Design and Engineering Shouldn't Be Separate Islands | Pensar, Tactile, Mathscaper, Vector7 | Rob Leonard
The smarter move could have been, let's hire somebody who really knows our business and have them figure out business development. But they took a bet hiring an inexperienced person in their industry. And, yeah, I've gotten to work things from National Labs to Spaceflight Systems to Xbox. And I'm really grateful because when you take curiosity and you put it in the same room with generosity, you know, it really has transformed my life.
Nate:You're listening to TRADEOFFS, a podcast about the trials and tribulations of designing, building, and manufacturing hardware and the
Rob:people that make it. Each month,
Nate:we sit down with founders, engineers, and other hardware professionals to understand the unique trade
Nate:offs inherent in building a business that makes physical products.
Nate:I'm Nate Padgett, hardware community guy and founder of Informal,
Nate:a freelance collective that helps companies of all sizes design, build,
Nate:and ship world class hardware.
Chris:And I'm Chris Rill, startup founder, engineer, and fractional CTO, where I help hardware and software companies build and scale their products. TRADEOFFS captures the best of these conversations so you can learn about the numerous skill sets needed to successfully bring physical products to market.
Nate:For this episode, we sat down with Rob Leonard, one of the most interesting people I've come across in the hardware community. Rob is a serial entrepreneur who previously led the shows in Pensar and Tactile, two award winning product development firms in Seattle. He's He's also an autodidactic who taught himself most of what he knows about hardware and manufacturing and somehow still has time on the side to be a sculpture artist. Chris and I had a blast talking with Rob, and we're sure you're gonna enjoy the conversation as much as we did. Let's dig in.
Nate:Why don't I kick things off? Rob, you know, hardware is really in your blood. You've got such a unique background across the board, but in particular, you've been pretty senior at some heavy hitter firms, and so I'm sure you have amazing trade off stories. But why don't we do a quick introduction? And then I'd love to hear how you got started within hardware.
Rob:Well, yeah, my name is Rob Leonard. I am a lifelong technologist. Hardware is sort of the most recent chapters. I started at IT management consulting. When I was a teenager, I lived in a town where I was maybe the only kid with a computer for quite a while.
Rob:Dad needed one at home for work, and Sneakernet, he'd bring home disks and work on Lotus Notes. So my world started in computers. In 2001, I sold my first company and needed to reinvent myself. So spent a couple of years trying to figure it out. I became a father during that time and then talked to a mentor.
Rob:He said, just go back into IT, and I didn't want to. The world had passed me by. I felt like anybody in that world probably had advanced degrees, and I didn't. And I had just kinda done it already. He said, well, what are you interested in?
Rob:And the first thing that came to my mind, hadn't thought about it a whole lot, was I like lasers. And he said, how much do you know about them? I said, not much. I want to. So he said, do whatever it takes to go find a job as a janitor or whatever it takes with somebody doing something with lasers.
Rob:So that's where my hardware life began, probably 02/1967, something like that.
Nate:Super cool. I want to work on lasers Yeah. And then manifest. Yeah. Wait.
Nate:What was that first company that you sold? Was that IT consulting, helping small businesses get on the Internet? Like, what was that?
Rob:Yeah. Well, that's exactly what it was. I started when I was 15 teaching DOS to a couple of people who found out that this kid knew what he was doing. So I put together curriculum and started teaching. By the time I was 16, 17, there was enough money coming in that we started a company.
Rob:By the time I was 20, I had I think seven employees. By the time we sold it, I had like 15. Our specialty was I partnered with ISPs and people building you know, back then, we were doing ISDN. This is before DSL. So it was like, you wanna go beyond dial up?
Rob:So I was getting companies on ISDN, helping them find their first domain names and building their first email servers. I built Washington Mutual's first email server, got them online. Except for there was one type of client saying no, people in the financial industry bound by rule 17 b from the Securities Exchange Act of 1929. So this thing called compliance was a real impediment for a certain class of customer to get email. It's for document retention, and that's a whole podcast in and of itself.
Rob:Anyways, I set up and solved that problem. I created the world's first SEC rule 17 b compliant email solution and sold it for a little bit of money and thought I was rich because I was 23 years old. Later, I found out that the company I sold it to was selling my software for a $100,000 a seat. So I probably had a $250,000,000 company and didn't know it. I learned a lot, and I didn't wanna go back.
Rob:I didn't wanna try to figure out IT or pull a new rabbit out of the hat. I wanted something new. That's how I got into hardware.
Nate:And did you find, like, a laser company and get a job, or was that when you started going into the service route, hardware service, professional services route?
Rob:It took some searching in my memory banks to figure out why I was interested in lasers, and I'll drop his name on here. A guy named David Bjorans I had met out and about in the world, I think, at a house party or something like that. And I asked him what did he do for work. Very typical American discussion. What's your name?
Rob:What do you do? Where are you from? He said, I'm an optical engineer. And I was like, oh, like glasses?
Chris:No. No. No. No. I'm an optical engineer.
Rob:I was really curious, so I kept asking questions. He might tell it that not a lot of people were as interested in what he did as I became. I was voraciously interested. Tell me more. Tell me more.
Rob:And he described what laser inside of a CD ROM does and how it works and the kind of engineering that it takes to figure out lens systems for something as simple as a CD ROM or something as complex as defense related spacecraft optics. I was riveted. By the time I was talking to Artie Burke, the mentor that said, go go get a job in lasers. Artie Burke, the longtime CEO of Shurguard Storage. He's got his name on a couple of buildings at the University of Washington.
Rob:Incredible mentor. I'd later figured out how it was that conversation with David Bjorans. I was sitting in a rug store drinking tea, a Turkish rug store in Kirkland, Washington, and in walks David Bjorans. And that's when it all kinda came together for me. He's the reason I'm interested in lasers.
Nate:And he
Rob:was like, hey. I think I know you from somewhere. I was like, I know you. And we got to talking. And he said, well and when I met him, he was under contract designing the optics in Microsoft Surface, the original Microsoft, which was a big table that had all kinds of
Nate:I remember that. I remember the big table project. Was like big multi touch? It was like 13, and I was like, damn. I want one of those.
Nate:And I saw the price tag, and I was like, goddamn.
Rob:They figured out multi touch. They used infrared illumination, and they could see your fingers through a diffuse reflective screen. It had to be the display reflective and transmissive to see. And he said, I left my project at Microsoft, and I'm starting a company. I've got a couple partners.
Rob:You should come see it. So I I don't know if it was the next day, but I found myself walking a building that still didn't have sheetrock. They were just building the walls. He's like, this is where the optics lab is gonna be. We're gonna paint it all black, and here's why.
Rob:So Artie's advice matched with be rediscovering where my curiosity about lasers came from and David Pajoren's walking in the door of a rug store really ignited that that was the lighting of the fuse of my hardware career. I didn't need a lot of money at the time, so I took a job for $30 or something like that plus commission as their director of sales and marketing. He was like, you know, you can totally do this. We'll teach you everything you need to know about our business, and you can go figure it out.
