Salvius traveled to the MassMutual Center today as a part of the Grinspoon Entrepreneurship Initiative. This is an annual event designed to provide networking opportunities to local businesses and startups. This year was the 10th annual event with approximately 700 attendees and over 60 different organizations exhibiting.
The event, funded by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, helps to support entrepreneurs and small businesses by allowing participants to showcase and even sell their products. In addition, students who attend have the opportunity to meet and hear from people who have already started various business endeavors.
Salvius's exhibit was set up to show attendees the new linear actuator that was developed to support the weight of the robot at its ankles. A video of the actuator working is available on
Salvius's YouTube channel. There was also a sample of the construction guide available, which showed all of the instructions required to create the same linear actuator out of recycled materials. The future release of the finished construction guide will provide a complete set of instructions on how to build robots like Salvius. For students interested in learning how to fund their own projects, the poster at the exhibit also had several panels showing how Salvius has been funded through crowdsourcing so far. In the past, Salvius has been featured in newspapers and also on the Make Magazine blog. It is extremely important for anyone who wants to get funding for their ideas to put that idea out there so that others can learn about it and contribute.
Later on in the day, Salvius met Harold Grinspoon himself. Grinspoon is responsible for founding the Entrepreneurship Initiative and helping many individuals in their various entrepreneurial pursuits. As a part of this conference, a panel of speakers was invited to talk about their own experiences creating projects and startups. As a part of this panel, I focused on some of the strategies that I have used to fund and develop Salvius. One of the biggest successes was when
Salvius made the front page of the Wilbraham Times during a fundraiser to help build him legs.
Part of the reason that I started building Salvius was because I wanted to be able to get up on stage like this to try to inspire people to learn about new technologies and to show them how they can make their own ideas a reality. For anyone looking to launch their own projects, robot-related or otherwise, I felt that there was two, really important items to know. The first is that technology is the most effective tool you have to scale your ideas. You can reach far more people online than you can through any other form of communication. It doesn't matter if you have created the most amazing new gadget, if nobody knows about it then it can not succeed. The second item is that your community is the energy supply for whatever project or startup you are creating. Your friends, family, teachers and co-workers, will be the first place you will turn to get the what you need to kickstart your idea.
