Boyan Slat

Businessman

1994-07-27

Boyan Slat is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, focused on ocean plastic removal technologies.

Quotes by Boyan Slat

I think very often problems are so big, people approach problems from the bottom up: 'If only I do this little bit, then hopefully there will be some sort of snowball effect that will be bigger and bigger.' I'm much more in favor of the top-down approach to problem-solving.
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Look at climate change. That's a bigger problem than plastic, but we can't all focus on that and forget about plastic - that isn't how the world works. We can divide our attention across different things, using clean-up to strengthen prevention.
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There will always be people saying things can't be done. And history shows that time and time again things 'couldn't be done' and they were done.
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Whenever you start working on something, you have to go about it with the underlying assumption that this puzzle has a solution, right? If you started a jigsaw puzzle not knowing whether all the pieces were in the box, it would not be a fun exercise.
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I'm a firm believer of the venture capitalist-style approach to solving problems. Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it's much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward.
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The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.
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The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.
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