JoeBen Bevirt to Young Innovators: Build Real Things
In a conversation that felt less like a lecture and more like an honest workshop in how invention actually happens, Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt sat down with young people and treated their questions as if they mattered. That sounds like a low bar, but it is also the whole point.
The setting is simple: young minds, big curiosity, and a guest who has built a career around turning improbable ideas into engineered reality. Bevirt is introduced in the video as a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Joby Aviation. And rather than polishing his story into a highlight reel, he frames innovation as something closer to a practice: notice problems, learn the constraints, build prototypes, test them, repeat.
THE FIRST LESSON: CURIOSITY IS A SKILL, NOT A PERSONALITY
One theme that comes through is that “being innovative” is not a magical trait some people are born with. It’s a muscle you train by paying attention. When the young people ask how ideas become companies, the underlying answer is that ideas are cheap, but curiosity isn’t. Curiosity is what keeps you in the work long enough to discover what’s real: what customers actually need, what physics will allow, and what the market will pay for.
This lands especially well with students, because it re-centers the process on something they can control: asking better questions, staying interested longer, and learning faster than the problem changes.
THE SECOND LESSON: BUILDING IS HOW YOU THINK
A lot of adults talk about innovation like it’s a “brain” activity. Bevirt’s approach is more grounded: you think by making. Prototypes are not just outputs, they’re tools for learning.
In the discussion, the best entrepreneurship advice is basically engineering advice:
Start with a real problem, not a trendy solution.
Make the smallest version you can test.
Let evidence, not ego, decide what happens next.
Improve what works. Drop what doesn’t.
If you want one line to anchor the piece, it’s this idea: progress is iterative. Not glamorous. Not linear. Just relentlessly educational.
THE THIRD LESSON: FAILURE IS DATA (AND EVERYONE HATES THAT)
Young people inevitably ask some version of: What if it doesn’t work? What if I’m wrong? What if I fail?
Bevirt’s answer, in spirit, is that failure isn’t an identity. It’s a measurement. The difference between “I failed” and “That experiment failed” is the difference between quitting and iterating.
This is the kind of reframing that matters in a room full of students. It removes the shame from the process. It turns risk into a series of manageable tests. It also quietly teaches a deeper truth: the people who look fearless are usually just better at recovering quickly.
THE FOURTH LESSON: TEAMS BEAT SOLO GENIUS
Another consistent thread is that ambitious projects are almost never solo acts. Whether you’re building a product, a company, or an aircraft, you need people with different strengths and the ability to work through disagreement without melting down.
For young people, this lesson is both empowering and annoying. Empowering because it means you don’t have to be good at everything. Annoying because it means you have to learn collaboration, communication, and patience. Unfortunately, those are non-optional.
So the advice becomes practical:
Find people who complement you, not clones of you.
Get clear on roles early.
Build trust by doing the work, not by “talking about doing the work.”
THE FIFTH LESSON: AMBITION NEEDS DISCIPLINE
The conversation also makes a subtle but important point: big dreams don’t excuse sloppy thinking. If anything, the bigger the dream, the more disciplined you have to be. That discipline looks like:
Learning the fundamentals.
Respecting constraints.
Doing the boring work (testing, documentation, repetition).
Staying focused when distractions look more fun than progress.
This is where Bevirt’s credibility helps. He’s not selling “hustle culture.” He’s modeling seriousness: the kind that treats invention as craft, and entrepreneurship as the delivery mechanism for that craft.
WHAT THE YOUNG PEOPLE REALLY HEARD
If you strip the conversation down to what actually sticks with students, it’s not a business lesson. It’s permission:
Permission to be curious.
Permission to start small.
Permission to be wrong.
Permission to keep going.
In a world that constantly tells young people to optimize for grades, credentials, and perfect outcomes, the message is refreshingly direct: build something real. Then learn from what happens.
And if the conversation accomplishes anything, it’s this: it makes innovation feel less like a distant mythology and more like a path that starts exactly where the students already are, with questions, tinkering, and the courage to try.