Nate:And this was a company he was spinning out of the original surface team?
Rob:Well, he had two partners, Rand Lee and Dave Jenkins, all people I remain in contact with and love. The three of them had collaborated on some projects and thought, hey. We should start a company. There's also two other guys, Dave Rush and Nick Bratt, that had a company called four d Optical. Four d Optical had all of the optics lab equipment from TerraBeam.
Rob:Do you remember TerraBeam? Okay. TerraBeam was a Seattle startup hardware. They were doing free space, laser, optical, telecommunications, and they raised a ton of money. It was Greg Amadon.
Rob:They raised a lot of private equity, and ultimately, it didn't work out. They never found their way to revenue.
Nate:Was that because they raised from private equity? I don't know. We talk shit about private equity on this podcast all the time, like, all the time.
Rob:We we can look it up. Fact check me, but I wanna say it was, like, a $500,000,000, and this was back in the early two thousand. So I think they were ahead of their time. Maybe the problem wasn't as big as they had hoped because fiber was getting cheaper infrastructure for Internet, satellite radios started getting more dense. LTE was starting to hit the horizon.
Rob:And so I think the need for free space, speed laser comms, I think they just missed the moment.
Nate:Because I know you've been working on some of these laser based power management. Right? That was the thing that we were talking about
Rob:with Link.
Nate:It's so funny, the through lines with your career, including the state of Washington, which I think we should get into in a sec. I know this was kind of the genesis, right, in optics. And then looking at your LinkedIn, you had a career in lighting as well as in product development as a service. So did you were those lighting companies kind of things you were doing on the side or that for me? Because it sounds like you went into PD after this company.
Rob:I think I can stitch it together then we can get onto the near side of my career. It began at Orb Optronics. We were doing products like we would be doing the optics for the blind spot indicator on a Ford vehicle. It was a super secret project that we were gonna be able to detect things in your blind spot and let you know about it. And we're gonna put a little light out on your mirror and tell you about it.
Rob:So Ford had all of that figured out, but they were using incandescent lamps. And that blew the power budget because you have to handle the motors and NTSB and I'm sure SAE and all of those bodies. Everything has to work at the same time. So that blind spot indicator, because now it's a piece of safety equipment, has to work even if you're changing your mirror Mhmm. Motor.
Rob:And so they blew the power budget. So they had to get it down to one amber LED, and that was a real optics challenge. So that was a good example of something that would come to Orb Optronics. Orb worked on a gazillion subsystems, but occasionally, from the business development seat, while talking about either earning the business or during the execution of the business of developing somebody's subsystem, I would get exposure to the systems engineering and the bigger issues. Like, do you need to get it down to one LED?
Rob:Mhmm. I learned how to spell SAE and NTSB and things like that and worked with thermal, electrical, compliance, mechanical roboticists. It turned that optical design into a lens that worked, into an assembly that worked, into a whole system that worked, ignited my holistic, hard, big problems, multidimensional product development brain. Then the lighting revolution started. Shujin Nakamura came up with the blue LED.
Rob:They started putting phosphors on that white light, all of a sudden, was quite efficient, and then this LED revolution happened. And I was therefore with a real interest in electrical and optical and mechanical engineering and the consulting business, and I had this background in having built an IT management consulting. Business. So it's really expert at running teams of really smart people doing really hard stuff for really important companies. Passion for optical engineering and a passion for product development, and then boom.
Rob:A whole new world of products that need to be developed.
Nate:Very good question. Chris, do you have a question?
Chris:No. I'm just super fascinated by how you went from, like, fully digital systems more on the business side to now getting down into the physics of making light. Right? So talk about some of the trade offs that you made or the companies made, especially for you getting into product development because I'm fascinated by that journey.
Rob:Well, we can talk about the trade off of hiring an inexperienced person in their industry to do business development. I I think it was all three of them. It was Rand, Dave, and Dave that had the belief that a really smart person who has the aptitude to go engage industry and think strategically about how to tackle new businesses, that's the harder problem. Teaching you physics, that's gonna be easy. They were like, you're a smart guy.
Rob:We can figure that out. And they turned out to be correct, but talk about risks and associated trade offs. The smarter move could have been, let's hire somebody who really knows our business and have them figure out business to build. Huge trade offs in there, and and they took a bet. I'm really grateful because when you take curiosity and you put it in the same room with generosity, it really has transformed my life.
Rob:I've gotten to work things from national labs to spaceflight systems to Xbox, all kinds of crazy stuff as a result.
Nate:You just seem intellectually curious. I would say on an engineering, science, and art side of things, You just seem to really be drawn to that in a holistic sense as you were saying. That is a pretty rare quality, and it sounds like those guys saw that early on and put a lot of faith in you.
Rob:Thanks. I mean, Artie Burke is the first person who taught me that I was a business development salesperson. I had no idea. Interesting.
Nate:What made him think that?
Rob:Well, I was doing this IT stuff, and I ended up helping one of his companies called Door to Door Storage. They invented kind of mobile storage that's now like these companies that drive a truck and then they unload a container into your driveway. A guy named Tim Riley invented that. So I went and worked for Door to Door Storage. And then when I left Door to Door, Artie said, I've got a bunch of other companies I want you to help.
Rob:So that's where that mentorship and friendship started. And he's the one who said, don't think of yourself as a technology guy. Stop it. You know how to do some stuff. But now your job is to hire people who know how to do stuff, and you know whether they're BS ing or not.
Rob:Your job is now to switch into a BS filter, and your superpower is really sales, business development, relationships. I thought he was crazy. I was like, what are you talking about? My identity was so closely aligned with my work and where I thought the essence of my being and the success of my company came from. He pulled out a big bright flashlight to show me that parts of that are okay, but it's not entirely correct.
Rob:The entirety of why things are going well, Rob, is you and these aspects of you. So he said stop trying to do everything technologically. Hire good teams because there's other really smart people. And so he really taught me how to think like a leader and build a consulting agency, not just an entity that can trade hours for dollars. Mhmm.
Rob:So that's when I accepted that I'm a BD person, and then the idea of switching industries became no problem. Like Mhmm. I wasn't stuck in IT because that's all I knew. Now I'm a business development mind when David Bjorn said, hey. Why don't you be our director of business development?
Rob:I was like, sure.
Nate:And then that was the title that you you wore? Because I I feel like that's kinda been your title for for a lot.
Rob:Yeah. Well and that's true because I don't I didn't this little surprise, and I love this surprise is I'm not an engineer. I'm not a designer. In fact, I only took a few college classes ever. My education and my career has been wholly based upon generosity, meeting curiosity, and being in the right place in the right time.
Rob:And that voracious curiosity, it's infectious. And so if you have a generous mind next to a curious person, that snowball rolls. And so my education has been very pointed. My personal philosophy and love of consulting and delighting customers, understanding risks and options and their associated trade offs tie it back show. It is really it begins as an art form.
