Last Thursday, I and a few other Rose scholars ate dinner and had a conversation with Michael Belkin, who is an entrepreneur and who created the app Distinc.tt. Distinc.tt is an app for people from the LGBT community of all ages, although it is by far mostly younger people who use it. I really think that it is a valuable tool, because it can be much harder for especially teenagers in the LGBT community to get in contact with each other and to form a platform of support. Many young people who have just come out do not even know other people in the LGBT community and obviously, finding one’s place in that community can be a great support. It did not start out as a platform for teenagers to meet though. A newspaper chose to highlight the fact that younger people were allowed on the app and that message really took off and all of a sudden the business plan that the company had spent a lot of time creating had to be changed, as the nature of the app was forever changed due to the press it received.

Michael told us that he started planning out his company while he was an undergraduate at Cornell. When asked about how he managed to balance schoolwork with building a company, he said that while it was hard, it was definitely worth it as he would have been a year or even two behind had he started after college. I found his persistence admirable, when he realized that this is what he wanted to do, he immediately enrolled in computer science classes at Harvard and began to build the app himself, even though he had no previous knowledge of app building. When asked if there is something he would do differently, he explained that it would have been easier if he had had a business partner from the beginning. That way someone else would have invested as much energy and time as he had and he would not have been not alone in striving to make things work.

I learned multiple things from this dinner and perhaps the most important is that you have to be flexible when you are creating a business. It might not turn out at all as you expected, but you can adapt to that and make some changes and reach something even better than you thought of.