I was scrolling through my Facebook feed the other day when I saw a comical post from one of my friends. He had screenshotted an article from The Onion with the headline, “WWE Staff Forced to Shoot Aggressive Wrestler After Child Climbs Into Steel Cage.” Below the article was a notice from Facebook that read, “False Information, Checked by independent fact-checkers.” My friend was amused by the “helpfulness” of this system pointing out that a satirical news article was false. Thanks, Facebook.
 
I’ve been particularly attuned to where my news is coming from this week as I read about the Coronavirus. Some articles are reassuring, explaining that Americans are still at greater risk from the flu than from Coronavirus. Others are pragmatic, giving clear instructions about how to wash your hands properly and whether or not face masks are effective (they’re not). And others are straight up conspiracy theories. It’s really important to understand whether your information is coming from the CDC or from www.wemakestuffup.biz. And unfortunately, the unreliable sources generally don’t advertise themselves quite so obviously.
 
The reason this feels so important to me as a college counselor is that my students are inundated with false and scary information about applying to college. We talk a lot at Collegewise about the myths we hear from our students. Things like, admissions officers don’t even read your essay, or my dad’s college roommate works with a guy who went to Harvard and he’s going to write a letter to get me in, or it doesn’t matter if you take hard classes – you just have to get straight A’s. And as counselors, we spend a lot of our time responding to these claims, soothing our anxious students and families, and trying to share good information about applying to college.
 
So with that in mind, I’d encourage you to apply the same standards to your college application advice that you would to your Coronavirus advice. Schedule a meeting with your school counselor, start following some of the colleges you like on Twitter, or read Georgia Tech’s epic college admissions blog. And wash your hands. Not for your college applications, but pretty much for everything else.

Halfway through my conversation with Denis Hiller, founder and label manager at NoFace Records, he said to me, “I hope I get the gold medal for the oddest career path you've ever seen.” If not the oddest, then he’s definitely in the top three. I don’t want to give anything away other than to say that every time I thought I knew where the story was going, I was wrong. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I wanted to do something world changing. I had really bad grades in school, but I intuitively thought that I could still accomplish quite a bit without school, which is maybe a little more common now, but back then it wasn't conventional wisdom.
I was living in the Bay Area at the time, and there was this bill to raise the smoking age from 18 years old to 21 years old, and I thought that was unreasonable. I thought, you can vote, you can serve in the military, you have all these obligations and responsibilities, but we're going to treat you like a child and raise the smoking age.
 
I connected with an organization called the National Youth Rights Association and they were doing things in DC and New York, but they didn't have a presence in California, so I asked if I could testify in California on their behalf. I wasn't some powerful, glamorous person; I was working as a host at P. F. Chang's at the time. But I just always imagined that there were bigger and better things waiting for me somewhere. Anyway, I asked them if I could testify, and they agreed. Next thing you know, I was driving to the committee hearing in Sacramento. On the way out, this journalist from the Associated Press asked me for a quote, and I was in The Wall Street Journal. The story became national and international news. That whole thing stuck with me and was a catalyst for a number of things, initially tech startups and then later the music business.
 
How did you get from high school to where you are now?
 
Getting involved in the political stuff was remarkable. I came from an immigrant, lower-middle-class background, and suddenly, I was surrounded by these really successful real estate developers, tech folks, and venture capitalists. I was by far the youngest person in the room, and I now had all of these mentors who were really extraordinary people. So I ended up being the first employee at a tech startup.
 
The company is called AnchorFree. At the time, they had equipment to make Wi-Fi networks, which right now isn’t extraordinary, but back in 2004, that was a really big deal. We made some of the first wireless streets in the world. They had an office and there were all these adult things going on, and I thought it was amazing. But they weren't getting any recognition for it. So I said, "Let's get some buzz, this is a big story." And they said, "Okay, try." Next thing you know, I was in the office working until seven in the morning, reaching out to the press, doing it absolutely the wrong way. I didn't know any better, which was a strength in some ways. After four or five months of trying, one publication covered it and then PC World covered it and then I called the San Francisco Chronicle and it snowballed and became a really big deal.
 
Finally, they ended up raising a round of funding and they asked me, "Do you want to stay in school or do you want to be our first employee and get some stock?" Next thing you know, I'm making $75,000, I have stock options, the whole thing. I ended up working for them for almost three years and they raised another round. And I can proudly say that they recently got acquired for something I was really involved in.
 
