Housser and his co-founder Brad Stroh were interested in creating a solution to consumer debt. He enrolled at Stanford, just as the dot-com bubble popped, throwing Silicon Valley into turmoil. “But I had no idea how I would get on the other side of the table.”īusiness school would give him an opportunity to pause, he said, and make that transition into entrepreneurship. “That seemed much more interesting,” he said. But each time he met with entrepreneurs, he realized he would much rather be sitting on their side of the table. Later, Housser became a private equity investor. Some days, he boarded the New York subway in his suit, wondering what he was doing. 'It was intellectually stimulating, but it wasn’t emotionally stimulating,” Housser said. From Wall Street to the other side of the tableĪfter graduating Dartmouth with an engineering degree, Housser took a job as an investment banker on Wall Street.

“There have been times I’ve been stressed or scared, there have been highs and lows, but there has never been a time I’ve wondered what I’m doing with my life,” he said. Being an entrepreneur working in a business he’s passionate has given his life meaning. He reflected on his experience building a financial services company that now has more than 3,000 employees. Housser, a member of the Magnuson Center’s Board of Advisors, was speaking with Andrea Johnson ’91, co-founder and CEO of Rally Reader and another member of the board. “Sometimes things are great, sometimes things are crazy and chaotic, and sometimes you literally think the world is ending,” Housser said during a Fireside Chat to kick off the Dartmouth Entrepreneurs Forum held at the Hanover Inn earlier this month. Looking back on more than two decades of entrepreneurship, Andrew Housser ’95, Founder and CEO of Achieve, sees a rollercoaster of experiences.

Andrew housser