End of Year Letter
Dear [Employee’s First Name],
I wanted to take a moment and thank you for making this year the most successful one yet for our company. As 2015 draws to a close, I wanted to reflect on my inspiration for starting this journey, which is rooted in my upbringing.
My mother was born in a small village in Turkey, the youngest in a family of six exuberant children, two tiny parents, and a handful of stray dogs. Spirits were high, but money was tight, requiring them to be extremely resourceful, like a brownish family Von Trapp. Meals often consisted of a small bowl of yogurt, followed with an algebra test. After studying day and night to win scholarships, my mother attended the second most prestigious college in Istanbul (which remains a stain on my family history). It was there that she met my dad.
My father came from wealth. His father had secured a small fortune patenting an experimental goat-farming technique during a sabbatical in the opulent Balkans. But like lightning, luck doesn’t strike twice, and is not caused by the sins of gypsies. They knew hard work and dedication to a real cause was the path to success.
Three years after I was born, they came to America, the land of opportunity. It was the 90s, during the first tech boom, so my dad found work easily as a janitor at a nuclear waste disposal startup. It was there that he became fascinated by the entrepreneurial spirit these men had cultivated. How clever to give nuclear waste disposal that handmade, artisanal touch! He invested every last penny in their vision.
When the boom crashed, my father was destitute. My mother resorted to the oldest profession in the world — sitting in the kitchen, audibly sighing over a pack of Marlboros. But they were resourceful people, and started up again, from the bottom. They ate meager meals of plain yogurt to save money, determined to send me to a fancy American college.
Their enterprising spirit has always stayed within me. In my fifth year as an undecided major at Sarah Lawrence College, I was inspired by a headline I skimmed about my idol, Steve Jobs. I needed to wake up and become the man my grandfather was, the man my parents worked so hard for me to be. I dropped out of college immediately.
There I was, in my parents’ garage in Silicon Valley, itching to do something revolutionary. I began by boring a handful of exploratory holes into plywood. But the drill was really heavy. My dad started to complain about the noise, and my life choices. As he himself did so many years prior, I decided to pivot.
Like Steve Jobs, I called upon my education to shake up an unsexy industry. The last course I took before dropping out was the “History and Applied Science of French Mimery”. That was it — I would disrupt the clown industry! A handful of lukewarm gigs later, I realized the world just wasn’t ready. But as they say in the valley — fail fast, fail often. This was all part of the plan.
It wasn’t until my fourth year in the garage, that I found myself itching again, this time from a rash caused by early-onset sloth. I went into the kitchen for some yogurt. There was my waifish dad, eating his yogurt, my willowy mom eating her yogurt. And then it hit me — why wasn’t the dog eating any yogurt?
The rest is history. I pitched the idea for YoDawg!™ to a local yogurt boutique in Palo Alto, and got a resounding yes. Now we’ve partnered to create a global organic small-batch yogurt for dogs campaign, spanning from San Jose, all the way to Marin County. And I couldn’t have done it without the innovative, risk-taking work ethic instilled in me by my family, my ancestors, and Steve Jobs.
Or without you. Thanks for all that you do. Here’s to a prosperous 2016!
