Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, (and graduate of U.C. Berkeley) gave this fantastic commencement speech at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday. My favorite quote:

“You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.”

This goes back to what I wrote about a few days ago. People try to carve out their perfect path to success, but there's only so much that one could do. Lead a fulfilling and exciting life, and amazing opportunities will come your way.

It's been an incredibly exciting year! With today being my 19th birthday and the end of my first year studying at Berkeley, I felt that it was time to glance over the great things that have happened in the past 12 months. I've been incredibly lucky for all the great things that have happened, and wanted to give thanks to the people who made it happen, as well as my naive sense of how best to live life.

Back in the fall, I was talking to Cal Newport about an upcoming book he's writing, and came to realize that the exciting things from my life came my mere desire to do fun things; not from my "selfish" attempt to actually further my career. As a student, I felt that my job was to do anything and everything to grow as an individual, and attending class was far from efficient in achieving that task.

I don't usually enjoy blogging about my "personal life", but I thought it'd be nice to do something different. Many of you have asked me to give a more personal touch to my blog, so here it is: a short list of some cool things that happened to me this year, and the incredible people I have to thank:

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- Just a year ago on May 17, I graduated from Simon's Rock, the Early College, with my Associates Degree. I first went to Simon's Rock to leave the boredom of high school, and to get a jump start on my career. If it wasn't for my freshman-year roommate insisting on going to Berkeley one day, I'm not sure if I'd follow in her footsteps.

- Over the summer, I landed a gig at PBwiki (now PBworks.com) as a summer web developer, and had the time of my life. The founder, David Weekly, has since become a close friend and adviser for my current company. If it wasn't for a referral from a blog reader, I wouldn't have landed that incredible opportunity.

- In my first week as a student at Berkeley, and in the first Discrete Mathematics class, I met a cool guy named Andy. We were the only first-year students, and the TA told us that we'd better make friends if we planned on surviving the class. Fast forward a few months, and he'd eventually become my best friend and co-founder for internshipIN and our latest company, Indinero. If it wasn't for the blunt TA, I'd still be looking for that perfect partner.

- In February, I went to my first TED Conference in Long Beach, CA. In the 5 days I spent there, I grew more as a person that I ever have before. If it wasn't for meeting a random TEDster on the beaches of Jamaica, I'd never have gotten an invitation to go.

- In April, my company landed a $35k grant from Lightspeed Venture Partners. If it wasn't for a random emailing from Berkeley Alumni who told us (and other students here) about the summer program, we'd still be looking for money.

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This past year has been filled with incredible serendipity, and the excitement in my life is more-or-less fueled by it. None of these fantastic things happened by directly looking for them, but rather by putting myself in the the right place to be exposed to the right people. Most of the great things on my list stem from having gone to Simon's Rock, and by living as exciting a life as I possibly could. And If it wasn't for high school being so crappy, I wouldn't have had the motivation to apply to college early.

Human life is so dynamic that there's no good way to plan for good things. People ask me all the time, "how did you get invited to the TED Conference?" And the only honest answer I could give is "by living the most exciting life that I possibly can." People are always focused on achieving the next logical step in their education or career, but that often prevents them from doing exciting things that would indirectly get them closer to achieving eventual success.

For example -- As a high school student, if I actually cared about going to college, I'd focus day and night on my school work. But by following my philosophy of "living the most exciting life possible," schoolwork failed to meet my criteria. So I did the most exciting thing I possibly could do, and that was to start a company. One year later, I got into college. And the admissions people looked specifically at my botched attempt to run a company while attending school, and accepted me half way through my 2nd year of high school.

Sure, my theory of life doesn't always work to further your career, but at least it promises you this: You'll grow tremendously as an individual, and live an exhilarating life. And if you have just that, I can guarantee you eventual success.

The following post was inspired by a breakfast conversation I recently had with a successful entrepreneur:

If there's a single thing you should take away from business school, it is to ignore sunk costs If your company is going nowhere, cut your losses and move on.

