A Quote by Ananya Birla

I just came from school one day and told my mom I want to start my finance company. — © Ananya Birla
I just came from school one day and told my mom I want to start my finance company.
My Mom played violin and piano when she was growing up and she insisted, and I don't know if you can imagine how uncool it is to play the violin when you're eight and ten years old, but I told my Mom that I would quit every day until I went to high school and I met these other gentlemen who would become Yellowcard, and my friends, and I really fell in love with music and it wasn't just classical music, just submerged in the arts in the school I was in.
When I started my company in the U.S. I was always told by my mentors, 'If you want to start a tech company, you need a technical co-founder,' because outsourcing just doesn't work. It is too slow, it is too expensive, and the product is going to change a lot.
As a company, we have to be very transparent. We are in a business very related to finance, and I want this company to last long, and I want this company to be audited by everyone.
When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn't say it to me, but he told my mom, 'No. I'm not going to allow that. He'll starve to death.' I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.
Basically what my mom told me - I was extremely shy, I didn't have any girlfriends 'til I was 21 - my mom would see me suffering and tell me, "Just focus on your school, study very hard, and some day you will be successful and you can use all the resources that you have to a dating advantage." Ultimately, I took that advice and turned it into dating sites.
I used to be really shy, and I think something happened in my brain where I was like, 'All right, I don't care anymore. I'm just going to be myself.' So I went to school wearing eyeliner and eye shadow, and they called my mom, telling her it was a distraction. My mom fought the school, and I got to wear makeup every day.
When I was about 6, my cousin was very active in a Filipino repertory company, doing musicals and plays. Her aunt was one of the founders of the company, and she told my mom that there were these auditions for 'The King and I,' and that they needed kids. I auditioned, got in and the love affair started from there and just kept going.
I went to this Episcopalian school, and one day I came home and asked my mom, 'What religion are we?' She looked at me and said, 'We're artists.'
If you had told me when I was at high school that one day I would be working for a for-profit company, let alone running one, I would have said you were crazy. But I am interested in how you can empower individuals to make change, and Causes is doing just that.
I started passing out the schematics and the code listings for the computer, telling everyone here it is. It's small, it's simple, it's inexpensive: Build your own. No idea to start a company. Steve Jobs came by later and say, you know, people are interested. Why don't we start a company?
When I decided that I might want to do acting for a living - I don't know where it really came from, since there was no school play or any of that - my mom gave me her blessing. I had to get a scholarship - that was the only way I could have gone to drama school.
I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn't understand why. It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and I freaked out on my dad: 'Why didn't you tell me you were in The Beatles?' And he said, 'Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.'
When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in dance classes. "Mom, I'm too young to dance," I told her. She kind of forced me, but I ended up loving it, and after the ?rst lesson I came back and said, "Come on, Mom, I'll show you the box step." That introduced me not just to dancing but also to working with someone without having a goal.
Growing up on a farm, I saw that if I didn't go to the military or go to school, and I knew my mom and my family wasn't going to be able to send me to school out of their pocket, so it basically came down to athletics. I knew I didn't want to work on a farm. I knew I didn't want to do manual labor the rest of my life.
I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it's criminal - child abuse - that they're not told to do this [in school]. Right now it's just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they're 50, 60 and 70.
Are you coming down with something?" Mom asks. And just for the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I'm not the girl in the catalog at all. I'm not a Happy College Student. I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.
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