{"id":5841,"date":"2013-12-11T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/creator\/?p=3778"},"modified":"2020-03-30T23:21:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T03:21:12","slug":"dwyl-you-cant-fake-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/community-stories\/dwyl-you-cant-fake-it","title":{"rendered":"Do what you love: you can’t fake it"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Andrew Kessler<\/a> went on a promotional tour for his first book, Martian Summer<\/a>, which documents his three month stint in mission control for NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission in 2009, he experienced how difficult it was to attract people to an event. This struggle led him to found his own company, Togather<\/a>:\u00a0a tool for smarter event marketing.<\/p>\n

Kessler sat down with us for this edition of Do What You Love \u2014 a series that showcases the entrepreneurs behind startups and emerging companies. Here’s what he shared:<\/p>\n

I went to Berkeley for university. I studied math.<\/strong> I love problem solving. I think I\u2019m just like everyone else: a simple, gratification-seeking monkey. Solving problems feels really rewarding for me. You\u2019re given a bunch of tools and you have to solve something. To me, [math] feels really creative. But I didn\u2019t keep going, I\u2019m not smart enough to be a good mathematician…<\/p>\n

Togather is events software.<\/strong> What we do is position content for events and help event organizers and producers drive audiences to those events. Then we have data around the people who are attending.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m really interested in cultural events and bringing events to people. I think we\u2019re so lucky here in New York City because we have all this access to things, but making and putting on [events] is so hard. That\u2019s really what inspired Togather.<\/p>\n

I was on a book tour for a book that I wrote<\/strong>, and I would have a hundred people show up one night and zero people turn up the next night. I thought a lot about why that was happening and how hard it was for the event producer to find the right audience who cared. I didn\u2019t want to ever go and speak to an empty room.<\/p>\n

I think we\u2019re all scared of a lot of stuff.<\/strong> You have to acknowledge that what you\u2019re doing is a risk and you have to confront it. The thing that will stop you is being in denial of how hard it is or how challenging it is. But if you deny it, it will conquer you. It\u2019s about getting up and doing the work everyday and keep moving forward.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t fake it.<\/strong> I mean, maybe you can and I just can\u2019t. You have to really care and feel strongly about what you\u2019re doing, or else you\u2019re doing the wrong thing and you should do something else.<\/p>\n

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When Andrew Kessler went on a promotional tour for his first book, Martian Summer, which documents his three month stint in mission control for NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission in 2009, he experienced how difficult it was to attract people to an event. This struggle led him to found his own company, Togather:\u00a0a tool for smarter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":890,"featured_media":3800,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43903],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-stories"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDo what you love: you can't fake it<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When Andrew Kessler went on a promotional tour for his first book,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/community-stories\/dwyl-you-cant-fake-it\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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