KH INSIGHTS · WORK · ENTREPRENEURSHIP · AI
At 71, physician and professor Richard Brown became a beginner again—designing a consumer product, learning new forms of marketing, and using AI to help turn curiosity into something real.
At 71, Dr. Richard Brown had already lived what many people would consider a complete professional life.
He was a physician, radiologist, professor, researcher and healthcare leader.
He had spent decades becoming very good at difficult things.
Then, in his seventies, he entered an entirely different world: consumer products.
Not because the life before it had failed.
He was simply still curious.
That may be the most beautiful part of his story.
It started with a banana.
Brown enjoyed making frozen bananas for himself and his grandchildren, but he wasn’t satisfied with the wooden sticks commonly used to hold them.
He looked for something better.
When he couldn’t find what he wanted, he asked a wonderfully simple question:
Could I make it myself?
His first idea didn’t work particularly well.
So he tried again.
And again.
After roughly 40 prototypes, Brown arrived at the design that became Poka Snack—a reusable tool intended to hold fruit more securely while it is frozen and coated.
Suddenly, a distinguished physician was learning product design, prototyping, materials, manufacturing, packaging, intellectual property, crowdfunding, retail and social media.
A professor had become a student again.
The operating philosophy may be more valuable than the product.
The banana skewer makes the story charming.
But several ideas underneath Brown’s journey are useful far beyond consumer products.
01 · Be willing to become a beginner again.
Experience doesn’t mean we know everything.
Its greater gift may be the confidence that we know how to learn.
After mastering difficult things before, unfamiliarity becomes less frightening. We may not know the answer yet, but we know how to search, experiment, ask for help and keep learning.
Being a beginner is not evidence that we are incapable. It is simply the beginning of becoming capable.
02 · Solve the next problem.
We often make entrepreneurship intimidating by believing we need to understand the entire journey before starting.
Brown’s approach is simpler.
Solve the problem in front of you.
Then look at what comes next.
How should the product work?
Prototype it.
What materials should it use?
Research them.
How will people discover it?
Experiment.
We don’t always need to know how something ends before we are allowed to begin.
03 · Don’t fall in love with your first answer.
Around 40 prototypes carry another lesson.
The first answer doesn’t have to be the final answer.
Good builders let reality correct them.
Build. Observe. Learn. Adjust.
This applies to products, companies, careers—and sometimes even our plans for life.
04 · Don’t be too afraid to look inexperienced.
Success can create an unexpected trap.
Once people know us as experts, it can feel uncomfortable to become visibly bad at something new.
A respected professor learning TikTok may look awkward.
An experienced engineer may know nothing about retail.
A senior executive may struggle with a first product video.
But awkwardness is often simply evidence that we have entered unfamiliar territory.
And unfamiliar territory is where learning begins again.
05 · Follow curiosity.
Perhaps we don’t always need a perfectly mapped second act.
Sometimes curiosity is enough.
Not every experiment must become a company.
Not every hobby needs to scale.
Not every new skill needs to produce income.
But curiosity can lead us toward work, people and problems that make life interesting again.
AI lowers the cost of curiosity.
Brown also became an entrepreneur at an unusual moment in history.
Fortune reports that he used AI throughout the Poka Snack journey—from exploring ideas and design questions to branding, business planning, creative work and marketing.
That doesn’t mean AI did the work for him.
Physical prototypes still had to function.
Manufacturing still mattered.
Customers still had to care.
And Brown still worked with people who possessed skills he didn’t have.
But AI helped shorten the distance between:
“I wonder if this could work?”
and
“Let’s find out.”
That could become one of AI’s more meaningful effects on entrepreneurship.
Not simply helping large organizations become more productive, but giving an individual enough capability to investigate an idea that might previously have felt too difficult, expensive or unfamiliar to attempt.
What this could mean for Filipinos.
The Philippines has millions of people carrying decades of accumulated knowledge:
teachers, engineers, nurses, doctors, technicians, farmers, accountants, OFWs, entrepreneurs and professionals across almost every field.
We often imagine a working life as a straight line:
study → work → build a career → retire
But longer lives, accessible digital tools and AI may allow another possibility:
learn → work → master → teach → learn again → build again
Imagine an OFW bringing home decades of experience and turning it into a useful service.
A retired engineer developing a small product.
A teacher using AI to create better learning materials.
A healthcare professional solving a recurring problem observed over many years.
Or an experienced professional simply mentoring someone younger.
Technology does not replace accumulated human experience. At its best, it may help that experience travel further.
Don’t just retire. Rewire.
Brown uses a word that captures the idea beautifully:
rewiring.
That does not mean everyone should keep working forever.
Rest matters.
Family matters.
A quiet life matters.
But retirement does not necessarily require retiring our curiosity, creativity or usefulness.
A later chapter could mean teaching.
Mentoring.
Building a tiny company.
Learning something completely unrelated to everything that came before.
Or simply solving one small problem that interests us enough to keep going.
Perhaps a meaningful life does not always require moving toward bigger and bigger things.
Sometimes it means preserving enough humility to become small again:
I don’t know how to do this yet.
Let me learn.
Let me try.
Let me make something useful.
That may be one of the most hopeful possibilities of the AI age.
Not that machines will know everything for us.
But that more human beings may gain enough capability to keep exploring.
At 30.
At 50.
At 70.
At 90.
There may still be another skill to learn, another person to help, another problem to solve—or another useful thing waiting to be built.
Sometimes it begins with something as ordinary as a banana. 🌱
Source & further reading
Fortune — September 20, 2026 profile of Richard Brown and Poka Snack.
WEMU 89.1 — September 11, 2026 interview with Richard Brown on older adults, innovation and entrepreneurship.
University of Michigan Department of Radiology — Richard Brown, MD, faculty biography.
Poka Snack — Product-development updates and company information.
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