He was in the room at Harvard University when Elon Musk was pitching his idea on SpaceX. The room was filled with doubt. This man wasn’t a good speaker, didn’t have a well planned pitch, and needed billions of dollars to launch a multi million dollar rocket into Space. They thought he was crazy.
Big new ideas might be so far out that people may have trouble understanding them or they might be technologically impossible at the time, but the only way that ideas can be big or new is if they are far out.
Startups. Entrepreneurship. The big idea. The next big thing. These are all phrases, or better yet, terms, that hover in the clouds of our ambition in this American Society. We would all want to be our own boss and change the world with one simple idea. However, most of us just dream that a big idea will just fall down upon us one day from that cloud of ambition and change our life forever.
Meeting with Micheal Belkin reaffirmed to us that that is not so. Ideas are dynamic, changing with the times, the environment, and the slightest difference in society. Ideas morph into something great. They don’t have to start off perfect. Belkin explained that a lot of his company is as it is today due to decisions and mistakes that seemed trivial at the time, but ended up completely changing his companies path.
Meeting with Micheal Belkin also reaffirmed the importance of being bold and confident in your ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem. I’m hesitant to bring up the hackneyed college applicant advice, but our conversations reminded me of the phrase “Be yourself”. You want to work on building a company that you would readily invest your body and soul to, and if it isn’t something you believe in, it will be a lot harder for you to build it up to greatness.
As an engineer, hearing about the path of an entrepreneur was intriguing, exciting, and motivating. At heart, I am a designer and an artist. And I want to couple this with my skills in engineering to create things that solve worldly issues. It was exciting hearing Belkin talk about his road to founding a company and his experiences building it from the ground up. It made entrepreneurship more palpable.