Assignment 1: An Introduction

My name's Carter Boisfontaine, and while I may seem like the average city-dweller I have somewhat of a rural heritage. I grew up in Dallas, Texas with family from New Orleans and Quitman, Mississippi – also known as the middle of nowhere. I attended a private high school, the Episcopal School of Dallas, and stayed there for my entire education before coming to USC. Like most Texan boys, I grew up playing football. Many summers of sweating bullets in pads in 100+ degree heat, I decided to try out for the rowing team. I was the only boy on the team over 150lbs – I was actually 215 at the time. We had just gotten a new rowing coach who was an avid rower, a loving mother, and a genuine psychopath. She used my grade of boys to be her guinea pigs. This meant many mornings at 4am at the boathouse to put in thousands of strokes, and many late afternoons in the gym. She quickly turned the program into one that was competitive in nationals every year. It was a very taxing experience, but also a very rewarding one. I like to think that my years rowing formed the work ethic that I have today.

Fast-forward to today and you no longer have the athletic specimen with numerous national titles. Instead, I figured out how good beer tastes. I'm quite active with my fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon, here at USC. I spent the past two years as their brotherhood chair. The moment I stepped foot on USC, I, like many other Marshall students, caught the startup bug. This lead to a series of ideas I built up and never saw come to fruition because I suppose I have a little bit of ADD when it comes to startup ideas. I am, however, sitting on an impressive amount of business plans with a grand total of zero dollars earned. I eventually worked for a Venture Capital firm, Canyon Creek Capital, and it hit me: Venture Capital was "it" for me.

I'm hoping to land a part-time gig at a VC firm this semester, and try and stick around long enough for them to offer me a full-time job. I'm extremely passionate and well informed about frontier technology, which is basically artificial intelligence, big data, automation, you name it. It's the wave of tech that's about to change everything we do day to day.



I'm similar to my parents mainly in personality. My entire family uses the same made up words, creating a sort of terminology that's almost like our own language. Other than that, I'd say we're very different people. Two strongly Republican parents had to watch both their children run off to California only to be turned liberal and vote for Hillary – what a shame. I'm a very progressive thinker, while my parents are very conservative. They're very organized, while I'm extremely unorganized, but it still works for me.

My only expectations of myself stem, once again, from my experience of a rower. I was put into a group of kids that had been rowing for a long time and quickly rose to the top. That degree of accomplishment has left me constantly wanting to put myself in challenging and uncomfortable situations and work harder than the next guy until I am the best. I definitely have my own agenda in who I am as a person, but you could say that my social environment has shaped my life significantly. I excel in the situation I am in, then look for a new, harder one.

I get the question "who is your role model" all the time, actually. I tend to say that I don't really have one. I don't really like the idea of emulating someone else in your own life, I really just plan to live my life the way I decide to. If I were to pick one person that's really inspired me, I'd have to say, Steve Jobs. Jobs has to be the ultimate example of brilliant entrepreneurship, but I could care less about how he allowed his professional career damage his relationships with his loved ones. Again, there's no one that's perfect enough in my mind to cause me to want to emulate them.

If I were to be an animal, I'd like to say I'm something badass like a tiger, but I'm sure my friends would have a different opinion. Tiger's have always been my favorite animal, and there are the obvious metaphors to be made of being powerful or hungry, so that's nice too.


While I was in high school I read a lot of Jack Kerouac, and one quote of his really stuck with me. Kerouac says that "no man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.” It basically means to say that social experience in life really controls and molds you. A great deal of self-discovery can be made by solitude. When I was young, I went to camp in Hunt, Texas and was categorized as an "outdoorsman." Part of becoming an outdoorsman means you spend several nights alone in the woods. It was a really cool experience cooking for myself, building my own grounds, and I even had a close encounter with a boar. Alone in the woods, there's not much else but you and your thoughts, and that's a very powerful thing, and I hope to do it again someday.