The company ended up pivoting and became one of the biggest VPN products in the world, Hotspot Shield. At the time, we had this VPN sitting there and nobody really knew what to do with it so we just put it out for free and forgot about it. One day, I asked one of our engineers, "Who's using this thing?" and he said, "I don’t know, let me look into it." A week later, I got the response that we had 900 people from the Middle East using it and 100 people from the US, and we hadn't promoted it to anyone.
 
After digging further, I realized that in a number of countries, their Internet was censored. So people were using our product not in the way we intended it, but simply because it gave you an American IP address. I came to the founders and said, "We should actively promote this." I started looking for a needle in a haystack, meaning a site that has a ton of traffic that would sell me advertising for cheap. After many months, I ended up finding this site in Egypt. We had no Google Translate. We didn't have anything. After many nights of trying to communicate, I asked him, “How does this work?" He said, "You can have a banner for a month for $300."
 
Next thing you know, I'm driving to a 7-Eleven to give them $300 of my own money through Western Union. I drove away thinking, "Okay, I just got screwed. There's no way this is going to work." But a couple of days later, he put up a banner and we went up from 1,000 users a month to 10,000 users. I went back to the founders and asked if I could have a budget. I was already on my way out, so I broke all the rules and I spent a bunch of money, but I took them to their first 100,000 users. And then they ended up raising about $50 million and getting acquired.
 
I had money saved up from my years at AnchorFree, and I actually had the benefit of not going to college because I'd been part of the workforce for five years. So I started another company with a couple people from AnchorFree. We were basically trying to create a Craigslist for college students where you could buy and sell textbooks, carpool with one another, and so on. A lot of people have tried it. A lot of people failed, including us.
 
We were in some universities,and we had some success. I was on these campuses, working with different students, organizations; I got to see a little bit of what I missed by not going to college and it looked really fun. We ended up raising a small round of funding, but then my business partners and I had a big disagreement. The same day that that happened, my girlfriend of two and a half years broke up with me. It was a train wreck on both ends. But I ended up walking away from that company with most of my shares and enough money to live for a year.
 
The whole experience was the first work-related stress that I remember feeling. It all rubbed me the wrong way. The thing in the back of my head was my immigrant parents saying, "If you don't go to college, you're going to be a bagger at a grocery store." I was really set on proving to them that I wasn't going to be that guy.
 
After the legal issues settled, I spent two months doing nothing, just de-stressing, watching a show called Entourage. I was just sick of tech; it felt soulless, especially after that experience, and I was just turned off and bored. So I'm watching Entourage, and I'm watching these four friends from New York, and they’re in Hollywood mixing and mingling with all these famous people and going to parties and it all looked perfect. So I decided I wanted to work in the music business.
 
I had no idea how much harder it is to get into the music industry than into tech. In tech, you have recruiters, you have positions to fill, it's professional. Whereas in music, 99% of people are on the outside and 1% of people are on the inside. So here’s what transpired. A friend of mine called me and said, "I'm tired of you sitting at home and feeling sorry for yourself. We’re going to a rave." I said, "What's a rave?" She said, "It's this illegal party in San Francisco." And I said, "Perfect. Let's go."
 
I'd been so busy working that I didn't have a social life. All of a sudden, I had all this time. We went to this rave in a shady little pizza shop where you go up these stairs and suddenly there's this makeshift nightclub with three DJs playing electronic music. I knew one of the DJs, Max Vangeli, because we used to be friends when we were kids. He gets on and starts deejaying. He jumps on this flimsy wooden table and nearly breaks it. He’s crowd diving and the whole crowd is screaming. I didn't know anything about electronic music or deejaying, but I believed in him. I was just blown away by the energy, by the fun, by whatever that was, and so was everybody else.
 
I kept coming to these things, and he said he’d like to work with me. He said, “We need to do this bigger.” And it was just electric. We had one goal: for him to play at the biggest nightclub in San Francisco at the time, Ruby Skye. He was creating original songs as well as deejaying, and we created our own events company. All the money we made, we just put right back into the shows. Next thing you know, his music started taking off and he was an international star.
 
In between, I had been running an email newsletter to support myself and doing a little PR consulting. It was just a way to pay the bills so I could get right back to the club. We were working 12 hours a day and celebrating and partying the other 12 hours a day. We had these dreams of doing festivals and bigger things. Max and I were on a plane to Miami, Arizona, Europe, crisscrossing the world. We ended up doing that for three years together.
 
