Rob Lawless: A Journey with 10,000 People Begins with a Single Hello

Rob Lawless is originally from Norristown, PA and he enjoys meeting new people.

Back in May of 2013, he graduated summa cum laude from Penn State University with a degree in Finance and minors in Accounting & Entrepreneurship. After graduation, he began his career with Deloitte Consulting as a Business Analyst in Strategy & Operations. It was his reach job at the time, but about 1.5 years into it, he pulled a Millennial move – he took a large pay cut and left the Powerpoint decks and spreadsheets for the laid back, $24 million venture-funded RJMetrics.

While at RJ, Lawless worked as a sales rep where he cold emailed people every day asking them to hop on the phone for 30 mins to chat about their product. And his job being sales, he often received responses like these actual replies:

• “Take me off your mailing list, cockroach”
• “I understand that this is your job. This being said. If asking a girl out for coffee and she ignores you twice and finally says no, you do NOT ask whether this is a no just now or a now forever – and you certainly do not ask her why you are not her type” 
• “Not interested (and you’re really starting to annoy me)”

He started the project of meeting 10,000 people to see if he could meet with people to chat for an hour for absolutely no reason and held his first meeting on November 11, 2015. He was rejected way less, the responses were all positive and encouraging, and he's met amazing people with incredible backgrounds who would all consider themselves normal.

On Monday, June 20, 2016, RJMetrics was acquired by a larger company, which didn’t require my position, so he dove in full-time on his endeavor to meet 10,000 different people for an hour each.

Since then, he's met over 3,000 people across 20+ cities in the U.S. & Canada, has driven across the United States six separate times. He's been featured by press sources, including Ryan Seacrest on his nationally syndicated radio show, “On Air with Ryan Seacrest,” as well as “Your Morning,” a national Canadian morning show.

Lawless loves adventure and loves potential – over the last 3.5 years, he's found this project to have both.