 I want to start by telling a story. I was in New York exactly 10 years ago for a similar gathering of techno-optimists. And it was called the Open Hardware Summit. And this group is still around. They still have meetings. But 2012 really stands out as an important moment for this community. There were lots of entrepreneurs, Aya Badir, who started Little Bits, was sharing her designs and raised a bunch of money for her company. She was actually at this conference yesterday. Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, was there and had started his 3D robotics drone company and was very excited about the possibilities of open hardware, taking the ideas of open source, that the open source software community was developing, and applying that to hardware in the real world. The highlight of the weekend was Brie Pettis, who got on stage and announced that their new MakerBot replicator was no longer going to be open source. They were going closed. And this kind of sent the community into kind of like a shock wave and started this kind of civil war. It wasn't so serious, but it was a real harbinger of things to come. We were there. My friend Eric and I had started a company, a project, sharing open source underwater robot designs. And we ran into a lot of the same problems that Brie did. It's trying to mix the ethos of open source with the realities of supply chains and venture capital and needing to capitalize a factory. It was a really tough balance. And for a lot of us, it didn't work out. We had some success, but it's kind of a long story. At that moment, what we were thinking was all we had to do was be transparent, share our designs, and add version control. That turned out to not be enough. And we know it wasn't right because we have the counterfactual. We have Raspberry Pi, which was this microcomputer that said, we just need to be small, we need to be cheap, and we need to have lots of GPIO. This needs to be a small modular tool. They really listened to their community and really focused on what they had to do, ignoring the kind of the larger dogma that we were creating in the open hardware community. And they had a lot of success, they still do. And I bring all of that up, because I think we're in a similar moment here, where a lot of the really exciting and interesting ideas that are happening in the web 3 space are trying to crawl out of the metaverse and into the real world. Like crypto cities, decentralized societies, Deci, I saw that yesterday, Solana announced that they're going to make a mobile phone. I think we're kind of at that same place we were 10 years ago. And I think there's a lot that we learned that would be applicable now. The reason we gathered 10 years ago is really the same reason that this group is gathering here. It's this kind of belief that the technology commons is at least as important as technology companies, that the things we build and design and share with the world are just as important as the products and services we provide. The history of standards are really strong. We're talking about it's not just open source software, it's not just the internet. We're talking about containers. We're talking about time. There's a really strong history of techno cooperation being an important driver of progress. And I have this kind of working thesis that standards movements are actually the foundational driver of techno scientific progress. But it's a story that not too many people know, the long story of standards making. Most people, when I bring up standards, this is what they think of this XKCD comic. Has anyone seen this comic? Yeah. Yeah, almost everybody. And everybody rolls their eyes and they think standards, committees like boring stuff. I want to change your mind about that, hopefully. So this book, I have to recommend it. It's called Engineering Rules. It was written by Joanne Yates and Craig Murphy. And it's the global history of standard setting for the past 150 years. Highly recommended. They talk about standards as an entirely different realm, different than commerce, different logic than politics. I really like this framing. Standards is such a wide variety of things. We have been talking with people about it this week and we're talking about the pasteurization levels in milk and then we're talking about unicode and emojis. It's a huge swath of things that exist. But I think they can be divided into these taxonomies. So Yates and Murphy write about steam boilers. These river boats were blowing up in the 1800s far too often. So they got together to create these safety standards for steam boilers. You think about interoperability. You think about screw threads. Before the 1900s, they were all screws and nails and everything was different. The movement to standardize screw threads was wildly productive for just about everyone who was using them. There's also such things as performance standards. So they talk about the steel manufacturers getting together and creating some performance benchmarks that they all wanted to meet. And this is how they ended up winning the contracts over iron to lay all of the railroads. So this kind of performance standard can help facilitate commerce. And then of course there's contractual standards, which Yates and Murphy don't mention, but I think are really important ideas. They have been important in web three, but they're also important like the common app or the safe note has really transformed early stage investment. Standards are things, they're rules, but they're also processes. And Yates and Murphy go through the three waves of standards. And each of those movements had different ways that standards actually came into the world. The first was kind of de facto, like the new screw thread, they just went out there and convinced everybody and they made it happen. The second wave was really voluntary consensus based, which saw the rise of these big international standards groups. And the most recent with the rise of computers and networking has been this kind of disruptive mode of standards making. So like the QWERTY keyboard is a de facto standard. They just made this for the first typewriters and it has pretty much stuck. I know there's other people who have different hopes and dreams about this, but we don't need to go into that. The container was something that went through the international organization of standards. ISO, there was a lot of discussions about what size container would work, but