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At age 14, I would have settled for two outcomes in life: to end up as a professional basketball player, or make it as an international entrepreneur. Little did I know that by that same age, I had already peaked in terms of centimeters. Entrepreneurship it was.

I grew up in Lake Stevens, Washington, a Dawson’s Creek-type bedroom community 30 miles north of Seattle. I joined my high school’s business club and during my senior year served as vice-president — a position I described to my teacher as not being worth a pitcher of warm spit. I always wanted to be the leader, you see, feeling out of place and discouraged when I wasn’t.

More on my precious ego later.

As most adults come to experience, my ship did not sail forth from that point in any way resembling a straight line. In university, I got bit by the artist bug and decided to study creative writing. I wrote long-winded screenplays unfit for any screen. I founded an artist’s alliance in NYC. Sold screenprinted t-shirts on the streets of Soho to fund our short film projects. Tried to get into advertising on the coattails of an older friend. And eventually settled for a corporate marketing job in the quick-serve sushi business. Through all these early exploits, I continued to view entrepreneurship as the most satisfying form of creation. I was constantly coming up with new ideas for online projects, though never with any reasonable idea of how to execute them.

Then I landed in France.

It was a girl of course. The initial plan was to come over for five months so that she could finish up school. Five months inadvertently extended into a year, which extended into two years (practical reasons), which for somehow turned into three, and before I knew it I had become entrenched in a country I had never intended to call my home.

It was, and still is, a great challenge to be geographically and culturally out of sorts.

France is a wonderful place, so what was the problem? Well, it went back to that whole warm pitcher of spit thing. I did not enjoy feeling like a second-class citizen. Back home, I was capable of taking charge and leading others. In my adopted country, I thought, Who’s going to want to go into business with a guy who can’t even pronounce the word “entreprise” in French?

So I got into the line of work many expats often find themselves getting into: teaching. And now there I found myself not only living in a country I had never intended to live in, but also embarking on a career I had never intended to undertake. So it goes, as the protagonist in one of my favorite novels would say each time another character died.

Although I may not have been dead, I certainly did not feel alive. Something was missing. Holding me back. I became an unhappy person.

This was my view whenever I tried to look into the future.

One of the perks, however, of my unintended professional path was a certain type of clientele I would occasionally pick up on the side: entrepreneurs and professionals in need of English assistance for their overseas ambitions. This, I enjoyed.

Meet Seb.

Enter one such client: Sébastien, a web entrepreneur working out of Plaine Images, a tech campus in Tourcoing. He reached out to me because he was looking for business-focused English lessons, as well as help with his international marketing and communication. Right from the beginning, we hit it off. He must have seen that I was not fully satisfied with my present lot in life, because after our second or third meeting he said: “Jason, it seems you have ideas. Why don’t you find a project?”

Though a simple question, it woke me up. Over the next six months, I would pitch different business ideas to Sébastien — all digital concepts centered around what I had come to know best: helping French professionals do their business abroad. He would give me his frank feedback, which usually centered around market demand and more often than not was not what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear.

At some point, Sébastien also introduced me to his business partners, Matthieu and Alexis, who were based out of the Euratechnologies tech campus in Lille. I’ll never forget the first time I set foot inside that building. It was as if I were stepping out of France and into an international environment: a space charged with energy, imagination, and the thing I had been missing for so many years, that revitalizing din of entrepreneurial ambition. I had to be there, a part of that community somehow. I honestly believed that my chance to thrive in France depended on it.

Matthieu and Alexis were very generous in welcoming me into the Euratech ecosystem. They allowed me to use a corner of their office in exchange for English lessons. They introduced me to other clients and helpful entrepreneurs. And like Sébastien, they encouraged me to find my project. Slowly, my mind began to shift back to its former state, the kind of enterprising mentality I had cherished back home as a 20-something. My sense of creativity and ambition were recharging.

In December of 2015, I took the plunge. I quit my teaching job with no unemployment benefits or savings.

I focused solely on consulting startup entrepreneurs. It was this work that eventually led, with the help of my co-founder Amber, to the creation of our own startup project: Mail Billy — a multilingual communication/content platform designed to help people just like my clients.

Following six months of incubation, our project was accepted into Euratechnologies’ accelerator program this past October. And now when I look out the window of our modest office, this is my view:

It’s worth much more to me than a pitcher of warm spit.