I was twenty-two, I had dropped out of Georgia Tech, and the crutch I was about to show the President was not yet in production.
That last part matters. In June 2014 Better Walk was thirteen months old. We had prototypes, a patent application, and an accelerator behind us. What we did not have was a product anybody could buy. Small-run production didn't start until the following year.
So the thing I carried into the White House was, strictly speaking, a promise.
One of three
On 18 June 2014 the White House held its first Maker Faire. The premise was that American manufacturing was being rebuilt from the bottom up, by people in garages and university labs with access to tools that used to require a factory.
Three schools in the country were invited to send a student project: Stanford, MIT, and Georgia Tech.
Georgia Tech sent ours.
GEORGIA TECH COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING · 2014-06-18 · QUOTING THE WHITE HOUSE RELEASE · COE.GATECH.EDU
I want to be precise about why that is the part I think about, and it isn't the flattering reason. Nobody who made that decision knew me. There was no relationship, no track record, nothing to go on. Georgia Tech had one slot representing the entire institution in front of the President of the United States, and they handed it to a twenty-two-year-old with an unfinished degree and an unfinished product.
They needed someone not to screw it up.
The part nobody reports
There were more than thirty exhibits that day. The President walked a subset of them, and ours was one.
But the crutch is not the only thing I handed him.
I also gave President Obama a 3D-printed letter, presented on behalf of a hundred and fifty universities committing to the Maker movement. One document, signed onto by a hundred and fifty institutions, printed on the kind of machine the whole event was about, handed over by a student.
That detail has fallen almost entirely out of the record. Search my name and you get "presented a crutch to Obama," which is true and much smaller than what happened. I was not there as a founder with a device. I was there as the person a hundred and fifty universities let carry their letter.
I have thought about that more in the last two years than I did in the ten before it.
What it was actually about
The Maker Faire was an argument, and the argument was this: the barrier between having an idea and holding the object is collapsing, and when that barrier collapses, the people who get to invent things stop being a credentialed class.
I was proof of the argument, not a guest at it. I had no manufacturing background. I had a broken ankle, six weeks of the worst pain I have experienced, a 3D printer, and two classmates who agreed the situation was stupid. Crutches had not meaningfully changed in five thousand years, not because the problem was hard, but because nobody with the tools had ever been the person in the armpit pain.
That is the whole thesis of everything I have built since. Find the thing everyone has agreed to stop noticing. Check whether it is actually fixed.
BETTER WALK FOUNDED MAY 2013 · US9808393 GRANTED 2017-11-07 · NINETEEN FILINGS, FIVE JURISDICTIONS
Seven months later
In January 2015 Forbes put me on the 30 Under 30 list for manufacturing. I found out from a tweet.
Between those two events I understood almost nothing about what was actually going to be hard. I thought the hard part was getting someone to believe you. It is not. The hard part is the four years after somebody does.
But I would not take the day back, and I do not think the people who chose me were wrong to.
They needed somebody not to screw it up. I didn't.
