When we think about entrepreneurship we often think about someone inventing something revolutionary or world changing. That is not always the case however. Being an entrepreneur is about finding problems that need to be fixed or improved upon and some of these areas may not be super glamorous and that is exactly what Liam Berryman, a 21-year-old that made it onto the fortune 500 list, shows us with his story.

Liam Berryman was a very intelligent child growing up. He attended Rock Canyon High School and took summer courses at Stanford University. Later went on to study at UC Berkeley where he worked as a manager at a design and nanomanufacturing lab. There his job included designing and maintaining new experimental instruction. After this, he went on to become a researcher in a laboratory which developed nanomaterial that had hydrophobic/hydrophilic properties for condensation acceleration. All these experiences helped Liam develop himself as a scientist, but more importantly it helped develop his ability to build a lead teams, a tool that assists him heavily today.

All the above examples really show how impressive Liam is, but there is one thing I did not mention, he dropped out of school.  After working and studying at the school for a few years and developing a novel synthesis technique of polymer microspheres Liam left school and started his own company called Nelumbo. After reading about all the schooling and research he had done in engineering, most people would probably expect that Liam’s company would do something revolutionary and it is in its own way. The company specializes in creating advanced heat exchangers. These are components often found in any refrigeration system. What is special about these systems is that they have shown a 30% increase in energy efficiency compared to their standard counterparts. This efficiency has the potential to save up to 11 billion dollars a year in energy costs just due to refrigeration.

What I enjoy so much about Liam’s story is that it shows a different side of entrepreneurialism that does not often get recognized.  As mentioned above, people often assume that entrepreneurial ideas need to be these brand-new, ground-breaking ideas that change everyone’s lives. Liam shows that this is not always the case. Sometimes successful ideas come from improving systems that already exist with your own unique set of skills. In this case Liam saw that there was room to improve the efficiency of heat exchange systems, especially for refrigerators, so using his unique science/engineering background he used his skills to create such a product. This ended up being a very successful move for Liam, his business now employs 15 people and he has been listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Energy and he has had the opportunity to speak at numerous conferences such as the energy and impact symposium.