career path that I've been on.
One of the nice things that I used at the time was the career center.
And they did a very good job of setting up meetings for
you to interview at different places.
And after a couple of weeks of doing that, the best job I could come up with,
was a job that paid $18,000 a year,
working as a new lab associate, over at Scripps.
And I thought, there's gotta be something more than just that.
Not that there's anything wrong with entry research at Scripps, but
I wanted something more and and I was interviewing for another position and
it fell through the interviewer didn't show up and I was wandering around with my
suit and tie on as a senior at USD looking for another interview to do.
Just to get the experience of interviewing and
that was one of the nice things about the career center was that you could do that.
And I happened upon this company called Millipore.
And they had an open slot, and I filled my name in the slot, took the interview.
And from there, it was a trip to Boston, and then another interview, and
before I knew it, I had a job offer that was pretty
good in a field that I had no idea I would ever be going in to.
And it was really kind of jumping off and saying, let's try this for a year and
see how it goes.
And if I don't like it, I'll leave.
And if I do like it, I'll stay for awhile.
I ended up staying for a little while.
But the thing about sales and marketing jobs is sometimes they have a ceiling,
and you can go under management but that's not the same thing as running your own
business which a lot of sales storage are exactly that running your own business.
And I realize that I had reached my saline and I thought that
one of the things that I was really interested in was law and
intellectual property in particular.
So I took some time, took the LSAT and
next thing I knew I was in law school at the University of San Diego.
A friend of mine called me and said, let's start a consulting company, and I had
always thought the consulting company's were for people that didn't have a job.
And I had a job.
So he said, no, this is where it's at now,
people start consulting companies because they're good at consulting.
And it was an interesting time to be in your mid-20s and
to hold yourself out as a consultant.
But the thing that was amazing about that job was, once again,
it gave me tools that I needed to be successful as an entrepreneur.
And the most important thing I learned about that was,
if you get smart people together, you really can do anything.
And we did marketing plans, and business development,
and PR, and investor relations, and at one point I was
guiding a Japanese company around the country interviewing people for
some marketing research that they needed to have done.
And in the next month, I was in New York with a group of executives meeting with
analysts on Wall Street, and it was just about figure it out and make it happen.
And that was a really valuable lesson for me because I think a lot of people
are fearful of being able to take on something that they haven't done before.
And when in reality you really can't figure it out especially today with
Internet and the ability to pull information off, and figure things out.
So those are really valuable lessons.
The consulting company was called Lucid Biostratagies and
we merged it into a local company called Mentis.
Which is a terrific design firm locally and
they wanted us to be the strategic group on front end of the design group.
And that was a great idea and I enjoyed that and for
the first time, I was evolved with writing annual reports.