Blake Resnick
| Blake Resnick | |
|---|---|
 Blake Resnick Headshot.png | |
| Born | |
| 💼 Occupation | Founder and CEO of BRINC |
| 🏢 Organisation | BRINC |
| Title | CEO |
| Blake_Resnick_ | |
| blake-resnick-164871bb | |
Blake Resnick (born January 26th, 2000) is an American engineer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of BRINC, a technology startup with a focus on public safety products.
A 2020 Thiel Fellow, Resnick dropped out of university in order to found BRINC, which is noted for having attracted funding from a number of prominent figures including Index Ventures, Sam Altman, Dylan Field and Alexandr Wang.
In 2022, Resnick was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Social Impact” list, the youngest honoree that year.
Resnick supports the widespread use of drone technology in public safety and has expressed his belief that drones can potentially replace police helicopters in the future.
Early Life and Education
Resnick was born in Las Vegas, Nevada to a doctor and a special education teacher. He grew up in the Summerlin community of the city, and from a young age was deeply interested in science and technology. Throughout his childhood he would disassemble and put back together household appliances to see how they worked, and by the age of 14 he was able to successfully build a nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ garage.
That same year, Resnick also started attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for mechanical engineering. Two years later at age 16 he transferred to Northwestern University, but in 2017 he dropped out in order to found BRINC.
In 2020, Resnick won the Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant awarded to young people to “pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college.” Backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, the two-year program also provided Resnick with mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists.
Internships
During his time at the University of Nevada and Northwestern, Resnick also held engineering internships at several high-profile companies:
In 2015 at an internship with the British super sports car maker McLaren, he developed a new brake cooling system that was both cheaper and more effective than what was being used in the company’s car models at the time. He also assisted the design director with various other projects, and would present them with the team to the CEO.
Resnick went on to intern with Tesla in 2016, where he created a data-driven predictive model that determined CAN bus latency based on network utilization conditions. He also packaged relevant algorithms in a user-friendly Matlab script, and worked on determining the threshold of when high bus utilization levels would cause catastrophic network failures in real cars.
In 2017, Resnick interned with DJI, one of the largest drone companies in the world. At the Chinese company he designed an active kevlar drone tether system to prevent flyaways, and also experimentally characterized the performance of an advanced lidar unit.
Career
BRINC
Resnick founded BRINC in response to the active shooter event at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas in October of 2017. The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, Resnick was struck by the fact that it took first responders over an hour to parse through the information received in 911 calls in order to determine where the shooter was located. On top of that, had they learned of his location and been able to send a SWAT unit earlier, that team likely would have been met with heavy gunfire.
Resnick’s best friend happened to be on the Strip when the shooting began, and he also personally knew many people who lost friends and family members on that day. Soon after, he cold-called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and was able to speak with the SWAT commander. They met for coffee and Resnick learned from him what the needs of the department were. He went home to his mom’s kitchen and began designing a drone that could be used in a number of emergency response applications.
Over the next few years Resnick continued to work with the Las Vegas SWAT team. The first version of the drone he presented to them was quickly dismissed as not suitable for callout operations, with problems including its inability to flip back over and resume flight if it was knocked to the ground. However, his next iteration piqued the interest of the SWAT commander who invited Resnick to test its functionality during live SWAT callouts. For the next half-year he accompanied Las Vegas Metro’s SWAT team on a number of missions, and at the end of that period they became the first customer of the BRINC Lemur drone.
Officially founding BRINC in 2019, Resnick has since worked to expand the operations of the business and increase its influence within the public safety sector. In 2021 when the Champlain Towers South condominium tower partially collapsed in Surfside, Florida, first responders were struggling with the logistics of searching for survivors in the rubble pile. Organizers reached out to BRINC to see if its drone could be deployed in that environment, and within hours Resnick hand-delivered a LEMUR drone that was used to assess stability in areas too dangerous for engineers.
Since the Russian and Ukrainian conflict broke out in 2022, Resnick has also facilitated the donation of nearly 50 drone systems to Ukrainian emergency responders, used to survey buildings that had been hit by cruise missiles.
In April of 2022, Resnick relocated the company from Las Vegas to Seattle.
In July of 2022, Resnick launched the “BRINC Global Rescue Network,” to “formalize and streamline a system for donating the use of our equipment, staffing and expertise to humanitarian efforts.” Most recently, In February of 2023 they deployed personnel and drones to the Turkey/Syria region that was hit with a massive earthquake, providing aid in recovery missions.
As of 2023, Resnick leads a team of over 100 people, and BRINC has raised over $80 million in venture capital. It is one of the largest drone makers in the United States and works with roughly 400 public safety agencies across the globe. Its LEMUR and LEMUR S drones have completed thousands of SWAT callouts all around the world, and the company has also released the “BRINC Ball,” a two-way communication device designed to be used by first responders in scenarios such as negotiations, crisis response, de-escalation, wellness checks, and disaster response.
In March of 2023 Resnick announced the next version of BRINC’s LEMUR drone series, the LEMUR 2.
Resnick was named on the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list for his work at BRINC.
Personal Life
Resnick resides in Seattle where BRINC is based.
References
https://blakeresnick.com/
https://www.forbes.com/profile/blake-resnick/?sh=4fb69fbc6608
https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2020-12-30/thiel-foundation-announces-2020-thiel-fellows
https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-resnick-164871bb/details/experience/
https://www.businessinsider.com/startup-founder-millions-blake-resnick-drone-brinc-peter-thiel-2023-4
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q111024312
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brinc-drones
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/meet-blake-resnick-the-22-year-old-engineer-who-just-moved-his-fast-growing-drone-startup-to-seattle/
