 Everyone, I hope you're back from the break. Jerry Elsworth is an inventor. She's the CEO and co-founder of Tilt5 and she's also our next keynote speaker. Everyone, please welcome Jerry. Wow, it's such a joy to be here. I've used Linux and Unix most of my professional career and I'm proud to say now on my primary work machine now I have KDE installed and loving it. I don't know why it took me so long to move over to you guys. So I have a lot of slides to go through and not much time. It's going to be a little bit of a rambly story but I hope the key points that you'll pull out of this is look for mentors along the way because my life has been drastically improved because of mentors and people that have helped me along the way. So my background is pretty interesting. I grew up in rural Oregon. It was raised by my father who raised me by himself. He had a pretty lucrative professional career when I was born but unfortunately my mother passed away the first year after I was born and he had to give all of that up and move to this little farm out in Oregon to be closer to my grandmother. He tells stories of how agonizing it was when you'd have to go off on business trips. He'd give me to the babysitters and I would cry and wail and he'd come back five, seven days later and I bonded with the sitters and then I'd cry and wail like who's the stranger to picking me up and so he made some huge sacrifices to raise me and I really appreciate that and in fact he's my first and probably most important mentor in my life. So as a kid, I was super curious. I didn't like not understanding how things worked and at a super young age probably I guess like five or six old enough to sneak into my dad's workshop and get screwdrivers and pliers and stuff like that I started taking apart all of my toys. This was very frustrating for my father because you know toys are expensive and I was just dismantling them but I just had this innate curiosity like why does this thing blink and make noises? I had to know and that kind of curiosity has stuck with me my entire life. To kind of stave off and destroying all my toys I specifically remember there was a time when my father who at this point had sold everything moved to Oregon and had been working as an auto mechanic a low-paying job auto mechanic brought home a box of automotive light bulbs and some batteries and some duct tape and some wires and he showed me how to use tape to stick to batteries and to light up light bulbs and this was really amazing. I had so much fun with this but you know of course as a curious kid the first thing that you do is like here's a light bulb, here's a different light bulb so I took my gooseneck lamp, tipped it backwards and screwed the light bulb and took one of the automotive light bulbs and dropped inside and as you could imagine you know I fell backwards there were showers of sparks everywhere the circuit breakers in the house blew I was scared I didn't want to reveal it to my father but I couldn't hide it from him very long eventually he figured out that half the power in the house was blown out he gave me a bit of a scolding and turned it into a learning lesson about the dangers of electricity batteries are one thing but playing around with 110 volts is another thing but my desire to take things apart wasn't staved off with just a rack of automotive light bulbs I just had to know how everything worked and so I continued to take everything around me apart including I should probably tell my father about this some day I took apart some of his stuff and actually broke it and at this point I don't know I was probably six or seven my father had done a really bold move he had given up his job as an auto mechanic he'd scraped together enough money that he could buy or lease a gas station and repair shop across town and it was an interesting time for me because I remember we were struggling a lot at that point there wasn't a lot of money and we lived off of a lot of the food and the meat that we raised on his little amateur farm but it was a really magical time to watch him go through that struggle and he was very candid and shared it with me but one of the things that he did that sticks with me today and was such an amazing thing is he couldn't necessarily buy a lot of toys from me to take apart but he did put a box out in front of his gas station with a sign on it that said bring your broken electronics and put them in here and every like three or four weeks or so I'd get a random box full of broken electronics that I could just take apart and play with and it was the best toy ever I didn't know anything about what was going on inside but I was taking these things apart I would bend the little components back and forth and break the leads off and I was making little piles of resistors with no wires on them and capacitors with no wires and so much fun I mean of course there were some negative things that happened too I remember one time I took apart a tape deck and there's this thing called a capstan it's on this big metal circular thing and it's like a nail sticking up and it was sitting on the floor of my bedroom and my dad walked in with his bare feet and stepped on it he was not happy about that so there was another lesson to be learned there about clean up your room and don't hurt me never lets me forgive that I forget that even today so I got a little more advanced I