Overall, my experience of the people was that everyone was warm and friendly, and they were building something. I expected a primarily political crowd and while I did shake hands with a few senators, I mostly met entrepreneurs and fellow investors.

When I shared with people about our recent $100M fund investing in pre-seed companies at the frontier of technology and design, I received high-fives and genuine congratulations. It felt like the people I met truly wanted to see Baukunst succeed in our mission. It’s easy to get down on Davos, and some critiques are entirely fair, (especially this one on taxation from Dutch historian Rutger Bregman) but on the promenade, it felt like there was an attitude of openness. All in all, it was a wonderful way to launch into 2024.

Here’s a bit of what I saw:

ONLY ROLEX REMAINS

The WEF is nothing short of a total town takeover. The promenade is a reflection on who’s up and who’s down on any given year. Storefronts are converted to the equivalent of large conference booths. On the tech side, Meta, Qualcomm, Uber, and Palantir all had cush spaces. Traditional news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and CNBC showed up strong; as did newer entrants like Axios.

The entry price for a storefront is $1M, and that’s before build-out or catering. I estimate the total budget for each experience to be in the $3-10M range for the week. One of the only un-transformed locations is the Rolex store. The advertising ROI may actually pencil out for them given the parade of designer-clad global leaders walking the block.

The Saudi-funded futuristic mega-city Neom had a booth, and it was full-on crazy. The immersive video installation dropped guests into an imagined “ultra-luxury” desert oasis, which felt like traveling to Alderaan in Star Wars.

Neom’s recent breakup with Sam Altman and the city’s proximity to war-torn Yemen were not mentioned.

The Female Quotient booth was the most considered in layout with distinct spaces allowing for curated panels, focused work, and coffee house or cocktail conversation depending on the hour. The space was warm, chic and welcoming in a way that is often characteristic of female-architected and oriented spaces when plopped in the midst of male-dominated environs.

Upstairs there was a woman sewing The Female Quotient logo tags onto knit hats. I asked if the sewing machine was a metaphor for the types of labor that used to be available to women. Was this some kind of performance art? Turns out they simply hadn’t sewn enough tags to meet the demand for custom beanies.

There were a few crypto houses, the best of the best being the Filecoin Foundation Sanctuary. Filecoin took over a quaint stone church with massive arched ceilings dressed in purple neon.

While crypto was represented, there were no traces of the excess seen in crypto summer. Conversation bent toward actual blockchain and the distributed web, particularly in the context of AI and robotics vs. in speculative finance. This seemed to be a relief for all involved, especially the technologists.

THE AI CHALLENGE? ACCEPTED.

Of everyone who spoke on AI (and everyone spoke on AI) it was will.i.am who caught my attention. You may know will.i.am from The Black Eyed Peas, but if you make your way around certain tech circles you also know he is deeply embedded in issues of technology, culture and equity. Will has served on the 4th Industrial Revolution Council at WEF since 2017.

When questioned about AI’s threat to the music industry, he answered, “Are we being our most creative chasing the 15 second TikTok algorithm? I don’t think so. If something is going to out-create us, bring it. We need something pushing us on imagination and creativity right now.” Challenge accepted.

When asked about his views on AI deep fakes and the upcoming election, will.i.am’s rhetorical response: “Why is Davos just getting to this topic in 2024, an election year, when we knew about these threats in 2017?”

Other AI takes:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web (and also happened to be my neighbor for the week), reminded us of Turing’s basic idea: If it seems to be thinking, it is thinking. Freaky.

Many tech leaders were asked when we’d reach artificial general intelligence (AGI). No agreement there. According to Hugging Face, we’re not close. Microsoft leadership, on the other hand, suggests we’re close-ish. As for Google, “Anyone who says they know is lying.”

AN URGENT HEART CALL

I saw Al Gore and John Kerry speak on climate. They are in the toughest race, trying to save the planet before they leave it.

I was left breathless by an astounding, heart-rending plea from three indigenous Chiefs from the Brazilian Amazon dressed in the full regalia of their tribes. Their words were followed by a sung blessing wherein women are gathering the fruits of the forest. Their message:

"We must rebuild society based on three principals: peace, love and forgiveness…Nature is asking for help from its children. We human beings must come together, the world governments, the social movements, the big companies. Not for us to save the planet, but to save our own selves and our existence on this earth.”

It was the only standing ovation I witnessed all week.

DRINKS, MORE DRINKS & AN UNUSUAL DESSERT

The only Davos event that charged money for anything was the Burning Man party. Ironic given that Burning Man is built on a gifting economy. The party cost 100 CHF to enter. It was co-sponsored by a champagne brand selling bottles for 300 CHF,  approximately $345 USD.

Luckily, the drinks were free and flowing at the iconic piano bar courtesy of Cloud Flare. Signage was tastefully nonexistent, dropped in favor of a lovely orange motif and strong executive presence. The peak piano bar moment came when everyone gathered ‘round, and started belting out the 4 Non Blondes song “What’s Up?”

“And so I wake in the morning and I step outside / And I take a deep breath and I get real high / And I scream from the top of my lungs / What’s going on?”

What’s going on, indeed. There seemed to be far more questions than answers at Davos this year.

Extreme flight delays left me stranded in Zurich. I made the best of the situation and took a car to Rosi, a Michelin watch list restaurant known for its Bavarian fare, with a twist. I’ll say — my dinner came to a triumphant close with the arrival of a giant glass dildo filled with mandarin syrup suffused through pine shaved ice. The dessert was dubbed “yellow snow.”

LET’S KEEP BUILDING

Eventually, my plane did take off. Up in the air over the continent, I felt reaffirmed in what we’re doing at Baukunst and fired up to keep building. This week in Davos reinvigorated my interest in climate tech. It also reminded me of the power of getting together in person instead of on zoom. Let’s do more of that! I’m looking forward to a fabulous year of collaborating and creating together.

“There is tremendous value in community in a world where we’re doing hard things.” —Nicholas Johnson, CEO, Orange Charger

Move fast, break things. This is the typical sentiment we've become all too familiar with when bringing new ideas into the world. But what if we adopted a more contemplative approach? What would a society less focused on breaking things, but instead on mending them, look like?

These ideas get to the crux of the conversations at Baukunst’s second-annual conference, where members of the collective came together to discuss progressive ideas about creativity, technology and business (you can check out the full itinerary and read more about the conference here). The collective also came together for the first time to celebrate what’s come from a year’s worth of work bringing Baukunst to life. With core programming grounded in a love for building, General Partners Kate McAndrew and Tyler Mincey unveiled the conference as ”'a peek into process”. Different esteemed founders within the Baukunst ecosystem shared what they were working on, actively asking audience members if they could help, while collective members pushed back with feedback and considered questions.

The ideas presented throughout the two day event within the creative landmark that is New York City’s Hotel Chelsea might have surprised those expecting a conventional business conference. There was ample discussion, for example, about the dangers of extractive capitalism, how to not let your creative practice die, and creating workspaces that welcome unexpected creativity and outside community.

The magic of bringing the Baukunst community together in one place was palpable—we’re beginning to see how the collective is taking shape, and the energy we can build toward a different type of constructive creative community. As Collective member and PROWL Studio co-founder Lauryn Menard aptly put it in one conference panel, “I’ve never had a place where I belong, where I can have the conversations [we’re having in this room].” That’s the kind of sentiment that speaks to the Baukunst mission.

In order to capture some of that magic for members of our community not in attendance, here are some insightful takeaways you can apply to your own work:

It’s not about ‘me’, it’s about ‘we’.

The concept of “ecosystem > egosystem” is one Baukunst has discussed since the beginning: the idea that whatever you build should not center around being highly competitive, but rather highly beneficial to the communities you cater to. This is at the heart of what the conference was all about, nurturing a support network for those bringing progressive new ideas into the world.

Have the utmost respect for the community you cater to.

Beyond merely hearing your user lies the profound opportunity to truly honor their wants and needs in what you create. To hear someone means to give space for someone to speak their mind; to respect them means to admire them, and, fuelled by that admiration, try as best you can to understand their world. An arterial line that connected many of the talks at this year’s conference was evidence of leaders with a love for the community they build for. There was a clear desire to solve a problem not just to profit from a market opportunity, but to create something their target user will truly appreciate. There are many instances in the world at large of massively underserved markets, or audiences that have been wronged by bad design. It’s worth asking, how can you look into a problem more deeply in order to come up with a truly novel and helpful idea? And if you are a leader who also happens to be a target user, all the better.

Small is a superpower.

“Large companies never fulfill the promise of ‘better’,” conference speaker and OMNIBUS Co-Founder Travis Schmeisser boldly asserted at this year’s conference. While some may argue about the accuracy of this statement, it’s difficult to deny the nimbleness of a small team. It was a helpful posturing to frame the small team not as a challenge, but an irreplaceable asset. Small teams are able to run circles around larger ones, and are perhaps the best people to bring a truly revolutionary idea to life more quickly. How can you rethink the power of your small team to bring something truly revolutionary more quickly to market than larger competitors?

Find out how to make work not feel like work.

And no, not in a “free snacks at the office” kind of way. An inspiring talk from Rachael Yaeger and Pam Batstone of digital design agency HUMAN centered around the question of, what makes work not feel like work? For HUMAN, their eureka moment came in 2020 when they decided to move their office from Canal Street in New York City to an inn in a sleepy fly fishing destination upstate. They’ve made many discoveries about what it’s earned them. Primarily, the locale gives them the ability to take meaningful breaks that lead to sudden insight, and facilitate visits with clients on site that become extremely important quality time, solidifying meaningful partnerships and sometimes even work revelations. Rather than succumbing to a “work is life” lifestyle, they embrace the idea that their studio is their “life’s work”. It’s important to see what your downtime affords you and your team, and how imbuing your own personality and personal motives into work can make it even more meaningful.

Progressive ideas for humanity are good for business.

It’s time to dispel the notion that ideas promoting equity are not adjacent to business success. Take the example of Bindery Books, a membership platform that noticed a huge problem for authors and BookTok influencers that kept both parties from making more profit from their expertise. In a panel discussion at the conference, Bindery co-founders Meghan Harvey and Matt Kaye explained the massive impact influencers have on book sales today, and the fact that these influencers receive little to no profit as a result of their efforts. The lack of marketing budget in the publishing industry means influencers are a large element of their marketing strategies, and many authors being published today are often considered in part because of their huge organic audiences.

Bindery Books is flipping the script on the traditional model, tapping these influencers to become publishers themselves. This now gives these influencers with huge public sway the opportunity to gain much more in profit, while the authors can spend less time marketing, and more time writing. It’s a keen observation on Bindery’s part to see the financial potential of putting these tastemakers in the drivers’ seat. Publishing is traditionally a very tough business to break into, and giving tastemakers access not only promotes more diverse voices in the industry, it makes for a business model much more appropriate for the current cultural landscape.

Flexible systems are key for future manufacturing.

What do we give up when it comes to climate consciousness and innovation when we prioritize bottom line costs? This is one of the questions at the heart of the panel “Manufacturing Excellence” at this year’s conference. There are a plethora of issues at the heart of the supply chain today, including its overall waste and its failure to adapt to evolving demands of retailers and consumers. The panelists all had interesting thoughts as to what’s to be done about it. One key takeaway was the need to embrace new technologies, and major restructuring of current factories. Panelist and CEO of SDA Dr Josef Waltl noted that the US manufacturing automation industry is currently under-apprenticed, despite being a key factor in future manufacturing systems. He proposed that software development and flexible systems are crucial pieces to the development of more adaptable factories. These changes can eliminate the frequent need for expensive tooling and slow turnaround times when it comes to turning factories around to manufacture a new product. “People don’t want the same things anymore,” Dr. Waltl added. Flexible systems allow factories and suppliers to satisfy that demand.

In order for this future to be realized, manufacturers must always keep scalability in mind. Panelists noted this takes precedence over trendy technologies, something engineers can fixate on due to personal interest.

Zone in on who you are building for—and who you are not.

Brand archetypes are a powerful and interesting tool for resonating with your audience—so interesting, in fact, it prompted Baukunst Co-Founder Kate McAndrew and brand strategist Jane McCarthy to write a whole book about it. In a conference talk detailing more about their upcoming book Goddess Guide to Branding: Your Blueprint for Building an Abundant & Authentic Feminine Brand, the pair also shared some deep insights about connecting as a brand to your audience in a truly meaningful way.

Just like any authentic person, an authentic brand focuses less on pleasing everyone, and instead on pleasing those they care about most. An excellent brand knows who they are and what they stand for, so be sure to be clear on your values from the get go. The primary goal of branding should not be just to sell products, but to resonate with your consumer on a heart and soul level. Understanding what your brand does and does not stand for is a great way to get there with the audience you really care about.

Iterate to product market fit.

Products should always be built to satisfy a need in the market that customers want to buy. This takeaway from Orange Charger CEO Nicholas Johnson’s talk serves as a healthy reminder to those still in the phase of research and building of a few things. One, it’s important to fall in love with the problem rather than the solution—it’s important to be nimble in the beginning, and potentially step away from your initial idea if a better market opportunity comes along.

Secondly, the timing of a company matters more than the idea, and how you respond to a moment. Founders ought to have a deep contextual understanding of their market in order to thoughtfully respond to a need, and be the first to present a truly novel alternative that can result in market success. So get to know your consumer deeply and their biggest headaches,, and don’t be afraid of a pivot if it’s what the market demands.

Finding the right team members can have multibillion dollar impact.

As many founders know, finding good people for your team can be an arduous journey, but have you truly metabolized the potentially colossal effect just a few key employees can have on your bottom line? Stack Shift Founder & collective member Chris Quintero might know this better than anyone. In his talk, he discusses the untapped power of the emerging knowledge workforce in locales like Lagos, Nigeria, and at an even higher level, just how important hiring the right people is to the success of your company.

Taking the harder route is rocky—but can put you way ahead of the curve.

In his talk, Nicholas Johnson highlighted the constraints of conforming to existing industry practices when building products, emphasizing the need to challenge these norms for genuine innovation. He admits through personal experience that deviating from these standard industry structures is likely going to be a much harder road to product fidelity with plenty of challenges. But taking this uncharted route might also be the key to creating a standout product with potential for success. To apply this thinking, one should critically assess the commonalities in the products offered within their industry. By identifying areas where competitors struggle, you can devise novel solutions that differ from the existing offerings. This frame of thinking could be your golden ticket to success.

On October 18 + 19, Baukunst gathered at the iconic Hotel Chelsea in NYC to reflect on our year together and turn the page toward what’s next.

"Enough has been written about—and, perhaps, more written within—the Chelsea to satisfy history hounds the world over. Those who know it do not define it by its historical significance, but, instead, by its ever-evolving, unmistakable otherness."

"Ecosystem" over "Egosystem"

We hosted a collection of talks and discussions over two days—with ample time for conscious pauses and sharing works in progress—all in pursuit of elevating our culture of creation. The phenomenal line up included eclectic voices from across the collective. During these talks, we delved into unpublished manuscripts, heard stories from creative side projects, and took a deep dive into the work underway at the first thirteen companies in the Baukunst portfolio (yet to be announced).

During the conference, we also unveiled exciting new features and offerings for collective members, set to roll out in 2024. Stay tuned for more information on these announcements coming soon.

Schedule

Talks were given from a variety of collective members, from founders and LPs, to trusted members of the larger Baukunst community. Topics included:

• Mystery Trains and Static: Finding signal, building an AI-first toolset in a noisy environment - Raul Gutierrez, CEO of Picture Studio

• Gridless Energy: Live Free or Die - Dulcie Madden, CEO of Dig Energy

• BEACON: How design offers hope in a climate crisis - Lauryn Menard and Baillie Mishler, Co-founders of PROWL; Kate McAndrew, GP of Baukunst; Chelsea Goddard, Associate at Baukunst

• Manufacturing Excellence: How world class experience translates to startup DNA - Dr Josef Waltl, CEO of SDA (formerly Siemens); Braden Ball, CEO of Threaded Manufacturing (formerly Tesla, Carbon, Rivian); Ying Liu, CEO Bluelake Packaging (formerly Apple), Moderator: Tyler Mincey GP of Baukunst

• Life's work: Creative bursts, longevity, experiments, and thinking like jazz - Rachael Yaeger, Founder of HUMAN and Pam Batstone, Creative Director of HUMAN

• Geopolitical Perspectives on the Future of Manufacturing - Christian Thönes, former CEO of DMG Mori and Axel Bichara, GP of Baukunst

• Engineering the Condition - Reggie James, CEO of Eternal; Yatú Espinosa, CEO of USB Club; Sean Thielen-Esparza, CEO of Genesis

• Creating Abundant Ecosystems - Matt Kaye, CEO of Bindery (formerly Patreon), Megan Harvey, COO of Bindery (formerly Girl Friday Productions), Chelsea MacDonald, CEO of Sylvie (formerly Instagram, Clubhouse); moderated by Kate McAndrew, GP of Baukunst

• Remote Hustle: Stories of Nigerian Talent and the Global Impact of Borderless Work - Chris Quintero, CEO of StackShift

• Founding a Full Stack Company - Nicholas Johnson, CEO of Orange

• Goddess Guide to Branding: Your blueprint for building an abundant & authentic feminine brand - Kate McAndrew, GP of Baukunst and Jane McCarthy, brand strategist

• Synthetic Solutions Demo - Allan Yu and Jacob Bijani, co-founders of Synthetic Solutions

The content seamlessly blended expert business insights with creative epiphany, prompting attendees to think critically about their work processes, priorities, and the importance of inviting community into what you're building. For insights from the conference, explore our post highlighting key takeaways from the full lineup of speakers.

