Ivan Avanesov

Tomorrow's maritime assets are unmanned. From harbor patrols to coastal defense, drone-boats will dominate the seas and our vessels will lead the way.

When I was in high school, I made a mini smoke machine out of spare parts for fun. I listed it on eBay and made my first sale within hours. Things took off from there and I quickly started supplying the top entertainment and industrial companies with MicroFoggers. They were mainly being used for special effects in films and for airflow visualization in factories and labs. People loved it, and I proceeded to design 5 generations of MicroFoggers while at university. So far, this venture has generated millions of dollars of revenue, and I've sold tens of thousands of units. But it was quite a trek to get here. There was always something going wrong, some design flaw to fix, some staffing issue to solve. Balancing this while pursuing an engineering degree at UPenn made it even harder. It was the best crash-course in business and engineering that I could have ever asked for. I learnt how to design for manufacture, procure parts, hire employees and a hundred other skills without which business collapses. I am very thankful to my loyal customers who kept me going with their encouragement (and purchases!) during hard times and for the professionalism of my business partner, Marcell, who joined as a software developer later on to program user interfaces of newer MicroFoggers. It was also incredibly rewarding. Getting calls from organizations like Universal Studios, the US Army and NASA on a daily basis, asking me when I'll have more MicroFoggers in stock really made me feel valued. By the age of 20, I had sold my products to nearly a hundred multi-billion dollar companies and dozens of government agencies. In terms of skills, I learnt how to design everything from PCBs to injection molded parts. I've made over 1000 revisions to the design of the MicroFogger since making the first one. I learnt how to communicate and negotiate with purchasing departments, employees and distributors. This was an amazing experience.

I was tasked with developing a deep sea dropcam: a device that autonomously descends down to the seabed, records footage, and later returns back to the surface. In the first part of my internship, I achieved this goal and managed to record video off the coast of Los Angeles, at over 500m of depth. In the second part of my internship, I further optimized the design, made it easier to use and began implementing a locator beacon to make recovery easier. I am very thankful for this experience and credit it with some of my later success with Vosentech as it opened my eyes to how larger companies design and manufacture hardware products. Not many 17 year-olds get a chance to work in industry, on such cool projects.