Just about 10 minutes ago, I was in the same room as Michael Belkin, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and an iOS developer, who built a successful LGBT social-lifestyle network from scratch. He attended Cornell and then went on to Harvard Business School, where he evolved his initial idea as single founder. As time went on the app few,  more people got involved and soon enough Distinc.tt got its big break.

Throughout the discussion of the logistics of how Michael got his startup from the ground, he opened my eyes on a lot of things. One of which was how much more difficult it is for individuals in the LGBT community to socialize with each other without running into awkward and uncomfortable situations, or how much harder it is for young teenagers to come out of the closet when he or she might be the only gay person in the local community. Belkin wanted to solve this problem by creating a platform to make it easier for these people to meet others like themselves and get a sense of what the community is all about. He combined his passion of business and LGBT community, and built his life around it.

When discussing app development and startups, he also gave insightful advice and revealed difficulties that this type of business entails. He mentioned that app development is all about fundraising, since a lot of the times startups spent a lot of time perfecting their ideas and don’t have a lot of funding to sustain their development throughout this period. He also highlighted the industry of software development and its fast pace advancement that is often hard to keep up with. After all apps are easy to make, but it’s hard to stay ahead and come up with an idea that will take the world over by a storm.