Rob:It feels like art, and then you realize it's a skill that can be taught. And a lot of my consulting philosophy is our clients take risks. We don't as engineering service providers. It's our job to present the options and the associated trade offs so that our clients can make great decisions. And if they wanna take risks, then it's their risk to take.
Rob:It's well documented, you can serve them really well taking those risks. If they wanna play it safe, then you can help them really well do that. So, yeah, I am somebody who philosophically can lead a engineering and design or really any kind of consulting practice with a voracious curiosity around engineering and Science. And I'm an artist too. And art.
Rob:Yeah. Which
Nate:which I wanna get back to that. I know you're flying solo now. Right? And you're building some of your own independent consulting practice now, which we'll talk about as well. But between Orb
Rob:I'm sorry.
Nate:What was the company called?
Rob:Orb Optronics. Orb.
Nate:Yeah. Between then and Pensar, what were you doing? Did you start your own consulting business in that time? Because it sounds like you already had that mentality and the ability to assemble those teams during that time.
Rob:I had an opportunity at Orb. I had a tiny bit of stock, but they offered me more stock to stay and grow the business. But my mind was already really excited about product development. And I went to work for a company called NextLighting. They had the initial idea together for a very early replacement for linear fluorescent lamps.
Rob:And I was passionate about displacing mercury and saving energy and pursuing LED and doing a product. And these guys, Randall Soznick, he was in house IP counsel for Apple in its very early days when Steve Jobs went out and started Next Computer. Randall actually incorporated Next Computer. So I'll never get to work for Steve Jobs, but I got to work for Randall. And Zach Berkowitz, who's a Olympic level sailboat racer, he's an amazing guy.
Rob:So I got to work with Randall and Zach who wanted to start a lighting company. Very cool. And they had a really cool idea. And so I did that for five years. We got crushed by Sibanye and GE and Chillips when they decided to enter the business, but we made an incredible product.
Rob:We lit all of Starbucks World headquarters, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs near Neck Of The Woods. We did a bunch of neat stuff and made a great product. How did I get into that lighting business? This tells the story of how I made it into Pensar. At Orboptronics, I didn't become the expert on photobiological hazard assessment, but I convinced the business that we should go after eye safety.
Rob:So it's a standard IEC six zero eight two five dash one. It was a laser eye safety standard, and there were no eye safety standards for LEDs. They were this new thing. And when they were tiny little indicators for buttons on your stereo, that was fine. But now we're gonna light rooms with them.
Rob:We're gonna light stadiums. We're gonna put these things out in the open. Is that safe? Big, big, big, hairy question mark. And so the nearest standard that could help us was six zero eight two five dash one.
Rob:So I was convinced that we needed to go hard at photobiological hazard assessment. And at the time, the US Department of Energy was doing a series of talks around the country, engaging with industry, and the DOE was spending funds and funding our US based research and development around electronics, around optics, around chemistry, around MOCVD of gallium nitride and everything, trying to make the solid state lighting industry happen in The US. So I ended up being a speaker at some of those DOE events on iSafety. And it was not super well attended, but the people that were there really cared about it and were serious about doing product development really well. And there was a gentleman from Toshiba there.
Rob:Got to know him, and he said, you, Rob, you are going to lead the product development of all of Toshiba's LED lighting products worldwide. And I was like, you got the wrong guy. I did college. One conference. Wow.
Nate:Well, no. Impression, my
Rob:friend. Several.
Nate:Okay.
Rob:Well, I was a speaker at a few of these things, and every time I spoke, he would stand in line and say, and that turned into some dinners and stuff like that. You had a groupie, Rob. You had a conference groupie. I did. And he was not gonna take no for an answer.
Rob:So rather than accept a job, move to Japan or wherever because I really felt outgunned. I did not feel like I had what it took to do something like that. Total impostor syndrome. Maybe I could have, but the way I solved it was, I'm gonna help you. And I was also extremely loyal to Orboptronics at the time.
Rob:I wanted to serve my employer. So we'll do your optical engineering. Let's go find a lighting designer. Jeff Miller knew them, who was the president of the International Association of Lighting Designers at the time. And I found Pensar to do some, you know, real deal product development that can manage huge set of SKUs, a lot of mechanical that can deal with compliance issues and build a catalog.
Rob:So we put together a joint venture between the three of us, and that's how I got to know Pensar. I interviewed all of the local engineering firms. Jeff Miller led that, but we got to know Pensar and and did a deal with them. Pensar never forgot it. So then I went to NEXLighting, and I started getting Christmas gifts every year from Pensar over the years and stayed in touch with John Murkowski.
Rob:John ended up calling me one day and said, what do you think about coming to Pensar? So I went and visited. Next thing you know, was their director of sales and marketing. And he told me that the idea was that I'd be managing director and lead the company, but nothing was certain. People have to like you, and you gotta come in and make an impact.
Rob:And so I did that and became one of the managing directors of Pensar right up until its sale.
Nate:That was your other run-in with Apple. Right? Because Pensar was working with Apple a ton. Did they end up exiting to Apple, or what was the exit story? Can they talk about it?
Rob:There are some people who are allowed to talk about it. I'm not one of them.
Nate:Not one of them. And they're like, we'll cut this part out. No.
Rob:Don't have to cut anything out.
Nate:It's sold, and there are many who believe it was to Apple. So my my first exposure to Pensar was meeting you right after the acquisition had happened and after you were on your own before you joined Tactile. What was at the time when you joined them, you brought them on, you were a client or a partner of theirs. What was the organization like at the time?
Rob:Yeah. I joined Pensar. There were probably 45 or 50 individuals, embedded systems, firmware, a little bit of software, and a lot of mechanical and also industrial design. It was an engineering firm with an industrial design group. One of the things I'm most proud of at Pensar is even though it's a small group, we've started showing up, especially toward the end, as a design an engineering firm.
Rob:Industrial design wasn't this thing that we also have, but it was something that we do. Every engineering project is going to have some design fingerprints on it. Conversely, every design project is gonna have engineering fingerprints on it. We turn that into a superpower, and so they fed each other. And we'd tell our clients right up front.
Rob:You think this is a pure design project? You're gonna see some engineering hours in our proposal, and here's why philosophically. And it worked really well. The designers that were there felt really valued, and I think the engineering team finally got to know the superpowers that they had with that design firm. So when it came to its end in a happy way for most, we're just north of 90 people, I think.
Rob:Clients like Xbox and Philips ultrasound, really incredible clients. We did some of the mechanical engineering and electrical things like Proprio, which is augmented reality assisted spinal surgery suite. It was just awesome. Awesome. I miss Pensar.
Nate:I'm sure you do. I mean, they had such an impact on the Seattle ecosystem. Chris, were we gonna ask? I think I had a question. I don't wanna keep So you were talking
Chris:about superpowers, and I'm curious why bring engineers into design projects, and why bring designers into engineering projects?