Amidst engrossing talks and discussions, we shared early morning coffee with a Hotel Chelsea historian and former hotel resident, broke bread at El Quixote, and listened to jazz over cocktails in the piano room. It was an electric moment that further unified the community as a whole, igniting excitement for what's to come for Baukunst over the next year.

The Baukunst Creative Technologist Conference is an intimate event, by invitation only. If you’re interested in joining us for a future gathering, drop us a line and say hello. hello@baukunst.co

Following the acquisition of their company Lumi, co-founders Stephan Ango and Jesse Genet came to Baukunst for an open and candid discussion about the roller coaster journey of getting acquired. And what it feels like when the ride stops.

Quick takes from their talk:

THE PANINI PRESS

Jesse Genet: I really drank the Kool Aid that when you start a company, you should persevere through literally anything. You should always be the person who's thinking the biggest, has the most confidence in what you're doing, and that in every circumstance, there's just no excuse for not being that, for not waking up being that, for not going to sleep being that, for not being that for the team. And that you have to fully believe in every fiber and every cell of your body that you can build a multibillion dollar company that goes public.

So how do you reconcile that perspective with then making the decision to sell? That was a really weird sandwich for me. It became a panini press. I had to squish these disparate ideas together, which was a bigger identity problem for me than anything relating to title.

I was asking, Am I selling anything short? Did I hire someone within the last six months and look them in the white of the eyes and say, 'we're doing XYZ’. And then am I changing that now in this moment? Those were tough things that got to me emotionally.

LOSING CONTROL

Stephan Ango: When you're a smaller startup, you're putting all of your wood behind one arrow. That's the right thing to do. You have to have all your eggs in one basket, to some extent, until maybe Series C or D. The most attractive thing about being part of a bigger company was having more than one leg to stand on, but you're also giving something away. You’re releasing some of the control over where it’s all going.

LIBERATION & TERROR

Jesse Genet: It's been extremely liberating and also, terrifying. The liberating part –  I went to an All Hands meeting and was like, I don't have to run this! When there was a hard hitting Q&A, it wasn’t directed at me.

What was terrifying was how I had started to attach my identity to these different aspects of running a company.  I had been a CEO for 13 years. Then one day, I just wasn’t. It was a reckoning. A true chapter change.

THE BUS FACTOR

Stephan Ango: Everyone's familiar with the bus factor  –  if someone gets hit by a bus in your organization, how much knowledge goes away?

That's still my biggest fear with Lumi. I am the only person who has the knowledge of how to run certain parts of the code base, and different things like that. I want to make sure that knowledge gets handed over.

THE WHY

Jesse Genet: The emotional part is wondering  –  Did I truly leave everything out on the field?

That sensation can actually cloud your vision when considering the rational path forward for a product. What helped clarify things for me was thinking about the manufacturers and the brands. I realized this path forward was actually great for our customers. In a way, it was an ego drop.

We didn’t start Lumi so that Jesse could feel she left it all on the field, right? That’s not the WHY of Lumi. The WHY of Lumi is deeper relating to the manufacturers and brands. It is rational to make a decision for your customers and the mission that you started with.

(Edited & condensed for clarity)

Nick Brysiewicz.  The Long Now Foundation was founded in 1996.  You can imagine that if you're a Creative Technologist in the late 90s, the year 2000 was where all the cognitive energy was for the future.  You know, the year 2001, Space Odyssey 2000, was when it was all going to happen.  And in ‘96, it was close enough for you to know you were about to blow past that milestone.  And where were you going to place that cognitive energy in the future after that?

Danny Hillis, who was at MIT, invented massive parallel computing and worked on some of the fastest computers in the world.  He started thinking that we need an enduring symbol for the future in the same way that the Pyramids of Giza are an enduring symbol of the past.  And what would an enduring symbol of the future even be?  Maybe it was a clock.  Could you imagine a monument scale clock, like the pyramids, that would keep good time for the next 10,000 years?

So that 10,000 year period on both sides of this present moment is what we call the Long Now, as opposed to the short now. Building a 10,000 year clock, you’re all of a sudden thinking about metal joints and stuff in a way that no one’s bothered to.  You’re putting some really bright people into a space of questioning where they might be the first person to ever sit with that kind of question, in that space, with that expertise.  And from there, derive some really cool insights that can then be shared.

Tyler Mincey:  One of things we’ve been hitting on at Baukunst is thinking about technology very  broadly and understanding that what we think of as technology (gears, and cranks, and software) also includes human systems and how we pass down knowledge.  How are you thinking about the transfer of knowledge, generation to generation?

Nick:  A couple years ago, we started a project called the Organizational Continuity Project, which is a research endeavor to collect information on organizations that have lasted for like 900 years.  It's absolutely wild how many there are.  There's not an infinite number, but more than you might think.   There are breweries, brasseries, hotels, distilleries, hot springs, all kinds of things.  And we’re combing through the existing literature and having researchers go to these places and find out how these organizations have done things.  You know, How did they get through the last pandemic?  You have these organizations that have knowledge for how to get strategically from A to B, across time.

In modern times, one of the issues with these long-lived institutions is, let’s say the knowledge is passed down through families, you get somebody who doesn’t want to be in the same business as their parents.  I can relate to that.  I didn’t want to be in the same business as my parents, but they were not ten thousand year cultural foundation administrators.  So, what actually makes it through the generational filter?

Tyler:   Right, and when you’ve spoken about some of these institutions, I’ve heard you touch on process knowledge.  That process, doing things together, is how understanding is learned and passed down.  That it's not just about what can be written in a book, and actually, there are limitations around what knowledge can be transferred in a purely written form.  And I really appreciate that the Long Now’s clock project is about groups of people coming together to do something, not just to talk or to write something down in a book.  I think transferring knowledge by doing things together is so important.

So, I’m curious how you field some of the criticism that exists around long term thinking.  There are so many urgent problems we face in our day-to-day lives, it’s sometimes difficult to be an advocate for dedicating resources to long term thinking.

Nick:  I think this is a challenge that’s shared by all art organizations, right?  There's something to be said for finding the people that are touched by the work you're doing and then drawing them close, and just continuing to do the work that calls out to you.  There’s a chance you might be the only person that’s hearing that call, and so you have to chase it.  That’s my personal take.

Tyler:  Absolutely.  I believe we can't just work on short term problems.  We have to work on short term and long term problems in parallel, because some things just take a long time to develop.  And if we don't practically work on them, it's going to be too late once we get there.  And I appreciate that you’re shining a light on some of the long term problems we could be working on.

Nick:  And I don’t think long term thinking is in opposition to short term thinking.

We’re good at tracking things that move at the speed of jaguars, right?  We’re pretty good at that.  But we don’t function very well at the speed of antibiotic resistance or climate change, things that are a bit slower to manifest.  These issues only become salient when you zoom out a bit.  So all we’re advocating for is attuning to the scale of civilization and to develop an awareness of this timescale.  It’s just about increasing our range.  Imagine a palette that adds some more colors that are the long term colors.  It’s not that these things exist in competition.  It’s a non-zero sum game here.  We’re all helping each other out.  The short term is supported by long term thinking.

AUDIENCE Q&A

Question:  Here in San Francisco, there are a lot of software startups.  And the way we experience software online, it’s so interface dependent.  You start something, you build it, but then, it can be taken down.  So I’m curious what it’s like to be doing these long term physical projects when so many things around you are software-oriented and potentially more ephemeral?

Nick:  Yeah, we’re living in a digital Dark Age, right?  Most of our records are a lot more ephemeral than archivists would like them to be.  One of our first events at The Long Now Foundation back in the late 90s, was attacking this problem, How do we understand this new digital world we’re in and how this affects the breadcrumb record trail that we’re leaving through time?  There’s a superabundance of things we’re creating, right?  Personally, what I think becomes more important in an abundant information ecosystem is curation and collection.  How do you sculpt the set of things people pay attention to, and argue for this curation?

If you look at these shelves, we’ve estimated we can fit 3,000 books on the shelves.  And this is one of our projects called The Manual for Civilization.  And the idea is, if you had to jumpstart civilization, what would you like to have?  You know it’s kind of a variation of the desert island record question.   So this is kind of a curatorial challenge, right?  We still have empty shelves.  So if you have suggestions, I want to hear them…And we are working to scan these into digital form with the folks of the Internet Archive.  That whole team, they’re dear old friends, and they’re doing some amazing work on long term archival stuff in the digital space that’s worth checking out.

Tyler Mincey:  That’s amazing, and my two cents is that the flow between what is physical, and what is software, and what is hardware can be an infinitely deep philosophical conversation.  That line is blurring more and more, but maybe it’s always been blurred.

Question:  Are you anxious about the future?  And if so, what worries you?

Nick:  I am super anxious about the future, because being anxious about the future is what it feels like to be in the present.  And it always has been.  People have always been anxious about the future and that's just how it seems to be.  You can read stories going back thousands of years of people who felt like they were on an existential cliff.  And a lot of them were on an existential cliff.  So part of being alive is being, I think, attuned to the fact that our aliveness is somewhat fragile, that this isn't the kind of thing we can just trust is going to happen on its own.

(excerpts have been edited & condensed)

Nichole Rouillac: Dieter Rams is considered the godfather of design.  When you go to most ID schools and many industrial design studios his 10 principles of design will be posted on the wall.  I do think at the time Dieter Rams wrote these principles (in the 1970s), they were really valuable.  He has inspired a huge number of companies and so many products, including Apple.

But you know, times have changed a lot.  And I think it’s time to change the principles of design for the planet we’re living on today and the times we’re living through.

I love the collaboration between Allbirds and Adidas because they’re actually putting the numeric value of the carbon footprint of the product and using design as a way to celebrate that, but also to educate people.  Because people cannot make better choices if they don’t know how bad the products are that they’re buying.  So we need to be able to tell consumers how bad products are.  What the life cycle analysis is.  What carbon is emitted in creating that product and getting it into your home, into your life.

Bret Recor:  We’re seeing the addiction to what we’ve been doing.  We’re seeing the ocean islands of plastic.  We see it out in the world.  We see the impact.  And you know, only 9% of recycled plastic actually gets recycled.  So, where does the other 91% go?  The alarming thing is  –  we eat it.  We’re actually consuming 21 grams of plastic a month.  It’s terrifying.

So, it’s not about recycling more.  We have to think about replace and change.  That's where we come to circularity.  Not just putting out in the world, which is a one-way street.  Right now, we produce products, we send them out, and people buy them.  And then we say to the consumer, it's all on you.  And we're still just throwing things out.   Even if it's a nice thing, like a car or a television, we still dispose of it.

In thinking about a circular economy, design is one piece and then there are all these other players.  In order for circularity to work, design needs to be talking to manufacturing, and to actually engage all aspects of the business side.  We need to fully engage, not just look at the end use or the material.

Dan Kennedy:  In an effort to reduce waste, we really want to move towards repair.  We can’t be gluing our products together because then you have to take them apart with a heat gun, and it’s a real pain to do that.  So better to use screws. We need a new paradigm that doesn’t hide screws under rubber feet and under labels.  We always used to say, Hide it under a label.  We can’t do that anymore.  We have to celebrate and communicate to the user how you disassemble this thing.

Apple was very widely criticized by the Right to Repair movement for blocking access to repair.  Apple was saying, Oh, you can’t touch this unless you have a license or you’re going to void the warranty.  Within a short year, they’ve actually launched this self-service repair store.  And you can get the spare parts, the manuals for disassembly, and you can also rent the toolkit which is necessary (because Apple is still kind of stuck in the mode of gluing everything together.)  But it’s pretty amazing they’re taking the steps to do this and hopefully in time they will apply design for disassembly to their products.

I want to start with some doom and gloom, but won’t stick on that for too long. We’re in a bit of trouble as a species. Over the next couple of decades, we have to produce around double the food that we do today to meet the projections for the growth of our population. We must do this with less and less available water, and with at least a 70% reduction in emissions from the food system if we’re going to meet anything close to our climate goals in order to continue to survive as a species.

This map shows that with the inevitable temperature rise we’re going to have— whether it’s one degree, two degrees, or three degrees— the available land for growing crops is going to get harder and harder to find. This is a pretty big set of problems that we’re focusing on at FYTO. You could call it the Venn dire-gram, because it’s pretty dire. Yeah, I like puns.

What we’re looking at is how we could subtly change agriculture in a way that doesn’t feel like we're changing everything about agriculture. We’re starting with the foundational ingredients— things like protein and starch. Things that feed our species and the species that feed our species. We look for crops that have the nutrients that are important to supporting life, and that are really productive. They need to grow fast on less and less land, with less and less water, and with fewer and fewer resources. They need to be able function in ways that don’t feel like massive changes to what we’re used to. That’s hard, and it takes time, and as I tried to point out in the first slide, we don’t have as much time as we’d like to make these changes.

At FYTO, we think this is a great place to start. We grow crops— all aquatic plants— that are really special. We do it using much less land, almost no labor, (if you can automate it, which we’ll get to in a second), and we do it with entirely renewable energy: zero fossil fuel inputs. If this sounds too good to be true, it’s because it’s really hard to do. I like our chances, but there are some things we still have to do to make this work.

The key is scale. The plant does a lot of the work for us, so we have to keep the plant happy. It’s an organism, it’s a bioreactor, but it’s also just a farm. It looks a little different than the farms you’ve been to— unless you’ve been to our farm, which a few people here have. Tyler Mincey said it reminded him of going to Jurassic Park, which is one of the best compliments I’ve ever received! We had this vision early on that if you have a crop that lends itself to automation, why wouldn’t you try that? It all comes down to CapEx and OpEx. If you can grow a crop in a way that allows you to reach scale more quickly, without having to spend money to train specialized labor, and you can add that to the cost of goods that will ultimately come down to the consumer, then you should really go for that.

We are a bunch of mechanical engineers who like to put motors on things, but that’s not why we did this. We did this because it enables us to reach scale more quickly. What this does is, it serves as a digital farmer. We have these plants that have certain needs— they need to be fed the right nutrients and they need to be harvested frequently. They reproduce vegetatively which is a fancy way of saying they split off as clones of one another. You don’t need to plant seeds. The plants just keep splitting and multiplying and you have to thin the herd, so to speak, so that they can continue to have that area grow. You have to give them the nutrients they want to be able to keep sustaining that growth. What that leads to is potentially year-round growth, where you’re having to harvest every day, having to feed them the nutrients they want every day. If you were to do that with manual labor (and trust me, I’ve tried that), it’s not very scalable. So this robotic system, and the software that goes along with it, that our team has been developing, enables us to scale the production of these types of plants.

We’re focused on the feed side of the market right now because it’s a really important problem. It’s also a massive market that’s ripe for disruption. FYTO doesn't believe that all you should be eating is aquatic plants. I agree with Kate (McAndrew) that I don’t want a future where somebody tells me exactly how I have to do things in this prescribed sci-fi life. I’d rather leverage what we can to allow for diverse diets and cultural differences with what people eat. I think we have to preserve that because it is part of being human. By showing that we can grow lots of different crops on a plant in a much more efficient way, you can really start to imagine how we can preserve a diversity of diets.

The quiz question is: “What’s a 200 billion dollar market?” The hint is: It goes “moo.” Cows are arguably the largest crop consumer on the planet. In the state of California, which is its own amazing agricultural production center, the largest crop under cultivation is alfalfa. And it goes to cows. Alfalfa is also the largest water user in the state of California, out of all human activities. Almonds get a bad rap; they use a lot of water. Alfalfa uses about 30% more per year. And why is that? Why would we set that up? Well, it’s because dairy is actually the largest dollar value agricultural product in California. It’s an incredibly important industry and employs tens of thousands of people. It equates to at least $8 billion in economic activity in the state alone— a massive, massive market. And it’s an incredibly important ingredient the world over. So while we really support the developments that are happening in alternatives to animal products (I 100% support those and have personally been a vegetarian since high school), I think this has almost no relevance to what we’re doing at FYTO.

I look at the trends, and I tend to believe that animal products are important to the survival of the species, and that this will continue to be the case. I have had the luxury to be able to choose my diet, but over 90% of the vegetarians are so because of economic necessity. I think, again, to preserve diversity of diet and choice, we have to make way for livestock as an important part of our diet.

