Bear with me, please, as I take you on a youtube journey…
I’m a sailing geek. I met my wife back these four decades ago when I was her sailing instructor, in a program co-sponsored by the Ithaca YMCA and Cornell Physics grad students (!). The classroom sessions, as you might imagine, involved vectors.
During the pandemic, my sailing activities have been curtailed, and I’m spending far too much time on youtube watching first the America’s Cup AC75s, incredible machines, then leading to foiling Moths. Well, you can get the picture.
So the youtube algorithms figure me out and recommend this video on how a land vehicle can exceed wind speed taveling straight downwind. Sailors worth their salt know that “tacking downwind” will give you more downwind progress than sailing directly downwind. This sounds a bit different, but the video is pretty convincing that it’s the same deal.
As a consequence of watching this video, youtube recommended this video of the creator of the small models that the previous fellow used. The young woman, Xyla Foxlin, is an engineer who went to Lexington (MA) High School (we lived in Lexington for nearly two decades and now live in the next town over). She went on to Case Western and along the way became a youtube star. I was blown away by her excitement and energy, and the positive role model she can be for young women in STEM.
I have watched several more videos that Xyla has produced and they are all incredible, so I highly recommend them.
But something else came up in the course of my Xyla “youtube stalking,” namely a video of a TEDx talk she did. In this talk, given at Case Western, Xyla talks about her entrepreneurial journey and discusses the incredible pressures that founders are placed under – and under which they place themselves. The video is worth watching, as I see the things she talks about every day in my angel investing.
Food for thought. Thank you, youtube, for the entertainment as well as the enlightenment. And thank you, Xyla, for giving be additional hope for the future!