Rob:Yeah. The best designs have their head in the clouds enough to get crazy and think about something new, but also have their feet on the ground to go get something done. And so your best designers have a real pragmatic side to them. But if you push that too far, the creativity can get dialed down. So when you allow for wild creativity with engineering riding shotgun, even more incredible things happen.
Rob:Engineers, if left to their own devices, will make the thing go together and work, and the best engineers have a design mind. But if they are spending too much time trying to make it look cool or think about the texture, then the serious engineering that has to get done, the punch list with unyielding schedules and things that have to work, I don't want you distracted from that stuff. But if you've got a mind for design and a designer's in the room, magic happens. You get the best of both worlds. If I had enough budget on every project, I'd never run a project without a designer and an engineer
Nate:at least. Oh, yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. Why were they separate islands at Pensar to begin with?
Nate:Like, why wasn't there better integration between the ID group and the mechanical group? I don't think it was intentional.
Rob:I think the mechanical engineering group in particular was so powerful, and it was such an economic engine for the company. Clients like Xbox, we'd have 25 people on Xbox for years running two or three Xboxes in parallel the way that that worked. I don't think it'd be kosher for me to describe everything that happened, but there's always more than one Xbox back then. It was such a group of incredible engineers bringing in the lion's share of the revenue for the company. It was viewed very you know, from a spreadsheet standpoint, it was the thing to go celebrate and pay attention to.
Nate:Was ID something that was it, like, a capability that was developed after the engineering group more kind of just out of necessity or because they, like, met some insanely good designers and they're like, we gotta have these guys on the team to figure out
Rob:how to make it work? Alex Diener, who I still am in contact with and love, he's kind of industrial design at Dexcom, an amazing company doing incredible things for human health and longevity, type one and type two diabetes. So Alex Diener was the head of industrial design. And I think in the very early days of Pensar pre Xbox, the idea was industrial design and engineering. Let's go.
Rob:I think Xbox just kinda took off and then that ME group grew so much that it drew the attention. Working with Alex, he took an incredible opportunity at Dexcom. And then eventually with Kristen Will who headed their industrial design, we work to drag it back to the intended design. Come on. This is a design and engineering firm.
Rob:Let's
Nate:Right.
Rob:Act like it. Let's write proposals like it. Let's go earn business like it, and let's go work like it. Yeah.
Nate:We've got a bunch of industrial designers in the informal network. The vast majority are mechanical engineers, and we often find that we're either getting engineering work or getting design work. Trying to fuse the two has been something that we've been trying to do more intentionally as it sounds like you did with Pensar, but I do feel like it's really easy for them to end up operating separately. It sounds like that may have been early on the case with Pensar before there was some real intention behind stitching them together. You're either getting asked for engineering or you're getting asked for design.
Nate:And you have to be like, no. These need to live together. You have to make that point to the client often.
Rob:I think that's true. Clint Schneider and John Rakowski, the owners at Pensar, taught me a lot about consulting. Doing what's right for the client even if the client has no idea what's right for them, and doing what's right for the client will always take care of your own success. The idea of putting together teams that include resources that maybe they're not asking for, it really kind of anchors in that philosophy from those two guys, which is what's right for the client. If you think of Pensar, if you think of Tactile, if you think of my new company, Vector 7, any any place that I've been, we have a responsibility as consultants, not just to take orders.
Rob:That's commodity engineering, dimensioning drawings and turning the crank. It's very important work. But when you're doing product development and you're tackling problems, we have an absolute responsibility to think by ourselves and present what we see to the client. And the best proposals feel like they're coauthored, that the client was quite involved with it. So that education and that collaboration is essential.
Rob:And the best deals all your heads are nodding. The best deals that you've ever done included all of that. And so in engineering, if you're taking orders and trading hours for dollars, if there's really good people in there who can carry the consulting bucket of water for that client, that works. Mhmm. And I think Informal has a fair amount of that.
Rob:For bigger projects that include teams, you really need somebody who can carry the water of the consulting arc of the project and who has philosophy that can really put together the right deal. And I count myself among some of the incredible people I've worked around who have that art.
Nate:You obviously brought that to Pensar. Did you then bring that to Tactile as well? Because Tactile's ID first with some engineering. Right?
Rob:Yeah. Tactile had been around for twenty years founded by Josh Kornfeld who I first met almost twenty years ago working on a Panasonic avionics. They had the crazy audacity to put screens in the back of the seats of aircraft. Nobody had ever put that much heat and that many photons in a cabin before. Would it even work?
Rob:How do you control it? So Tactile was also coming up with a controller, incredible group of industrial designers. They had motion graphics, visual effects, mechanical engineering, and the UX. What I really learned there was that user experience is not a software term, that user experience but I think Tactile and I would say this about Pensar Tic, really integrated with my own being in such a powerful way, but incredible designers, great philosophy. The philosophy around user experience being physical and digital and having no bounds.
Rob:It is who is interacting and and how, whether it's physical or digital, and getting it all right holistically. Now it seems so natural, but honestly, before entering Tactile, that felt so novel and new. Now it seems like it should be automatic.
Nate:And they were doing digital experiences as well? So is this kinda like the revisiting of digital and doing digital products?
Rob:Yeah. Clients like Starbucks where they're pure UX. Most of the UX that Tactile was doing was on things like medical devices. What the industry mostly calls UX with patterns and for class two and even class three medical devices. Yeah.
Rob:Pretty awesome.
Chris:So for Pensar and Tactile, what were some of the characteristics of the teams that you guys engaged with that you could read the tea leaves between a successful product and a non successful product, not based on the product, but based on the team itself? Like, what are some values or principles or things that you saw that correlate with success?
Rob:I'm gonna abstract the word team to mean more than just the people we assign to a project at Pensar, but also to include the client. Your client is part of this team. Now they might have a minor role or they may have a huge role and you're playing a smaller role. Really understanding what's at that interface and who the players are and getting ways of working set up right is essential. Every project needs somebody with the role, not the title, but the role of consulting lead.
Rob:Mhmm. And we're an engineering and design firm consulting lead. That's novel. Pensar did that. You need a technical lead.
Rob:There could be one technical lead. If it's Xbox, there could be several. It could be thermal electrical. But a technical lead on a typical project, this is the engineer who owns the technical excellence excellence of everything. And then there's a project manager.
Rob:It's not to deprecate project management, but project management is keeping the trains running on time, keeping people informed, holding people accountable, understanding budgets, etcetera. Project management often is a role within the skill set of somebody who's a technical leader or consulting lead. Sometimes these could conflate into the same individual. So you can have a consulting lead who's the project manager. You can have a technical lead who is the consulting lead also.
Rob:But no matter the size of the project, those three roles have to get assigned, period. Mhmm. And you better be careful because if you take on the role of consulting lead, that's your baby. It's your responsibility to take the work product that's being generated and know what the next meeting needs to be about. Change the meeting if it's about the wrong things.