There are three things that could happen to your company: 1) It can succeed by going IPO, getting acquired, or by making a modest profit. 2) It can fail. 3) It could go nowhere. The absolute worst thing that can happen to for it to go nowhere. Few thoughts:

Firstly, it's widely agreed that entrepreneurship is best while young. You're the most ripe for doing business from the second you finish school up until your mid-late 30s because you have less to lose. At a younger age, you're more connected to what's going on in the industries you're associated with. If you start a company in your early 20s and the company drags on for more than a few years, you're wasting precious time. If you don't see lots and lots of growth or if your company's not bringing in cash, cut your losses within a few months of starting the company and move on to the next opportunity.

If your company lacks a business model, yet it continues to grow, you should have the option to sell out. Matter of fact, you should probably think long and hard about selling such a business after two to three years of working on it. If you had a serious business model that proved to be effective, this would be different. Given that the company is (supposedly) growing, you'll probably be getting acquisition offers left and right. What's important is that you always have the option to sell. The discussion of selling a company will vary from person to person. There is no correct way to do this, because while some entrepreneurs prefer to exit early, others prefer to create businesses for the long term.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was offered billions by Yahoo to sell Facebook? Many of us critiqued him for not selling, because the future of Facebook was unknown. Most of us would kill to sell our company for even a few million! But his reasons for not selling probably weren't monetary related. If Zuck had $2B VS $20B, the course of his life wouldn't change all that much. He wants to build a true business for the long run, and selling out to yahoo would be premature. As long as Facebook continues to grow, he has the option to exit.

For other companies that either aren't growing or aren't finding a way to exit, cut your losses sooner rather than later. If you start a company and within three months, you realize that you don't click with your co-founder, get out. He or she is wasting your irreplaceable time and energy.

Even if you know that it's time to get out, it can be incredibly difficult to sell. After all, you've been growing your business as if you were raising a child. Sending your child to college is always difficult -- sending your child to college years before the average child goes is even more difficult. I see selling businesses in a very similar light. It's different from person to person, and when the time is right, you'll know when to exit.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Over the past year, I've learned a lot about successful leaders and entrepreneurs. The remarkably successful ones aren't working 247 on their businesses because they were smart enough to recruit a brilliant team for both their personal and business lives. A fellow TEDster I met this weekend told me about ways he manages his life -- he recruits experts in all fields of knowledge to assist him with his financial life, his children, his home, his vacations, his appointments, his company's technology, his company's marketing, etc… To guide his decisions in life and business, he has what he calls a "board of life." In other words, a group of remarkable individuals who feel personally invested into his future.

Firstly, no entrepreneur should be expected to know everything about business, but s/he should be able to know enough in order to recruit help from remarkable individuals in their respective fields. And if the individual is anything short of remarkable, look for someone else. Remarkable entrepreneurs don't need to be baby geniuses, but they need to be able to network with the individuals who will influence their businesses for the better. If the entrepreneur manages to hire and manage a remarkable team, s/he will have more time to devote to a personal life.

While I ran my first (failed) company, I managed to do just that. I recruited incredibly smart techies to help manage all of the issues related to my dedicated server clients while I enjoyed time on the beaches of Puerto Rico. My team didn’t exist to assist ME -- their purpose was to serve the company, and my existence was to make sure that their ideals remained that way.

This unnamed TEDster proposed the idea of having a "board of life," which caters more to the individual entrepreneurs. This board should consist of accomplished entrepreneurs and experts who feel personally invested in one's future. They'll get you the connections you need, offer you limitless personal support, and encourage you to do amazing things. In a way, I see members on my board of life as being my aunts and uncles. While it takes time to build a relationship with them, you almost have an inherent instinct from the moment you meet them as to whether or not you can provide meaning to each other. They literally feel like family in that both you and your "mentor" would go out of the way to do anything for each other. I call them "mentors" because they're far more than mentors. The TEDster I met with made clear the distinction: while mentors are there to give you sound advice, members on your board of life have a family-like relationship to you.

The ideas of recruiting a dream team can also be applied to managing one's personal life. My parents employ multiple people fulltime to manage our family's finances, home, appointments, travel, etc… In fact, I'm the only person in my family who hasn't yet taken advantage of the ideas that I'm proposing to you as I write this. Why? Because I enjoy making my own appointments. I enjoy comparing the prices between a Jetblue and a Virgin flight. I prefer to email my blog readers than to have my publicist send generic replies. I still utilize my mom's accountant and secretary, but only because it makes more practical sense for me to do so. When it comes to emailing people and managing my own schedule, nobody can do it better than me.