started learning more about electronics playing with light bulbs and all these like components are soldered into these circuit boards and I wanted to get them out and so I discovered that I could take a AC wall transformer and hook it to a power transistor and it would get really really hot and when it would get really really hot it would melt the solder that holds the components in of course I was far too young to have a soldering iron I was 7 or 8 years old at this point probably and so I was secretly doing this in my bedroom when my father wasn't around and it worked quite well it was kind of smelly so I had to be careful one day I was trying to do this and my father walked in and he was not pleased at all and so he's like you know I'll teach you how to use a soldering iron and stop doing this let's teach you how to do it safely so at a very young age my father was open to letting me use potentially dangerous equipment and he got me a soldering iron and showed me how to use it and that was amazing the number of hours that I sat just pulling components out with a soldering iron it's staggering so at this kind of young age it was probably around I don't know maybe 1983 or 1984 somewhere in that time range we went to visit one of my friends of the family and they had a TI-994A computer and I had been seeing computers on movies for years and years and I was just enamored with them these magical devices that could do anything and so I begged our friends to let me play with a computer and I spent probably two hours just typing on the keyboard things like I didn't know how to program so I would just type like draw a house and it would say syntax error paint house syntax error but that didn't stop me I was just having a great time doing things with this computer on an old black and white television eventually we went back to the friend's house a few times and they brought out the programming book for it and said this is how you use it and one of my most fond memories of using a computer was the first time I entered several hundred lines of code and made what TI called it Mr. Bojangles dance on the screen he was this little block character that would just dance and his hands would move up and down I was completely hooked at that point so I started a full court press on my father to get me a computer and back in those days there weren't really computer stores around you could go to you'd go to the big box stores and living out in the middle of nowhere I was nine miles away from the closest town and we didn't have a big box store so it was probably like an hour to get into one of the bigger towns I was constantly begging my dad like let's go to Monkham Rewards or let's go to Sears so I can look at the computers and occasionally we would be making a trip and he would make a special stop by the computer and electronics section and back in those days the store displays were really primitive they didn't have any kind of software running to demonstrate them they were just a line of computers there was Atari's and Apples and Vic 20's and they were just set up sitting at basic prompts so you know I at this point I knew how to type things like 10 print hello go to 10 and I'd be like dad come look I'll write a program for you and super fun I know that he was struggling he was trying to get his business off the ground he couldn't really afford to do this but I just I really wanted one and he was he made it happen and what's funny is I wanted a Vic 20 because back in the day there was the Vic 20 and Commodore 64 the Vic 20 had really big characters on the screen so the letters were really big it was 22 columns versus 40 columns the super high resolution display of the C64 but that's what drew me in was it was the one with the biggest characters but fortunately for me he got me the Commodore 64 and the Commodore 64 was an amazing machine and many of you have probably used those as a child of the 80s but I think it was really interesting the way that he purchased this he purchased it and hid it in his bedroom in the closet and I caught him one time he didn't realize that I caught him but he had been unpacking it from the package and hooking it up to his television in his bedroom and trying to learn how to use it before giving it to me so you know I'm living with my father alone and I'm riding the bus going to school so a lot of times I'd come home you know he had to work until 6 or 7 o'clock at night at a service station so I had like 3 hours by myself so for probably a full month I would sneak in and I would take the computer out and the disk drive out and I'd hook it together and I would start playing with it and at the time we only had one diskette for it and I didn't know how to format the disks or do anything with them and it had some demo software on it and it had like a few blocks free of storage and I wrote a couple programs and filled the disk up before I even got a chance to that it was revealed to me so eventually my father gave it to me no special occasion it was pretty amazing I pretended that I was surprised we set it up in a common area and I started playing with it a bunch so he did go and buy me one video game cartridge, Donkey Kong I must have been talking about it he went out and got it for me and it was amazing to have a video game that I could play because we had no other software for it but that didn't satisfy me forever I was