At EXPLO Startup, 13-year-old Nicolas is working on a product that he hopes to get on the market soon. With positive feedback from successful entrepreneurs and inspiration from the EXPLO community, Nicolas is prepared to take his product — and his career — to new heights.

I’m in the Startup program because I’m interested in entrepreneurship; I like starting things, creating things, pitching things. I was part of a program at my school with a company called D-Academy, which is for future entrepreneurs, and we made products and put them up for sale. It’s like what I’m doing now, but here I think I’m learning more of a professional approach. I’m learning about timing, good restrictions, and body language with elevator pitches, where you need to speak efficiently in three minutes.

The product I’m working on now is a device that will cost around $15 that we call the “Renew.” It’s going to be a fidgetable device, so you can press it when you're bored and it transforms the kinetic energy you produce when you're fidgeting into electricity, which will allow you to charge your electronic devices. It’s a good initiative because electricity is getting expensive and it’s not accessible to everyone — and all this movement we make in our lives is energy that can be transformed into electricity. 

EXPLO is a very inspiring program. It’s incredible to learn new cultures and share with all of these people that teach me new things that I would have never even known or thought of in Switzerland. We were at Greentown Labs today, which is affiliated with many startups that have something to do with the environment. They were really interested in this idea of mine, so with all the good feedback I’ve received I think I can go really far with this product.