Then in 2012, I was done touring and partying, and I wanted to get back into professional work, but in the entertainment industry, not tech. I noticed that half of my contacts at the time were in LA, so I decided to move to LA. At the time, Max was part of a collective of artists under this record label, Size Records. The owner of Size Records was a guy named Steve Angello, another producer and DJ, but on a much bigger scale.
 
I had a rule at the time that I would always take meetings in person. Even if I wasn't around the corner, I would get in my car and fight traffic to get to wherever they were. My thinking was that face time is so important, relationships are so important. These were really influential people that in other circumstances I could've never reached, and they're sitting on calls all day. But when you’re with another person breathing the same air, in the same environment, joking, strategizing, that creates a much more meaningful connection.
 
At the time, Steve was managed by Red Light Management, which is one of the biggest management companies in the world. They said, "We need somebody to run our marketing." And I said, "Guys, it's done." I knew that this was a position that thousands of people in LA would have killed for. I made another rule for myself, which was to spend an hour a day in the break room. Anybody who walked in, I'd say, "How's your day?" chat them up, all of that. I got to know most of the people who worked there, managers, assistants, everyone. I ended up working there for about two years.
 
Steve is one of the hardest working people I've ever seen. He worked 16, 17 hours a day, and I thought, “If somebody who's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a show is working that hard, I'm going to work that hard.” I would set an alarm for three in the morning just to see if anybody had emailed me and then go back to sleep. It was totally unsustainable, but it was so much fun at the same time.  
 
Then I was so burnt out. It just hit me at some point; I was so done with the music industry, with all of it. So I quit. A buddy of mine was back in Sweden, and he said, “Why don't you come to Stockholm for a while? Some of my friends have an office here, let's do something." Next thing you know, I'm flying to Sweden where I'd never been, and we started working on a business idea together.
 
We tried to create a media company for PR professionals, a B2B thing. My business partner was also a former music industry person, so he was interested in music. So we started an artist management company simultaneously. We also opened an office in the Philippines, and I lived in Manila for a year. We made money, but we also ended up spending money, and both of these businesses ended up suffering.
 
So in 2016, I came back to the Bay Area after my two businesses fell apart. My whole world came crashing down. I worked with the AnchorFree guys for a while, but I quickly realized that I didn’t want to live in the Bay Area, I didn’t want to do tech. It's like getting back together with an ex.
 
I'd spent some time all over the world, so I was without roots in a way. I felt very lost. I ended up selling a property I’d bought in 2012, and I went down to Mexico City. I wanted to focus on education. I wanted to pursue something, not for some sort of financial gain, but for knowledge. I had such a great time in Mexico City, and I met people so I decided to stay. I got a private tutor, and I was learning Spanish. I treated it like a full-time job. I was watching YouTube videos, I was reading, I was walking through the streets of Mexico City and talking to people. But a month in, I thought, "This is not enough." At the same time, Max called me and we reconnected.
 
His career had taken a bit of a downward turn, and he was just really down on himself, like I was. I said, "Drop everything you're doing and come to Mexico City." Next thing you know, he's on a plane. We hadn't been following what was going on in entertainment, and we were outdated in the approaches that work today. But through networking, we connected with the biggest influencers in Latin America. They invited us to the MTV Millennial Awards in Mexico City and we just got thrown into this world of tech and influencing. And now, I’m running an indie electronic music label called NoFace Records with Max.
 
In many ways, we reinvented what a label is. In the upper echelons of record labels, you're not very accessible, you're above the people, hard to reach, they can't get their demos to you, you are very removed. We took the opposite approach. We wanted to get as many demos coming in as humanly possible. We wanted to consider songs on the merit of how much the music spoke to us, not how many social media followers these people have. And we wanted to get away from deals that screw artists. We just wanted to make it very simple.
 
Beyond that, we created videos about how the business of music works, what you need to look for in a contract, how you reach different labels and send them your demos. We have a 400-person Discord chat community of music producers and artists. We want to show you how to improve your knowledge of the music space, how to network, all of that. When you send us a demo, that's the end of the process. We want to be with you well before that. And it just came from a place of let's build something that we wish was there when we were getting started in this 10 years ago.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
When you're lost, everything is shiny and interesting and you're jumping from one thing to the next. When you've found something you really like, it becomes so easy to say no to things. When I got focused and said, "We're going to build something great," it was unbelievable how quickly this thing grew and how rewarding it is to wake up and know that we're doing what we feel is important work and we're helping other people.
 
