ISDI Student Spotlight ft. Danny Bozzuto
In this weekly series, we’ll be highlighting the student journeys and accomplishments of our future leaders in digital business.
This week we feature Danny, an insurance brokerage professional whose sage life advice reminds us about the importance of staying true to our strengths and authenticity. Here’s some exciting life facts about Danny!
- Tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to make ISDI a part of your journey?
I’ve worked in business now for 9 years between a couple very different industries such as pharmaceutical research and insurance. Although my work there has been great, practical business experience, looking at the trends in the market both locally, nationally, and globally I knew needed to adopt a new set of skills if I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley and be successful. I knew the co-founder of ISDI from my professional network so I was invited to attend one of their ISDI Talks event. Their curriculum and mission made a lot of sense, not to mention the impressive board so I made the decision to join ISDI to skill up and learn how to digitally transform a business.
2. We know ISDI has a full spectrum of digital thinkers, which one are you: Digital Immigrant (new to technology), Digital Native (one with technology), or somewhere in between?
Digital Native — I’ve always been the kind of person as soon as there’s some kind of technological advancement I would adopt it right away.
When I was 6 or 7 I’d got and abandoned old work computer and even at that age loved tinkering around with it. In college even when Google Drive was very beta, I loved organizing things in Google Drive and Google PDF while all my friends still loved writing with paper and pen.
3. If your friends and family had to use 3 words to describe you what would they be?
Eclectic (jack of all trades), Outgoing, Thoughtful
4. What is your proudest work accomplishment? Life accomplishment?
Work: I took on an operations focused project at work and ran with it for 2 years. During that time I built company trust and turned it into something very successful that cut operational costs and generated the company a lot of revenue. We were expecting a 10–25% increase in operations but I was able to find and implement things that lead to double that revenue growth so that was very exciting.
Life: When I trained and ran a marathon. It was right when I started working full time, I didn’t have any other obligations outside of work. I would just work, come home, then run for a few miles and that lead to a full marathon which was a great feeling.
5. If you had to write a book about something, and you knew it would be an all time best seller (as in this message would be seen by millions of people) what would it be and why?
I’m a big sci-fi nerd but I’d want to write an educational sci-fi book with an underlying theme around the idea that the journey of life is never what you expect. I’d write an unpredictable ending to portray that some parts of your journey won’t always turn out as you’d imagined it would. I’d want the message to be clear that it’s okay to fail at things and so long you learn from the failures.
6. If you decided to start a business tomorrow what would it be and why?
Because I’m so swamped I always joke I’m just going open a coffee shop on the beach and live the simple life — but that’s because I’m in school and work mode.
More realistically it’d be really interesting to try and run some kind of lifestyle business centered around food, travel, and culture. After learning another language (in my case Japanese) you learn how people think differently and get to the same end, so having a business to unify people with food, travel, and culture would be really fascinating.
7. What is a piece of advice you’d give to the younger version of yourself?
Be aware of the sunken cost fallacy. I’ve caught myself investing too much time in something because I had already invested so much time in it and I may as well “ride it out” until it’s over.
Instead, it would have been better to just walk away from it earlier with the understanding that you’re not the right fit for it after you had given it your best shot. Knowing those limits and knowing when to walk away is truly valuable — with discretion of course.
8. What is a product, service, company, book, activity you WOM (word of mouth) advertise all the time to family and friends?
Brandon Sanderson — he’s an excellent fiction writer and a fascinating person. He has a interesting way he organizes his thoughts in his books, he’ll say here’s how this world would work and here’s the laws of the universe and now that I’ve built this thing here’s what’s happening inside it, it’s a different way to tell a story than most authors out there.
I’m also a big fan of Google products and nifty cookware products like sous vides.
9. Give us a digital tip or trick you’ve learned at ISDI!
There’s a lot of them:
1) I’ve used all the design thinking and innovation skills across multiple projects already.
2) Tools like Balsamiq or CMS’s I’m a huge advocate for, they have great tutorials even if it’s something you’ve never done something like create a website before, all you have to watch the tutorial online. If you need further support you just engage with customer service, these companies like WordPress and Balsamiq are entirely devoted to your success.
3) You don’t always need to DIY it, if you don’t want to tackle a specific service there’s platforms like Fiverr or UpWork to help you accomplish your task. We learned how to describe to an engineer or designer exactly what we wanted to make sure things turn out the right way for a particular project so that was super helpful.
4) Implementing AGILE — we learned how to break up your project into multiple pieces through this methodology. We would break out 2–4 incremental steps in between and between each one you get your team to think how they use what they learned and implement the swift rapid changes AGILE is known for. It pushes the team to be comfortable with that fluidity of change which is so necessary in this day-in-age.
Thanks for joining us on our Student Spotlight Series! For more ISDI blog posts written by our amazing students and our esteemed academic board, check them out at our ISDI Blog here.
Student Spotlight Series: Danette Mashkoori
Student Spotlight Series: Pam O’Brien Betts
Student Spotlight Series: Nicolette Song
Student Spotlight Series: Mandy Llerena
Student Spotlight Series: Steve Schrepferman
Student Spotlight Series: Elizabeth Vasquez
Student Spotlight Series: Matt Reyes
