Guest Speaker - Derek Young

Our guest speaker on Thursday was Mr. Derek Young, an experienced entrepreneur. Mr. Young earned a degree in politics and biology from the University of Puget Sound and a MBA degree focusing on finance and marketing from the University of Washington, Tacoma. Besides that, Mr. Young also has an IT background. He has created many businesses such as Suite133, Exit133, Tacoma Runners, Seasonal views…

Mr. Young has started a sport team management website which organizes workplace sport. The website has became popular because the Microsoft staff knew about it and used it for lunchtime sports. Unfortunately, one day the database of the website got crashed and they immediately received $15,000 from people to ask him to fix the website.

Later, he started Tacoma Runners, a large local running group. The income of this business is mainly based on the membership fee and sponsors. Then, Mr. Young was a publisher of the Exit133, a website focuses on politics, development and change of Tacoma. The website has been launched around 10 years ago and still keeping grow. He also has created a tool that track negative and positive comments and feedback from the internet and got attention from some other companies. However, because it was created for personal purpose, he will need to work more on it before it could be used by other companies.

Talking about himself as an entrepreneur, Mr. Young shared that he is not afraid of opening a new business, in other words, he does not mind risk. He also shared about some of his strengths and weaknesses, such as he is good at building relationships but bad at HR. He said that he has a lot of passions in creating new ideas, and his view about the entire career is learning from mistakes.