I wouldn't be afraid to take a nontraditional path if that's something you're set on doing. If you're going to do it, you have to have a thick skin and understand that most of the people around you are going to question you until you make it. And then when you make it, they're going to say they knew it all along.

​I was chatting with my colleague, Kirsten, today, and she shared a recommendation that she gives her families that really resonated with me. She explained that she tells her students that they should feel comfortable keeping their college lists private, and not tell everyone who asks where they’re planning to apply to college.
 
The reason I liked this idea so much is that I’ve noticed how anxious my students – and their families – get just hearing about where their friends and neighbors are applying. And the thing that always strikes me as odd about this is that anyone can apply to any college. There’s no minimum GPA required to apply to Stanford; you just have to be willing to write all those essays. And you don’t have to take calculus in order to apply to MIT; you just have to be willing to fill out their two-part application. And you don’t have to speak French to apply to the Sorbonne; you just have to be willing to move France and take all your classes in French.
 
Even though families know this, it’s hard to remember in the face of all those conversations at school and at dinner parties and on the sidelines of soccer games. And then students and parents feel pressured to change their lists and add just one Ivy League school even though you’ve done months of thoughtful research to get to that list of schools. Somehow, the raised eyebrow or tone of confusion from your orthodontist or your uncle or your 4th grade soccer coach means more than all the time and energy you know you’ve put into choosing your schools.
 
Students have all kinds of reasons for choosing the colleges that they apply to: financial, cultural, or just a gut feeling. So while you might assume that the smartest kid in your biology class would apply to Princeton, you might not know that she has a full scholarship waiting for her at Auburn University. And while you might think the star of the track team would run for UCLA, you might not know that he has a dream of sledding down snowy hills on cafeteria trays like they do at East Coast colleges. People have all kinds of reasons for choosing the colleges they apply to, and we have no idea what they are.
 
So as you start to research schools and visit colleges, trust that you know what’s right for you more than all those other voices. If you want feedback on your prospective list, talk to your parents, your school counselor, or someone like me, people who know you and know which colleges might be a good fit. And feel confident that your list is a positive reflection of your goals and your strengths, even if that’s not obvious to outsiders.

My favorite question to ask people is about how they ended up in the field they’re working in now, hearing about all the twists and turns that led them to their profession. And the only thing better than doing that with my own friends, family, and acquaintances is getting to do it with famous people! Unfortunately, I don’t know any famous people. So instead, I’m taking this weekend’s Oscars ceremony as an excuse to dig into the backgrounds of some of the nominees.
 
Cynthia Erivo, nominated for her starring turn in Harriet, was born and raised in London. She initially began her higher education journey at the University of East London, where she studied psychology. But after just a year, she applied for and was accepted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which launched her into a successful theater career in London, and later, on Broadway. Harriet is only Erivo’s third feature film and has already landed her significant critical acclaim, an auspicious start.
 
Adam Driver, nominated for his role in Marriage Story, has had a slightly windier path to Oscar. A self-described “misfit” in high school, Driver went door-to-door selling vacuum cleaners after graduating. He also did some telemarketing and construction before applying unsuccessfully to study drama at Julliard. He then enlisted in the Marines, where he served as a mortar man for two and a half years before being medically discharged after dislocating his sternum. He attended University of Indianapolis for a year before reapplying to Julliard, and this time, he was accepted. He finished his BFA in 2009 and spent the next three years in New York, performing on and off-Broadway, on television, and in short films. In 2012, he was cast in his breakout role in Lena Dunham’s series Girls.
 
Joe Pesci has recently returned to the screen in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, receiving his first Oscar nomination in almost 30 years. Pesci has been acting in plays since he was five, so you’d think he had a straight trajectory to a successful acting career. Rather, he started out working as a barber, just like his mother, while trying to launch his singing career. He started branching out into comedy and even appeared on Broadway for one week. He then starred in The Death Collector, a low-budget crime film that would change his life. For the next three years, Pesci worked at an Italian restaurant until Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro reached out to him after seeing his performance in The Death Collector. They offered him a role in Raging Bull, for which Pesci would receive his first Oscar nomination.