At just 33 years old, Montreal native Jeff Anders has lived in NYC, Beijing, and Bangladore, among many other places. He carries with him a MBA from McGill, a master’s from Harvard, and another from MIT. He is the co-founder and CEO of The Mark News, an online media source whose content is generated by some 800 contributors, each of whom are distinguished experts in their respective fields. Despite a loaded resume and accolades for The Mark News, Jeff maintains a rather humbling and unpretentious disposition.

You’ve made several career moves, not just moving from company to company, but from continent to continent. Did you ever feel intimidated or ambiguous between those positions and during those transitions?

Absolutely. The biggest ambiguity after I graduated from school was trying to figure out what I would do next. From the time that classes ended to the time I decided to start building The Mark was very difficult for me. I hadn’t been working for a few years because of school, all of my classmates had jobs, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. It was disheartening because I felt unproductive, unsure, and a lot of pressure was building because I had student debt.

What inspired you to walk into the media world?

I had been working on Michael Ignatieff’s political campaign with my professor at Harvard… and about 150 other people. They were young volunteers, really extraordinary people, who were doing all kinds of cool things all over the world and who most Canadians had never heard of. So I thought to myself ‘Is there a way to build something that would showcase these people to the Canadian public?’ I wanted to create something that would showcase Canadian ideas, bring together great Canadian thinkers, and project their ideas into the global market place. And that’s exactly what The Mark is: it’s a collection of extraordinary people.

What are some of the obstacles you’ve had to overcome with The Mark News?

The biggest one was funding. The biggest recession that we’ve seen since the Great Depression hit just as we were trying to start The Mark. People were losing their jobs, nobody was investing, newspapers were going bankrupt, there was a lot of uncertainty. Raising money for the product was especially difficult, since I didn’t have any experience, and because we were launching into a small market (Canada only), and it was just too new for people to understand.

What do you think it takes to be successful in your choice of career?

It requires a vision. You have to know exactly what you want to create, you have to be committed to that vision, and you have to think as big as you possibly can. If we had started out saying “we’re going to build a blog with five bloggers at The Mark,” we would have ended up with three, because it’s hard to exceed goals. But we said, “We want to build something that is going to be here 100 years from now. We want it to be a media company that’s producing written, audio, video content for distribution through web, mobile, print, radio and television, and we want to be a lasting Canadian media institution.” We were setting the bar very high. Another thing it requires is a team of extraordinary people; this is sort of cliché, but it’s true. And finally, just sheer refusal to fail. Get knocked down, get back up.

Do you have a mentor?

I have a few mentors, I have old friends back home, former professors—it’s not one person. But I have one mentor specific to The Mark who is also a lead investor here. He provides advice, he kicks me in the ass when I need it, he’s helpful and he’s a friend. But it’s ok to have several mentors, which I encourage to my staff.

How do you recommend our readers go about finding one?

In thinking about who the mentor could be, know that people are always looking to help younger people, who are eager, organized, who are humble and have humility and are flexible. You can send an email to absolutely anybody and say ‘Hi, I’m a student in this program, I’m interested in this field, and I would love to have coffee with you for 10 minutes, outside your office, if you have time in the next 6 months,’ — it’s very likely that people will respond to that. People love to talk about what they do, they love to pass on the help that they were given by their mentors, and you have to know that if you just ask, very often they will respond.

The ultimate goal for The Mark is to...

Create a place of discussion and debate where the people who are making good decisions that become news can come to communicate with a national audience of people who want to understand more deeply than the headlines — what is going on, what the thinking is, and who the personalities are behind those headlines. jp