Rob:Like, it's your job to convey what's going on, what are the risks that we're coming up against, what are the trade offs that we need to convey, and then make sure to get that consulting content delivered so that we could get actions. And then the PM make sure that the minutes are taken so that contractually we're covered. And the plan of record at the front end of a project, it needs to be understood by the team and it's the SOW. Mhmm. That SOW that is this day zero plan of record.
Rob:Plan of record then is wet patent after that. Things can be dynamic. Great projects often follow the arc of the SOW quite well, but you've gotta read and run. Things happen. We need another board spin because whatever.
Rob:And so the ability to keep that really well documented requires in those three roles. So that's part of the team. Then you could have two more engineers in addition to that or 60. Those roles are absolutely essential. That's the beginning of an answer, Chris.
Rob:We could probably do a whole podcast on Oh, sure.
Nate:Yeah. Running teams.
Chris:I was more curious about the client. Like, a lot of times, Nate can relate with this, it's not necessarily the consulting firm or the product development firm that's responsible for the failure of a of a project. Right? Oftentimes, it's a confluence of things. And I'm wondering, looking back on the projects that worked out, the founders are maybe curious.
Chris:Right? They had a passion for the space. They didn't really care how the problem was solved, but they were coming to you because they were confident you guys would do it. What would be those elements of the humans that come to you that you got this sixth sense that things were gonna work out?
Rob:That's a great question. I love it. The and it gets back to why I wanted to abstract team to include the client. My favorite kinds of clients, my favorite founders are obsessed with validation. Not personal validation, but market validation.
Rob:We are gonna go build a thing and because it's really well understood. Like, at Pensar, we did some r and d, especially around space flight stuff, but we didn't do a ton of
Nate:r and d.
Rob:It was a core technology was designed, so it's a medical device. It's been demonstrated. They have a what we call the lab queen. Some would call it a mule or whatever where the tech works. It's ugly, and it's laid out on a bench, but we can break kidney stones with ultrasound or whatever.
Rob:Now we gotta make a product. So that's often the moment that we would meet clients. So understanding the users and the use case scenarios and the overall design constraints, the regulatory stuff, getting all that together if they don't have a PRD, that's the moment. I love a founder who knows who the next audience is. And anybody who says, we want to take it from this pile of parts to our first product, and we wanna get to revenue by such and such a date.
Rob:That scares me because they're missing a lot in between. My favorite founders either become my favorite because they listen and they learn about the things that I view as really important, not just me, but other smart people who've been around for a while, or come and say, our goal is to go to a product over here, but we need to reach this milestone. We need to get all of these parts volumetrically in a place where we can do CG testing for ISO thirteen four eighty five. And I'm like, that's my founder. And often that requires somebody with product development experience or somebody on their team with PD experience and influence, and the founder has a willingness to listen.
Rob:So I think those ingredients on the client side. To be a good client does not just require a cool idea in a checkbook. That's a start. To be a great client, you've got a real responsibility in an SOW. So our SOWs, any SOW that I've ever written, highlights, like, clients' responsibilities.
Rob:These are the things we expect. These are the materials we need. We understand that these roles are being filled by these people, and they will be accountable, responsible, etcetera. Does that begin to
Chris:It does.
Rob:Get out of it, Chris? We could do a whole podcast on it too, probably.
Chris:Yeah. Maybe, Nate and I, we could do some, like, therapy session on projects that didn't work out.
Nate:Yeah. You know, I'm glad you were asking those questions about characteristics for founders, Chris, for anyone who's in the audience because I do feel like a lot of the people that are listening to this are gonna be probably pretty early stage founders. Right? Like, probably pre a, maybe even just in pre c, maybe just completely bootstrapped. Then that
Rob:obsession for validation needs to include market validation. Right? Of course. Yeah.
Nate:101100%. Right? Those founders, when they hear someone saying, like, before we even start talking about the engineers, we've got all these three managers that we've also gotta have on the line items for it. Right? That just sounds really, really expensive.
Nate:So I guess one question I would have is, Tactile Pensar, when you when you were working with them, what stage companies were they usually working with? And we can think about that in terms of what they've fundraised, but also in terms of their maturity or where they usually in terms of their maturity.
Rob:Yeah. They're quite different. Example of where Pensar would often take this. PRD and MRD are probably together. There might be some wet paint, but they've got core technology demonstrated.
Rob:Now they are thinking about crossing the chasm to product, and there's a lot of engineering to happen to take the idea of an Xbox that we pick this silicon to actually get it under the Christmas tree is the art of Pensar. Tactile meets somebody at quite a different stage. Often, it's much earlier. I've got an idea. PRD, we don't know what the requirements are.
Rob:We think we know the juicy center of the technology or what the device is, but there's still a ton to be discovered. That was a breath of fresh air having come from Pensar where the Christmas tree example is they're unyielding schedules. So incredibly challenging trade offs. Tools have to get cut, nothing has to ship with unyielding schedules, particularly in consumer electronics. In design, much earlier, there's more breathing room.
Rob:Doesn't make it any easier or less intense or important, but it's just a completely different phase. I really did enjoy that. Tactile's best clients are pretty well established and often have their own design groups, which is a little bit of a surprise. Some of their longtime clients have great design groups in them. And Tactile has some particular superpowers, including CMF, color material and finish is an acronym that should roll off the tongue of anybody in mechanical or industrial design.
Rob:Tactile calls it color, material, finishing graphics, and it's an absolute superpower. So special editions for Xbox. Like, if your kid to have a Minecraft Xbox, you can send your grievances to Tactile. They design tons of those kinds of special editions. They do it for lots of other companies too.
Rob:You should have them on so that they can name drop their clients. But when it comes to UX, it's almost always going to be along with physical hardware development. There's an HID, and the digital UX is part of an overall experience, and that's a real superpower for them, that confluence of physical and digital. It's often well established companies with an early idea for a product, and it needs definition. And then sometimes is, here's version one.
Rob:We need to get to version two, and here
Nate:are our objectives. So Tactile's still working on the front end. They're still doing a lot of you know, those early pieces, but it does still tend to be like a more mature organization. But it sounds like those edges that they have with graphics and CMF and probably just their design language, right, and their aesthetic, that's what keeps them coming back even to these orgs that have really killer internal design groups. Yeah?
Rob:Absolutely. And some of the big names in town, they've got great design groups, and they still tap Tactile because Tactile has certain superpowers, and, also, they're so reliable. When you hire Tactile, you know you're going to have a design that's measurably better.
Nate:They did a beautiful work.
Rob:Gorgeous work. I miss it there already.
Nate:It's kinda
Rob:hard to speak about them in the past tense.
Nate:That's all very fresh. We'll we'll talk about what you what you're doing soon, but you kinda opened the door to talking about Washington and the Seattle Metro Area since I know that's Yeah. Where you've been working the longest. You just mentioned, like, you know, the great teams in town. Every time I meet someone in Seattle, they're like, have you met Rob?
