Being entrepreneur is all about taking risks: Harris
He loved to take risks. This streak in Dr Bernard A. Harris helped him travel in space and later become a successful entrepreneur.
Kochi: He loved to take risks. This streak in Dr Bernard A. Harris helped him travel in space and later become a successful entrepreneur.
Delivering the keynote address at TiEcon Kerala 2013, here on Saturday, Dr Harris, the first African-American to travel to space, said an entrepreneur always viewed the world differently. “Explore new ways of doing business. Take risks,” he told budding entrepreneurs.
Describing his incredible experience as an astronaut, Dr Harris said it was the moon mission that made him dream about space journeys when he was a 13-year-old in 1959. As payload commander on space shuttle Discovery STS-63 in 1995, he served on the first flight of the joint Russian-American space programme. A medical doctor by profession, he conducted research in musculoskeletal physiology and disuse osteoporosis in space.
Currently, CEO and managing partner of Vesalius Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early to mid-stage healthcare technologies and companies, Dr Harris said that after his space career, he thought about how to participate in the economic prosperity of his native country, the US, and decided to become an entrepreneur promoting medical technology. “What I knew was medicine. Convergence of technologies promises a lot in telemedicine and remote patient monitoring,” he said.