Hello and welcome back to Redirected. My name is Andrew East and this is show we sit down with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, really anybody who has experienced a pivot or change in life. I call these changes redirections.

At some point in the other way we all go through them and so I wanted to sit down and talk with people who have made it through these changes well in order to glean some wisdom and also hear some pretty dang good stories.

So today we're continuing our Forbes 30 under 30 series where we sit down with people who are redirecting the future.

And our guest today is Jeremy Kai who is the CEO at italic.com and italic is a one of a kind membership that grants access to over a thousand quality goods from the same manufacturers as top brands but you get them at cost.

Anyway Jeremy is an impressive entrepreneur and his story is really interesting. I'm really glad he took the time to have this conversation. He actually dropped out of college. He was going to school at Babson and dropped out in order to pursue these different ventures.

He actually got paid to drop out which he'll tell a story behind that and it's really interesting. Anyway he's a really sharp guy. I enjoyed our conversation and if you want to find out more about Jeremy and what he's up to, you can find his information as well as the link to italic.com down below.

And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do so and give it a rating on whatever platform you're listening on. Anyway without further ado, I bring you Jeremy Kai.

Jeremy pleasure meeting you man. I don't know how you made time for me given all that you do, but I'm honored that you chose to sit down with me. So thank you.

No, it's a real honor to be included as a guest. So I'm scrolling through and I was like, okay, yeah, this guy started a clothing brand. Great. Oh, I know he. He also is a founder of a hiring platform. Okay, actually he does CBD as well.

Dude, I want to start though. I'm curious. I love hearing people's upbringing and kind of the context within which they grew up what their foundation was. If you can give us the abridged version of maybe what your parents did and how you got to where you are right now.

Yeah, sure. So my, to be honest, I have like your archetypical like, you know, Asian American like growing up stories. So, you know, super academic parents. They were both immigrants from from China.

So, so I was, you know, I guess the second generation here and and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. They actually, I think, you know, went a little bit different of a path from the standard immigrant experience.

They started a manufacturing company around 40, 40 years ago or so when they got here and and I guess like growing up, that was always kind of like a topic at the dinner table and and of course, like, you know, grades were paramount and all that stuff.

But I think there was like that, you know, founder mentality, if you will, that was baked into our family.

So, so I went to college out east and in Boston at a small school called Bapson, you know, enjoyment time there, but it wasn't for me.

I spent a lot of time. This is like back when I think like, I don't know if you were, you ever participated in this, but there was like a lot of these things called like hackathons back in like 2013, 2014.

So, I knew about them, not so far enough to participate though. Sorry, I didn't mean. Well, for what it's worth, I didn't either, but I was excited about them and I went to a bunch, even though I couldn't actually like, you know, curd myself.

So, so we're super inspired by that. And then from then on, I had like, I know this is so stereotypical. I'd like your stereotypical, you know, Asian upbringing, but also a very stereotypical, I think like tech background, which is like, I dropped out of college.

Classic. I mean, let's go. You know, there's, there's, I'm like, cutting out a lot of the kind of the dirt that we had to go through to get there, but like, you know, once the San Francisco got this thing called the Teal Fellowship, which basically, you know, gives you money to stay out of school and drop out.

So that helped me convince, you know, my parents to leave college for a couple. I'm still technically on a leave of absence, I think like.

And then I started a company called, it was originally called onboard a queue. We, we since rebranded it to fountain.com and it's a hiring automation platform for large workforces.

We did this thing called, why a combinator, which allowed us to meet, I think a lot of investors. And then we've kind of built that into a business of its own.

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