Nate:I'm like, of course I've met Rob. Know, we'll we'll get you to speak at a hardware meetup as well. That'll be the that'll be the next But now that you're going off on your own and you're building your own client base and you're wearing a bajillion hats, I imagine that ecosystem and that network that you've built within Seattle is a big part of it. Are most of your clients and the work that you're
Rob:finding as you're going independent, local? Or I'm yeah. So I started a company called Vector7. Quick story on the brand is if you're anywhere in the universe and you wanna navigate, there's forward, backward, up, down, left, right. Those are the six directions.
Rob:North, south, east, west, up, down. The seventh vector in Vector7 is within. Don't forget to return home. Don't forget to come back to yourself. And the the inward journey is as important as navigating the external world.
Rob:So that's kind of the origin of the brand. I'll do some consulting. I'm doing work for cancer research analytics and biostatistics right now. That's away from hardware and product development. That's kind of a passion project.
Rob:But an entity that I can do that. But I'm also a manufacturers rep, has a line card of manufacturers. I've got relationships with the ecosystem, not just here in the Pacific Northwest, other places in the country as well, including informal. But I'm building a line card of these firms, Teague, Fresh Consulting, and a bunch of others. I don't think I wanna rattle them all off here.
Rob:But I'll have as many as 30 agreements where I'm not just trying to get a referral fee, but I'm gonna play an important role in consulting with early stage founders who are looking for market validation, technology validation, risk reduction, r and d. I'm a good guy to have around because I'm connected to the entire ecosystem. If I understand your problem well enough, I'll say, oh, Fresh Consulting. Well, let's go talk to Jeff or let's go talk to Chad Brigherhoff who runs their internal PD group. Chad, by way, was the managing director of engineering alongside me at Pensar.
Rob:So while I ran PD and Smallest world in the world. Small world. So if I've got a client who needs embedded systems firmware, e e, and they need a UL box build shop, I'll be thinking through my mind and be like, Fresh has a UL box build shop, and, oh, this company's in Bothell. Fresh is nearby. I can triangulate a specific need and then walk him in the door, high fives and hugs with Chad, introduce him to my client, and then I get to sit both sides of the table.
Rob:I can help Fresh understand the needs of the client, make sure that they are not missing a thing. And then I can help the client understand how to be a really good customer of a consulting firm. Chris, you were asking what makes a great customer. Sometimes they need a birdie to whisper into the ear how to be awesome as a client. What parts of the team are they missing to be a good client of a company like Fracture, Symplexity, or Andrews Cooper?
Rob:So, yeah, I'm gonna play that role. I'm gonna help especially early stage companies or companies doing r and d, many of them in dual use, some in aerospace, make anything happen. And now I'm no longer limited by the capabilities of an employer. I'm limited by the capabilities of physics.
Nate:Well, and I I love how you're almost consulting on both sides now. Right? Like, you're obviously helping to match
Rob:I am.
Nate:The companies with these firms, right, or with the individuals, but then you're staying involved as a coach on both sides. Not coach. That's probably the wrong word. You're But you're helping me.
Rob:I'm I'm kind of a coach at CREB. I'm a CTO at Gloam Studios. I'm technical architect at Laced Gaul. You know, I play the right role in the right company.
Nate:I'm glad you just said that because I wanna go back to the hats now. You just rattled off a bunch of the hats, and they all are very different. How are you handling all the context switching? How are you managing your time?
Chris:Well, Nate's asking because he's struggling with that himself.
Nate:No. I actually have figured out a good system for myself, but I don't have an art practice, for example. So how are you how are you juggling all that?
Rob:Well, you mentioned juggling. I'm a juggler. Oh my god. It's another thing. Gunk.
Rob:It's another thing. Oh, yeah. I'm a decent juggler. Anyways, juggling, it's a great analogy because when you're first learning to juggle, everything is happening all at once, and you can't imagine finding the space to do anything else. When you get better at juggling, you find that there's tons of space to do all kinds of tricks, to add other patterns, to throw from different angles, to speak while you're juggling.
Rob:So there's a capacity that I've built that I'm I'm proud of, and it's not limitless. I have a four year old. I have beautiful wife. I've got art practice. I've got all these things going on.
Rob:And I wouldn't say that I'm the best at finding balance, but I do find a way to get it all done. Not having a full time job helps a lot, mate. I've been gainfully employed.
Nate:But you were juggling all these things when you did have the full time job. Is it just, like, ruthless prioritization? Or, like
Rob:Yeah. It's ruthless prioritization matched with, I will only give you my highest valued time and not much more. When I had the job at Tactile, I mean, I was with CRAB, cancer research analytics and biostatistics. It was like twelve hours a year. I'll meet you for one hour a month, and I'll be ready for it, and we will go through what's going on in your world and so really high value, low time.
Rob:I was on the board of Glom Studios and became their CTO. It was just an idea of a company coming together, and so we would meet at night, like, once a week. Mhmm. Part of the impetus for my time at Tactile coming to an end is Lace Golf is starting to take off. We're entering tooling and compliance and planning on shipping July, August.
Rob:Lace is looking like it's going places. That's gonna take more of my time. Not having a job was the important ball to set down, not drop, but set down. Right. Because it would have been untenable to do it all.
Rob:So it created the space.
Nate:And when you say your CTO, we just spent a long time talking about you as a managing director, as a BD guy, as someone who obviously technical in building email systems Yeah. But CTO for an IoT company. What does that entail? Because Chris is also a CTO, but you're a different flavor of that. I'd love to kinda unpack that.
Rob:I I'll start with Lace Golf where I think they call me founding technical architect or something. They're creating space by, I think, partially my request to hire a CTO because I had a job at Tactile. I wasn't gonna be your full time CTO, but Adam Weil, who was a software provider for Laced Golf, before they met me, they had engaged on the contract, and they were starting to think about how to build the software ecosystem. And Adam very astutely said, this has got some serious hardware stuff to it. Do you know Rob Leonard?
Rob:Can I introduce you to Rob? So that conversation began, and I didn't love their patent. I take it left a lot to be desired with their thesis. They wanted to aim and be able to set up your feet for a golf shot. Right now, the state of the art is a stick.
Rob:And so I put them down on the course of IMUs. I said, I think you can take quaternions out of an IMU and get them down into Euler vectors and, you know, at least now have angular stuff. And after you get pointed in the right direction, then you have accelerometers and the rest of the quaternions to learn all kinds of neat stuff about the dynamics of the golf shot. And so I became co inventor with that advice and held the lantern on the ecosystem. How are we gonna get prototypes built?
Rob:Where can we get this stuff machined? What are our priorities? How do we ruthlessly prioritize to use that in this context? What is our MVD? That's a Robism, a minimum viable demonstration.
Rob:Not MVP. I'll probably I don't know if I'll write a book about this, but MVD, I'm passionate about this. I'm surprised I haven't mentioned it earlier. So what is MVD varies wildly, but it's a good q and a with your stakeholders. Like, what is the next thing that we need to do?