A little bit more on where diets appear to be headed: Our population growth is increasing steeply, as is disposable income, which is a good thing for a lot of emerging market economies. People in places like India are trying chicken for the first time. And in China, the production of swine and chicken is going through the roof. It’s a very difficult ethical thing to say, “Hey, sorry, you need to turn off that spigot because we messed up over the last 50 years in other parts of the world, and now you need to eat powder that’s made from peas.” It’s just not realistic. You could pretend that’s the way it’s going and keep working on something else. But we’d rather not pretend. We’d rather meet the moment.

We got in front of our potential customers early, and this is something the Baukunst team really helped us with. You’ve got to nail the product market fit as early as you can, because otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time developing something that might be close, but actually isn't quite what anyone wants. We haven’t nailed the product, but we’ve spoken to a lot of dairy farmers, and we’ve had some very exciting pilots in the last year. A nutritionist (gatekeeper to what cows eat), said FYTO is “highly palatable.” It’s like the chef’s kiss, like we got our Michelin star. It’s really exciting!

As much as we like cool tech and we see a large addressable market, you also have to zoom in and ask, “What is this going to do for a single farmer? How is this going to help somebody? And does it make sense to do this?” And we think it does. We can make a superior product that costs less, that uses a lot fewer resources.

The only input we need to feed our plants is cow manure, so we solve two problems with one solution. We also address the stress of not knowing where feed is going to come from. Each high-producing dairy cow needs to eat the caloric intake of a human running two marathons in a day. It’s a huge amount of feed. A huge amount of nutrient density is required. If we can solve that, and offer a little bit of predictability by putting the resources closer to the farm, and support reliable production year round, that stress reduction is monetizable.

Our massive goal is to take at least two gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere. We have very real plans for how to do that. The way animal feed is produced now is not good enough. If you look at soy production, it requires at least 5 million acres of deforestation every year. We’re knocking down trees to grow soy to feed cows. We want to reverse that trend by actually making it economically easier to switch to a FYTO crop.

Chelsea’s been an early stage investor at Dorm Room Fund and Space Capital where she led investments into companies like Gaia AI.

Prior to full-time investing, she founded Apex Haus, a boutique product strategy firm working across developer tools, climate, and biotech. Prior to Apex, she worked in Solutions Architecture at Mapbox, Research at Harvard, and Product Strategy at ESRI. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley in Law, a BA from UC Berkeley in Environmental Studies, and an MBA from the Haas School of Business.

Bonus fun fact: years ago while scouting local music talent and booking shows in LA, she helped put on the band Haim’s first residency. Chelsea has an eye for spotting talent early and, at Baukunst, she’ll be supporting the entire investment process at the fund with a special focus on network-driven sourcing.

We took this occasion to sit down with Goddard to learn about the virtual communities she is lurking in to find founders, the forthcoming San Francisco renaissance, and the areas at the intersection of tech and design that most fascinate her.

What’s most compelling to you about working in venture capital?

Chelsea Goddard: I love the detective work that happens behind the scenes. With venture, I am able to step back and research trends in the market, and look for clues about what’s coming next. From there, I am able to piece together a narrative about what is going to happen based on what is happening right now. I think this affords me a very unique opportunity to pattern match across history about technological innovation and act as somewhat of a soothsayer in service of LPs and the Partners.

What I also love about VC is how this more passive work is balanced by the more active role of being of service to founders, helping them build their teams and think through their commercialization strategy.  It's really an incredible opportunity to work with people who have the courage to bet on themselves, against the odds, and trust you to help them bring their vision into the world.  It’s a great combination.

Where do you go for intel on what’s happening trend-wise?

Chelsea Goddard:  I'm on Twitter all the time and am very much a lurker.  I don't post a lot.  I’m more the residential reply guy.  Through Twitter I’ve gained exposure to a bunch of different communities that I’m excited about.  Over the past four days, I've spent an embarrassing amount of time obsessively looking at every person on this site called Read.cv. There are some incredible designers in this community and Read makes it easy to look at their portfolios; it’s a similar ethos to Dribble but with a more engaging UI/UX.  It’s been a great way to interact with people who are launching new projects and/or looking for new product design roles.  And then another community I’ve enjoyed getting to know recently is The Forum on The Information.  If you subscribe to The Information and download their app, you can directly interact with the authors of The Information’s articles as well as guest contributors.  I've seen a number of founders and investors here, but it still feels relatively undiscovered, which is probably one of the reasons I like it.  I think as people have started to kind of churn from Twitter and Mastodon has still not quite delivered on its promise, The Information could be a fascinating template for a future-of-media company.

In addition to being on Twitter a lot, I like meeting people in-person. IRL, go figure. Being social is an important part of the role so I’m always looking to meet people in different cities who are lightning rods for talent and who have the uncanny ability to attract highly attuned people to their friend groups.

In terms of being social, how do you find San Francisco?

Chelsea Goddard:  My hope is that 2023 is the renaissance year for San Francisco.  Living in San Francisco, there’s a high density of really smart individuals who are often working at the frontiers of innovation.  And at the same time, it’s a sleepy city.  It doesn’t have the same energy as New York or LA.  But I think this can actually be a great catalyst for you to play an active role in organizing events yourself.  I’ve started to host dinners and now as part of the Baukunst team, we’re going to be doing this on a regular basis.  I think San Francisco is a place where a lot of people want to connect and that presents a great opportunity for someone like me who enjoys bringing people together.

Why is the pre-seed stage of investing appealing to you?

Chelsea Goddard:  When I was a kid, I always wanted to be the person who was in the know.  I wanted to be the one who knew about the band before everyone else did.  I grew up in Los Angeles and one of my fun facts is that I helped the band Haim put on their first residency. I loved being the person who got to share a great piece of music with someone for the first time. For me, that’s magic. I also feel this way about early stage founders. Pre-seed is really interesting to me because, to be great, I think it forces you to find creative ways to discover people who are the best in the world at what they do and establish such a genuine connection with them that when they decide to start their company, you’re their first call.  It’s not a stage for transactional fundamentals or the faint of heart.

Beyond the cultural and emotive appeal of investing at the pre-seed,  I also like that early stage investing has 1) the highest potential for returns and 2) the closest proximity to my customer base. As a VC, I have two customers: Founders and LPs. I focus on finding the best companies at the earliest part of their journey to ensure that when there is a clear fit (stage, sector, expertise), we are able to support the team in structuring the financing in a way where “everyone wins” (as the Baukunst GPs like to say). There are a lot of approaches to investing and I’m excited to work with a team that has so much experience helping founders successfully raise follow-on capital by investing with discipline.

Are there any areas within tech you’re especially excited about right now?

Chelsea Goddard:  I think about this all the time because I really like thesis-driven investing so it’s important to me to have a rotating list of themes I can explore using a repeatable process.  For the last six months, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at climate tech and specifically, companies developing novel technologies to generate carbon credits.  I think areas of opportunity in that space are both finding better ways to underwrite risk for carbon credits as well as developing lightweight hardware products that make it easier to generate carbon credits.  Another area within climate tech that intrigues me, though I’m not sure there is a venture opportunity there, is water filtration.  We need new ways to reuse water, and that’s a very interesting design problem.

I’m also always curious about software companies who are building better tools for designers and developers. My partner is an engineer and I also spent a few years helping manage project development for engineering teams, so this is an area I want to continue to develop opinions about.  And then an area I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about recently is media.  What does the future of media look like?  And is that a venture scale opportunity?  Historically, publishing and news has been a hard business to get right.  But could there be a genuine opportunity for high quality, short form news (like Medium meets Apple News)?  It’s an outstanding question.

What motivated you to join the Baukunst team?

Chelsea Goddard:  I met Matt (Thoms) a few years ago and we casually stayed in touch. Honestly, he was incredibly gracious with his time since I started reaching out to him when I was first learning what it meant to work in venture capital.  When I saw the launch of Baukunst, I reached out to Matt to congratulate him and he suggested I meet with Kate (McAndrew).  Kate and I met in a cafe in San Francisco, where we had an hour-long coffee and discussed her thoughts on everything from investing to working with diverse founders.  Afterward, on my way to my car, I called my fiancé and said, I just met the woman I want to work for someday.  Then two hours later, Kate e-mailed me to ask if I’d like to interview for a position. The rest is history.

I think how VCs treat their team members is often emblematic of how they're going to treat founders.  The way I clicked with both Matt and Kate then Tyler and Axel gave me a lot of confidence that this team was going to be very founder first.  I’m excited about that.

At the recent Baukunst Creative Technologist Conference, Stephan Ango interviewed myself, Kate McAndrew, co-founder and GP at Baukunst, and Sydney Thomas, Founder and GP at Impressionism Capital*, to discuss the art of investing at pre-seed. Together, we unpacked how different pre-seed philosophies can be, what we each look for in a founder, and the ambitions we have for our respective portfolio companies.

Quick takes from the talk:

STEPHAN: What’s the role of the pre-seed investor?

SYDNEY THOMAS:  In the early stages, you are so much more of a sounding board.  You're so much more of a mentor.  You’re so much more of a grounding force to the founders because everything is changing all the time.  That first year is just rocky.  It's a mess… And so we try to be the least messy.  We try to help the company become what it's meant to be and remove barriers as much as possible.

KATE MCANDREW:  What I really love is figuring out -  what does this person need from me?  Each founder is unique.  Where they're coming from is unique.  What they're building is unique.

And to give that sense of trust, while also holding (the founder) accountable.  I think in any relationship, you want a partner that both gives you the benefit of the doubt and is also going to call you on your shit.  That allows you to build trust.

STEPHAN: There are so many more seed stage deals happening today than there were ten years ago.  Is the number of great ideas also accelerating or staying the same?

SYDNEY THOMAS:  I actually think it's increasing.  As the number of venture capitalists increases, it allows for a velocity of ideas to get funded.  It allows so many more people to become founders.  And not just founders, but become tech founders.  People who might not have been able to become tech founders three to five years ago because they didn’t have any connective tissue to someone who could actually invest in them on the VC side.

One of the coolest things about being a VC is that everyone is doing it because they think they see the market differently.  Especially at pre-seed, there are a lot of different opinions about what a good company looks like.

KATE MCANDREW:  To me, a truly great idea is actually pretty rare.  And a team that can bring a great idea to fruition on the 10 plus year journey that it will take to get there is also pretty rare.  They absolutely exist.  And we have the privilege to work with a lot of them.  But I think in the last few years it became very cool to be a founder.  And so there are a lot of people pitching things that don’t pass the do-we-think-this-should-exist test.  I believe venture capital’s purpose is to find people with really ambitious ideas that require capital in order to build, you know, transformational tools and technology. And I think that that's very different than just a company that needs money.

The current volume (of people pitching) makes it so much harder.   You’re hopefully walking up to the haystack with a magnet.  But oftentimes, you don't have that.  And so the sorting becomes tougher when there’s this volume of people that may or may not be lit up by the thing that they're telling you they're going to commit 10 years of their life to.

STEPHAN: How do you think about second time or third time founders vs. brand new founders?

SYDNEY THOMAS:  I'm really biased towards first time founders, because I think they're able to see things unencumbered by a lot of the shit (for lack of a better word) that second time founders sometimes bring along with them.

I also think generally there's a bias in venture toward second time founders.  People think, ‘Well, they know the teams to assemble at any given point of their company formation in order to hit some random goal.’  But then you're optimizing from an operations perspective, not a vision perspective.

STEPHAN: There are so many options available for founders in terms of how they raise money.  What is the value of a VC in this broadening landscape?

KATE MCANDREW: We have a deep belief that collaboration makes us better.  So if you’ve decided to raise money from a VC, it's really about picking the people you want to collaborate with.  And I think a big part of why people raise money from this person, or that person, or this fund, or that fund, is they believe that collaborator is going to help them raise their game.

And that is our job, right?  Our job is to use capital as a means to build and cement a relationship.  And in that relationship, it is our responsibility to help make that company better. And if we don't do that, we have failed, even if we make money.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

*At the time of this talk, Sydney Thomas was an investor at Precursor Ventures. She recently started her own firm, Impressionism Capital.

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Nova Labs (formerly Helium Inc.), founder of the core technologies powering the Helium Network, is now moving into 5G and carrier services.   At our Creative Technologist conference in October, I spoke with Mark Phillips, VP of Business Development at Nova Labs about the latest in DeWi and what the future looks like for the Helium network.

We think the transformative model the Helium ecosystem is pioneering within mobile has the potential to revolutionize how people perceive and participate with their cellular carriers, so we’re very excited to share this conversation with you.

Mark Phillips:  Nine years ago, when our company was founded, we were called Skynet.  We were Helium Systems after that.  And then about six months ago, alongside a D round fundraise, we changed our name to Nova Labs.  We started as an IoT sensing wireless company.  When I joined the company in San Francisco about nine years ago, we were building public IoT networks for companies that wanted to put a sensor inside their refrigerator to make sure, for instance, their sushi inventory didn't go bad.  That was moderately successful, but we ran into an issue where the quick service restaurants didn't want to maintain their own wireless networks.  So after that, we tried a few different vertical products.  And then, in the middle of 2017, when Bitcoin and Etherium were experiencing their second wave of attention, we thought, what if there’s a way to compel people with an incentive to build this wireless network?

In 2019, we launched with 140 of these pieces of hardware called hotspots that look like Apple TV.  You put the hotspot in your window and it contributes to making a BIG IoT wireless network.  We wrote the Helium Blockchain from scratch, which I do not recommend doing, but we wrote it to reward people for providing coverage with the token HNT.  And our vision was always to apply this incentive to other wireless networks.  So we started with IoT and we just announced that Nova Labs will be rolling out a mobile carrier service for devices using 4G and 5G connectivity, based on this same incentive mechanism.  The model has been wildly successful, at least in creating supply of coverage.  We've created the largest contiguous wireless network in the world.  And when I say we, I mean the community, the millions of people across the world who are participating in this.  

Today, in about 185 countries, in 75,000 cities, you can get some amount of Helium coverage. Most major cities in the world, where we can get radios in, have very good Helium coverage. Meaning you could take a device with a radio module that uses the Helium network, and turn it on, and it will start transmitting data.  And so, we’re now switching away from supply and switching our focus toward demand.  We’re exploring how to demonstrate that for the next 5, 10, 15 years, this incentive-driven mesh network will have as much, if not more, data usage than traditionally built wireless networks.  So that's where we're at.

Tyler Mincey:  From my professional investor point of view, I think the fact that you started out by addressing a set of problems and built a model focusing on network expansion, using tokens to help you do this, is important.  You didn’t start out as a crypto enthusiast looking for some way to apply crypto.  

Mark Phillips:  Right.  We started by asking, how do we build this network faster?  The use of crypto in the Helium blockchain was out of necessity.  It was not driven by thinking we’d get a lot of attention and hype just for slapping a blockchain label on the project.  

Tyler Mincey:  And what's most exciting about the network to me is really the innovation in the business model itself.  You used these technological tools to transform a fundamental problem with wireless networks, and lots of capital intensive systems in general.  It's very capital intensive to deploy a wireless network.  In order to have that capital, you need customers.  But you can't get the customers, because you don't have the network yet, right?  It’s a chicken and egg problem. It’s why wireless networks have been so slow to be deployed over the years, and why we’ve seen it take decades to develop networks.   

Mark Phillips:  And even if you do get to that point, the carriers want the network to be entirely their own.  The first network that our community built is using something called LoRaWAN.  LoRaWAN is a wireless protocol that’s been around for about 12 years but requires a ton of capital to build. And there are companies out there that have been doing this for a long time, but they only fund network deployments when their customers cut a big check for it.  So, if you go to a utility and say you want to monitor your meters, that’s great.  They’ll say, we can put 50,000 meters out there, but we’re going to have to spend $500,000 in CapEx to build this network for these two cities, and you're going to pay for that, and sign a contract for 20 years. So they can lock you into stuff.  

LoRaWAN has a ton of promise for IoT devices.  We're still very early in the IoT space.  When you're talking about noncellular connected devices and you go to a CEO of a company that wants to build something that gets deployed everywhere, you can't say, we can connect it in this city, but in these 15 other cities which are major markets for you, that’s going to take 6 or 12 months to build.  That doesn't work.  But now, with the massive coverage we’ve gained just over the last six to 12 months, we can have very serious conversations with enterprises that are rolling things out at a national level, even an international level.  And they can trust that instead of being in just 20% of the cities they want to roll out in, they can be in 85% of those cities.  And this is going to grow to 100% over the next six to 12 months.  And that's a huge change.

Tyler Mincey:  It’s amazing to see how the network has grown to be the largest contiguous network, and it was deployed basically in two years. 

Mark Phillips:  Our growth rate now, though down quite a bit from its peak, is still impressive. We're still adding 15,000 - 20,000 of these IoT hotspots every month. And now, we're adding more cellular radios.  

Tyler Mincey:  It's incredible to see that growth given what's been happening in the consumer electronics supply chain where you're basically device limited.

Mark Phillips:  Yeah, for the longest time we had hit this sort of magical and wildly frustrating confluence of crypto exploding in popularity and Helium sort of riding along with it.  Which of course, spurred more people to get involved purely for the incentive mechanism, which in turn crushed our already weak supply chains for the components that our community needed.  We’re about to pass one million hotspots.  We may have gotten there a lot sooner, if people hadn’t had to wait three to five months to get a hotspot and instead, had gotten them in one to two weeks, the way they can now.  

