Can a party restore our connectedness? There is a colleague that I work with that I have the good fortune of talking with regularly. But the change in him since lockdowns, closings, stay at home orders and protests is notable. He doesn’t dispute the necessity of these things, but it is clear that they are taking a toll on him. Being part of an international community, most of the people I work with on a daily basis rely on online communications as our primary way of getting things done.
Over the past two days I have been looking over product and start-up pitches in my role as one of the judges of this year’s Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition at Stevens Institute of Technology. Each year undergraduate students turn their undergraduate engineering and business Senior Design Projects into business plans, and prepare elevator pitches to compete for prizes that total $17,500. I have been spending my evenings reading executive summaries and listening to the (video recorded) pitches while providing feedback and asking questions about their business ideas and product approaches.
This week has been hard. A lot of the daily professional discussions I have are related to how research and data are shared more effectively and efficiently. This week I was even in a full-day meeting discussing how we might help accelerate how insights from clinical data are shared. As one might expect, examples naturally gravitated to the current crisis and COVID-19 research, response, and treatments. But my mind was elsewhere…
This month I took the leap from a path of working with and for entrepreneurs and new ventures as an employee, to venturing out on my own. Over the years I have played the role of cheerleader and enabler. Leaders of new efforts have turned to me for advice or help as they realize their visions. And, as I thought about it, I realized that the thing I’ve liked the best about my experiences has been the variety of contributions that I’ve been able to make at the initiation of a project or venture.