KuzoClass Entrepreneurship Fellow — Stories: Iris Guo

Iris Guo

Age: 20

Profession: Student

Hometown: China

University: University of Waterloo

Fun Fact: Loves the book,“The Hard Thing About Hard Things”

Born in China, Iris Guo migrated to Canada in 2015. As a student at Western Canada High School in Calgary, Iris excelled in her academics and was actively involved in extracurricular activities. She was also appointed as the president of the Junior Achievement Company program, which Iris describes as her first experience with entrepreneurship, “It’s a group of 15–20 students who come together to create a company. One could keep their product or pass it to a charity.”

Iris decided to pursue her Bachelors in Accounting and Finance at the Ontario-based University of Waterloo, “I was convinced that Waterloo’s renowned co-op program would enable me to explore different career paths. Interacting with people excites me, so I wanted to study business and choose to major in AFM,” Iris says. Her first co-op experience was at Scotiabank as a Sales and Trading Analyst, where she learnt a lot about the ways that an institution can use leverage to finance itself.

Soon Iris got involved with the Student Venture Fund at the University of Waterloo as an investment analyst. In her words, “I was involved with due diligence on startup investment deals. Our team discusses an investment idea amongst ourselves, followed by discussing it with our investment committee if we find an idea viable.” Recently, Iris completed her second internship at Ontario Teachers Pension Plan as a Private Equity Analyst, where she got to witness investment deal flow on a granular level. Iris is currently a research analyst at her university, where she helps her professor in research, extracting data from Bloomberg and other financial data websites.

On asking about her favourite book, Iris replies, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things, it has inspired me to pursue entrepreneurship, and to face challenges with confidence.” She is resistant to failures and always makes it a point to learn from them. Iris also loves to travel and is leaving for her exchange to the IE Business School in Spain, “I am considering the possibility of moving to a different country in the future. Exchange provides me with an opportunity to screen different countries beforehand,” she says.

Iris’s future plan is to work at a startup as a product manager because she feels that the product is the most critical part of a company and drives the customer experience.

Interested in joining the KuzoClass Entrepreneurship Accelerator? Join the waitlist today at www.kuzoclass.com or email john@kuzoclass.com with your LinkedIn and a few sentences on why you’re passionate about entrepreneurship.