Mentor: Mr. Joshua Meek

Profession: Owner of Meek Industries

Location: Virtual FaceTime

Date: February 11th, 2020

Time: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Assessment:

This week, I was able to finally able to return to my regular schedule of weekly mentor meetings with Mr. Meek. By simply having the meeting, I was not only able to officially start my true mentorship process but also set a constant routine of meetings to constantly set action points and act on them. Every week, Mr. Meek and I will meet so that I can provide him with updates on Groundify LLC, receive direct mentorship on my impact investing paper, and learn important aspects of leadership as I grow into a professional. Specifically, during this meeting, I was able to catch up with Mr. Meek about specific updates within my professional projects as well as simply talk about the current events within the stock markets.

During this meeting, a large part of our discussion revolved around my Final Product. Originally, I had thought about establishing Kismet, an innovative web platform to connect social entrepreneurs with impact investors, thereby digitizing America’s private entrepreneurial ecosystem. My initial thoughts regarding this project were combining my entrepreneurial interests within Groundify with my primary research in impact investing. This would combine my professional interests with social impact for my ISM Final Product. However, upon analyzing the importance of this project and the skills it combines, Mr. Meek and I both felt that it is vital that I hyper-focus my project on impact investing, emphasizing the technical aspect of the stock markets and trading strategies. To do so, Mr. Meek and I decided to propose a new idea for the Final Product – a research paper. Through this research paper, I will detail numerous research sections as following:

Through this, I feel that I will be able to better portray my skills as an impact investor. Since I may have first paired impact investing with entrepreneurship, that may have diluted the two concepts. However, it is through the research paper that I will comprehend the absolute technicality of impact investing and be able to apply this technical knowledge to become a seasoned investor. Through this in-depth project focused on specifically impact investing, I will be able to complement my entrepreneurial skillset with traditional research skills while benefitting my mentor, myself, and my community.

In conclusion, the biggest takeaways from this meeting were that I was able to better comprehend the shortcomings of my original Final Product plan to improve it to better cater to my skills. Moreover, I was able to briefly discuss important updates and growth/exit strategies for Groundify with Mr. Meek as he continues to help me with my startup. Ultimately, I look forward to continuing working on my startup while sending new proposals for the revised Final Products to get started on the latter aspect of my ISM journey.