again a curious kid it didn't take me long to open the top and peek inside and then also I didn't have really a good concept of how electronics or eProm storage worked so I figured that this cartridge was just making electrical connections so I should be able to make the same electrical connections by sticking knives and forks into the cartridge slot and so I did that I would stick a knife into the fork into the cartridge slot and dig out and there would be all these colorful things happening on the screen and I was just sure if I poked it in the right way a video game would pop up so I ended up burning up two or three Commodore 64's and he had to send them off for repair or exchange they were probably under warranty at this kind of early stage I helped the demise of Commodore back in the day but I remember the day I came back after I'd broken it and he's like, yeah, those Commodore 64's are junk, they're not reliable so the guy at the store gave me this Commodore Plus 4 uh oh those of you that know Commodore the Plus 4 was not really a great gaming machine but that was okay I wasn't necessarily into games as much as I was into programming advanced version of basic with graphics routines and things that you could do with simple commands versus the Commodore 64 which was a lot closer to the metal so this was my computer for many years I was very very happy with it I learned a lot on it so probably one of the pivotal moments for me is my father bought me this electronics playground as a gift and this is where there was a big transition for me from not understanding electronics to starting to learn electronics I'm probably nine or ten at this point and these electronic kits were amazing they had a bunch of wires and a booklet with cute little cartoons and they told you how to hook these things together and you could make police sirens or you could make an AM crystal set radio or you could make the seven segment play like a dice game and I just endless hours of fun and learning with this it was such a great investment in my future and because I got into this I met a boy actually I should tell this story first so at this point I'm starting to learn a little bit about electronics and I have a step brother he didn't come around much today and occasionally he would show up he was much older than I was we didn't have the best relationship for various reasons probably because he was older and then I was always kind of probably taking care of a lot more by my father during these visits but I started to discover with three little components a transformer, a relay and a nine volt battery I could make an improvised taser and so I wired this thing together to generate a little taser device that would administer mild shocks and so you know my brother's giving me a hard time one day I run off I grab my taser and I zap him with it which he promptly ripped out of my hands and then started torturing me with it so it's like okay if I'm going to do this again I need to come up with a better plan so my plan was you know I'm going to hold on to the nine volt battery so if he tries to rip it out of my hands I'll have the battery and I can get away and so I had some other visit he comes by and I'm going to go tase him and I shock him and he grabs the transformer rips it out of my hand and it's success I have the battery in my hand and so he starts chasing after me and I'm running away and he takes this heavy transformer and throws it and hits me in the middle of the back you know listen learned you know just don't tase people it's just not a good idea even if you can disable the taser also because of that electronics kit I got into to radios quite a bit because they had a project where you could make a little transmitter and also in the junk bin at some point that my father was bringing home I got a short wave radio and this was really an amazing device for me the short wave radio in particular because it could pick up foreign broadcasts and it was this strange world of foreign broadcasts and you would hear Morse codes and all kinds of interesting things and it would fade in and out at different times of the day and I was just obsessed listening to it I think for me being a kid living by myself nine miles out of town with like no nearby friends it it made me feel a little bit less lonely knowing that there was this big world out there it was super fascinating and so also got into building these transmitters and I met a boy on the bus who was just a couple years older than me and he was also into electronics and also had one of these electronic kits and he was also interested in transmitting and so we started building little pirate radio stations and we would start we would meet up and we would count the number of phone poles from his house that we could hear the radio station on our little transistor radio on the AM band and then we would ride from my house and we would count phone poles and that's how we would compare each other's transmitter and it was kind of this war between us like one day he would like optimize his and go a little further and then I would build one a little bit more powerful and you know we were all we were doing this with like scrounged up hearts you know eventually you know we moved from using little small transistors to we started finding old tube radios at you know in garbage cans and stuff are sitting alongside the road and we