Tyler Mincey:  To recap some of the economics, at the peak stage of the network's growth, there was a period of time where if you were deploying a new hotspot at the edge of the network even the relatively expensive hotspot (about $500 at the time) would pay itself off with rewards within a week or two.  That was amazing to see.

Mark Phillips:  Yes, and the community built myriad tools to help people investigate this.  From a rewards perspective, we use something called Proof of Coverage (PoC), which is a way to verify, as best we can, the usefulness of the coverage as being provided by this piece of hardware.  Proof of Coverage incentivizes good, robust, not overly dense coverage.  Kate (McAndrew) was complaining earlier, because her hotspot in San Francisco doesn't earn very many rewards. In that case, I would argue you should move your hotspot out of there, maybe send it to your mother.  What we’ve found fascinating about the incentive mechanism is that incentives drive every single bit of behavior.  Early on, that surprised us.  We now spend a lot more time thinking about this as a community. 

Tyler Mincey:  It's important to consider what’s driving the market around these tokens, and it raises questions about speculation.  I believe there are both healthy and unhealthy forms of speculation.  As a VC, our business is hopefully the healthy kind.  Our focus is to invest in companies that will create real value.  Many people have a negative perception of the speculation involved in some crypto projects because they can’t see a fundamental use case that would drive value.  But with a wireless network, you can do real modeling of the data transfer market today, where you think it’s going in the future, the price per gigabyte of data transfer, etc.  You can apply real analysis to the market which, for me, substantiates the value of the token.  There are good economic fundamentals to the market itself.

Mark Phillips:  Yeah, I would agree. We don't get into the speculative side of other projects.  Our community's known for not allowing any discussion about speculation.  If you go into the Helium Discord server, it's a wild, absurd place (there are 200,000 people who are super rabid about the entire thing), but if you say anything about exchanges, or pricing, or trading, a bot comes in and shuts you down.  It's not allowed.  The price of the token over time should reflect the value stored there.  The way we've crafted it in the community is that as the usage of the network increases, there should be more value conferred upon the token, because the token itself is actually used for the transaction fees for sending data.  

There’s another mechanism called a data credit, which is derived from the HNT.  As a customer of the blockchain, you pay data credits.  If you talk to some users of the Helium Network, they will tell you that when they run their cost benefit analysis of using it, they often think there's a bug in their Excel sheet, because it's far too cheap in their minds.  

I've actually got a couple sensors with me today.  This is a location tracker from a company out of the Netherlands called Viloc , it's kind of like a LoJack for micromobility assets.  You put this on a scooter and if someone steals it, which happens all the time, you can go out into the field and retrieve it.  This thing probably sends a packet every five minutes, that packet is like 15 bytes, incredibly small, and probably costs about one US dollar per year to operate this on the Helium Network, which for this company is remarkably good.  But when we're trying to demonstrate usage of the Helium Network, even in a world where there are 10 billion devices all transmitting constantly, it's very hard to make a dent in what is typically viewed as blockchain protocol spend.  If you look at all the protocol spend on the Helium Blockchain, we're consistently in the top three or four of all these layer one chains (Etherium, Solana, Avalanche, etc.), but a very small percentage of that is actually data transfer.  And that's just going to take time, especially on the IoT side.

Tyler Mincey:  When you compare that to the timescales of network deployment, you’re just at the end of network rollout.  It’s natural and normal for it to be where it is today.  

Mark Phillips:  Exactly. I mean, talk to me in 10 years. We think we have other mechanisms on the cellular side, but with the IoT and small device market, it’s going to take 10 years for these companies to get one hundred thousand, one million, ten million devices out there.  

Tyler Mincey:  So let's talk a bit about the future.  I’m curious what you see happening with 5G.  A lot of things are evolving, the types of people operating the network and doing the deployment are shifting a little bit more to the enterprise end of the spectrum, but still very accessible for the average person relative to the past.  

Mark Phillips:  Yeah, so when we first started out with IoT and LoRaWAN, we had this idea that with a long enough timeline, if the model was true, we could revolutionize how most wireless networks are built.  About a year ago, a company called FreedomFi (who Nova Labs actually acquired a few months ago), introduced the idea of using the Helium incentive mechanism and the token HNT for cellular networks, specifically using spectrum the United States calls CBRS, which is a public cellular band.  Typically, to build a network like T-Mobile or  AT&T, you license spectrum from the FCC, and pay billions of dollars for this.  And then you put up radios, and create your own network, and you sell and support a subscription service.   CBRS is actually something that Ajit Pai, who is the former FCC commissioner, made possible.  It’s a way for you and me and Tyler to deploy our own cellular radios.  

Our community approved a few radios that can be deployed to create 4G and 5G coverage.  Today, there are about 6,400 of these cellular radios deployed to the Helium Network (and earn a token incentive for that).  We needed to tune the reward mechanism for this different network so we have a new token called MOBILE.  And now my company Nova, which is a for-profit entity that is the founding member of the ecosystem but now very much just an ecosystem member, has announced a carrier product.  In Q1 2023, we’re releasing Helium Mobile, which is a cellular carrier you would use instead of Verizon, or AT&T, or T-Mobile, or any of these companies that would sell you a subscription product.  It’s easiest to think of it as a MVNO, or a mobile virtual network operator.  And there are hundreds of these MVNOs who go to AT&T or T-Mobile and say, we want to buy a ton of data from you and we’re going to put subscribers on your network.  We have a relationship with T-Mobile, where when you subscribe to the Helium Mobile Network, when you don’t have Helium 5G core coverage, you’ll use T-Mobile’s macro-network and it will function as a national network.  

As our infrastructure gets bigger over time, we think we can change the economics of the game.  The more data we can put onto the Helium core network, the less we’ll need to put onto macro-networks, and subscribers will see the price of their connectivity come down.  Our initial offering includes three data plans that are competitive with most plans out there.  Over time, the price will go down, because our coverage will increase.  And with the crypto incentive, we think we can give people an excuse to actually like the carrier they’re with.   Incentives in the network are crafted so you earn rewards just for using it.  And if you are also helping to build the network by having a radio or two in your house, you’re earning tokens for providing that coverage as well.  And what’s fascinating about the mobile network vs. IoT is the usage is tangible.  I think we can fundamentally change how people view carriers, and we intend to be the first company there.

Tyler Mincey:  I’m excited about the prospect of communities being able to manage their own cell coverage.  If you’ve ever lived in a dead spot, it’s horribly painful.  And there are issues around how dense of an area you need to be in for the major carriers to care about you.  

Mark Phillips:  Yeah, the carriers do some modeling and figure out what it's going to cost to create coverage.  And then they consider whether they can sell enough subscriptions to recoup their costs.  In a lot of places in the US, it's still not there.  The carriers are still not going to provide coverage.  We see an opportunity to change that.  You can put your own tower up then tell your neighbors about it, and they can use it.  It's pretty beautiful.

Q&A

Question:  I'm curious what's in it for T-Mobile with this deal?  Because it seems like it’s really putting a competitor in business.

Mark Phillips:  First and foremost, this is an established product they have in market.  It's a T- Mobile MVNO relationship.  There's a rate card,etc.  Now, they don’t automatically approve you to be a carrier partner.  You have to jump through some hoops.  But there's a dollars and cents relationship here that they’ll benefit from.  In addition to signing us up as a customer, they’re actually very interested in where the space is going.  On a long enough timeline, we envision a future where someone like T-Mobile would start to view the Helium Network as more of a neutral host network, where there’s coverage available for any carrier to use.  For example if you go to SFO and you’re on AT&T, you’re not actually on AT&T’s hardware, you’re using Boingo’s physical infrastructure and they just sell connectivity back to AT&T.  We think we can get to the point where the coverage we’re building is resilient enough and the quality of service is high enough, where someone like T-Mobile would roll onto Helium Mobile coverage in places where they don’t have coverage.  

Question:  One thing that comes to mind with the telecom industry in general is how entrenched it is in terms of policy lobbying.  The large carriers spend a lot.  How do you think about being a startup within an ecosystem like this that’s so heavily regulated?

Mark Phillips:  At a very tactical level, anything that gets deployed on the Helium Network has to comply with any regulation of the FCC.  The hardware is manufactured by independent manufacturers that are part of the ecosystem and go through all the standard processes to get these things approved.  I mentioned before that we're using something called CBRS, which is a public piece of cellular spectrum.  Again, as long as you're complying with the rules for CBRS, you can make use of that.  So we feel very comfortable with our current approach.  That said, we're always looking to see what might be coming down the pipeline. 

Question:  How do you deal with the incentive system disappearing at scale and how do you prevent the network from collapsing at that time?

Mark Phillips:  That's a big question, a very good question.  The cycle we've gone through when it comes to deploying coverage, specifically on the IoT side, is starting with the early, bleeding edge adopters, people who cared about the technology, people who sort of sat at the intersection of the bleeding edge in tech and crypto and who wanted to spend $300/$400/$500 and put this thing in their window.  That portion of the deployment cycle worked very well and lasted for probably 18 to 24 months.  Then we moved into a period, and this is actually how the incentives are crafted on the network, where over time you are rewarded more for usage versus being rewarded purely for mining.  And as you alluded to, we don't just create tokens in perpetuity.  There's a system where they tier down by half every two years.  And the goal is to have the usage component replace the raw, Proof of Coverage component.  Coupled with that, we have also seen a huge and very promising trend in the last 6 to 12 months, where instead of someone deploying purely for the incentive mechanism, we get an enterprise that needs more coverage.  There’s a business use case behind this, because the amount of capital a company will spend with us is the same or cheaper than they’d have to spend for a private network that doesn’t have the benefit of mining.  And even if you mine just a very small amount of the token, you can pay for most of your data traffic from your devices just by virtue of the fact that you're putting this network out there. 

With cellular, the tangible benefit of using the network is massive, right?  The fact that you can use this thing, and it's in your home, or your business, or on a tower that you own, fundamentally changes how people view the relationship with something that's mining a token.  We are trying to get ahead of the question you raised by stressing usage on day one versus stressing the building out of the supply of coverage.  It’s certainly a hard balance to strike, but if we can get the usage ahead of the curve on the cellular network before we’re 18 to 24 months in, we basically can get ahead of all the concerns around purely mining a token, just for the incentive, and instead have people who are interested in actually using the network coverage.

 (Excerpt has been edited & condensed)

Raul Gutierrez is the founder & CEO of Tinybop, a children’s media company known for designing playful experiences to inspire creativity, curiosity, and a love of learning for children worldwide. Raul has always enjoyed the tension between art and technology and loves working with creative teams to turn code into delight. Raul is also a member of the Baukunst Creative Technologist Council.

The transcript has been compiled from the presenter’s notes and condensed.

My name is Raul Gutierrez and this talk is about my journey with generative AI over the last few months. I've gone from being a skeptic to an evangelist. So, let me start at the beginning and rewind. I grew up in this small town in East Texas called Lufkin.

Lufkin is in a forest. I always describe it as an island surrounded by trees—trees instead of water. It felt isolated especially pre-cable, pre-internet. Stories and storytelling were my escape and how I found meaning.

In high school, I was a music geek, computer nerd, and photographer. During my senior year, I got a phone call from a man who said that he was my grandfather. The only grandparents I knew were my abuelito and abuelita in Mexico. My mom didn’t talk to her family. She told me they had all passed away. I didn't know of an Irish grandfather, so I hung up. He called back. Again I hung up and again he called. Eventually, my mom got on the line, and things got serious; she told him not to call again. I don't believe that he ever did.

A few months after those calls, a large crate arrived, and was deposited at the end of our driveway. It was bigger than me. The crate came with a note that said it was from my mom's father and that he had died. He had arranged to send the contents of this crate to my mom as his final wish. My mom never opened the crate. She burned it. And so I never found out what was inside.

I thought about the crate a lot, because I was obsessed with my family’s history. On my father’s side I was the unofficial family historian, collecting and recording stories from my tios and tias. I was the one taking, organizing, and collecting family photos.

But my mom's family was a blank for me. From my mom's childhood, I have exactly three pictures. I would try to ask her questions to understand why she was estranged, but I never learned that history. She did say that she had Maine ancestors that stretched back to the colonial era—sea people she called them—but mainly she just deflected.

Soon after the crate incident, I went to college. Six months after I graduated from college, my mom died and my world crumbled. To my great regret, I had never asked all those questions. I never learned about her family. I never learned what might be in that crate.

I happened to be thinking about the crate a few months ago when I was reading some papers on new AI enabled generative image techniques. I'd long been interested in image recognition processing and this was a fascinating extension of those techniques. But what I had seen so far of generative image making was unimpressive.

At this point I had done some genealogical research and had begun to connect some of the dots of my mom's story… I had the idle thought, what if I used AI to fill in the blanks on her side of the family tree? And maybe I could use these images to help tell her story.

I assume people in this room are aware of some of what's happening with these generative AI models. It might seem like its all blossomed at once and a popular term of art is the “AI Cambrian explosion", but it's really been about 10, 15 years of research on computer vision, language models, text image synthesis, and diffusion models that have been trained on billions of text image pairs. Everything converged this year, and really within the last six months, but especially in the last two months, since some key projects were made open source.

I'm going to try to quickly summarize some of what’s going on in generative AI, but I'm not going to talk about the math behind how AI works. I'm going to talk about how babies learn. 

When a baby is born, they have all the mechanics to see. They have eyeballs and the image is projected to the retina and the receptors and nerves on the back of the eye in the same way it is with you and me, but they don't perceive anything because their brains don't understand what they're seeing. 

Babies only see light and shadow for the first few days. And then shockingly quickly, they start to see eyes, and then nipples, and then faces.

We think that this is hardwired. They've put babies in MRIs, and have shown them pictures of various things. Many images don’t prompt responses, but faces, nipples, and eyes light up the brain. For a short period, that's really all the baby is perceiving. If you've ever had a newborn in a room with a lot of faces you might have experienced them freak out and get overstimulated. It’s because they're just seeing all these eyes and it's too much information to process all at once and they can't handle it. What I find interesting is how they go from seeing faces to understanding objects and understanding how the world works. Eventually with kids, these filters click in and they start to notice objects and they become interested in things. This is connected to language acquisition and starts accelerating as children learn words.

Even before babies can speak, parts of their brain connected to language start lighting up, and specifically their brains start lighting up around object-word pairs. Unless you know how to name something, you don't know what that thing is. 

My kid got into a phase where he was really interested in wheels for a while, and once on a trip in Portugal, we spent the entire trip with him looking at wheels.

He was building his database of wheels, and he was trying to understand all the different types of wheels. What do they look like from different angles? There are big ones and little ones and ones with spokes. In his brain, neural pathways are forming. He's developing the idea of a wheel, the concept of a wheel and storing memories of wheels.

Then eventually, he's done with wheels and he moves on to the next thing. This is also  the first step of AI generative image-making processes. You have to have a good data set. If you have bad data, you can screw up your concept. But as long as you have a good data set to begin with, you can imagine and extrapolate all manner of wheels. Sometimes, a concept is not enough. What if you want to build an image of a specific object? This is where memory comes into play. I can imagine a tractor wheel only if I connect it with a memory of that specific wheel. When we are accessing a memory, it's not a recording in our brain. Every time we access a memory, we're rebuilding it from component parts. And this is what AI does too.

This is a photocollage by David Hockney called Pearblossom Highway. He created it for Vanity Fair. It's built from around 800 polaroids taken over 8 days. It was an illustration for an article about the monotony of American roads.

But this road does not actually look like this, it looks like this:

Hockney as the artist was taking his experience of the road and reconstructing an image made of component parts. He creates a new image that evokes Pearblossom Highway, but it doesn’t mirror the experience of standing there.

When AI starts to synthesize an image, this is what it's doing. It's taking a text description that contains the idea of tree and a stop sign and a road and putting them together in a plausible way to create something that didn't exist before.

The question is: can you create something totally new from a data set trained on existing images?  That's the big beef against AI image making: Is everything created derivative of something else? The argument some make is that everything AI outputs is necessarily derivative, a pale reflected average of original data. But I’d ask: Is Hockney’s image original? The same arguments were laid out against photography when it was introduced.

Culture is derivative. Culture is a set of copies and interpretations. I'd like us all to consider Adriano Celentano. He was an Italian entertainer. He loved sixties rock and roll, and specifically he loved American and British rock and roll. He tried to sing Italian rock and roll, but he always felt that something was missing when he sang it in Italian, because–at least to him–Italian just didn't sound right. He didn't speak English, but he had been trained on thousands of hours of English music. So, he decided to sing a song in pseudo-English. This, he thought, is what rock and roll should sound like.

The song became a number one hit in Italy and remains popular to this day. It's his number one song. Italians accepted the song as English because it's good enough. It sounded like rock and roll. I actually ran the song through Whisper, which is an AI that can decode English. It generally rejects foreign language or babble, but it actually decoded the song as English, even though none of these words are actually in there.