intermodal transportation had proven to be more effective. Eventually this big international group settled on the 20 foot TEU container and the 40 foot TEU container. ARPAnet really changed things. This was the first, I would say disruptive standard. ISO was working on a standard, ITU was working on a computer networking standard, but the group at ARPA just got something working. I mean, this is where we get the phrase rough consensus and running code. They just proved that it worked and then invited everyone else to be a part of it. And I think thinking about this, how you should go about making a new standard is you really should sit down and think about who the stakeholders are. What's holding all of them back? And then what's the goal? Do you need safety? Do you need performance? Do you need interoperability? Think about what is the right type of standard to help move that community forward and then really think about what's the appropriate standards making process. Maybe it is de facto, maybe you can just do it, but maybe you really need to take a disruptive approach and have a strong go to market isn't the right term because we don't even have terms for go to market for standards making. We're still in the very beginning of understanding this. And then the last thing is prototype prototype prototype. So what's becoming more and more true is the things that work end up working. And so I don't think this is a wait and spend a lot of time in committee thing. I think this is a build thing. Couple examples, so the CubeSat was developed by two professors, one at Stanford and Cal Poly and they wanted to create a way for their students to be able to launch experiments into space. And so they grabbed a beanie baby box and said, okay, this is the right size, 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. And they created the P pod launcher so they could piggyback off NASA launches and other launches. And they created this design and this has been important for their students to launch their experiments into space but it's also turned out to be a wonderful prototyping platform for companies, companies like Planet, companies like Spire. This small compact way for them to actually hitch a ride to space proved to be really important and it continues to be really important standard. But it was started by two people without much resources. So it shows you that idea of a disruptive thing starting on the periphery and changing an entire industry. We're trying to do this now for oceans. So having worked on it for 10 years, this is, there's a strange bottleneck which is the connectors between sensors and platforms. So we're trying to build the USB for the ocean and we're trying to do it with interoperability and performance in mind. We're doing this with experiments. So thinking about a contractual open standard, experiments been around for 10 years. They've honed this open grant proposal design through crowdfunding. But I've been taking that model and trying to figure out how that contractual standard could be a better bridge for science funders and scientists. And the thing that really seems to be working and we were just talking about this in the session is this idea of science angels of just giving scientists budgets and letting them quickly bet on each other. And we've got quite a few of these, more than 10 science angels going on our site right now. You can check them out experiment.com slash grants. And to give you a better sense of how that works, it's a foundation writes a grant to the experiment foundation and we hold a budget for a scientist to quickly, you know, in a matter of weeks, bet on projects that they know, that they like, that they think are promising. So this to me is really decentralized science, moving the decision making further out to the scientists at the periphery so they can make bets on each other. I think that's really important. I'm really impressed with the molecule platform that's come up a number of times here. I think they're doing standards making right and that they're really sitting with this idea of how do we connect investors, in this case the DAOs like VitaDAO and PsiDAO, how do we create a new contractual standard that connects those investors with scientists in a way that's productive for all of them. They're spending a lot of time trying to get this right and I think that's absolutely the right way to build a new standard. So I'm talking about this history and putting this all in context because I think this is important. We didn't do this 10 years ago at the Open Hardware Summit. We didn't think about how the work that we were doing fit into this long story of techno cooperation and it's a rich history and I'm actually quite convinced that tokenization and crypto economics actually do represent a kind of fourth wave of standards innovation but to really be successful, to really move out of the metaverse and into the world, I think we have to be a part of a bigger story and so I encourage you all to think of yourselves as standards entrepreneurs or standardizers which I also think is a cute kind of name and I think we need to celebrate them. People like Bob Twig's at Stanford who created the CubeSat, we need to celebrate those kinds of standards makers even when they're in different corners of the world and I think we need to build an ecosystem of support. For the ones that I've been involved in, it's very rare to get support to prototype and build and design new standards. I think this conference, this discussion that we're all having about building these tools is a wonderful first step but just think about all the resources that are available to you if you're starting a company, all the accelerators, the books, the blogs, the investors, there's so much infrastructure for starting companies. I think we need a similar push to create infrastructure for standards entrepreneurs and new standards including celebrating standards adopters because I think the early adopters of standards are equally important as the people who start them. If you take nothing away from this talk, I hope that the next time that you see this comic, this XKCD comic about standards that you don't roll your eyes, that you don't think, oh God, another standard, that you think, all right, we've got another person who's in the standards game, we've got another standards entrepreneur who's digging in and doing the great work of techno cooperation, so thank you very much.