Rob:Well, we need to take this idea that was on a whiteboard of using IMUs and Euler vectors and line up a damn golf shot. We need to build that main thesis and write down the algorithms and implement it in code and start seeing it to understand latency that there's a huge list of risks that we need to start retiring. And so what do we need to do? We need to find a dev board or go find somebody who's got an IMU and a radio cooked up that we can start strapping issues and start goofing off and writing code. And so I did something very similar to informal.
Rob:In fact, if I were to do this again, I'd probably just reach for the informal button. But I reached into my own network and got a software person, got a firmware embedded systems, and just freaking figured it out. The thesis worked. Now NPD reached. Now there's a new NPD.
Rob:What's the next thing? Well, now MBD goes from hardware. We've proven the math works. We've proven the hardware works. We did it on a single sided board.
Rob:We know volumetrically about where we could get. Now the next MBD is digital. Let's see what we can do volumetrically and do some better than first order industrial design and then do some three d prints and do some user testing. So we can use real hardware alongside some three d prints and some renders and start getting market validation. So then we did Instagram ad, etcetera.
Rob:So that is kind of, you know, co inventor plus really holding the lantern and teaching two founders who were golf buddies with a hell of an idea. Mhmm. I loved their business, but I didn't like their technology approach and guide them every step of the way. And so as a result, I get a little bit of stock and take a little bit of my time and hold the lantern. That's that one.
Rob:Well, and we got another one.
Nate:You know? And, Chris, as someone who is a fractional CTO, right, I would just love to hear kind of, like, your experience with it as well. Yeah.
Chris:Well, I think the role of CTO is around prioritizing the strategy of technical execution. Mhmm. So you don't need to be technical necessarily, but it sounds like Rob's been around enough really competent technical people that he probably does it better than most folks with the title today. Like, in a lot of cases, I know enough to know that I don't know enough about a certain topic. But in other rooms important skill.
Chris:But in other rooms, I'm the literal expert. So you have somebody who will self identify not as an expert being the expert in the room, and that oftentimes is a really valuable person to have because at least you can help point the group in the right direction. So I'm not surprised Rob's the CTO because Yeah. Not everyone who gets that title necessarily has the same path or an engineering degree.
Rob:Yeah. I'll pull on that thread. My role as CTO at Galome Studios is understanding this incredible ecosystem, knowing what good looks like, and agreements, and putting together teams to tackle things like f one and a company called Aguiena that's doing really neat stuff in Barcelona, International Museum of Dance, which doesn't exist yet, but building cool experiences for an eventual museum in San Francisco. Hugely diverse clients and diverse technological challenges to overcome, many of them PD and developing objects. So you need somebody who can choose which direction to go, have a network to do that.
Rob:So my role as CTO is, I won't write a line of code. It's not like I'm spinning up firmware and stuff like that. I build those teams, and I know exactly what needs to get done and work with our ecosystem to make it happen.
Chris:And if you can speak to a large language model, you've got 95% of the product already done yourself.
Nate:Are you using AI in your process, Rob?
Rob:I work a lot with AI in my process. I've got LLMs built for each of my clients, and, I think they're just called LMs. Right? They're not large language models. They reference large language models.
Rob:They're just LMs. That's another podcast. I use a lot of AI in my workflow.
Nate:Are you a Claude person, OpenAI person, or are you
Rob:using a Claude person? Models. I spread it around a little bit, but I find myself using Claude more and more partly because of the momentum of using it, but also philosophically, it it feels like there's no great company out there, but Anthropic feels like it fits the bill mostly. I spin up a lot of cloud projects.
Nate:Well, you are technical, actually, and I think your art is a really great demonstration of that. Can you talk a little bit about your art practice and what you're doing there?
Rob:Yeah. Well, helped start a little company called Mathscaper. Math like the subject in skulls, scaper like somebody who makes stuff. So Mathscaper was born in my mind around the age of 13. I had a little misunderstanding with recursion and specifically Julia set recursions.
Rob:I was in a hurry a lot, so I took shortcuts and I skimmed a lot of materials. So through that, I ended up seeing Julia sets as three-dimensional. Talked to my math teacher about it, who told me I was just dead wrong. Pre algebra, by the way. But I wouldn't let it go.
Rob:I was seeing these three-dimensional fractal geometries, but Julia said, it's completely planar. I was obsessed. So I just kinda held it with me. Some ideas we have, it's just there. It'd be nice to do, but not that important.
Rob:And then there are some ideas that are like splinters. And at some point, it's gotta come out. This was one of those splinters. So I would talk to anybody who would listen. When I would talk to them, they would tell me that's impossible, and you can't make them.
Rob:They're infinitely complex. And I was teenager and then in my twenties and then in my thirties. I kinda stopped talking about it. Then I found myself working at Pensar. Now I'm surrounded by incredible minds, and I just ran it by somebody that I trusted.
Rob:Hey. I I have an idea. Do you think it would be possible? And they were like, yeah. I think you could do that.
Rob:You could burn a hell of a lot of machine time, but, yeah, why not? Go for it, man. And so that was an initial nudge. And so I bought a CNC. I met somebody named Tyler Martin, and, he said, I'm a mathematician.
Rob:I work at Tableau. I'm a visual site you know, data visualization scientist. And he said, yeah. I think we could do that. And three or four days later, I got a text from him saying, check your email.
Rob:He did a Julia set in three d. He did a couchie convergence, and I'm spinning around a point cloud. And so we started a company. I knew I probably needed to raise money because I couldn't say, hey, honey. I need to go we need to buy a $500,000 building and a couple $100,000 of equipment and software.
Rob:Alex Kamara entered the fray, actually, at Burning Man, late night talking. He said, we should go into business together. And I walked him through the whole thing. He said, I don't understand everything that you just said, but I'm in. Let's talk about it when we get home.
Rob:So we started late in 2019, bought a CNC, parts arrive in January 2020. Oh, boy. And you know what happens next. Oh, I know. And
Nate:it was in Seattle first. City. Right?
Rob:It was like the epicenter. Sarah and I think that we had COVID in January. She got so sick and was having to use her inhaler, which is just something for emergencies. And and and she we lived and worked in Kirkland, and which is where it was first reported at at the nursing home. Anyway, so Our calendars cleared up.
Rob:And so Mathscaper was born, and our first exhibition was in the Holter Museum, kind of also helped by the pandemic. So don't ask for advice on how to run an art business. I still don't know what the hell I'm doing, but we've been in three museums and been, you know, shown in front of millions and millions of people. It's a hoot. But the basics of it are
Nate:It's big. Right? Like, how about the scale of it?
Rob:Yeah. The piece we showed at Pioneer Courthouse Square had just been in the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and Museum. It's a model of a gallium nitride crystal. Now let's back up. I was laying in bed, and we model what's called eton dew, which is if you take a volume of the crystal lattice structure of an emitter, like a laser or an LED, it's not a single point that all of the photons originate from.
Rob:It's the volume. Even though the LED or the laser diode is really small, you have to think of it as a volume because photons come throughout the lattice and exit in four pi stradiate in in any direction. So we always use straight lines, of course, but I had this weird dream. I wonder what the interference pattern of these photons behaving as waves would look like within the crystal lattice structure. So I wake up, and my wife says, write it down.
