in my opinion, was a risky one. Studying economics did something odd to me - it didn’t make me more risk averse. You think studying scarcity and how to make the most of finite resources would make me more afraid to take chances. In a weird way, it expanded me. I began realizing that innovation and value creation would govern our future; that wealth was dependent on our ability to own the factors of production (and not our labor), and that money can be allocated effectively to achieve not just economic growth but social change. Economics introduced me to the possibilities permitted through money, and taught me not to be beholden to it. I remember writing in my journal that my business school was a place where I learned that “amazing things can happen to everyday people.”
I know what you are thinking, yes, I was the idealist in the sea of cynics. When I didn’t land that post-graduate role, I knew what time it was. I knew it was time to finally take a stab at the life I wanted from when I was a child - the life of an entrepreneur. Now entrepreneurship is glamorized in today’s culture. We hear the stories of Mark Zuckerberg coding in his dorm room at Harvard to becoming a billionaire, Whitney Wolfe Heard starting Bumble after a breakup - we are taught that entrepreneurship relies on a series of do-or-die moments. The dramatization of these stories is good - it leads to press, books being written, and movies being made. The dramatization, though, isn’t realistic. It isn’t realistic about what it takes to succeed, the many reasons you can fail (some of which are out of your control), and the many reasons why some never take the leap to start their own venture.
If I keep it real - entrepreneurship is scary. I’m entrepreneurial because God never allowed me to get comfortable. When you have no full time job, no safety net, there is no fallback plan. You have no choice but to execute. You have no choice but to find a way. You’re going to learn to put yourself out there, to overcome your insecurities, to try and fail and try again. My lack of traditional success set the stage for me to think outside of the box and create my own reality. The path I desired - the path that makes the most sense - working for two to four years before breaking out on your own, wasn’t the path laid out for me. I had to break out on my own from day one in my career, from ground zero. Now this is the part where I tell you that my first business attempt succeeded, that I’m wealthy now, that and all is well. Sike - can’t say that just yet.
One of my favorite quotes in Jamaican culture is that “God has a sense of humor.” Well, God surely humored me. At first, I saw my lack of success in traditional recruiting as God giving me what I wanted - the life of a founder. I won grants, I started building. I knew I needed investment - but the chances were slim. Black women only earn 0.4% of venture capital funding, but youthful idealism tells you that you can be in that 0.4%, or that the angel investments will save you. My optimistic brain said - I went to a well-regarded university, I should be okay. The network - right? That was another sobering moment. My emails went unanswered. My requests for mentorship were denied. My phone calls weren’t returned. I wasn’t viewed as someone worth investing in. One woman even said it herself, “this road will always be hard for you because you are young, Black, and a woman.”
To make matters worse, I had a vision for equity. I wanted to be a pioneer in the equity tech space, particularly the DEI tech space. I knew that my lived experience - as a leader on a DEI student board and a struggling Gen Z, woman of color entrepreneur - could lead to transformative solutions. Once again, I got a grant, and got into programs. I found myself running in circles, and soon I realized that with every grant I received - the farther and farther away I was from my vision. I got bold and decided to turn down my last grant, in hopes that I would find an aligned investment opportunity that would give my vision more leeway. Well, what happens when you make a bold decision and things don’t go as planned? That’s what I learned - the bold decision, the right decision, doesn’t always lead to the expected outcome. Sometimes we take big bets and we lose. My decision to turn down the grant was the final blow to my business. The thing that I poured my energy into, working long hours on, traveled for, and dedicated myself to just wasn’t meant to be.
Like a bad relationship, I knew it was over long before the final straw broke. I just didn’t want to read the writing on the wall.
I was forced to shut down my business. I was ready to go, pitch decks, wireframes, UX designers, contracted no-code developers, business plans, etc. Everything came to a halt. I had to send those dreaded emails, take down the websites and social media pages, and furthermore - tell my network that the projects they were looking forward to would never launch. I felt grief, despair, and a whole host of emotions I never felt for the first time in my life. No one talks about the regret you feel - the way you wish you could’ve done things differently, the decisions you wish you never made. It brought me into a strange place - one where I started contemplating things I should’ve left behind - the mistakes I made during college, the connections I never built, the way I failed to find a co-founder - my deepest insecurities went into overdrive.
Entrepreneurship is a mirror. It forces you to confront the shadow areas of yourself. The parts of yourself you’d prefer to never face and keep buried.
This was a moment where I had no choice but to fall on my knees and pray. I was ready to just do something, anything, whatever God wanted me to do. I experienced the struggle of pursuing a business idea that, while impactful, lacked God’s favor. The closed doors were immense, the disappointment was crushing. I reached a point where I was willing to pivot into any direction God wanted me to do. I threw out the career “rule book”, I disregarded my plans and my vision (I’m an avid vision board maker), and asked him for His guidance. Then, it happened. I got the alert that I won a scholarship to pay for my post-graduate studies in the business and management of media and entertainment through UCLA Extension.
