Live big, give big.
That’s the simple message Jamie Bianchini plans to deliver in his 15-minute TEDx Carson City talk on Friday.
“It’s about balancing goals and intentions. Taking care of our families, meeting our financial obligations, doing that big and dreaming big,” Bianchini said. “And balancing that with giving big.”
Bianchini has endeavored to demonstrate that much of his adult life.
After college, he chased making money, he said, becoming an entrepreneur in the outdoor sporting goods business in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up.
“I went bankrupt at 28,” he said.
That’s when he decided to pursue an earlier dream of riding a bike around the world.
“I had the idea a long time before, thought I would do it when I graduated but then I caught the bug of making money,” Bianchini said. “It resurfaced and in my heart I needed to do this trip.”
He and a college friend began planning and dubbed the trip Peace Pedalers because they wanted to use the adventure to combat prejudice in the world.
“We didn’t know how we’d do it, we just said we would do it,” Bianchini said.
Then Garrett, Bianchini’s friend, came up with the perfect idea: instead of mountain bikes they would each ride a tandem bicycle and invite perfect strangers they encountered to ride with them.
In 2002, their trip started in Japan and, unfortunately, Garrett was injured in Malaysia about a year later, but Bianchini decided to carry on alone.
“I was drawn by a mission to finish,” he said. “I hadn’t finished a lot of things in my life and I wanted to finish what I had started.”
Bianchini also wanted to demonstrate wherever you go you can make new friends and total strangers will show compassion.
“It was my hypothesis, but it proved to be true,” he said.
Time and again, people proved him right, Bianchini said.
In China, townspeople worked to recover one of their stolen bikes. Bianchini contracted malaria numerous times and was always cared for by people he hardly knew. And throughout local people would warn him where and when to travel.
“People would come out and see the vulnerability and respond to the vulnerability,” he said.
Bianchini’s trip lasted eight years and took him to 81 countries where more than 1,000 strangers hitched a ride on his bike, including his future wife, who gave birth to their son two months before the adventure ended.
He and his wife Cristina and their two children, with another child on the way, now live in Minden.
Bianchini wrote a book about his travels — “A Bicycle Built for Two Billion” — and now works out of Carson City’s Adams Hub, where he’s once again an entrepreneur, launching a business inspired by his trip.
One night in Burkina Faso, he awoke to a fire in his room caused by a burning candle. That gave him the idea to come up with a candle that always burns out on its own before it can do any damage.
He now has a patent on the design, has a tentative deal with the cable shopping network QVC to sell it, and is raising money to fully launch his new company, Lu Dela, in the summer of 2018.
In September, he placed second in the Tahoe Pitch Showcase and is working with several local investors.
Bianchini has also hooked up with Books for Africa to donate a book for each candle sold.
But first he’s been fine-tuning his TEDx talk and how to convey his philosophy in a brief talk.
“It’s challenging, there’s a lot of stories I’d like to tell about the infinite possibilities powered by compassion,” Bianchini said. “I have a message I’m trying to share: have the courage to connect.”