started building bigger and bigger transmitters and at some point we built transmitters and it was so powerful that we'd ride for most of the afternoon we couldn't reach the end of our transmit range and that was when we switched to from the AM broadcast band to the FM broadcast band and we started having you know it's a little more difficult to broadcast on FM and it doesn't go as far and it's the same thing it was super delightful I had a trick though you know if Mike ever sees this I my bedroom is on the bottom floor of the house near where the phone lines came in and I found if I could wrap like 10 wraps of wires around the phone lines I could get extra distance and I think he never understood why every time we would kind of go under a phone pole my signal would get louder I'd say you know I didn't know what a mentor was at this time but even though Mike was just you know near near an age he was very much a mentor he was a little bit more skilled than I was and I started to learn this kind of you know if you can be excited with your mentor about what you're doing they'll give you lots of help and exchange and that's worked for me and helped me throughout my career and my entire life so around this time I was just so hungry for information about electronics I'd go to our old Carnegie library which was really small and it had like three books on electronics and I read them cover to cover like 20 times and they were probably books from like the 1940s really far out of date but I looked on to a couple gentlemen that came there they were hand radio operators and I got to know them they were very old compared to me I probably hadn't interacted with anyone that old before but I I got over my creeped out factor of talking to old dudes and we started talking about electronics and I found that they were a fantastic resource for me and they invited me over to their homes and one of them had like this shed outside back of their house and the inside the shed looked like this full of electronic gear and radio equipment and this is this is like dream for me all of this equipment and the ability to do things and here is another set of mentors that came into my life that really helped accelerate my skills and in fact those folks I wish they were still alive today I would go to them and thank them profusely for what they did but they started giving me really junky old equipment they gave me an oscilloscope they gave me voltmeters they gave me books and this was so critical being like 11-12 years old to have this information and it helped me start doing projects that were more advanced I started interfacing things to my computers like making sound digitizers I started making amplifiers for my pirate radios which they hated they're always offended by that but I think they also were happy that I was interested in radios but that was great it helped so much about this time I think I was 12, 13 or so my father you need to start working in the family business so after school I'd ride my bike over to my dad's gas station and in Oregon you can't pump your own gas into your car so you have to pump gas so first thing I started to do was pumping gas into people's cars as they came up learned how to make change and do all those kinds of things it was quite amusing I'm like 12 year olds how much gas would you want are you old enough to do this in most cases no but since you're a family member it's sketchy stuff like pump gasoline but he also made me do everything around the gas station like he would service vehicles changing oil swapping out cylinder heads lapping valves honing cylinders and he had me doing all of that stuff and it was such a great experience I learned so much at the time I maybe was a little grumbly that I had to go work every day after school instead of going home and playing with my computers but it turned out to that I learned so many skills and it was also hilarious too we had a hoist that would lift the cars up and I was so short that to drain the oil out of a car I had to lower it way down just to get to the plug and sometimes I couldn't get the plug loose through the filter off and my dad would have to almost crawl on his hands and he used to get under there to help me but this did one thing for me that was awesome and oh sorry I'm ahead of myself around the same time I really got into phone freaking back when there were landlines and people weren't walking around with cell phones we had these things plugged into the wall and you had to pay money to call a long distance and do things like that and I was forbidden to use the phone because my dad feared that I'd run up the phone bill so somewhere along the way I acquired a broken telephone fixed it ran wires like sneakily alongside the house kind of buried in the dirt to reach the phone connection and I took the bells out of the phone and had my own little phone and in fact actually the first phone that I ever was one that I made out of that electronics kit and I used the Morris code key to dial so for those of you that have ever seen a rotary dial phone when you dial a number it's actually pulsing it's making and breaking connections on the phone line and you can actually do the same thing with the Morris code key so I'd call my friends up on my electronics kit and I hated my friends that had a zero or a nine in their their phone number because you had to do nine or ten pulses