If you are an English speaker you will hear words in that song that don't exist (and different people hear different worlds). This is how a model can create something new out of pieces of things that it's been trained on and create something new that makes sense or is at least good enough to seem to make sense.

And so in generative image making there are three fundamental ideas. There are concepts, objects, and styles. A concept might be, a sixties rock band. An object is The Beatles. The Beatles are a real thing. And a style is, Beatle-esque, like Os Mutantes, a Brazilian band that was copying The Beatles.

Another example: On the left are impressionists. The object is Vincent Van Gogh. On the right, the style is the style of Van Gogh. When AI is trying to figure out how to create an image, it first has to understand whether you are talking about an object, a concept or a style. When there are problems with AI generated media, the model is usually confused about one of these things—concept, object, or style. Consider the term “Van Gogh”. Are you talking about the man, one of his painting, or his style?

Just a few years ago, the state of the art for computer vision research was the ImageNet database, it had 15 million text to image matched pairs. The database was being used for image recognition research to help robots understand the world. But then researchers realized they might be able to use the database to generate images. In 2016 researchers generated this bird with a red crest on its head in a tree from a description. The image is ‘good enough’ but probably wouldn’t be mistaken for a photo. It was also computationally expensive. The second image was produced a few days ago in a few seconds by DALL-E. This is the difference between a model trained on 15 million images versus one with 250 million text image pairs with 12 billion parameters. For reference, Stable Diffusion has 600 million captioned images in the database and 4 billion parameters. The state of the art right now (the bar changes almost daily) is Google's Parti, which is not public. Parti uses an auto regressive text-to-image model. It has 20 billion parameters.

To give you a sense of where we are, this is what you get if you ask DALL-E to create an oil painting of two rabbits in the style and layout of American Gothic.

DALL-E confuses American Gothic, the object (the painting in the middle), with the concept of gothic (hence goth rabbits), whereas the Google Parti version can understand the sentence better. The key to the improvement is a textual understanding that allows the model to build an image that matches the intention of the prompt.

Creating intentional images has been my white whale for the last few months. I started using Midjourney and DALL-E as soon as they became public. Like many early adopters, I immediately started creating robots. And if you log into the community, you'll see a lot of robot images and a lot of elves. That's true of many early adopter tech communities—they quickly optimize for robots, dragons, and elves. This is changing at lightning speed as the userbase goes from being geeky tech folks, to everybody.

This is one of the first robots that I created. They were cool, but I didn’t feel any ownership. They didn’t feel particularly like my images. So, I started working on things that I care about. I have a lot of esoteric hobbies. One of them is early photography. So I decided to create an image of a Paris salon in 1930. It's pretty convincing if you're looking at it from afar. If you start to get into the details, the image falls apart. But from afar, it’s good enough. Good enough is the baseline now.

Next, I asked the AI to create a salon full of Rothko's hung salon style. I confused the AI. I didn't generate a room full of Rothko’s as I had imagined. It had turned the whole salon into a Rothko as if he was an interior decorator.

Eventually I came back to the idea of creating imaginary Maine relatives, my mom’s family. So, I typed in a few terms including photography, 1930s, Maine and beach and came up with these sorts of images. Pretty good, but they didn’t feel like MY images.

My question was how do I inject some of myself into these images because if you're looking at old photos, there's always a nose that looks like your nose, or a family ear? So I started with images of myself erasing everything but my head, and then I let the AI create the rest.

Those were fairly convincing, but they're still based on images that I had started with. With this technique I could imagine a range of “Maine relatives” from the near and distant past.

What would future residents of Maine look like? Maybe they would be water people or wear jet packs. While the AI could redraw the background and the clothing the magic trick wasn’t complete, the images were still too close to the source images. What I needed was a model of myself that I could put into different situations.

About two months ago, Stable Diffusion, a text to image model from StabilityAI was open sourced. The community quickly created techniques that allowed for the training of private models. And for me, this is the killer app, because rather than just creating images based on other people’s work, I could make my own models. I could use my own images, drawings, recordings etc. This infinitely extends my creative toolset and the output feels as if it is mine.

The day that this was released, I was, for whatever reason, thinking about Mexican retablos. Mexican retablos are these religious images. They follow strict rules of iconography. Each saint has his or her own set of talismans.

My abuelita loved this weird little baby Jesus called Santo Niño de Atocha, and I plugged that into the AI. The results were not good. Santo Niño de Atocha is very specific. He’s this creepy little smiling baby Jesus carrying a basket and a staff with a gourd.

The iconography is very defined, so it should be perfect for AI. But when I plugged Santo Niño in, I got these even creepier images that had nothing to do with what a retablo looks like.

This happens because the training data is bad. There's this site called, Have I Been Trained? You can type in any piece of text to see what images were used to train a particular token. For Santo Nino de Atocha you can see that the training didn’t consider the whole phrase as a single concept, so you get random santos, random niños, and images of Atocha the city. The data set was bad, so there was no way to get good San Niño retablo output.

As a test, I used photos of real retablos to train a model. Training on five images, I was able to get to the image on the left (below). It’s still wrong and a little creepy but much better than before. Training on 15 images, I was able to get the image on the right. It's still a crappy-looking retablo, but you see all the elements noq. He’s carrying the basket. He’s got the staff with the gourd. If I trained it on more images, I could make perfect retablos. I just need a bigger data set to get there.

Then as a next experiment I decided to train an image of my head. Very quickly, with a relative few number of images, I was able to create shockingly good versions of my head. I could create almost perfect photographs of myself driving a car or in a jet pack. But then I could also ask, what would I look like as a 10-year-old? 10-year-old avatar me looks more like me now than real me looked as a ten-year-old (if that makes sense). What would I look like as an astronaut or as a  Korean? My wife's Korean. What would I look like as a sailor with a big beard or as a 65 year old or an 80 year old? As an 80 year old I look a lot like my dad… A LOT. This was fun. I kept going.

What would it look like if I just got out of prison?

My own models had made all the difference. Now I felt ownership of the images.

These next images are products of the same model. The variations are infinite: here I am as Maine sea captain, as a Roman coin, as a statue, as an aging Mexican wrestler with a pompadour.

The aging wrestler really hit me because when I was a kid in Mexico, I really loved Mexican wrestling, especially this guy called El Santo who would fight vampires. Then, I went down the rabbit hole and created a Mexican wrestler army.

These images did not feel derivative. They felt like parts of a strange visitable reality... As somebody who creates images and tells stories professionally this feels like a new world has opened up. 

But there are always costs which I fear will snowball quickly. We live in a world where much of our information comes through a screen, and dabbling in AI image making is making me doubt what I see on those screens.

The other day I saw a social media post about the Pickelhaube Pyramid, which I had never heard of. It was accompanied by an image of German helmets helmets stacked into a huge pyramid on Park Avenue in front of Grand Central Station (this was just after World War I). My immediate instinct was that this was an AI image. Was this a joke? But a bit a research led me to conclude, this was a event and a real image. I should note I was doubting that image was true because that very day I had imagined myself as a 1930’s Thanksgiving Day parade float.

I now have these true/not true internal debates daily.  We will soon have a desperate need for verifiable sources of truth as a tidal wave of generative content is coming.

This idea that we have a way to verify an image is going to become increasingly important because  soon we’re not going to be able to tell the difference. I might create a benign jokey imagined family history from synthesized images but others will knowingly mislead and create misinformation an order of magnitude more convincing than what exists today. And even if we know something is false it’s hard to unsee things or unfeel the emotional responses those images might provoke.

I actually started putting all generated AI images of myself in a folder titled “Not Raul”, because I realize if I get hit by a car my kids would not be able to tell the difference. So, this idea of truth becomes an interesting one, and it's a hard problem. The more these images get out there, the more they'll pollute the data set, the more you'll have copies of copies. Pure image data sets connected to accurate metadata that accurately describe them will become increasingly valuable.

For me personally, I love having new tools to tell stories. I want to incorporate AI-generated content into our app making business at scale, but the tools aren't quite there yet. Right now, I can wake up from a dream, I can take that dream, describe it recording my words, and create images until I find a match to what I am imagining. It's powerful  kickstart to my creative process, but I don’t yet have tools that will allow my team to work with AI models and content in an organized way.

At Tinybop, we make children's apps and in our practice, we work with amazing artists. I want to give them tools to move faster and to tell stories and to make meaningful content more efficiently.

The first time I showed these tools to our team, the artists, were upset. Our tech artist’s first response was, "I'm out of a job." My argument to them is, you're not out of a job. I'm not paying you for your ability to draw. I'm paying you for your ability to imagine. And these are imagination enhancers. 

This image took weeks to make. It's part of an app about biomes. Every tree is a specific tree, and these wolves were a specific type of wolf. In this app, if you move the sun, you go from day to night, and you can keep moving the sun, you go from summer to fall to winter. All the artwork took a very, very long time to make.

I will soon be able to easily train our existing art to imagine new biomes.

Today, some of the results are a little off, but  I can imagine very soon, we’ll have results without these obvious bugs. I can imagine generating vast playground worlds on the fly. We can do some of this today algorithmically but generative AI will allow a new level of complexity and immersion.  That’s powerful and exciting. These techniques allow us to imagine experiences that would be to expensive or time consuming to make now. Small companies like ours can cheaply tap into models that cost millions and millions of dollars can create. A new layer of applications—currently a thin veneer for the command line—have been quickly built and they're exposing what is possible right now. But there's another class applications being imagined that will provide creators ways to create and manage private models for a consistent set of characters, environments and styles. These are tools being built now and we’ll start seeing them very soon. They will be world changers.

When I started this journey, I didn't imagine I could be moved by AI, but over the course of these experiments one night I trained a model on a bunch of images my mom... She died when she was 45, and these were pictures from her thirties and forties. I'm now older than my mom. I asked the AI, what would my mom look like at 77, the age she would be today? The results made me stop cold. The images took my breath away. They had the ring of truth. It was very Black Mirror. Weird but moving.

I'm not sure exactly what to do with this, but I think experimenting with those kinds of experiences will be powerful. Tyler was talking the other day about creating things that outlast you. In theory you could train these little models, on your face, on your voice, on your words and create a pretty good virtual version of yourself. If it exists online would the person on the other side of the screen know it was not really you? Would you want this for yourself? I think I would, but I’m not 100% sure. 

It's all so new and it’s a fast moving stream. I have a lot more tire kicking to do, but think these tools will help us tell our stories in ways that will delight and inspire. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

If you want to follow along on my AI experiments, I have a new Instagram called Is This Electric (@isthiselectric). Most of the slides you've seen here, I've been posting real time, and I'll continue to do so as I try to figure this stuff out.

Q&A

If kids are introduced to these (AI) tools really early, how can we still take those kids that have a knack for creativity into their own voice, to create new pathways rather than getting them too excited about just what they can generate based off of these databases?

This is exactly one of the problems I’ve been thinking about. And the answer is, I don't know yet, but I do know that what I react against. I've seen people taking a child's drawing and running it through AI, and then showing the kid what the “real" version would look like. And as a parent, and as somebody who studies how kids learn, I think it's horrible because it's an endpoint on their creativity.

The best tools are ones that are open-ended, that allow kids to better tell their own stories. What I can imagine—and while I'm thinking very hard about this, there’s a lot we don’t know—is a tool that takes a children's drawing and brings it to life extending it without supplanting what they've created. I don’t want to create am app to draw a little 2D car and turn it into a “better” 3D car.  I want to take that 2D car and allow a kid to drive it around the a world consistent with their drawing style.

How do you see traditional arts marrying with more tech enabled arts? And also, how could you imagine possible compensation models in the future, giving credit where due?

This is a real issue. I created images from artwork that we as a company own, but when we bought that artwork in the artist’s work for hire agreement, this technology didn't exist. The artist never imagined that I was going to take her artwork and essentially regenerate things that she had never drawn, in her style. I don't think I would consider putting something that into production without consulting the original artist and figuring out fair in terms of compensation. I hope artists will be empowered tools to be able to use them to create more, better and faster—Photoshop on steroids. That said there are real issues to work through.

The training models use data that is scraped from the web with no consent. For the tech companies, it’s like “let's do it and worry about the problems later,” but it's very quickly going to be a problem. As somebody who has built my career working with artists, I really value artists and the human touch. I want to empower them. I don't want to take away from them, but they will have to adapt too.

There was a time when every sign in New York was hand painted, and but when computers were hooked to printers all that changed and the world became a little poorer for it. I think some of that is bound to happen, but I can also imaging a future in which these tools allow artists to express themselves more fully and in which artist contributions are tracked and properly compensated.

Addendum

This talk was presented in October 2022. The video of the talk will be posted in early January 2023. In short time between, scores of projects and companies have released AI-enabled to tools to generate and manipulate text, video, images and music. 

Most of the then experimental techniques shown in this presentation have quickly been wrapped up into easy-to-use products and apps.

Chat-GPT has taken the world by storm and is expected to have a profound impact on the way people live and work. 

We believe that generative AI will have truly arrived when we don’t feel the need to call out the fact that images/text/video were created by AI. 

That said, it should be noted that this text was generated in part by Chat-GPT. 

Zach is determined to make digital sovereignty accessible.  Foundation designs intuitive software and hardware products that  lower the barrier to self custody for the increasingly mainstream crypto user.

After leading the pre-seed round at Foundation back in 2021, Baukunst GP Tyler Mincey began going deep on how crypto and web3 technologies will fundamentally change connected devices and our relationship to them, presenting his thesis at the Baukunst Creative Technologist Conference last spring.  Last week, Ledger announced that Tony Fadell, ”Is Trying to Build the iPod of Crypto.” 

Smart people who understand intimately how personal computing paradigms shift are paying attention to this space. 

BAUKUNST:  What do you think is the appropriate role for governmental regulatory bodies in the crypto space?

ZACH HERBERT:  Well, I think most of these governmental agencies are pretty corrupt.  These regulatory agencies, especially the SEC, typically go after the smaller actors.  They don’t go after the bigger actors for some reason.  We’re seeing that right now with FTX who was working closely with the SEC to try and carve out a regulatory moat it could use.  And FTX is not even an American company.  It’s based in the Bahamas.  The SEC has regulated by enforcement actions without giving any clarity to our industry regarding what is actually illegal or not.  They won’t give you a straight answer as to what’s legal.  And I think you can extend that to other agencies, like the Department of Treasury that, for example, made a move against Tornado Cash a few months ago.

BAUKUNST:  How do you think the implosion of FTX is shaping the crypto landscape?

ZACH HERBERT:  It’s a wake-up call around the importance of self-custody.  It’s now beyond clear that storing your coins on an exchange is extremely risky.  I also think it’s a wake-up call in terms of corruption and the fact that regulators are not actually protecting you.  And then, it’s a wake-up call regarding the media.  The mainstream media coverage of FTX has been horrible.  I mean, horrible.  There are accounts on Twitter giving excellent coverage of the clear, premeditated fraud that took place, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, these very respected media outlets, I don’t know how you can read their coverage.  On Twitter, you can find drastically better, much less biased coverage.  And people are waking up to that.  But the unfortunate thing is a lot of people have lost their life savings.

BAUKUNST:  Foundation’s products are manufactured in America.  What drove that decision?

ZACH HERBERT:  There's a geopolitical imperative, and a security imperative, to manufacture in the United States.  I think we’re moving toward a multi-polar world and it’s only going to get crazier.  I personally would never trust a device to store my Bitcoin that was made in China.  You can look at Apple moving a lot of iPhone production to India...they’re starting to get out of China.

And I want to be on the ground at the factory myself.  We manufacture in New England and I live in the Boston area.  I’m at the factory at least every couple of weeks, if not more frequently.

BAUKUNST:  What role does design play in your products?

ZACH HERBERT:  Design is core to everything we do, and you can tell that by looking at our products.  We aim for a design that’s distinct and breaks from trends in the tech industry, which are dominated by ultra-minimalism.  The monochrome.  The black and white.  Everything kind of looks the same and comes from the Jony Ive vision at Apple, the idea that a sheet of glass is the ultimate form factor.  I think that needs to change.  We call what we’re aiming for Digital Deco, inspired by the visual language of Art Deco.  We’re embracing color and ornate design.  The cryptocurrency industry has focused on dark colors for some reason.  I think that’s completely wrong for our industry.  I think it should be about futuristic optimism.  Bitcoin is supposed to be a counter to the dystopian future, and our design should reflect that.

At the same time, the Web 3 and NFT sub-industries have moved in a direction that’s almost playful and game-like.  That doesn’t appeal to us, because a physical device that allows you to potentially store your entire net worth is a serious thing.  It should not be game-like or whimsical, but it should be very futuristic and very optimistic.

BAUKUNST:  As far as the pessimistic and optimistic future goes, what most scares you in terms of where we might head as a society?  And then, what most excites you?

