By Arts & Culture Staff | Edited by Maddy Simpson

As a venture capitalist, Sterling Witzke works on the edge of innovation, funding and mentoring entrepreneurs in their journeys to make it big. She has degrees from Stanford and The Wharton School of Business, and today works at Winklevoss Capital with the Winklevoss twins, the Olympic rowing champions of The Social Network fame. She also models on the side. She does a little bit of everything, but she does everything for a purpose, which she explained to Bethel University journalists, including her sister Peyton, in April.:

Here’s the best of what she said:

It’s easy to get caught up in your friends if they live in a nice apartment because they get paid more than you.

A friend of mine who I worked with came up with a really great idea for a company and said we should start this together. I left consulting and started the company called Relay Rise, which is now rebranded as Turo. It is the first peer-to-peer carsharing service.

If you buckle down you’ll be much happier later on. 

There’s nothing wrong with taking a job you need to pay the bills. That’s what I did. I think you need to be laser focused even while you’re doing that and, if you don’t know already, figuring out exactly what drives you and exactly what makes you super passionate.

The long term goal I had was to start my own venture capitalist firm and I needed an east coast network to do that so I ended up going to Warden for business school which is where I met Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

I’m very fortunate. I’ve now figured out exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life. I’ve been doing it for three years now. The very cheesy saying: if you love what you do, you’ll never have a day of work in your life is 100 percent true.

The coolest part of my job is that in any given day, my job is to go into the room and find the smartest, most passionate people who are trying to change the world.

I think you need to be laser focused on what exactly drives you and what makes you super passionate and working your way toward finding a job in whatever field that is or creating a job in whatever that is.

I was very fortunate growing up to have parents who never made gender and issue. I was a math major growing up. I’m the oldest. I was always kind of “daddy’s girl,” like he taught me to hunt, and never made me feel like there was a large difference between what girls can do and what boys can do.

My father was very adamant, whatever boys can do, you can do better.

Very rarely do things go as planned.

Be careful to live within your means.