Celine Chai – NinetyEight

Putting to action the words of a professor who said, “If you can’t find a job, go out and make your own,” a small team of Gen-Z-ers became entrepreneurs by starting a marketing consultancy company in their senior year of college while Covid hit job markets hard. Their shared birth year of 1998 became the basis for their company’s name: NinetyEight. They successfully utilize their insider knowledge of their own generation to help companies connect and communicate better with Gen-Z.

Celine Chai is one of the co-founders and is CEO of NinetyEight. Her struggles during high school forced her to redefine how she measured success. To a detrimental and debilitating degree, she had taken on a detail-oriented extreme perfectionist mindset. If she was not going to be incredible at something, she would simply not try it at all. She had to rediscover the value of the journey of improvement and finding things she enjoyed.

As people and entrepreneurs, we are highly affected by how we measure our own success, what standards we set for ourselves, and how we utilize personal drive. Celine learned that being successful sometimes looks like “putting passion over perfection.” Enjoying the actual activity has value beyond just being able to complete it with precision and excellence. Finding and engaging in a hobby that can remain low pressure but also bring great enjoyment was significant to her journey. She says her hobby of dance rejuvenates her; I relate to this so much and think that finding something that consistently rejuvenates you and coming back to it time and time again is so important if you are going to pursue entrepreneurship because it demands a lot. “It is just as important to have fun, to have happiness and joy, when you’re on the road to reaching your dream as it is to obtaining your dream.”