By Neil Nachbar
Becoming an entrepreneur can be an exciting, but intimidating goal. For young adults considering such a path, entrepreneur Aidan Petrie has two words of advice, “Be brave.”
Petrie, who started 15 companies to date, will share his challenges and successes in entrepreneurship in his presentation on Sept. 10 at URI’s Avedisian Hall, 7 Greenhouse Road, Kingston Campus, from 6 to 7 p.m.
Petrie’s lecture, “Want to be an entrepreneur? Start here!” is free and open to the community, and he hopes young adults in the audience find what he has to say especially helpful.
“I see a lot of unnecessary uncertainty among young people,” Petrie said. “The price of failure for someone who is 24 years old and unencumbered is relatively low, while the reward for success is very high.”
According to Petrie, even if someone doesn’t start their own business, it’s important to think and act like an entrepreneur.
“Everybody today benefits from an entrepreneurial mindset, even if you work for a large corporation,” said the Jamestown resident.
Petrie’s greatest success may be Ximedica, a company he formed in 1985 with Stephen Lane. Ximedica helps clients bring medical technology products to the market by navigating federal regulations, developing a usable design and determining commercial viability.
Ximedica, which has become a $34M company with offices in Providence, California, Minnesota and Hong Kong, takes an interdisciplinary approach to each project.
“Increasingly, the days of single point inventions are over,” Petrie said. “Products coming to market now are multi-faceted, which requires experts from multiple disciplines working closely together. This wasn’t so much the case 30 years ago, when one person could be the driving force behind a product.”
Petrie witnessed how much URI students can be inventive and collaborative last fall when he was a guest judge of the 2017 HealthHacks RI competition, a 48-hour design challenge.
“The competition exceeded my expectations,” Petrie recalled. “It was great to see how well the teams of students from URI and other universities worked together.”
Petrie’s lecture will be part of the Anthony J. Risica Lecture Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The lecture series was established in 2003 thanks to a generous gift from Anthony Risica, a URI engineering alumnus. The series invites prominent leaders in engineering and business to share their knowledge with the campus community and public.
The next lecture in the series will occur on Oct. 9. It will be given by Gianluca De Luca, president of Delsys, a company in Natick, Mass. that designs and manufactures high performance electromyography instruments.