Click Your Fortune #3: Inspiration - Jennifer Indovina

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Click Your Fortune is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style series that literally feeds questions from students to knowledgeable experts around the world. This intro video explains it all: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/click-your-fortune-episode-3

This episode features the professionals listed below answering dozens of questions submitted by students from all over the world. Got a burning question? A hero you'd like to see interviewed? A career you would like to see explored? Suggest and vote up ideas for future click your fortune videos here: https://community.ed.ted.com/teded/topics/suggest_questions_careers_and_people_for_the_next_click_your_fortune_episode

Francis de los Reyes III: Professor, Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University
Deena Gornick: Executive Coach
Jennifer Indovina: TED Fellow; CEO, Tenrehte Technologies
Daniel Suarez: TED Speaker; Author; Senior Systems Analyst

When Tenrehte was first getting off the ground,

we entered our prototype PICOwatt

into a competition associated with CES,

Consumer Electronics Show,

the world's biggest industry trade show.

And we built the prototype in my dad's basement.

We had no idea if it was actually going to work

on stage at a live demo for CES judges.

And the product, when we flew it to Arizona,

it wasn't working right off the bat.

We were fixing software

and changing it at the last minute.

And I got a sinus infection on the plane,

and I had to get up on stage

and do the demo anyway.

And I was holding on to my phone

to demo that the PICOwatt

would turn lights on and off on stage,

and I had no idea if it was going to work or not,

but I was hoping that it was.

And when I pressed on,

the light turned on,

and the product worked,

and it was just this serendipitous moment

between me and my partner Carlos

when the product worked live when it had to

in front of a huge stage,

you know, with a huge audience

and tons of judges.

And I think it was at that moment

I really knew we weren't just playing around

with a start-up company,

that we could actually do this.

We could build products.

We could get it out there

and that people would appreciate what we were doing.

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