In the end, you need to come to terms with the fact that you're not superman. You don't know everything and you don't have the experiences and perspectives of everyone on this planet. You're hopefully smart enough to realize this -- recruit the necessary help in whatever part of life you need. By surrounding yourself with accomplished people in their respective fields, you're more likely to see your own success.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

My young entrepreneur friend Mazy told me about a Facebook group where everybody was talking about what they would do if they knew they couldn't fail in life. In anything! Of course, the majority of the people in this group were raving about how awesome it would be not to fail, but my friends Matt and Mazy knew better: without the potential to fail, how could we motivate ourselves to do more with life? How could we feel satisfied with whatever we did? Sure, there's an exception when it comes to altruism, but with anything else in life, we would feel like empty souls.

Here's a quote from my other young entrepreneur friend, Matt:

Losing the ability to fail? I'd get depressed and eventually shrivel up and die. Failure is what makes everything worthwhile - what the hell is the point of life if there's no challenge?

I decline your offer of success.

And I also decline the offer of guaranteed success. If I knew that I'd succeed in business, I'd be settling for mediocrity. I could be super wealthy without spending any effort on my company, but I'd feel like a total shmuck. Without the chance of failure, you lose the motivation to work, you lose the desire to succeed (because you already know that you will,) and the concept of adventure is completely lost.

On the other hand, while it's good to be able to fail, it's a waste of energy to focus too much of your attention on the potential of failing. These things tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies.

If your company fails, (as the one I was just working on has) no big deal. You failed, but the company you work on that eventually succeeds will bring you much more of a reward. You would have earned it! The bottom line: The fear of failure is no reason not to try. Embrace the idea of failure, go into the real world, and do something amazing!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

I've taken a look at many companies and called them lame, boring, or generic... only to find that years later, they've blown up to be the hottest companies on the block.

I didn't actually have the opportunity to invest into Google back in 1999 because I was only nine years old, but I've heard of so many people passing on the idea of either working for or investing into Google. Firstly, there's no possible way for people to completely know which companies are bound for success. Instead, it's much easier to tell which startups are destined for failure, mainly by looking at the management team.

I was reading a blog post by Ben McConell from Church of the Customer, and he was talking about the idea of predicting the outcome of something like the superbowl:

"It's impossible to know. Too many other variables are at play. It may be fun to talk about, but it's not very productive."

When I was asked to speak on the future of web at an upcoming conference, I immediately knew that I couldn't make a prediction about the future of web, let alone the future of a startup. Practically speaking, trying to predict the web is a philosophical sense seems to be unproductive, but knowing what WON'T happen in the future seems more worthwhile. (and much more entertaining!) You see this happen in all realms of business and life: as an investor, you decide which companies not to invest into. As an entrepreneur, you decide which ideas not to pursue. As an admissions officer at Harvard, you decide which students not to admit. As a student, you decide which classes not to take. The list goes on forever.

I have a friend who was classmates with Sergey and Larry back in the late 90's, and he heard about the opportunity to join the duo in a weird search indexing startup. Like most of his classmates, he took a pass. Many of you are probably thinking, "WHY WOULD YOU PASS ON SUCH AN AWESOME COMPANY?" Well, everybody has a startup! Everybody is doing their own thing, trying to attract other people. There was no way for the students to predict which startup was the one worth joining. Instead, they decide which ones not to join because it's a much easier task.

Bessemer Venture Partners, a well known venture capital firm, has a publicly displayed anti-portfolio. It lists all of the amazing companies that include the likes of eBay, Google, HP, and Apple that the venture firm decided NOT to invest in. This just comes to show that not even the best venture firms are always able to see future success.

Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

A venture firm that's able to showcase an anti-portfolio must be incredibly secure with itself. They get thousands of business plans per year and can only invest into a select few. If you don't get a pass, it doesn't mean failure. But if your team sucks (just as many of mine have in the past,) you're destined for failure before you even brainstorm your idea. Bessemer Venture Partners can't possibly look at each startup in heavy detail because it's unproductive. Just like college admission officers, they weed out the majority and focus on only the one's with most potential.

But bottom line? Success is unpredictable, but failure is much easier to spot. If you're in the position of making a choice, first focus on what not to choose.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.