Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Board Building: Zak Homuth, Upverter”.
I’M Zach and I’m from a company called up werder, and I want to start my talk by being a little bit. Contrary on, I think, there’s a serious problem with innovation in the developed part of the world, and I and here’s how I know. First, our economy has never been as good as it was post-world War. Two we were growing a three percent year-over-year by the time we hit the 70s. It was two percent year-over-year, 1 %. By the time we hit the 2000s and and and there’s there’s not no trend that says that this is going to get better technology is the way that we grow the economy when we can’t add more people or more stuff and we’re not doing our job. Second, we move slower than we ever have since nineteen sixty highway travel slower nowadays than it was 40 years ago.
Airplane travel slower. We don’t go supersonic, we don’t go to the moon. Third, we’ve stopped getting older um hundred years ago. The lifespan was growing three times as fast as it is today and lastly, eighty percent of parents believe that their children’s generation will be worse off than they are economist.
Tyler Cohen calls it the great stagnation, and if that all is not grim enough, i think it’s going to get worse. We still have to handle the retirement of the baby boomers and an education system which is continuing to decline, but this isn’t where we were supposed to be 40 years ago. It was commonly believed that the standard of living would have already doubled. By now that we would virtually have eliminated bacteria and viruses that we’d have cured cancer, that a hundred percent of cars would be electric, that we’d have space colonies in planetary travel, they have translating telephones and and Dale, wouldn’t have had to use an earpiece.
Had you know, maker maker faire Rome we’d have reliable speech-to-text, we, you know we were supposed to have cured cancer, the common cold and lived to be at least a hundred. So what happened? Most of the doomsayers seemed to think that the world is run out of ideas. We did the easy stuff, sanitation that improved our lifespans better than drugs or pharmacy, or anything else will ever be able to come up with. It was really easy to tap.
Niagara Falls for power. It’S really really hard to do better nuclear antibiotics were the result of messy lab work. Gene the gene was terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of crunching for 10 years to figure out our genotype, but I’ve kind of a different theory.
I think that there are three things that are really really holding us back at the highest level. I think society is getting in the way of innovation. I think between government regulation, a lack of funding, increased costs of energy we’ve made it systematically harder to do things with atoms.
We ran out of enemies, we kind of adopted this culture of the world’s going to get better, and that’s not my job. We stopped encouraging our children to become scientists and engineers and we gave up our manufacturing sector, but I think engineering culture is also pretty broken, and Massimo talked a little bit about this hide our innovations. We don’t share or collaborate or reuse or build on top of what other people have done standards we do our best work in college or at home.
We use the same rules and ideologies that we did a decade ago and that’s a good thing. Arif. I’D of China and India, stealing our jobs, while all the while we make it harder to be an engineer in America, but maybe worst of all, we’re handicapping the few engineers and scientists that we do have by giving them the tools that do legacy tools, tools that Had most of their innovation done in the 80s, but I believe, if we’re able to fix these problems, we can return to a period of both.
I don’t think we’re destined to no longer be innovators. My vision is a society that wants engineers and scientists as badly as it needs them a world where engineers work in harmony, sharing and collaborating reusing their work, a world where startups can build devices for healthcare as easily as they can build. Photo-Sharing apps a world of free and available education tools, hardware, compilation and product distribution. It’S my vision and I think we can get there and it’s already started to happen. In February up werder hosted a hackathon with Y Combinator. In Mountain View, we had over 300 applications in the two weeks leading up to the hackathon.
We could only let in a hundred and fifty people who all showed up they hacked 48 hours came up with 40 new products. They did stuff in eight hours. The companies have been trying to do for years.
They built haptic devices that Stanford has been working on since the 90s. They built google glass. What else they do they, both a circuit board printer, they built they built a baby rocking carriage that was mobile, controlled.
It was an amazing amazing event, we had, we have retired, we had retired NASA engineers and children and they all work together and they all collaborated and they built some really really incredible stuff, a couple of which have gone on to become startups. So let me tell you a little bit about up further. We started the company three years ago.
We launched our first product about a year ago into the market, and when we set out it was to solve this problem of innovation as much of it as we could. Our goal was to make it easier for people to build things and we can’t really fix the social problem. That’S that’s really outside of our control, but we can enable engineers to do a better job sharing.
We can enable engineers to do a better job, reusing and working together, and we can try to build better tools. And so in the three years that we’ve been working on a perder we’ve built a community, vibrant community of people, sharing parts and schematics and reference designs and layouts all in their web browsers are often different parts of the world. For a little while China was our largest country in the world for a little while India was our largest country in the world.
Nowadays, it’s the US, but we have thousands and thousands of engineers all over the world working together, tangen your new products, and I think it’s going to get better and I think if we all work together, it’s it’s going to get better and we’re going to solve This innovation problem thanks, you .