Nil Ertok

I'm standing because I think entrepreneurship and innovation in tech needs to happen in communities like ours, not just in corporate spaces.

I'm a Biomedical Engineering student, and I'm working on my own startup right now. When I started, I realized that the people who actually do things are just the ones who try. I reached out to professors about research gaps, applied for opportunities, and got a research internship at Stanford. It was not magic, it was just not being afraid to ask.

What I want to do is help other people in our society feel like they can do that too. I want to organize events where we actually hear from people building real things—founders, researchers, people who've taken risks. Not just networking for the sake of it.

More than anything, I want to build a culture where people feel like it's possible to pursue their ideas. Where they have connections, where they see others doing ambitious things, and where it does not feel impossible to try.

I think our society could be a place where people actually support each other in building things. That's what I want to create.