When Nichole Mustard found herself adrift after college, she made a simple promise to herself: “be happy.”
Time and again that choice led her to revamp her life and start over someplace new.
Ten years ago, it led her to sell her house, take a 60% pay cut and move her family across the country to found Credit Karma – a startup that today employs 800 people and is valued at $4 billion.
But it almost fell apart months after she risked it all.
Nichole Mustard isn’t your classic Silicon Valley tech founder. She didn’t teach herself to code as a kid. She didn’t attend Stanford. She didn’t intern at a tech giant.
After college, she was a trainee manager at Pizza Hut, living hand-to-mouth in a cheap LA apartment with a roommate, she tells Business Insider.
And yet, today, she is one of the three founders who built Credit Karma, a consumer credit score company, into a startup worth $4 billion, according to deal-tracking site Pitchbook.
Her career offers a valuable lesson: focus on being happy and it will get you through what life throws at you — even when the startup that you risked everything to build almost falls apart on you.
Looking for her happy place
Mustard grew up in the tiny, rural town of Coldwater, Ohio (population 1,700), and put herself through college at Miami University to get a degree in zoology. She wanted to be a scientist, until she discovered that it meant mostly hanging out with mice.
“I love people,” she laughs. “Me being in the lab with a bunch of mice was not a great future.”
By ditching her chosen profession, she found herself with no direction.
So she made a promise to herself to always be happy. One problem: she didn’t know what kind of lifestyle would get her there.
So she …read more
Source:: Business Insider