Hi Build-llionaires, welcome to the first episode of Build Builds. Our very first guest is Cody Simms, a Partner from Techstars. Techstars is an American seed-stage accelerator with over 1,600 startup companies in their portfolio. Some of their more prominent alumni include SendGrid, DigitalOcean, Zipline, and many more.

I was fortunate enough to be able to get a hold of Cody in person after he gave a couple of talks at a tech conference, right here in Hong Kong.

Cody was invited by the organizer to be a guest speaker at more than one panels, covering topics like:

“From zero to one hundred: Accelerating your first idea” and “Southeast Asia: Silicon Valley of the East?”

So I thought he would make a great inspirational guest on this podcast as well.

After our chat, I was especially fascinated by Cody’s story of how he got his start in tech, and how he worked his way up to where he is today.

Cody’s been studying the Chinese language for a long time, and his original career goal was more along the lines of something that would require his special language skills. And when that didn’t pan out at first, he’s not afraid to adapt to the next best opportunities that presented themselves.

This mindset is definitely helpful for when we are building builds. Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to, and so being adaptive to changes is a really important virtue.

And hey, look at Cody now. Who’s to say his language skills aren’t paying off as he’s traveling all around the world, including Asia.

So if there’s something you’ve been meaning to learn, or a new skill you’ve been wanting to pick up, do it as soon as you can. And keep going even if you don’t think you’ll see results right away. In the greater scheme of things, pretty much nothing we go out of our way to learn is ever “wasted” per se.

I’ll let you listen to the rest of Cody’s journey for yourself when I play the clip in just a little bit.

I do have to apologize in advance for the sound quality, since our chat was recorded in a tech conference environment, where it’s nowhere near soundproof.

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Techstars website: https://www.techstars.com/

Our website: https://buildbuilds.com/

Cody's Twitter: @codysimms

Kathy's Twitter: @kathybuilds