Boyan Slat, 20, is the founder and president of TheOceanCleanup, a Dutch non-profit that has designed and built a floating boom system to remove plastic and other garbage from the surface of the ocean. The group has raised more than $2 million by crowd funding. Q. You saw that the need for cleaner oceans existed, and you came up with an idea of how to do it. Part of your plan involved leading a team of about a hundred expert volunteers and full-time staff. How does a 20-year-old prepare for that role? A. The project started with just me, myself and I. And then all these people joined me and they shared this vision of trying to develop this technology to clean the oceans. The point from where I was alone to where we had five or six people, that's a crucial aspect of leadership - that you can communicate your vision and let them also do what you had in mind. The most important tool for that is just being extremely genuine and enthusiastic about what you would like to see being done. I think that the most crucial thing is to just have them focusing on the same goal that you are. 0. Given your age, how do manage these older, more experienced experts without bruising egos? A. Actually, that has worked surprisingly well. I notice quite often that they don't really realize that I'm 20 years old. For example, we wanted to potentially hire someone who was 28 or something, and I was a bit doubtful of that decision. And then my colleagues mentioned: "He's young, he can learn." And I thought, to me he is actually pretty old, so I don't know if his youth is a great argument. But somehow I've never really noticed my age being an obstacle. Q. Is leadership learned, or are you born with it? A. I think a lot of it is learned. But some people are better at quickly learning it than others. What I don't think is acquired is the fact that I am naturally curious and I always wanted to see things be created. I never planned to be a manager or anything, it's just that there was a necessity to do that in order for my goals to be realized. 0. You are also responsible for firing people or not renewing their contracts. Is that difficult for you? A. Yes. And that's really something that I never really signed up for, but it is part of my responsibilities. I intended to start this organization just by developing the technology, and that would be that, but all these things came with it that I wasn't fully prepared for. There's perhaps one thing that's even more difficult than firing people that work for you on a paid basis, and that is letting go of volunteers. You have to be very careful, because you don't want to hurt someone's feelings. A huge part of the success of our organization comes from the volunteers. You don't want to make enemies with people who initially came out to help your cause. Q. How do you keep people motivated? A. We are so focused on delivering and working on a goal, that sometimes you forget about maintaining the people you are working with. On the other hand, we are in the very lucky position that everyone wantsto have clean oceans, and for the people with us that's especially true, so we can kind of get away with being a bit passive about that. Q. Because of your organization's growing popularity, you now get a lot of people who want to work with you. How important is it to differentiate between passion and skills when recruiting volunteers? A. It's extremely important. There are indeed a lot of people now who really want to help but lack the expertise. When I stared this project I was a first-year-student [at Delft University of Technology], so I'm not really an engineer or anything, and the first people I attracted were engineers and scientists. It's just incredibly important to get people around you that do things better than you would, because otherwise you start to interfere in their work, you start to try to improve their work - which is exactly the opposite way of how things should be going. I'm not an expert in everything. Q. Given that many of your experts are based in places quite a distance from the office, how to keep everyone feeling like a team? 4. The head of oceanography lives in Australia and the coordinator of the maritime law topics is in Canada, and I think I've never personally met about a third of the team. But it doesn't really feel like that; it feels like you are working with them on a day-to-day basis. Thanks to video conferencing, we are really well connected. We also let them be part of the team meetings. They constantly get updated, so digital communications are really important there. It's very doable. Q. Most people with ambitions like yours would first study, then gather experience and expertise. How were you able to skip all those steps and coordinate a such a big project? 4. I thought it was a really urgent, pressing thing. I was just constantly thinking about it. I gave myself half a year to see if I could get it off the ground and that sort of worked out. That was the "pull factor" toward a project like this. But the "push factor" away from studies is that what you learn in university makes you an expert in a very small aspect of something. And when you want to lead a project like this, you have to know something about basically every aspect of the project. So you have to know a bit about human resources, a bit about engineering, a bit about finance - especially with the problems of today that are really complex and interdisciplinary. It's something that university can't really prepare you for. It's not a good preparation if you want to be an entrepreneur working on a global issue