ZACH HERBERT:  I think we're getting really dystopian, really fast.  And people are distracted and have their heads down. The timing is unfortunate.  It’s unfortunate that this is happening when people are hurting and we're entering what I think is obviously a recession (though the people in charge refuse to call it that.)  So people are worried about living day to day – about food, gas, their home.  It’s hard to get people to care about anything else, and understandably so.  I think the scariest thing is the idea of Central Bank Digital Currencies.  And this idea of instead of having a checking account with say Bank of America, you have a checking account with the Federal Reserve who can monitor, and perhaps dictate, every transaction.  This kind of thing is already happening in China with social credit scores.  It's insane, but it's actually happening. And it's being entertained, and researched, and talked about very openly here in the U.S. and the rest of the western world.  I think that's terrifying.

Obviously, what excites me is the rise of Bitcoin as a counter to that.  I feel every type of technology can be used for good and evil.  With nuclear technology, you can make a bomb or a power plant.  With blockchain technology, you can make a Central Bank Digital Currency and go for a dystopian future, restricting what the public can do with their money and surveil everything.  But you can also create Bitcoin, which is completely decentralized, permissionless, and uncontrollable by any governing party.   I come to the mantra Fix the money, fix the world.  I think it’s the most important thing to pursue at this point in history.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Kate McAndrew is a Co-founder and General Partner at Baukunst. For more from Baukunst, join our newsletter or follow us on twitter.

This is edited from a talk I originally gave at the Baukunst Creative Technologist Conference on May 5th, 2022.

For some time, I’ve been wanting to talk about how I see crypto and web3 technologies fundamentally changing connected devices and our relationship to them.

I’ve had the pleasure of working on a number of groundbreaking products in my career, most notably the original iPhone and many generations of iPods during my time at Apple. These were amazing products…delightful to use, approachable interfaces wrapped around surprisingly complex embedded systems that we completely redesigned year after year – custom silicon, dramatically new software experiences – that would go from idea to being manufactured at over 200,000 units/day often in a span of just 12 months.

I’m deeply deeply familiar with this type of product. Connected devices that have enclosures, printed circuit boards, radios, embedded software, apps, etc are my expertise. But to be honest, my excitement has waned over the last few years as everything seems to have converged into these platonic pieces of glass. Pick your aspect ratio, maybe the cameras get better, maybe the UI gets snappier. Not always sure.

Meanwhile, I’ve found my interest being pulled towards crypto. Now “crypto” is a hilariously broad term for a number of technologies and use cases that mean many things to different people, but I’m just going to use that as shorthand and roll with it. I’ve been starting to see the edges of how that world is affecting the devices around us. I’m going to be a little bit more hardware leaning in what I’m talking about today, but fundamentally these devices are platforms for software and it’s really the integrated product-level experience that makes this so interesting.

To start with I have three premises

1. “Crypto” represents a major computing paradigm shift.

2. It’s happening now and faster than anything we’ve ever seen.

3. Our computers will never be the same.

If / when this paradigm shift happens, our old computers are not going to be our new computers.

Crypto Devices

Now, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a “crypto device” is something like this.

This bitcoin miner just looks a little over-the-top… makes you want to joke about razor blades, but it’s just as silly as a giant mainframe computer that filled up whole rooms in the 40s and 50s.

It’s a reminder of how much optimization and improvement happens over time. We should treat that mining rig with the same respect that you might treat an old mainframe if you went back in time with the knowledge of how much it would change personal computing and personal lives. In just one lifetime these things can come a really long way.

Core Technology

“Crypto” is actually a confluence of a number of different core technologies:

• Public key cryptography

• Distributed ledgers

• Decentralized consensus + incentive mechanisms

• Belief systems → passionate early adoption → network effects

The first, public key cryptography, is a process by which two parties can securely exchange information and verify identity. I can hold a secret that can be used with certain algorithms to provide a publicly verifiable signature that I am who I say I am and send messages that only I can send. This is all really just math. Conversations around regulating this technology border on free speech issues to me. Next is a distributed ledger (of which blockchains are a type), a shared account of who owns what and a record of transactions. And finally consensus protocols: you can have distributed ledgers without agreeing on which is the right one, so you have to invent systems of agreement, how you incentivize good behavior, punish bad actors, and agree on a source of truth (hopefully).

Beyond these three typically cited core technologies, there’s one that is often overlooked: the underlying belief system. Strong veins of privacy, self-sovereignty, autonomy, transparency, decentralization, and equitable value distribution run through the communities developing this technology and motivate its applications. This mission-driven zealotry has spurred a groundswell of early adopters and builders which has in turn established real network effects around these protocols and systems. To me, the culture itself is an undeniable part of the tech stack.

When you bundle all these things up, what do you get?

• A decentralized identity system

• A decentralized asset and ownership system

• A decentralized payment system

• A decentralized computer - execution, storage, networking

I can say who I am… you can verify who I am…without a centralized authority. That’s super interesting. We can have an accounting of digital assets (or digital tokens that map to real world assets) in a way we can traceably exchange. We can send funds to each other without a central gatekeeper. Super powerful. We have a Turing-complete decentralized computer where we can develop all possible software and run it in a decentralized fashion.

Like the Internet in 1994

This is looking like the fastest technology adoption in human history.  Let’s take a quick accounting of the world in 2022. We have just shy of 8B total humans on the planet. Shockingly a little less than two thirds of them are on the internet. We’re not totally on the internet island for a third of the world still. We’re still in the slow end tail of the S curve.

Graphs like this are often cited showing how technology adoption is accelerating over time. But to be clear, this isn’t a value argument. New technologies are not necessarily getting adopted more quickly because they are better. They are getting adopted more quickly because people are more closely tied together. We’re traveling more, communicating more frequently. Faster means faster, not better.

That being said, if you zoom in on crypto and line it up against internet adoption, some estimations show crypto is growing faster than the internet did on a time adjusted basis. Where we are today is roughly analogous to where the internet was in 1994. Imagine sitting around in 1994 saying “hey this internet thing is going to be pretty big.” You’d be on to something. That’s where we’re at with crypto right now. This is happening.

Today we’re at ~100M crypto users, only about 2% of people online today. (We’re still early™) And it’s interesting to look at how widespread awareness is. In the US, over 86% of adults have heard of crypto currencies, just about Bitcoin and Ether in this study, not even NFTs etc. Amazingly high levels of awareness. And 16% of US citizens say they’ve held some crypto asset. Over 1 in 10 Americans.

Some stats around activity: Metamask published numbers saying they have 32M monthly active users, a relatively large slice of the full crypto install base. Tools are catching on incredibly quickly.

If you roll up the market cap of top coins, we’re actually at over 1% of the global stock market. [A lot has… um...changed in the crypto world since I gave this talk. I’ve left stats at May 2022 levels for history’s sake.]  An amazing amount of economic weight. Some of the liquidity is razor thin around those tokens and you couldn’t actually cash that value out, but there’s amazing financial resources at play.

Consumer Crypto Devices

Drafting off this growth, we’ve seen the emergence of a new class of crypto-centric consumer device. This first wave are hardware wallets: semi-offline devices that allow people to securely hold keys and verify their identity, transfer assets, etc like we talked about in a (supposedly) more secure way than a general-purpose, online computer. You can search Amazon for “hardware wallet” and see some examples:

We’re at the Cambrian explosion / dumpster fire stage of this category of device. They have arrived. You can buy bejeweled bitcoin keys. These are all horribly untrustworthy to do anything with…it’s impossible to sort through them all. Lots of sponsored results. It’s a fairly noisy market right now (to say the least).

“Wallet” is already an anachronism though. These are identity systems, with a similarly transformational evolutionary roadmap as phones→smartphones.

A couple of the major players today to call out are Trezor and Ledger.

The device on the left is the Trezor Model One built by Satoshi Labs based in Prague. They’re notable for releasing this “original cryptocurrency hardware wallet” back in 2014 and have announced that they’ve shipped over a million units since then. They’ve been dedicated to open source hardware and software from the very beginning and have maintained a smaller, independent minded ethos.

The current market lead by volume is Ledger, based in France, who makes the Ledger Nano shown on the right. They’ve raised ~$500M at north of $1.5B valuation and by some estimates are shipping >1M units a year. The totals of just these two products establish hardware wallets as a high volume consumer electronics category.

It’s interesting to compare the different security approaches of Trezor and Ledger.

Open source designs are key in this world. The phrase “trustless” is thrown around a lot but the intention of being open source is to achieve trust by being open, auditable, and enabling rapid patching over time. This stands in stark contrast to the closed source model of deriving trust by a brand having a black box and demanding that you trust them.

Trezor is a completely open source device, both hardware and software, and they’ve really stuck to their guns around that process. You can be relatively confident that the device is deeply understood, but that came with some compromises. The private keys do exist in physical memory and in software in ways you can extract if you lose physical control of the device. There have been proof of concept attacks demonstrated where someone with very basic lab equipment can extract keys in ~15min. You should assume you’re pwned if someone gets a hold of your Trezor.

Ledger took the opposite approach of being a mostly close-source system, relying more on security through obscurity and the use of more physically secure, but closed source hardware. Ledger *does* use an embedded operating system that is built on an open source framework, but the firmware itself and the hardware is not. Notably, they use specialized components called secure elements that can hold private keys in a single surface mount component that the system and software only interact with at a high level, sending messages to be signed, and not directly with the private key. Secure elements themselves are notoriously closed source and often require restrictive NDAs from manufacturers to procure. Now, nothing is unhackable…you can still get at those with a sophisticated laboratory but they provide a level of physical security above and beyond purely open source designs like the Trezor’s.

So Ledger has a much better story in regard to physical security perhaps, but it’s important to consider all the attack surfaces surrounding these devices.  Ledger had a Shopify hack a couple years ago where the customer data of over a million users got exposed, including home addresses. Not great for this category of users. People actually started receiving fake devices in the mail…things that looked legit but might have had suspicious code on them. Security considerations extend beyond the devices themselves to the adjacent social and logistic systems as well.

And let’s just say that the user interfaces for these devices leave a lot to be desired. You shouldn’t feel like a telegraph operator putting in a password. You should be able to easily read the full addresses associated with a transaction. Your tin foil hat can hurt as much as protect…people probably lose funds just as often for forgetting a password as they do getting hacked.

Not Your Computer, Not Your Keys

A common question: What about custodial services?

There are custody services (like Gemini) that provide web app layers on top of private keys so users don’t have to manage those themselves. Other services (for example, centralized exchanges like Coinbase) don’t keep your funds in a dedicated wallet…you’re just trusting that they account for your funds correctly on their internal ledger.

That kind of works right now for some users [Nov 2022 self is laugh-crying], but we have to remind ourselves where this is going in the future. Yes for low frequency store-of-value transactions…you can imagine doing that with your bank today. But in a future where you’re doing a cryptographic action every time you sign into a website, any action in an app, or a move in a game. It really just doesn't work unless you’re in control of your own keys at that point. When you start thinking about the frequency and complexity or those actions, for me, it’s totally inconceivable that a financial institution would intermediate that for me. Only companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have implemented authentication layers like that with any success and they kind of still suck. To think that’s going to happen with a financial institution, even a relatively digitally-forward one, is totally crazy to me. I’m long on self-custody…more for user experience than security.

Another common question: What about my phone?

A few modern smartphones *do* have architectures with secure enclaves that can provide a layer of additional key storage security. And we’ve seen the emergence of many software wallets, like Rainbow and others that take advantage of them. I think there’s a place for those products that strike a balance of security and interoperability. But smartphones these days are just fundamentally slow moving systems, and companies like Apple have chosen to deeply integrate the secure enclaves into their mainline SoCs. The timeline to develop the main SoC for a phone stretches into many years…a mismatch in keeping up with evolving cryptographic algorithms/curves, support for new blockchains, and patches for exploits. They’ll continue to evolve slowly and perhaps be a trustworthy foundation for the slightly older applications / algorithms, but unlikely to be cutting edge.

And they’re still security issues too. A couple years ago the highly touted T2 chip was completely jailbroken. For everyone one of these exploits we hear about publicly, there’s probably five we don’t hear about too. The massive install base is a huge target.

Beyond security, there’s a real risk of being deplatformed if your app runs afoul of sometimes-opaque app store approval processes, or the evolving in-app-purchase revenue sharing rules become incompatible with your business model.

Glimmers of what’s next

Hardware wallets today remind me of mp3 players in 2000. There’s a real opportunity for these devices to have an iPod moment. The iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player, but it was the first product to take the converging technological building blocks and wrap them in a well designed product experience.

As the crypto user base pulls more mainstream and people want their products to “just work” without having to understand the underlying complexity quite so much, there’s a real need and opportunity to balance user experience with the novel technology. It’s also important to remember that there was no iPod without iTunes. Rich multi-platform software experiences make these products work.

Some emerging new examples:

These are hardware wallet concepts that we’ve seen Square Block experimenting with. No comment on the industrial design but they’re working on some interesting conceptual directions. These are designed to be a companion device for an app on your phone and certain tradeoffs (biometrics, no screen) were made with this in mind. [They’ve been quite transparent in recent months on everything from processor architecture, to key recovery mechanisms, to supply chain design]

I’m fortunate to be on the board of Foundation, who’s making a Bitcoin-centric hardware wallet that’s designed to balance user experience with uncompromised security and self-sovereignty. Their first device, Passport, works with a camera to exchange QR codes to a phone app, a truly airgapped design with no wireless radio connection between the devices (and especially easy to support in 3rd party apps vs a bluetooth/NFC device). Their companion app makes device setup a breeze and longer term will have an increasingly clever backup and recovery service.

I also put the Stem Player in this consumer category even though it doesn’t have a blockchain connection right now. This is a product with a dedicated content distribution network associated with it. It speaks to a specific ethos of ownership, participatory media, vibrant subcommunities, and relationship with artists. This is a great example of a product that considers culture a part of its tech stack.

This is a hardware wallet concept from Multi that Eli Rousso and team are working on. It’s a hardware wallet specifically designed around NFTs (in this incarnation) that takes a forward thinking, borderline alien, approach to the design language. Details are sparse, but they’re also strongly in the self-sovereignty camp and it’s another gesture towards new images of technology and our relationship to them as people that’s really exciting to me.

New Technical Architectures

To build one of these products, there’re many architectural considerations that are fundamentally reprioritized vs most consumer electronic devices. To name a few:

Key storage, secure elements/enclaves

How are keys stored? What attack vectors do you care about? How hard-line are you on open source? What signature curves do you need to support now and in the future? What do you do if a vulnerability is discovered?

Key provisioning, entropy sources

How do you generate keys in the first place? Does a centralized authority issue those? There are interesting predicates with SIM cards. Giant companies like Gemalto that have been built around securely issuing cell phone identifiers that allow people to get on carrier networks. There’s an extremely deep body of knowledge in that industry.

** **Or do you want the devices themselves to derive keys in a decentralized way? What is your source of randomness in that process? If you have only a semi-random process, you can be more susceptible to brute force attacks. In an interesting example, Foundation’s Passport incorporates a clever open source circuit design for an entropy source.

Key backup

How do you back up the private keys, if at all? Do people have to write down a seed phrase or engrave them on a steel plate? Is there a way to back them up in the cloud? How secure is that? Do people put them on SD cards (and do the devices need card slots)? Do you spread signing privileges over a number of devices in a multi-sig configuration that requires coordination between multiple parties and/or redundancy for device loss/failure? Do you back up full device state?

Wireless Architectures

How exposed should the device be to the internet and remote attacks? Does the core user experience require connectivity? I believe that for the high frequency + interactivity use cases being imagined, wireless will be required. Designers will be looking at more siloed system architectures where the core key management is happening on a dedicated coprocessor and separate from the wireless interfaces or application processor perhaps….affecting both the hardware and firmware in deep ways.

Firmware Security

Smartphones today from major manufacturers are quite sophisticated in this regard but most consumer electronic and IoT devices pay shockingly little attention to firmware security, especially startups but large companies too. Running signed code, secure boot, secure wireless interfaces…mayyyybe a startup thinks about 5 years later on gen 2/3/4 of a new product. But for a crypto-native device you have to plan for this on day 1.

Should a user always be able to sideload their own code? That has tons of implications. You have to decide how thick your tinfoil hat needs to be. Where did you get your source from? Do you trust your compiler? Who has code signing authority? But also the physical interfaces of the devices. Do they all need USB ports? Do they all need desktop clients?

Open Source Model

Is this a requirement for a crypto-native device? In the future, I think so. I believe over time that security by obscurity is going to always lose to an open source model. And not just from the perspective of security itself, but also for composability and new models of community product development & personalization. Today there are clear counterpoints with the Ledgers of the world though.

I think the companies that embrace open source are ultimately going to win, but that undermines business models that revolve around making points of margin off of a one time sale of a hardware widget. The people that are going to succeed at open source are also going to have to succeed at innovating on new service/protocol-centric business models that pair with open source.

Supply Chain Verification

A box shows up in the mail…do you really know where it came from? Had it been opened en route? How do you know that the right code was programmed on it? There are physical design mitigations: Maybe you go with ultrasonic welding and heat stakes instead of screws. Maybe you use security tape on the boxes. And there are ways to use checksums to verify the software to some degree but how is a normal person ever going to be able to deal with that stuff?