to do it but at this time also I started learning about phone systems and I was super curious about them I learned a bunch of different things that you could do I had my friends convinced that I had complete control over the phone systems I made some circuits that would pick the phone up so fast if they tried to call me that it would immediately pick up before the ring tone was on their side and I hooked it up to a tape recorder where I could play back messages like this phone number has been disconnected and so I'd prank call them and they'd call me back and be like you call me back I'll just disconnect my phone line I can just do this because I'm so smart and also during this time I guess this is what I was getting at earlier is working at my dad's gas station gave me money so I could get more stuff and so I worked one summer and got a Commodore 128 which was amazing and I worked two full summers plus after school and got an Amiga computer so much fun I learned so much it's kind of funny is after I got the Amiga it was such a complicated computer I ended up probably using my Commodore 128 more this is also the time that I got into bulletin board systems I convinced my father I would be responsible with the phone and I got a modem and what an amazing time like pre-internet days you could go online you could get games and stuff a lot of them bootleg you know pirate but you could also go online to multi multi phone line bulletin boards and play games with people through doors or have chat and I did that for quite a few years now that I think back about it how sketchy that really was I mean there were times as soon as when I got my car that I would meet up with people of all ages for meetups and you know today you would never do that but back then I guess a simpler and more naive time so alright I'm a weird kid right I am into science of all types when I was a kid I built model rockets and launched them all the time and I ended up burning like two acres of grass because I launched a model rocket and it set a big fire and the other kids around school couldn't relate to who I was and so around junior high and high school I started getting picked on a lot like really bad emotionally tortured and physically tortured they spit on me they would write on my clothes it shoved me around and they just abused me because I was an easy target and I was a sensitive kid you know they could make me cry easily and so this went on and on and on into high school and I think it was my sophomore year I just like had enough one day there was this bully kid he tripped me when I was walking in the front of the class I was carrying this like big thick it was probably a math book or something I can't remember now but a thick one and I just lost it I just snapped internally and I just started clobbering him like you would throw a discus I just started smacking him across the head and he flipped out of his chair and I was just going ballistic on him and our school unfortunately you know I wasn't smart enough to like start beating this kid up not in front of teachers and we had the zero tolerance policy there so you know I just remember the teacher grabbed me by my arm and drugged me down the hall my feet probably didn't touch the floor two or three times as I went down to the school's office and got suspended for like four or five days you know I was pretty distraught about it you know my father he was pretty understanding he knew I was being picked on he often told me he'd give me pep talks he'd say things like hey you know you're tougher than them you're mentally tougher than them you know if they pick on you it doesn't really matter that I remember today and I think of this today when people like give me a hard time like online he's like you're stronger you're mentally stronger than them so if they're picking on you it doesn't matter and if they're picking on you they're leaving somebody else alone but that wasn't the case you know when you're like 15 or 16 years old suspended I come back and then all of a sudden there's this new respect for me in particular with the bad kids and you know I'm intelligent so I'm like hey you know if I hang out with the bad kids and they respect me then the bully jocks and the mean kids will leave me alone so I started going down this really really angsty teenager path I was the bad kid and my grades like started slipping I started failing grades getting held back getting in trouble it was very common for me to get hauled home by the police late at night because I was out past curfew you know I was I didn't feel good about myself and I actually channeled that into some unhealthy behavior like I was always like the one like hey let's climb this barbed wire fence and like go into this restricted area I don't care like you know much of my teen years and I was always looking for an edge that made me kind of a little bit more edgy you know I went through different phases like kind of a goth phase things like that I'm still working with my father at the gas station and he's super concerned about me he's given me a hard time he's like you know he's trying to give me some of the tough love stuff that wasn't particularly helpful saying things like you keep this up you're going to be face down dead in a ditch someday maybe he's right but you know lots of yelling and screaming and like a divide between me and my father growing at this