Rob:She knows me well. She said, write it down. And I did. So I wanted to model the constructive and differ destructive interference patterns of photons inside the crystal lattice structure of gallium nitride, and I got a little help to do that in Houdini from my friend Kyle Ham. It was exquisite.
Rob:It was gorgeous. It was beautiful. And so I made a sculpture. And, actually, the final geometry that is love transceiver came because Kyle was helping me, and he's using a number keyboard. And the whole thing was made out of hexagons.
Rob:It was the knowledge of a cube octahedron. And he fat fingered a three instead of a six, and he'd built the thing procedurally. And the whole cube octahedron showed up made out of triangles instead of hexagons, but all of the vertices were still there. And we've searched high and low. That is a novel geometry never been seen before, and it's wild.
Rob:Go check it out. We'll include, Lane.
Nate:It it it was pretty wild to look at. Yeah.
Chris:So it was just a happy accident.
Rob:Yeah. The final geometry of the thing being made out of triangles instead of hexagons. I had built another cubactahedral sculpture called fundamental vibration on these same ideas, but I was taking it a step further and then fast figuring it at three and turned into left transceiver. And it it's a wild shape. It's really wild.
Chris:I was looking at it. I was like, what is that? Because I'm like, oh, this is very your brain follows it like, oh, I've seen this before, and then you're just like, what is that?
Rob:Nobody has ever seen it before. And it also shares the structure of a gallium nitride crystal. And so Mathscaper's mission is to express the beauty of mathematics and science through art for all. And it's just there's so much beauty in this universe and in science and in math. I could make a new art piece every day and never have started.
Rob:Yeah. And you basically do.
Chris:I saw there's an accessibility element to this, and and I didn't really can I would love to just have you talk about that because I feel like we take for granted our eyes, and in a lot of cases, folks don't either have them or they're not functioning like they used to?
Rob:Wow. I'm so glad you brought that up. Yeah. I got invited to build a piece of art for a show honoring a blind artist, And the show was gonna be made of art from other alter abled some people with all kinds of disabilities, including blindness, contributed to this artist. So I was the one very able artist in the show, but the curators of the show asked me to do something because my work is so tactile and because my friend Chris before I worked at Tactile, I made that tetrahedron.
Rob:I don't know if you'll find it on my Instagram. It's the tactile fractal tetrahedron. But I had shown Chris
Nate:got you the job. It was meant to be. Yeah.
Rob:Chris, who's blind, came over to my house, and I had a huge Julia set that was 12 feet wide and eight feet tall integrated in our TV room. And he was able to experience it. He sat down and stick and was just kinda up against the wall experiencing it. And that that, Chris, opened up my eyes to the accessibility of my work. There's a point where you don't want people to touch your work.
Rob:Generally, as an artist, my work begs to be touched. It is so touchable. In fact, at the Holter Museum, we were the first exhibit ever to have the sign, please touch. And my own work inspired that tactile fractal tetrahedron, which was made to honor a blind artist, then led me to deepen my friendship with Chris. He's blind.
Rob:Guy does acrobatics and acro yoga. And Oh, wow. He blindfolds the people that he does acro with him and has this incredible anyway, burning man on their Instagram featured Chris recently. He's been in an Alexa commercial. He's a really cool dude.
Rob:But, yeah, I found accessibility as part of my art as a result of my friend Chris coming over to visit, and it just became so clear. And so we endeavor in all of our work to make it extremely accessible and touchable. Tactile fractal tetrahedron doesn't sit on the ground. It sits up a little bit so that your toes, if you're in a wheelchair, can get under it so you can get right up close and touch it. It's something I put in the all of our work.
Nate:I love it. I also love that your artwork involves math, but it's also involving lighting. And I just there's this through line throughout your entire career of all these passions that you've pursued, and it's cool to see these things all congeal into these next chapters for you. I think that's really awesome. Chris, sorry.
Nate:I kinda jumped in right when he had answered the No.
Chris:Was I think the origin story for the artwork is fantastic. I'll have to get out there so I can actually see and touch the sculptures.
Rob:I've got my well, my wife is the thank for this. She says yes to so many crazy things. Like, let's go buy a house that has a huge shop and a crane, and the house is really cool. It's just like, yes. Let's go.
Rob:I couldn't do this without her, so super grateful. Yeah.
Nate:Good partners. Right? Your wife, but also the partners along the way that you've worked with. It sounds like that's been a big part of what's opened the doors. Absolutely.
Nate:One of the things we always like to ask is, are there books, articles, or content that you would recommend someone who's early in their career as a hardware founder, someone who's maybe aspiring to start their own hardware development agency, or someone who wants to develop their own art practice?
Rob:I'm gonna give one book, and I think it applies unilaterally. The creative act by Rick Rubin, producer for so much music that you know and love and an incredible individual.
Nate:Fantastic beard.
Rob:Philosopher. Yes. And it's a great and it's a great beard and no hair. But the creative act by Rick Rubin. In that book, it really talks about being open to diffuse thinking and allowing ideas to come from anywhere without judgment, anyone, anywhere, including yourself and from anywhere within yourself.
Rob:Highly recommend it. And then what to do about an idea and your responsibility to as an artist or as a creator to get it out there. And then remember who it's for. One thing I learned in that book is not making art for anybody else. You know?
Rob:The answer to is it good enough is one you can only ask yourself. Now at some point, I pushed back on that because somebody's gotta wanna buy it, but he would argue no. If you're doing it for somebody else, then it's a product. It's not art.
Nate:It's been on my list for a while, so I'll have to check that out. I think that's a great recommendation.
Chris:Not the first time that book has been mentioned on this podcast.
Rob:Oh, really? I think really when who else mentioned it?
Chris:I think Sarah.
Nate:Well, then I guess we just gotta read it. Yeah. Let's go. Let's do it. Maybe do a reading group next.
Nate:Hey, Rob. How do people stay in touch with you? How can they follow along with what you're doing?
Rob:Yeah. I'm Rob at Vector seven dot com for my consulting practice, early stage companies, folks that want me to hold the lantern, I'd be thrilled to talk to, and Mathscaper on Instagram, Rob at lacedgolf.com, and then Rob at Gloam Studios, gloam,studios.com.
Nate:Well, this was really, really fun. Thank you so much for for doing this with us. Thanks. Wealth of knowledge.
Chris:I'm not surprised given Rob's background.
Rob:I'll credit my own affability. I've made a mark a couple of places.
Chris:TRADEOFFS is hosted and produced by Chris Rill and Nate Padgett, editing done by the illustrious Alex Michael. Our logo is designed by the talented pixel alchemist, Tanya Shica. If you'd like to be a guest on the show, reach out to us on our website
Rob:at tradeoffs.fm.
Chris:If you made this far, please rate and subscribe to the pod. Nate and I appreciate your support.
