The Inventor: 托马斯·迪克森，13岁

几十年, 度, 然后是创业, Geopipe Chief Science Officer and cofounder Thomas Dickerson laughs. “发明家. It’s not really a job title, is it?”

事实上，是这样的.

企业家这个词, 他承认, has a Renaissance flair to it, a sense of being between spaces, an organization searching for a viable business model. But Dickerson and his friend and cofounder Christopher Mitchell have invented a product and a company, 为满足需要而设计的, using technologies that are constantly evolving.

“We use machine learning to efficiently build game and simulation environments from real-world places,他解释道.

These can be used in gaming, but can also be used by builders and in training first responders, in a range of possible contexts.

Dickerson and Mitchell, both with Ph.D. expertise in dividing complex problems into smaller pieces to be solved on many computers at once, 开始 Geopipe, a Burlington-based company, in 2016. The company is still in its early stages; its product is ready, but it is still iterating on the right ways to engage with the market, a landscape that can be ephemeral. This is where the liberal arts come in.

托马斯·迪克森，13岁, chief science officer and cofounder of Geopipe, in front of one of his simulations in a conference room at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies in Burlington. (杰瑞·斯沃普摄)

“You have to be a good science communicator, listen to the customer’s pain points, and figure out ways to solve their problems. You have to be able to speak to potential investors, make complex concepts accessible. The gap between ideas people may have and what happens in practice can be huge,迪克森说, 他的物理学学位, 计算机科学, and Mathematics taught him many languages. 在一所文科学校, you have the opportunity to break out of one discipline to learn the language of another, 他解释说.

Dickerson’s father is a professor of computer science at Middlebury College, with affiliations in creative writing and environmental studies.

“He’s the poster child for breaking out of silos,” Dickerson says proudly.

He’s equally proud of his mom, a homemaker and community builder. 和, 让我们面对现实吧, the kid was a bit of a young genius, completing half of the College’s computer science requirements while still in high school.

在圣. 迈克的, Dickerson got personal attention from faculty that he might not have gotten at a larger school.

“I got to take an independent study, T.A. computer science labs, and work on some very cool math research—all in my first year,” he says.

After taking a class with Physics Professor Alain Brizard, he did a summer fellowship at Princeton’s Plasma Physics lab in 2012.

“你是闪电侠的学生?那里的人说. “He’s the smartest person I know!”

The liberal arts help you become a more well-rounded person. Inside and outside the classroom, you are surrounded by people with very different interests and abilities. So when Dickerson was deciding where to go to graduate school, 他选择了布朗大学而不是纽约大学, because of its more interdisciplinary campus culture. He also believes that the liberal arts help people make the decision to pursue potentially life-changing paths and imagine various outcomes. How do the hypotheticals play out? The broader your perspective, 他认为, the more outcomes you can imagine, 你的选择就越多, and the better your chances of making the right choices.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing entrepreneurs starting companies?

“Half the people you talk to will say, ‘you’re insane, don’t do that,’” he says. It’s hard to hear “no” so often. 然后要钱, from customers or investors, can be a “deeply uncomfortable experience”—experienced startup mentors may recommend “asking for more and more outrageous stuff” in your daily life to become desensitized to rejection. The life cycle of a company also includes scaling up and hiring people. Dickerson is keenly aware of the responsibilities of being a manager—Geopipe has hired dozens of employees over the years, 所有的租金, 抵押贷款, 医疗保险, 家庭, and other things to think about.

那么为什么要这样做呢??

“这不仅仅是一个骗局. 和 it’s not just about making money. The reason to do it is that there is something you want to see brought into the world,” he says. “和 you can’t get it out of your head.”