Vlad Tenev

How many were overwhelmed by all the options?

Okay.

I know I felt the same.

Well, buckle up.

It's only going to get more overwhelming.

When I was 20 years old, I was graduating from Stanford University with a degree in pure mathematics.

Nobody had sat me down to tell me that my pure math major wasn't going to be the most desirable qualification for prospective employers.

And I probably wouldn't have listened if they did.

So I went off along my default path, a math PhD program at UCLA, buying at least one more year to figure out my career.

Now, my first month in graduate school, Lehman Brothers went under, the start of the global financial crisis.

Most of my friends, particularly the ones that felt the most secure in their financial careers, found themselves packing up their cubicles out of work.

Some of us wondered whether the economy would recover at all or whether we were in store for another decade-long Great Depression.

But amidst the uncertainty, the pessimism, the malaise, really, of that time, some of us found a source of optimism.

The iPhone, and in particular, the App Store, came out that very same year, 2008.

I still remember when the SDK, which was the instruction manual for how to build iPhone apps, was released.

I was at my parents' house, and I was up all night reading it, learning, trying to understand.

I saw an opportunity for a new level playing field.

And if you think about it, pretty much everything I've done since then, the company that I created,

my professional career since that point was a product both of the economic malaise but the technological optimism of the time as well.

But times have changed.