When Kelly O’Hara looks back on the past year, she can’t believe that she balanced running a company and applying for law school.
“In the entrepreneurship world, it’s just so time-intensive and draining, and I think there’s a lot of reasons people think they can’t do this and do something else,” says O’Hara. “But for me, the priority has always been to the best of my ability, doing all the things I care about. And finding a way to make it work.”
Though downtime these days is rare, the 23-year-old says she wouldn’t live her life any other way. There was a time when her schedule wasn’t jam-packed with pursuing passions, but it’s not a time she’d like to return to.
It was one year ago, to be exact, when the Brooklyn-based entrepreneur was working in advertising and feeling unfulfilled.
“I wanted something that was more of a challenge and that I was actually invested in day-to-day,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to spend the next year or however long doing something I didn’t care about.”
She remembers venting to her father, an experienced entrepreneur who was visiting from Boulder, Colorado. Turns out he had plenty to vent about as well.
“I was telling him that I was frustrated with work and that I felt like I wasn’t using my brain,” she says, “and he was telling me that he was getting frustrated because he had an idea for a startup and no one to work on it with.”
O’Hara’s says her father was on the lookout for a young marketing pro—someone eager to be a part of something new, “something on the ground floor that isn’t a guarantee.”
“He called me two days later and said, ‘This is stupid. Do you want to start a company?’” says O’Hara. “And I was like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it.’”
In May 2015, the father-daughter duo started working on Cue. Set to launch around late summer or early fall, Cue will advise small and medium sized companies as to what technology will get their businesses off the ground.
“You won’t have to sort through all the nonsense that you don’t really understand or care about,” says O’Hara, based out of WeWork Dumbo Heights. “We tell you the stuff that you should be caring about.”
The ultimate goal? To be entirely cloud-based and give customers the chance to purchase whatever technology they need directly through Cue.
The five-person operation is currently based in Boulder with the exception of O’Hara, who is moving to Berkeley for law school in the fall. That also marks a special date for her: the one-year anniversary of O’Hara feeling comfortable calling herself an entrepreneur, feeling that the title was actually legitimate.
“When we started the company—and I think a lot of people have this—I felt so in over my head, and it was lot of ‘poser’ syndrome,” admits O’Hara, whose twin brother is a computer electrical engineer and founded a tech startup while attending Carnegie Mellon.
“I felt like someone was going to find out that I wasn’t actually a startup person, and they were going to take my WeWork card away,” she says. “And then I realized—it was sort of a gradual process where someone would call me to ask about something, and I would know the answer right away. Wouldn’t have to look it up.”
Photos: Katelyn Perry