**Read this on Substack if that’s more your vibe.**
I am a big fan of Graham Duncan’s writing and recommend that folks check out his personal blog. It has a lot of useful frameworks, insights, and nuggets of wisdom. One thing that Graham does incredibly well is figure out people, and part of being good at understanding others is understanding one’s self. A helpful framework that Graham uses for his own life, and the lives of others, is Dan McAdams “Life Chapters” analysis.
Dan is a professor at Northwestern who has studied people’s life stories, and has instructions on how to outline one: Please begin by thinking about your life as if it were a book or novel. Imagine that the book has a table of contents containing the titles of the main chapters in the story. To begin here, please describe very briefly what the main chapters in the book might be. Please give each chapter a title, tell me just a little bit about what each chapter is about, and say a word or two about how we get from one chapter to the next. You may have as many chapters as you want, but I would suggest having between about two and seven of them.
I recently wrapped up my MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business and figured it was as good a time as any to reflect on my own life chapters and the inflection points up until this point.
I was born in Milan, Italy to parents Will and Claudia Ferguson. My dad was a consultant working on a long-term engagement in Italy and my mom came along for the trip. I spent 21 days in the country before flying back to the United States. Being an American Born Abroad didn’t grant me Italian citizenship, but I did get a pretty fancy United States birth certificate out of it.
I spent the first few years of my pre-memory life living in New York City and San Francisco. My first conscious memories are in Los Angeles in the house my grandparents lived in. I lived in a four generation household for the majority of my childhood. My great-grandmother, grandmother, parents, and three brothers lived under the same roof. My mom is the daughter of immigrants and this certainly had an impact on my view of the world.
I attended Santa Clara University where I studied Economics and Environmental Studies. Some highlights include playing on the Men's Lacrosse Team, running my fraternity’s philanthropy efforts, studying abroad in Germany, engaging with small businesses in Nepal, interning at a consulting firm, and working with a hardware startup.
When graduation rolled around, I had a job lined up in EY’s Strategy and Transactions practice. The plan was to spend two years there, and exit for greener pastures at one of the Bay Area's many startups and tech companies.
I started my career in EY’s San Francisco office. We were 5 days a week in-office and spent time on the road visiting clients around the Bay Area. Often times, I would ride the CalTrain from San Francisco to San Jose at 6:30 AM and would be would be woken up by a conductor telling me I needed to get off the train or risk waking up at the final stop in Gilroy (for those unfamiliar with Bay Area geography, it’s not close by).
I learned a ton in the first few years working with some of the world’s largest technology companies and growing startups in the Bay. Our team worked on a niche finance topic known as transfer pricing and we advised companies on how to transact between their own entities, price intellectual property acquisitions, and operate their businesses internationally. I spent a ton of time interviewing executives to understand how their businesses worked, got pretty good at financial modeling and know my way around a discounted cash analysis, learned how to sell, and learned how to work on a high-performing client-facing team.
After COVID hit and we returned to the office, I was feeling restless. There was an opportunity to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina for a three-month rotation and I volunteered myself, asked my girlfriend (now fiancée) to move with me, and spent three-months below the equator.
After Argentina, I moved to New York City and continued working at EY. I always knew that I wanted to get an MBA and decided it was time. My team was incredibly supportive of my goal and I spent the year studying for the GMAT and writing applications.
I decided I wanted to execute a career pivot, and came to the conclusion that I wanted to work more closely with startups. I loved the work I had done with my startup clients, and worked with many of them from early-stage to IPO. After reading some books, speaking with people who were far smarter than I, and exploring my options, I decided I was going to use my MBA to find my place in the startup ecosystem. I was ultimately admitted to the Part-Time Langone Program and Stern and started the program in August 2023.
I was fortunate enough to have a series of conversations prior to my MBA that altered the course of my journey. Shortly after being admitted to Stern, an admissions officer connected me to some extremely helpful and kind Stern alums who had landed roles in Venture Capital. They gave me some advice: learning what you don’t want to do is often more effective than learning what you do want.
I decided to treat my MBA like a science experiment. My hypothesis: I think I want to work with startups. I broke my experiment down into three parts: start something, work with startups, and invest in startups. I believed the fastest way to find my next career move was to try everything, test my career frameworks and uncover where I saw myself spending the next chapter of my career post-MBA.