Kelsey Breseman

About Kelsey Breseman

Kelsey was the editor and voice of Frankly Speaking for most of her time at Olin. Kelsey blends her engineering background with an interest in speaking and writing. Since Olin she has been a member of the Tessel Project, also called Technical Machine. Kelsey is currently working on helping refugees in Ritsona, Greece and is working with another alumni to raise money for shoes there.

Kelsey graduated from Olin in 2013 with a degree in Neural Engineering. During her time at Olin, she took part in a student-created bakery. She and her friends saw a need for freshly baked goods in and around Olin, and together they began a business in baking, selling, and delivering such goods. Midnight Bakery was her first successful business and laid the foundation for the entrepreneurial projects she is pursuing today. Kelsey notes that this project was not related to her core technical skills, but nonetheless was informative in a lot of ways.

She thinks that there are parts of a real world entrepreneurship experience that are hard to cover in an academic environment, like hiring, or corporate taxes, but these are things that you can only really learn by doing.

After graduating, Kelsey took part in Tessel, an open-source rapid prototyping development platform which allows low barrier entry to design. She continues to speak at conferences about Tessel, and is looking for her next entrepreneurial venture.

Kelsey’s experience with Tessel was an incredibly valuable one. Among the things she has learned, she recounts that when starting a company, the product and the business are completely separate. If you focus on one, it’s very hard to make any progress on the other. Additionally, at the startup, nobody had any prior experience with starting a company and bringing a product to market, and there was a lifetime’s worth of learning through missteps and mistakes. She says that at any point, they would look at the past months decisions and be able to see all of the ways that they could have made better choices. Rather than failures being negative, they were a sign of learning, and helped continuously improve the trajectory of the company.

Finally, Kesley holds that she has truly found the meaning of life. In her words, “You have to live the story to understand why it exists”.