Chanel Realegeno’s parents were both entrepreneurs, so she thinks it’s only natural she should be one too. At 19, she’s already secured US$250,000 of funding (from a VC she found on LinkedIn) and is about to launch her first company, Tyro Jobs.
Chanel is a student at California State University, Chico. Appropriately enough, she’s studying Entrepreneurship. She reads about my book online, borrows a car, and drives 200 miles down to Los Altos, where I’m staying, to talk about leadership.
“When I set up the company, I sat down with my business partner and asked, ‘What sort of bosses do we want to be? Do we want to run this company in the traditional way?’ “ says Chanel.
One thing she decided early on was that it’d be best just to let people work when they wanted to, as long as the work gets done: “I don’t think my generation wants to work a typical eight hour day.”
When she was looking for holiday work recently, Chanel was frustrated by the lack of dedicated websites: “too many of them were offering cr*p jobs, like envelope stuffing”. The idea behind Tyro Jobs is to give university and college students a trusted source of interesting and relevant work opportunities: “ideally, only quality jobs”.
Appropriately, “tyro” is Latin for novice or beginner. Sign up here for the pre-beta Tyro Jobs launch.