More stringent lifetime / reliability requirements

Many of these devices are long term stores of value. I believe they’re going to need to be less disposable than other consumer electronic devices in our lives. That comes with lots of ultimately healthy requirements around device reliability in physical or environmental conditions, battery lifetime etc. Repairability is also a more important factor but usually fundamentally opposed to supply chain verification / tampering concerns.

Biometrics

Like Apple demonstrated with TouchID and later FaceID, biometrics can provide a path to great user experience alongside reasonable security. Those features were all about the UX improvement of not having to put in the passcode every time you unlocked your phone, not really about making it more secure. There’s a rich design space to integrate biometrics with crypto-native devices (which are only lightly adopted beyond fingerprint sensors) but come with serious security tradeoffs.

UI - screens, input devices

Does the device need a (touch)screen? (Block decided their device didn’t) Do you need to verify things like wallet addresses on the device itself vs a companion app? How interactive does it need to be? Do you feel like a frustrated telegraph operator putting in a PIN into your Ledger?

Web3 IoT

Let’s get back to the numbers. Today there are estimated to be over 10B devices on the internet…that’s 2x humans online. The whole IoT thing is happening somewhat slower than projections (especially with the chip shortage), but there are still way more computers on the internet than humans and the gap is widening. The same will be true of web3.

When we think about these crypto-native devices being online and interacting directly with web3 protocols, they’ll need to have equally deep technical architecture and user experience design as humans. We have to think about them as intelligent agents on the network with equally complex considerations.

We’re seeing extremely interesting things happening already with crypto-native IoT devices. Take Helium as an example: They’re a decentralized wireless network where individuals own and operate hotspots that others can send/receive data on in a more permissionless way.

They’ve seen amazing growth in the last two years and have created LoRaWAN coverage in most major metropolitan areas in the US and increasingly Europe and other parts of the world. They claim to be the “world's largest contiguous wireless network” today.

Here’s a chart of active hotspots over time. This is crazy during the chip shortage. Very few hardware companies can draw this chart during the last two years. Their big innovation was using a token incentive model that rewarded hotspot operators for providing provable network coverage before there was significant usage of the network. This incentive system will evolve to reward network usage over time as well and the same tokens will be used to pay for data transfer. Harnessing the value of that potential future market for network build-out was a major breakthrough.

There were times when hotspots on the edge of the network (which cost ~$500) were paying off on the order of two weeks. That’s largely driven by arguably unhealthy levels of speculatory pressure, but in this case it was incredibly productive for network expansion.

Helium started by making their own hotspot that was designed and manufactured in a centralized way, but have expanded to a whole network of third party manufacturers that now build totally different devices that operate on the network.

In the old way of thinking, this is just a bad idea. You usually try very hard to minimize the number of versions of a product you have out in the wild. Even supporting a couple old versions of firmware is usually a bad idea, much less completely different hardware products with different code bases that are all supposed to play well together.

This is a fundamentally hard thing but it’s demonstrably starting to work and the benefits start to outweigh the challenges. It’s been interesting to see this evolve. Now you can buy a hotspot from all these different manufacturers.

How do you pick? It’s really hard. And there’s a nice disclaimer telling you to do your own research.

All of these vendors have made slightly different decisions around that full list of architectural considerations we talked about before: How you install the device, what environment it’s designed for (indoor/outdoor), how you get support, etc. It’s a bit of a wild west that’s fairly consumer unfriendly. Some obvious room for improvement in helping people navigate these choices better.

Other people are following that same tokenomic incentive model. There’s Planet Watch that’s doing a similar thing for air quality sensors and data.

Dor, who makes a foot traffic counting system that was primarily being used in retail environments, is now selling their sensor as a miner. Individual operators can now buy these sensors and get compensated for contributing data that is monetized from their SaaS revenue streams.

Dor was a traditional hardware + SaaS company initially and benefited from a mature blockchain platform, Constellation (who ended up acquiring Dor), to launch this new model. Constellation’s platform helps companies launch their own tokens and provides other required infrastructure pieces like a software wallet and a decentralized exchange in addition to strategic crypto-specific support. I expect to see more companies pursue similar tokenomic models by building on platforms instead of getting into the crypto-specific weeds too much themselves.

There’s other token projects/ platforms like IoTeX playing in this space of the physical and digital coming together.

They’re building out systems for people to provide proof of various things in the real world (location, data from an activity monitor etc). We’re seeing the emergence of platforms that are productizing the underlying infrastructure for these classes of device

To recap the key points on how web3 is changing IoT:

1) Tokenomics breaking traditional chicken and egg cap ex dilemmas

Helium is a strong proof point that tokenomics can break traditional barriers in high capital expense network buildout. It’s expensive to build a wireless network. You’re building or leasing towers and  installing expensive equipment with specialized labor. In the past, you couldn’t afford to do that unless you had customers already… but who’s going to be your customer without credible wireless coverage? That was the fundamental dynamic that has slowed network expansion historically. Helium is a singular proof point that creative, crypto-driven incentives can break this dilemma and we’re seeing many other projects rapidly applying this approach.

2) Tokenomics dramatically reducing op ex

All these individuals operating wireless infrastructure in a decentralized way has changed the operational expense of running these networks. The network isn’t directly paying up front for site scouting, land, buildings, energy, data backhaul, and maintenance. It’s truly a win-win-win between the infrastructure operators, the users of the network, and the protocol/network level themselves.

The model isn’t a magic wand though. All the same buckets of operational support still need to be in place at someone’s expense, but the tokenomics design incentives more efficient, on-demand support from underutilized resources in the ecosystem.

3) Decentralized manufacturing

I was a huge skeptic but there are real proof points now that decentralized manufacturing is working to some degree. There are immense hurdles in customer experience, interoperability, and software upgradability/compatibility to overcome, but if they are, it unlocks transformative customization and supply for users.

4) Pre-order and fulfillment mechanisms

We’re increasingly seeing mechanisms like Planet Watch’s licensing system where you actually buy a license that’s separate from the device itself and can pair the two together. I think we're going to see variations on this more and more for other physical devices. I believe that buying an NFT to hold your place in line or as a preorder is 100% how all physical things will be bought in the future. There’s so many benefits: generating a secondary market and price discovery, extra cash flow for secondary royalties, helping with inventory financing. This is a huge opportunity with lots of correspondingly large challenges.

Culture > Tech

We covered a lot of technical detail/minutiae in this talk, but to close I want to revisit the last point in the tech stack. The cultural change this technology represents and the values that drive its community of builders is the most powerful thing in the space right now. People are building towards autonomy, equitable value distribution, long-lived collective infrastructure, and complex ecosystems. The underlying technology is being dramatically reinvented and re-architected to match those value systems. The new world demands new infrastructure.

Further Reading / Coming Soon:

• Helium Mobile

• Block Wallet Team

• Tropic Square

• Foundation - Leading an Open Hardware Renaissance

• MULTI

• Solana Saga

If you’re interested in building this future, I’d love to talk to you. We have a $100M pre-seed focused fund at Baukunst and a great community of builders to work alongside.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q:  Do you identify as a creative technologist?  And if so, what does being a creative technologist mean to you?

A:  I don't know whether I'm a creative technologist. However, I love bridging creative and technology. I was the global CEO for Hello Kitty and grew the brand from a $500 million company to a $6.5 billion company in five years. I connected Hello Kitty with technology (like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat) and turned Hello Kitty from analog to digital.  And that's how I grew the brand.  I feel like there's a lot of opportunity to do this with old industry and new industry  - connect them together and grow the business. And so if you call that creative technologist, then I might be that.

Q:  Who or what - it doesn't have to be a person - is in your creative ecosystem?  Who's on your team?

A:  I work with lots of creative people.  I am Chief Strategy Officer for a brand called Human Made– this is what I'm wearing.  Human made. The creative director is called Nigo. He had a brand called Bathing Ape.  Now he's artistic director for Kenzo.  And he's my business partner for the Human Made brand. Pharrell Williams is our ambassador. So I work with his team as well. This is a collaboration with A$AP Rocky.  So there's so many creative people around me who I interact with.

Q:  What problems are you working to solve?

A:  I'm trying to connect global IP with new technologies.  There's a lot of new technologies in the US and there's a lot of great IP in Japan and Asia.  For example, we have Pokemon, Mario, Dragonborn…so much IP. Some of them have succeeded in new technology. Some of them haven't. Some of them became global. Some of them are not. I am bridging this gap.

I'm a board observer for Peanuts, which is Snoopy and Charlie Brown.  Interestingly, these characters have been in the world for 25 years, 50 years, 70 years.   You see this NFT movement right now. This IP is in year one, year two, year three.  And they need to survive in order to build that history of 50 to 70 years.  How can they do that? The new industry needs to learn from the old industry.

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q:  What does being a Creative Technologist mean to you?

A:  Being a creative technologist is about problem-solving.  On the technology side, necessity is the mother of invention. And the creative part implies that there can and should be an artistic flair to solving problems.  Solving problems doesn't have to be mundane.  It can actually be beautiful.  I think humanity is inherently artistic.  That’s what it means to me.

Q:  What problems are you working to solve?

A:  In my career, I've been working to create less friction between different groups  trying to do good work together.  I think that people spend so much effort trying to do productive things.  In my case, making packaging, running brands, trying to scale brands.  And my job is to make that a little bit easier.  They're putting in so much extreme effort. Why should extra paperwork or extra bureaucracy get in their way?

Q:  Who or what is in your creative ecosystem? Who's on your team?

A:  In the circles that I get to  travel in, I have the privilege of interacting with a few groups who really stand out to me. First, other founders, other people who have started businesses.  It's such a rich group of people.  They’re so different from each other.  So different from me. And I just love that we all get kind of painted with this founder badge.  It's both fun and insane, because there's nothing that we have in common except for the fact that we started businesses. So I kind of love that and love the camaraderie there.

And then the investors, the people I've come to think of as capital allocators.  That might sound so boring.  But in a sense, people who get to decide where money flows have a really challenging job to do. And I really respect them.  It's been really interesting for me to learn about their work as I've run a company.

Q:   What are you an expert at and what are you learning?

A:  I'm an expert at getting people excited about boring things.  I have run a supply chain company.  I've run a packaging company.  And somehow people have been like, riveted with what I have to say about these things.  Why?  I mean, it's really raw enthusiasm jammed into historically boring things.

And then on the flip side, what am I still working on?  I think that managing people and recruiting people is a lifelong project.  I always think I've gotten to another level only to realize that all the levels are before me.  Because assembling a great team, and finding people, and keeping them enthused just feels like the work of a lifetime.

Q:   What are you most proud of?

A:  I think I'm most proud of the smallest pieces of feedback and the smallest things that I get as reactions to things I've built and companies I've built.  People who find me years later, and tell me I - or the company I built - had an impact on them in a positive way.  It sounds so basic, but having touched anyone's life with something I put on their laptop is inherently satisfying.

Q:  What do you think is especially interesting or important about what Baukunst is doing or how they’re working?

A:  The people of Baukunst have a unique set of attributes for drawing in talent that is a little different.  And, because I think there's a startup ethos where everyone assumes it's like a monoculture. But it's not a monoculture.  Really different types of people decide to start businesses, and I think they seek out investors and partners who speak to them on more of a soul level.  Baukunst will draw those people in like magnetically.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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At a time of unprecedented technological and cultural change, we believe the most impactful companies of our lifetime will be founded by creative technologists, those who combine visionary thinking and expertise with powerful tools. They craft transformative product experiences, build companies we can be proud of, and inspire teams along the way.

We believe investing at pre-seed is worth specializing in. A founder’s first hires, first customers, and first products lay the groundwork for an enduring company. In the last 10 years, we have watched the foundational phase of company building be defined by party rounds and “foot in the door” investing, where investors place a small bet, sit back, and try to double down when the business gains traction. Our strategy is the opposite.

Our commitment to our founders is to go all-in at pre-seed. Baukunst will be the first to commit to investing, lead every round we invest in, and invest between $500K and $2M in each company, with a willingness to take the entire round or invest alongside strong partners. This is a high conviction strategy that allows us to partner deeply with each team who selects us as their lead investor, and gives us the capacity to dive into the art of building with them from the ground up. The early days are messy and magical, and they are what we live for.

United by entrepreneurial heritage, our Limited Partners include family offices built by extraordinary entrepreneurs, founders we have been fortunate to back previously, and both companies and individuals responsible for shipping groundbreaking products in technology and design, many of whom have joined our Creative Technologist Council. We can’t imagine a better group of people to build alongside. Thank you.

If you know of an exceptional person looking to begin a journey of company building, we would love to speak to them. Let’s get to work.

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Baukunst is hiring an Analyst or Associate. This is a rare, partner track position. Learn more here.

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On May 4 + 5, 2022 we gathered for the Baukunst Creative Technologist Conference at The Interval at The Long Now–a prominent foundation for long term thinking in San Francisco–to share projects, processes, and new areas of inquiry. Expanding upon his recently published essay, ROLE: CREATIVE DIRECTOR || COMPANY: USA, Reggie James, CEO of Eternal, and Eugene Angelo, Creative Director of ANGELO, engaged in a dialogue about why Mars needs a creative director. They posit that Mars is the only image expansive enough to break us out of the saturation of the internet age, get us off apathy island, and offer design principles for Mars that might help us reimagine Earth.

This transcript has been edited and condensed for readability.

REGGIE JAMES:  So as always, when you go into album mode, you'd like to change the title right before the launch. So the new title of this talk is, “This Could Still Be a Movement.” I was inspired by many, many, many texts between me and Eugene–we're about to really dive into the future of creative directing Mars. What that means, why that's important, and why it's also extremely not a joke. So, off the bat, Mars is an image. And we have to understand what an image does. What Mars really is.

EUGENE ANGELO:  A lot of our conversations over the last few days have been around how to break the apathy we're currently experiencing, especially in youth culture. I think it’s largely to do with a lack of images to truly energize people. So, when we talk about Mars, we're semi-serious, you know? Maybe in 10-20 years, we'll be going out there, and there will be creative decisions that are being made, and it's important that we think about those creative decisions.

But for the most part, Mars is really a point of inspiration. It's a direction to move in. A framework. An image is like a boat. We're leaving an island, which is the current era we're in, and the boat is the means of getting to that next place. So it's not an end, it's a means to an end. What we need to do is get on a boat and leave this island, because if we continue to stay on the island, it will be overpopulated and ravaged for all it has.

Humanity has to keep moving forward with new images and keep building new boats. We can get a broad view throughout history of how this takes us up to today, which is that the last boat we sent out, as a grand image, was the boat of globalization: a human project that was super ambitious and got us out of the early industrial period in Europe. So that grand image of globalization, which includes everything associated with modernity, modernism–and later on, Silicon Valley at the tail end–brought us to the present day. I think 2020 was when that image died. Once an image becomes real, once what we've thought about becomes truly manifested and becomes our current reality, the image is dead. We're at the island, but there's no longer a boat that we’re on. There's no direction anymore. The danger of being there for too long, as we said, is ultimately, stagnation and exploiting that island too much. Just really festering there. We need to keep moving. I think that's integral to how we preserve a good balance of optimism in the human consciousness.

So yeah, this is a broad view. I think 2020 specifically was this moment where you really sensed that globalization had peaked as a concept. Our supply chains started to break down. We were now truly, densely connected through the internet. Everyone had to adopt zoom, and everything else. It really felt like the image, this grand project of let's connect the world, let's create a global standard - that was truly complete at that moment.

Here's a good example of this on a kind of more specific level, which is this Apple advert from 1987 - so it's about 35 years old now.

What's interesting about this image is that it's now our reality. You can look at every detail in this image. It's very deliberate. It's not a fluke: there's a bed in the corner–it's about the proximity of work to sleep and leisure. In the corner, you see a picture of the man’s family in the background. He's not wearing a suit, which is a really key detail in 1987. He's got a cat–a bit of companionship there. There's a whole lot of detail in the man’s proximity to the city, a sort of prospect refuge with the grand overview of the city.

Everything in here is a vision. It's an image. I think something interesting about images, not just on a broad scale of how we create trajectories for humanity, is that images are really the basis of companies, too. One insight we've had is that with hardware companies like Apple, the real innovation, we think, is actually in the image. The hard work is in making that image real. That's where the real hours go in. But this vision really condenses all of that and drives it forward. A lot of people have their own theories on this, but people say Apple might be stagnating or has reached its peak. I think that's because ultimately, this image they created 35 years ago has become real, and that's a great achievement, but they haven't set out a new boat - and we can apply that back to humanity on a broad scale.

It even goes back to how an ambitious person lives life, right? It's like, you set out a grand ambition or goal that you see for yourself, and once you're there, you feel a bit ripped off. It's all about setting off new boats, essentially. What's key is that Mars is not the island. “We're going to Mars” is the boat. It's a vehicle for thought. It's a vehicle for moving forward. It's not necessarily the destination.

