40-Day Series: Thank You Simon Kuo

I love telling the story of when I first worked with Simon. It was back in 1996 in the training department at Sprint. He was a Kelly temp helping the training schedulers with overflow work. I should say he was a bio-chem PhD holder who was a Kelly temp. The man was just brilliant and I couldn't freaking believe he was a Kelly temp. Come to find out, he had recently left his academia lab rat gig to try something new. As you can imagine, he quickly moved from temp to leader and would end up becoming a VP in Strategy.

I kept in touch with Simon over the years and we re-connected in person last summer. We wanted to catch-up on life as we both had left telecom and ended up sharing our new found insights and assessments of the world. We would go on to meet again and started to discuss the possibility of working together on a start-up. He was already connected in with a group of people and thought I may be a good fit to help the team. I never thought that our "catch-up lunch" would be the first step towards achieving my entrepreneurial dream.

I officially became co-owner and Chief Development Officer of LightThread late last fall. With Simon's leadership and guidance we are on track to formally launch by the end of this month. We plan on being in our new office space next week. We already have a growing customer pipeline with two beta customers currently enjoying our services. I am still amazed that a "re-connection" lunch ultimately led to my dream gig...I owe it all to Simon and am so thankful!

Golden Nugget: Stay in touch with old colleagues and be open to new opportunities they offer.

Be who you are and learn to be better,
Lisa