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Marty's Open Road

  • INTERVIEWED BY:

    Team BNE

  • INTERVIEW LOCATION:

    Brooklyn, NY

  • AIRED ON:

    Public Television: Season Nine

MARTY ODLIN

Co-founder/Engineer
Bamboo Bike Studio

“You don’t have many chances to get on something you really like. If you’re lucky in life, you get one....But they’re not just gonna keep coming. So as soon as you see something, go at it as hard as you can.”

INTERESTS:

Design Engineering Sports

THEMES DISCUSSED:

Hobbies & Pastimes Opportunity Chance Hard Work Passion Family Pressure Dedication Conflict Perseverance Exploration Character Individualism

TAGS:

being young, bicycles, bikes, cycling, fisherman, focus, happiness, hope, hyperactive, ideas, learning, making things, possibility, product design, prototype, racing, role models, successful, supporting yourself, welding

BIOGRAPHY:

Marty Odlin might assemble bikes—but his job is anything but an ‘assembly line’ of repetitious tasks. In fact, Marty does far more than just piece together cables and spokes at his do-it-yourself bamboo bike studio in Brooklyn, New York. The engineer-student-turned-bike-maker/educator/entrepreneur wears many hats in his varied day-to-day activities—which is exactly he needs to satisfy his admittedly-ADD attention span. Marty dabbles in a bit of everything, whether it's running his business, teaching people how to build their own bikes, or figuring out how to open up bike factories in countries like Ghana to provide low-cost bikes to local markets. Marty is on his toes and loving it--but he didn’t just wake up one day thinking: “I should open a chain of communal-run bike studios!” He sat in cubicles and made quite a few Excel spreadsheets at prior jobs before finding his current Road, but he learned a lot about himself in the process. These days, he knows that variety brings him happiness, and he revels in his work which allows him to change it up day to day. He encourages everyone to find the thing they’re really into and go after it with gusto!