Liam Bates, Entrepreneur, television host and adventurer
Liam Bates
La Châtaigneraie, 2006
Entrepreneur, television host and adventurer
China
Learn more about me :
Right now, I live primarily in China, but spend a good 30% of the year travelling the world between China, Switzerland, the USA and Canada. I am the founder & CEO of Kaiterra, a tech startup working to reduce the world's carbon emissions by making buildings operate more efficiently and intelligently.
Before doing this, I started a couple of companies, produced and directed documentaries, made survival shows on TV, lived in the Indonesian jungle for a while, and spent some time travelling the world on a dollar a day.
Honestly, my best memory is probably the day I didn't go to school because there were 5 consecutive days of snow in the mountains, and then on Wednesday the sun finally came out. IB HL Physics V.S. a day on the mountain with 1m of snow and nobody else skiing? It was an easy choice! I will always have great respect for the select few teachers that saw my goggle tan/sunburn the next day and just knowingly winked. Then there was the time we sneaked a turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cake into the library and had a secret Thanksgiving dinner there.
I had friends from a dozen different backgrounds and cultures. There's no doubt this has helped me live in many countries, make friends, and work with colleagues from various cultures. Our company has staff based on almost every continent and we speak a dozen languages - I'm sure Ecolint provided a great foundation! I was also lucky enough to have a handful of very intelligent friends who pushed me academically.
I would not change a whole lot about my experience at Ecolint! I had a good time and kept myself busy with a million projects throughout high school.
My words of wisdom for Ecolint students: don't take yourself too seriously and definitely don't care what other people think! Do what you love, and what brings you fun. Surround yourself with people smarter than you. You're right, you will almost certainly never use trigonometry again in your life (I haven't, and I work in engineering!) but the training that your mind gets by doing trigonometry/algebra/calculus will help you in whatever you choose to do in the future. Think of it as training your brain to work better, not "learning to do something I will never do again".