REGGIE JAMES: Yeah, once you've achieved that image, you kind of have this sinking feeling that it's over. This quote from Elias Canetti, I think really solves what we're discussing: “A crowd exists as long as it has an unattainable goal. The image is acquired and there is nowhere else to go.” Setting off images allows crowds to condense their energy somewhere.

This book Canetti’s book Crowds and Power is one of the most important books, I think, and is disgustingly non-existent within tech discourse. Goal equals crowd. Crowd is what scale is. I think what we're experiencing a lot of now, is the dispersing of scale into decentralization, and all these things that are kind of crumbling to bits. So we need new images. We're gonna repeat that several times. But I think what's really exciting about new images is that we can learn from the previous ones.

A very big critique is people thinking Mars is some colonization dream. But the really nice thing is there's no one there. The European story is one of coming over to land where there are people, you know what I mean? And so there are ramifications upon ramifications of what that produced industrially and what it produced also from a Eurocentric, white-centric viewpoint of industry, society, beauty. And what's exciting about Mars is that none of that is there.

Therefore, we have to think about where our spawn point is, and our spawn point is the internet, which is a hyper global, intercultural, colorful experience that at scale is larger than any one nation. It's very post-nation-state. So the key point is that the image has to be larger than the origin. And I think, because we have probably the largest image today, which is the internet and globalization, what happens is any new work, any image that is smaller than that, it kind of just gets sucked up into the hall of mirrors. I like to use the analogy of mirrors, because the internet and technology serve as these great reflection points back to who we are as individuals. And what gets really frustrating for a lot of people with the internet, I think, is that they see themselves so often, and their flaws, with nowhere else to put that energy. When you get stuck in that mirror of looking at self, and the flaws, we have culture wars. This is why Mars as an image is the only thing really larger than the internet right now. And this mass, global, unified sense of self.

EUGENE ANGELO: Yeah, and a story arc is really a trajectory. It's this huge buildup of momentum. You can't just go from a horizontal point A to point B. It has to be this summit we're reaching for. What is a sufficiently big enough image relative to the origin point of the internet, which is already such a vast thing? What is sufficiently big enough that we get this overall summit feeling and the sensation of really needing to push for something? I think that's the issue right now, especially on the internet, when we think of the modern crises we're facing. With the internet as the spawn point, the origin point, none of these create trajectories that are big enough.

It’s a terrible thing to think about, but solving climate change as a story arc is a regression from something as large as the internet. So we need to think way bigger to actually start to solve those problems and collectivize people. Mars is the only image big enough – we’re open to suggestions – but I think it might be the only one for now. It's the way to mobilize us to think bigger and break through this apathy. The hall of mirrors on the internet is Apathy Island. Nothing else is big enough to motivate us to go and build a boat and set it off.

REGGIE JAMES: Apathy Island is the thing that when we think about what it means to be a Creative Technologist, it’s what we have to break. When we're not producing images that are in that resonant interval, I think we actually just exacerbate the problem. For a bit of critique, the main image on environmentalism is of Greta yelling at adults. That doesn't really inspire any sort of movement towards solving that issue. And then you even get, let's just say they're global peers of youth, then adding to the critique of that image itself. And in creating that larger image (of Mars), you create the ability to solve these very big things that we view as issues, as the byproduct of our movement.

EUGENE ANGELO: So the crux of what we're saying here is that instead of focusing on issues directly, focus on the thing that’s going to collectivize people. It’s best to focus on the story arc. The thing that is going to really give people a sense of collective purpose. Just bringing people together in a more positive, optimistic way will create byproducts that will solve problems. This isn't about utopia. This isn't utopian thinking. It would be utopian thinking if we were saying Mars was the final destination. But it absolutely isn't. Mars will probably be bad too. I mean, there'll be bad things that’ll fuck it up. It's probably not going to be amazing. But the point is to launch a boat off from there as well. To keep moving. That's the real premise.

With Mars as a thought vehicle, we can start to imagine, “Okay, what will we put up there?”, and we can think outside of the systems that really hinder our thinking on Earth. We'll go into a whole set of design principles that we can use for actually building things there. But, ultimately, it's really important to just think beyond our current systems. We have some starting points for anyone who wants to start thinking about this stuff. These are some key ideas that, based on the mistakes of the last image, we can use to move forward. We can learn from those mistakes.

The first is this idea of a post-true-self era. The real disease of the Western world is the idea of the true self. The true self is the idea that is foundational to the current consumerist economy we're in. It's the carrot on the end of the stick that we endlessly chase. As soon as we consume something, it gets us slightly closer to the idea of who we want to be. It's all about ego formation. I think we're locked into this type of economy because it's so profitable. But Mars is actually an opportunity to reorient our economy around fluid, ever-changing identity and remove the idea of identity as a fixed construct. I actually think this is a more abundant economy, because we have to think about how much creative restriction there is due to something not fitting the criteria we have of what or who we are, and how much we don't feel comfortable with being something because maybe it doesn't fit our image of ourselves. Or, you know, not creating something because it doesn't fit our image of ourselves, or not collaborating with someone because they don't fit the criteria of who we believe we are, and who we're supposed to hang out with or work with. The amount of withheld energy that results from the idea of the fixed self is a serious problem, and we should think about it. To put it in very Silicon Valley terms: the multi-identity era is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.

REGGIE JAMES:  Mars, and the vehicle-of-thought-that-is-Mars, is going to look far more like a string of Vatican cities tied to Singapores than it’s going to look like, you know, the United States plot on Mars with Little Italy next to Tokyo Town. Those aren't the structures we're going to orient spatially around.

And when you then think about what it means to be post nation-state, post-language and again, you take that mirrored view, you really start to look at things like immigration reform very differently. And you start to see how silly some of these things we put up are. So taking, again, this vehicle for thought of, What does it mean to be post nation-state on Mars? It allows you to think about what it means to be post nation-state right now, and all the generative opportunities of that.

EUGENE ANGELO:  What's important here, too, is that this isn't about removing cultural nuance. It's not about removing the richness of language or the richness of culture. It's about re-orienting our borders around things that aren't violent. I mean, the current issue really is that culture and language are reinforcing violent borders that exclude and restrict people. The purpose of a border should be to appreciate the flavor of one place from the other. It should remind us of the beauty of nuance, the richness of the world, right? I think we need to move past borders as a tool for economic exclusion and ultimately, barriers to occupational mobility. By thinking about these things in the form of images, in the form of ideas, we can just produce mock-ups. We can start to now think, Wait, what if we just brought that here (earth)? What if we applied that here? Then we get these byproducts.

REGGIE JAMES: And there is really no excuse for monoculture thinking. Allowing yourself to be post-monoculture opens you up to the same thing as being post-nation-state.  It’s the beauty of exploring what’s on the other side without there being a hard division or sense of violence. So where do we start?

EUGENE ANGELO: And we absolutely should have it as a priority that we involve everyone in the conversation about what the next image is and where we're going.

So then, what is a creative director? “Creative director” is a funny term, because it got co-opted by every kid on Earth over the last 10 years. I think creative directors summarize a broader culture. There'll be a broader culture that exists and a creative director understands what that culture is about, knows the key references, and is able to summarize it for an outside market that doesn't necessarily have the time to appreciate that broader culture for its full nuance, but does have the time to experience it through the condensed lens of the creative director. “Creative director”, as a job, has a lot to do with simplifying the world where we don't have the time and capacity to understand everything.

One problem with this is creative directors taking credit for broader culture and eliminating those large groups of people that play a part in something. We're not about that. This is more about open referencing. Everything you make should point in the direction of a reference or something else that's going to take people deeper. So if you are curious, you can go deeper. You can find more things.

REGGIE JAMES:  It's big Ecosystem vs. Egosystem. (1) No reference point to go off of, that’s Egosystem. That's I am the synthesizer therefore you consume me, and I give purpose to your identity. Ecosystem is, I'm showing you every line that I pulled from, and I'm giving you access to every single person. One of our favorite talks is Tremaine (Emory), Asyde, Heron (Preston) and Virgil (Abloh) and it's because you really realize it's not Virgil just being Virgil. It’s Virgil in community with his peers and deriving reference from peers and everything that goes off to. There's a really big myth of the genius founder. While there are some exceptional people, it’s always about the 80 people that actually allowed something to materialize. And allowing that reference, those lines are being drawn in the ecosystem. Not doing that has been one of the failures of the current state of production.

EUGENE ANGELO:  Yeah, in the world that I come from specifically–making T-shirts and album covers–I think a lot of what I saw wasn’t pointing in the direction of something deeper. A lot of kids are in that situation where they have unlimited curiosity, but they’re not being given the codes. I think what's key to this is just always pointing to something else, always leaving something where, if you have that curiosity, you can go deeper. Then, we'll get more nuance. We'll get more creative directors, because there'll be more people with more knowledge. There'll be more people who can create these images and do it well, and not just be derivative. That's the real issue. There are no reference points. People are just looking at surface stuff all day, and they're just gonna keep making surface stuff.

So these are some places to start from.  We wrote down a bunch of ideas. You know, like, Insert thing on Mars here. Have fun with it, right? We've played around with these ourselves and reached new conclusions based on the principles we put forward earlier. Things that are actually deeply relevant and would really transform things on this planet.

REGGIE JAMES:  Yeah, tell us your favorite ones. Design it. Use Midjourney. Send it to us.

Q&A

QUESTION:  I’m not sure if you went back to take a historical look at how the image of the internet and globalization emerged…there’s this process of competing, in the evolutionary selection of what image wins and gains consensus.  I’m curious how you’re imagining that evolution happening with Mars and some of the dynamics you’re encouraging us to consider so we don’t repeat the mistakes of last time.

REGGIE JAMES:  Part of the reason we did this talk is there’s one person who talks about Mars extensively and that’s Elon (Musk).  Part of this talk is just to say, ‘yeah, guess what, now you have competition.’  Now there are, at minimum, two visions.  I think that’s really important.  Because once you have two visions for something, then there will always be 50.  It takes one person to copy - and then there are 50 versions and it’s like, ‘Yo, how did that happen?’

QUESTION: I wonder, what do you think it means to be a good pilgrim to Mars?

REGGIE JAMES: We’re already off to better footing, because we’re not displacing natives. And I think what it looks like is keeping the internet as a spawn point and not one nation or one guy.  I think the immediate flaw would be if the first Rover to Mars was just five white dudes from Space X.  Like, bad pilgrims.  Immediate bad pilgrims.  Good pilgrims is like, ‘We’re gonna have the Olympics’ and almost a World’s Fair competitive structure to who’s going first.

QUESTION:  Whenever people talk about Mars, I always have questions about why Mars.  I feel like human beings have already destroyed planet Earth.  Why do you want to move to another planet? Why don’t you think people should focus on solving problems we have in our community, our nation, our world?

REGGIE JAMES:  I probably philosophically disagree with the statement that we’ve destroyed Earth.  But this is about the mirror.  This is about thinking larger and creating images that will solve these things as byproducts. And so, if you fundamentally disagree with that probe then there’s nowhere to go conversationally between us.  But if you can start to think, ‘Okay, Mars is an interesting mirror.’  Then it’s like, ‘What is going to be necessary on Mars for us to grow our own food?  How are we going to do that?  Well, it has to be more sustainable than what we’re doing on Earth.’  And then ‘Okay, we’re going to Mars.  What does the team look like? Well, it’s two Black women.  It’s one Asian woman.  It’s like two Indian guys. And one gay white guy, right?”  And so immediately, we start to look at - ‘Well, how come our other power systems don’t look like this…’

And so we can do this for every single thing that we need.  And I guarantee you the byproduct is solving those things. The current system says, ‘How come you can’t fix these things on Earth?’  Look at the images you’re making.  I’m not interested in them. I don’t care about them.  The kids don’t.  The dopest thing right now is like a 24 year-old hot girl on TikTok talking about nuclear energy. She’s going to be the new legislator on nuclear energy. France works on like 75% nuclear energy. Why don’t we? Why are we in all these conflicts? Because the images  y’all make suck. That’s the youth culture answer for you.  The images y’all make suck. Mars is a better image, and it’s going to solve these things in a far more interesting way.

(1) Meet the Baukunst Creative Technologist Council, Tyler Mincey

Kate McAndrew is a Co-founder and General Partner at Baukunst. For more from Baukunst, join our newsletter or follow us on twitter.

Ecosystem vs Egosystem

We believe individual genius is over-represented and the complex power of scenes is undervalued. This lies in stark contrast to the egocentric, genius obsession that permeates western technology culture today.

In typical startup mythos, the individual is at the center. Everyone knows the founders, but overlook the first ten employees. We always hear about the lightbulb moment, rarely the stories of execution. We’re told of new disruptive tech emerging from isolation in a founder’s head, not evolving from deep interconnectedness with the world around it.

At Baukunst, we believe groundbreaking work is most often NOT an isolated incident, but rather a product of a complex ecosystem and sustained execution.

“A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large num­bers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cul­tural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.”

—Brian Eno

You don’t get Horses without the love story between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, or the ability to trade art for rent at the Chelsea Hotel. You don’t get Apple without the Homebrew Computer Club. You don’t get the magic of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, or Xerox PARC without a rich community of interdisciplinary experts.

Baukunst takes a collective approach to building companies

Baukunst is setting a new technology scene where collective creation and execution is championed alongside the individual. We’ve assembled a group of expert practitioners to join the collective at Baukunst — masters of their craft, able to define and redefine the bounds of their domain — not simply work within them.

They come from different stages in their careers, seasoned veterans and fresh voices, all sharing a passion for advancing their art and widening the impact of their craft.

They’re joining Baukunst to support the next generation of creative technologists building transformative, enduring companies. Together, they support a decentralized studio experience: where resources, interdisciplinary experts, and thoughtful peers come together to achieve our best, most impactful work.

Over the next few months, we will introduce you to each of these builders. We look forward to sharing their stories with you.

If you want to be a part of this ecosystem of builders, we’d love to get to know you.

We invest:

Baukunst makes venture investments in creative technologists at company formation. We are independent minded and invest with conviction. We lead pre-seed rounds, and often invest the full round ourselves.

We build:

You can think of Baukunst like a decentralized studio: where resources, experts, and thoughtful peers come together to focus on achieving our best, most impactful work.

We document:

The early messy magic of product and company creation is unique, and it is our sole focus. We capture and share origin stories as they unfold.

Many investors start with what they invest in, we start with who.

Seeking Creative Technologists: those in pursuit of the art of building.

Creative technologists combine two potent talents: visionary thinking and expertise with powerful tools. They craft transformative product experiences, inspire teams along the way, and build companies we can be proud of.

Interdisciplinary in nature, creative technologists have unique insights into unexplored areas of opportunity. The products and systems they design often defy comfortable categorization and require multi-disciplinary teams to clear technical and regulatory hurdles in the early days of building. While many say, “sounds complicated,” we lean forward and say, “tell us more.”

Creative technologists are our people and we have a long history of being the foundational partners to their success.

We’ve led first investment rounds in creative technologists who are:

• Building first generation technology products that unlock new business models and transform industries (like Tonal and Pair).

• Reimagining the modes of production by transforming how we design, manufacture and move objects around the world (Onshape, Desktop Metal, Tempo Automation, Tive).

• Redesigning outdated systems with sustainability and the center (FYTO, Blue Lake, Denizen).

• Re-writing cultural norms and advancing the art of company building itself (Bobbie, Eternal).

These themes illustrate what we will focus on investing in at Baukunst. In all examples, we were the first round lead investor, often writing the founding team their first check, or co-founding the company ourselves.

At a time of unprecedented change, creative technologists are the builders we want shaping the future. They build with the long term in mind and use technology as their medium of impact actualization rather than fetishizing tech for tech’s sake.

Meet the Collective

Baukunst is a selective ecosystem of founders, investors, and domain experts coming together to elevate our culture of creation. We specialize in doing new things well and welcome people, products, and companies that don’t easily fit into existing boxes.

General Partners

Baukunst has four equal general partners responsible for investing the collective’s capital: Kate McAndrew, Tyler Mincey, Axel Bichara, and Matt Thoms. We have shipped over 50 first generation technology products (including the first iPhone), co-founded multiple startups, and have been the first check lead investor in over seventy interdisciplinary technology companies.

Domain Experts

We have assembled world renowned experts into the Creative Technologist Council, many of whom are also investors in Baukunst. Each person is a master of their craft, able to define and redefine the bounds of their domain— not simply work within them.  You can read more about the council here.

Founders and Early Teams

Founders and early teams in Baukunst are building new products and companies that will grow, scale, and endure.

In celebration, and with gratitude

To commemorate the launch of Baukunst, we are commissioning a unique work of generative art by renowned new media artist, designer, computer programmer, and educator Zach Lieberman. The commissioned work begins today on our homepage, and will evolve and change over ten years to match the investment period of our fund. We’re honored to work with Zach and look forward to collaborating with more artists in the future.

Many thanks to those who make today possible: our families, friends, creative communities, past portfolio companies, investors, and close collaborators. We are honored to be stewards of Baukunst, to promote, to champion, and refine our collective level of craft and discernment—and the dynamic and vibrant ecosystem we foster within Baukunst.