By Emily Chiu & Chiara Piccinotti (Co-Founders, Apply in the Sky) Winning the award for “best web start-up” at Women 2.0’s PITCH Competition last November was a surreal moment for us. Here’s a visual for you: picture two first-time entrepreneurs, trying (successfully, we hope?) to hide our nerves, as we stood before a live audience of over 300 in San Francisco, preparing to pitch our company, Apply in the Sky, for the first time.

By way of background, at that precise moment it had been:

• 458 days since we had gathered up the courage to ditch our cubicle jobs;
• Less than a year since we had finally gotten comfortable with the panic of giving up our regular finance paychecks to bootstrap our way towards visions of self-actualization;
• 63 days since we had launched our beta for Apply in the Sky (after slaving through 300+ bug fixes);
• 2 weeks since our first big partnership conversation;
• And less than 3 hours since we had each pulled all-nighters to put together our Women 2.0 slides and video demo… to present Apply in the Sky to the public for the first time.

For both of us, it had been a long journey from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. And, in many ways, we are atypical tech entrepreneurs: we are both women – women without technical backgrounds, one might add; neither of our parents are entrepreneurs (in fact, they’re quite conservative); armed with finance degrees from Wharton, we both started our careers in investment banking – a move that isn’t typically the first step towards founding a start-up; and we were surrounded by few examples of peers that would dream of throwing away competitive jobs and stable salaries to work out of a garage on something that no one had ever heard of.