"I’ll tell you exactly how to be successful. It sounds basic and stupid, but here it is: just get started. Everyone loves to daydream and talk about their ideas, but almost no one actually does it. You have to work at it. Learn things. Make things. Once you’ve gotten started, congrats! You’re ahead of 95 percent of other people. But then you can’t give up. You hear in the press these instant success stories, but it’s not real. It hardly ever happens. People put in years and years of hard work before that 'instant' success happens. We didn’t get to where we are today by some flash of progress. It’s persistence. You keep walking and you don’t stop, and the next thing you know you’ve run a marathon. Don’t talk about it — just get started. You won’t regret it."
-- David Rusenko, a 2007 Penn State alumnus, is the CEO and co-founder of Weebly, a tech startup based out of San Francisco, California. Weebly enables anyone to create a unique, high-quality site with no HTML experience. Today, more 100 million people a month visit one of the 20 million sites created on Weebly, and 60 percent of people starting a site on Weebly are entrepreneurs.
Rusenko was named to the Forbes “30 under 30” list in 2011 and 2012. He is also the youngest recipient of the Penn State Alumni Achievement Award, which he won in 2010. Weebly has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Newsweek, Inc., Entrepreneur, NBC and BBC. Rusenko is an active angel investor including investments in Parse, Cue and Zenefits.
Rusenko spoke at University Park on April 14 as part of IST Startup Week, a weeklong celebration showcasing talented innovators and entrepreneurs from around the country. View the schedule or watch live streaming events at ist.psu.edu/startup.