A brief introduction: my name is Thaddeus Diamond.  Currently, I am a first-year full-time MBA candidate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  Before this I was a software engineer building the data ingestion and transformation platforms for the Amazon Echo.  Even before that, I was an experienced (read failed) entrepreneur at CoderHeap, early employee at Hadapt (later acquired by Teradata), and Yale comp sci major.

Why am I writing this? I think there are several answers, but to start I’ll give you the three most relevant ones:

To make mistakes and pay tuition. I saw Michael Alter (co-founder and former CEO of SurePayroll) speak today and he brought this up.  In life, you need to get out there and make mistakes.  I’ve had an amazing first few months at Booth, but I’m already ready to get in the wild and start doing.  If I can have an outlet for writing, thinking, and interacting with folks, I know that I’ll improve on a personal and professional level.  Which brings me to…

Getting in touch with more people in the startup ecosystem. I want to hear from you, no matter what I’m doing.  You’ve taken the time to read this blog post, so thank you.  Consider it that I owe you! If I can be of any help, or if you just want to chat on topics that would interest you, I would love to.  I’m in downtown Chicago, and always happy to converse by email (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) or talk in person over a cup of coffee.  And finally…

To find The Line.  What is the line you might ask? Why was that the title of my inaugural blog post?  The line is a concept I was discussing with a classmate in one of my Fall classes.  Here at Booth, every first year takes LEAD, a course on how to develop effective leadership skills.  Early on in the course, one of my classmates posed a very insightful question: “What is the line between self-improvement and self-acceptance?” It’s deceptively simple, but in the past few months, I’ve had a tough time even forming a rudimentary answer.  As I continue on my journey at Booth I want to learn makes me “me”, and how I can get better.  Over time, I hope this blog acts as a long-form answer to that.  By chronicling my journeys, struggles, and insights, maybe I can help you to start to find The Line as well.

That’s all for week one.  Check me out for more real-time updates on Twitter or LinkedIn in the meantime!

– Thad