Recraft Takes the Stage Next Week!

To carry on from my first post regarding doing something for the first time, I start thinking about risk taking.  Risk taking means something different to every person. For me, risk taking began when I found the love of my life, startups.  Weird yes, exhilarating, definitely. I am not a natural born risk taker.  I feel as if I have trained myself to become one though, and I am still not the most daring risk taker I want to be, but I'm getting there....baby steps.  So as I was saying before, I am not a natural born risk taker, I like order, I like playing it safe. But, once I found something that excited me to no end I started to like the risks that this excitement entailed.

Coming into school as a freshman I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  I couldn't decide on a major, I really did not get along with any of the girls in my freshman hall, and I got sick constantly.  Freshman year=sucked.  Nothing in school felt right to me and I was always unsure, which was hard because in high school I always felt sure, I always felt that I knew myself so well and was so confident.  Half way through freshman year I thought Michigan was not the right place for me, but within the course of some weird path of fate, things started making sense.  One day I saw my friend who was wearing a cool t-shirt with key on it. I asked him about it and that was that, my college life changed.  It was nothing crazy, nothing extraordinary. But what his t-shirt unlocked a community of people who were similar to me, thought about life in a similar manner to me, encouraged me to go beyond the status quo and understand that ownership, value props, pitches, and risks could be a way of life at 21, not 55.  The Center for Entrepreneurship is where my friend's shirt came from, and immersing myself in that community turned my freshman year flop into an extraordinary journior and senior year.  Classes, venture challenges, networks, trips, and friends, all coming from a small community called entrepreneurship formed who I would become and what I would experience for probably the rest of my life.  So to make a long background story short...after I found entrepreneurship I took a deep dive into everything and anything I could find.  This is what eventually led me to the current startup project I am working on, Recraft.

Next week Recraft will take the stage at the Clean Energy Venture Challenge and pitch our clean tech idea to the University of Michigan. All the hard work, all the hope, all the determination and will be judged in less than a week. We will risk our reputations and our dreams for the chance, the slim chance, that it may inch us closer to startup success. Let's take the stage and take a risk!