Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post.
Taking on Natural and Business Climates with ERGO
By Spencer Williams (EN ’22)
I’m part of the ERGO team, a startup dedicated to helping people with mild mobility impairments have the means and confidence to access the outdoors. Working with the team to found a company has been an intense exercise of improv, even before this internship, from our initial ideation up to obtaining a provisional patent and giving a pitch at Sling Health’s National Demo Day. I started with this project hoping to put my engineering skills and experience to use, but it’s only now that I’m realizing this journey has been exactly what I needed.
I have always been at my most productive under a little pressure and in uncharted territory, but I never would have chosen entrepreneurship as a career path. I’m no business professional; I’m majoring in biomedical engineering with intended minors in computer science and writing. I’m an engineer first and a negotiator about fourth. That’s the unique part of running a startup, though; your skills, whether they’re ready or not, are needed on all fronts. I expected to spend all of my time furthering our mechanical design of a cane attachment that adapts to different environments, but I’ve spent the past few weeks making supply and manufacturing contacts, presenting to potential beta testers, building a website, obtaining software licenses, and, of course, engineering that better prototype. I couldn’t make the prototype without a supply of metal, a place to work, and design software. I couldn’t use the design software without a website explaining our company’s purpose, which is now available at ergooutside.com. I couldn’t learn all of this in classes even if I were that patient; our provisional patent expires in one year if we fail to submit a utility patent application. There’s no incentive to learn how to do all of those required steps more effective than the countdown to the demise of your startup, your idea, and your passion.
This may have sounded horribly stressful before I started my work, but everything I listed is achievable when taken one week or even just one day at a time. One day last week, I was growing more and more desperate for a supplier of a small amount of custom-length aluminum rod, which is surprisingly hard to find. I had already waded through the slow shipping and poor customer service offered by multiple pages of Google results, but I knew this was a problem that needed to be solved. If I hadn’t found my metal by the end of the day, several of my future prototyping goals would need to be pushed back. To avoid this, I spent that day traveling around St. Louis looking to buy directly from a metal store. I finally found a small metal supplier far from the city’s center, and after I was done shopping, I was exhausted yet somehow satisfied. I hadn’t spent a day on buses just to buy around $20 worth of aluminum; I had made a valuable contact and learned that no matter how far I needed to go to keep the project alive, it would be worthwhile.
ERGO wants everyone to be able to reap the health benefits of an active outdoor lifestyle. Our product will help transition canes from indoor use to hiking outdoors and on rougher trails. Through experiencing the multifaceted process of turning an idea into a licensed patent, I am discovering how my engineering skills in design and theory can help people in the real world, one step at a time.