point and but I was always looking for something really crazy and edgy and I remember briefly my father had done some kind of hobby racing on a dirt track and I thought that was really cool and at this point I had a car and some of my friends and I had a local race track that was pretty close and we'd watch this quarter mile dirt track racing and in the upper left hand corner that's what this looks like these really fast cars sliding around really close to each other that picture is not a picture of my me out there all the other pictures are of me so I came back after watching a couple of these and I'm like dad I'm going to build I want to race cars build me a race car and he's like no way you know it's too dangerous he's trying to protect me no I got to do this I got to do this I'm just so into it and I'm pestering and build me a car and finally after months and months he's like I'm not going to build you a car but if you can figure out a way to buy one or build one yourself that's the only way you're going to do this I'm like alright I really want to do this and so I started to come up with a scheme to do this I'm like well I'm not going to be able to afford to buy one these things are thousands and thousands of dollars so I'm going to build it so I started going to all the machine shops in town and talking to the machinists and telling them what I wanted to do and I found this one machinist Mr. Harder another mentor entering my life and he's like I'll teach you everything you need to know but you have to help me out and you have to work for me I want you to come in on Saturdays and work for me and I'll teach you some stuff that you need to know and so that's what I did I'd get up super early which I didn't like doing and I'd go into his machine shop and he would make me do all of the dirty work I'd have to climb around under the lathe and clean the chips out and oil the the gibbs and the ways and haul metal around I was just kind of slave labor labor for him in exchange he would take me to the side towards the end of the day and he'd grab a scrap piece of metal and teach me how to weld or he'd show me how to chuck something up in the lathe and bore holes or turn metal and it was amazing he was a funny character and I'd run into folks like this before and they they pretend to be grumpy when you do something wrong but actually inside they're kind of happy about it and once I figured that out I started feeling less bad about when I did things wrong for instance you know tapping holes in metal is difficult and then tapping holes in a lathe while it's spinning is even more difficult so he would let me make mistakes, drill a hole the wrong size he knew and I could kind of see it on his face as I was getting ready to like tap a hole and I'd run the tap in snap the tap off and he'd just like throw his hands up and just kind of make like some kind of like cost me money and I'd catch him kind of like smiling like yep you brat these are the lessons you need to learn and I'm really really grateful for him and out of that relationship I was able to start building this chassis and welding it together and part way through building this first chassis my father came around he's like alright you know I'll help you finish this thing and I want you to be safe and that was amazing you know my father and I had this big divide and we came back together and we worked on this race car and I learned a ton the first year that I went out to race I was convinced I would be the fastest race car driver of all time and I went out and I was like the absolute slowest racing cars does not come instantly you have to practice you have to have discipline you have to make sure your car is set up right the second year I got another mentor in my life this is another amazing situation there were books and stuff on how to set up race cars and I'd like bought these books and obsessed on them and there was a phone number in the back a sales number I found if I called that number I could actually it was just a kind of a small scale business I could actually reach the guy that wrote the book and I was constantly asking questions like how do you do this how do you get better and he's like you know if you just come out to Florida I'll put you up for a week or two and I'll teach you everything you need to know about racing you know pretty much quit calling me about all this stuff that's what I think it was and so I'm maybe like 17 years old at this time maybe 18 and I jump on a Greyhound bus and I drive across the United States and spend a week with this gentleman and his wife his name is Duke and what was interesting about that was that he told me all the basics like you know this how you adjust your shocks and cross weight and stuff in the car and that was helpful but he spent probably half the time or more talking about the psychology of racing and how to be a winner and that was interesting you know sometimes being a winner is not about having the best car being a great driver it's about winning the hearts over of your fans or winning the hearts over of the flagger at the track and anything you can do to do that is helpful and so I came back and you know took that to heart and I became very competitive I learned these little tricks things to get fans really excited about me for instance I would spend a lot of time in the audience talking to fans and kids in the audience and I started winning so many trophies I didn't care about these little plastic trophies anymore so then I would just give the trophies to the first kid I saw when I went into the grandstand and I became like this huge fan favorite and of course the flaggers the flaggers are there to make money by selling beer and nachos in the grandstand so they want happy customers and so you get a little extra favoritism if you are a favorite around the track so that was super awesome it was a great time of my life I started making so much money doing that I dropped out of high school my father was a little concerned about that but he now had these ambitions he thought he was trying to connect me with these pro racing teams out in North Carolina and stuff he thought it was going to be like this race car driver a pro so I did that for four or five years and it's not easy being a lady around the track it's rough it's a boys club or it was in particular back then so it was frustrating for me I didn't like the dynamics of it so one day I was visiting one of my high school friends and sitting in his man cave that he had built in his garage and in his garage he had a 486 computer so this is probably around 1995 and he's like this computer would be $1500 but I tricked a wholesaler into selling me the parts for wholesale prices and it only cost me like $700 to build it and at this point I had been building race cars and selling race cars and winning money I had completely turned into an entrepreneur at this point plus seeing my father be an entrepreneur helped too I'm like oh that's some great margin racing cars every single weekend I'm like how about I just sell off all my racing stuff and let's open a computer store this is 1995 Windows 95 isn't out yet but AOL is a thing and I could see that it was going to be big so we started a computer store things took off pretty well now remember I was this super edgy gothy kid every other word was a swear word out of my mouth I had a chip on my shoulder a bad attitude and of course first thing we get the company off the ground me and my business partner we just are at each other's throats constantly and he ends up booting me out of the business and I lost everything I was so young and naive I didn't know what to do it was just like he hired a lawyer I was out so I'm in my apartment I'm crying in my beer what should I do I call my father what should I do it was a good run you should go back to school and get a degree get your high school diploma get back on track in your life okay so I sat there and thought about it and then I got mad I'm like this guy can't do this to me this is going to be a reoccurring theme with me so I sold everything I had I scraped every penny together I broke the lease on my apartment I got my deposit back I found a little one-chair barber shop just down the road from his store rented this thing dirt cheap threw the barber chair out the back which disappeared at some point overnight managed to get the store kind of looking like a store started living in the back of it no money for the electronic components so it's like well I got a bootstrap this somehow so I'd go to his dumpster I'd get all of the colorful boxes and put them all over the wall so it looked like I had inventory and the customer would wander in and be like hey I want that sound card and be like well that one's committed but if you give me the money for it I can get you another one in three days that's how I bootstrapped the company it was really robbing Peter to pay Paul constantly and plus I really hadn't learned how to relate to customers at this point I was still this really edgy you know kid had some really embarrassing moments like I didn't have enough money to pay for garbage service so I was like taking my garbage and throwing in all the garbage cans around the neighborhood and I got caught and the police came by and embarrassed me in front of one of my customers and you know it's you know I've probably spent the first six months just starving to death in the back of the computer store not really getting off the ground but fortunately for me across the street another mentor entered my life he was an insurance salesman he was interested in computers he came by at lunch oftentimes and he would bring me food because he knew that I was just barely getting by and he would say the nicest things to me he's like he would give me pep talks and then he would give me some guidance he's like you know I noticed you interacting with that customer and you were swearing in front of them that's not really a great way to be relatable and I saw you like you know the way you dress you know having super dark eyeliner and like gothy that's not really relatable and torn up jeans and stuff like that you know you should kind of look the part you got to look the part you know I admired him he was successful and I started to adapt those things and introduce those into my life it was interesting like this was a weird moment in my life where I had my friends that were still kind of living that lifestyle and I'm starting to diverge from them and you know I've heard it as like the crab pot syndrome where crabs will pull you back in it felt like a lot like that I tried to step forward pulled back into their gravity and that was that was rough and difficult and I had to grow and get around that what's interesting is this whole time even when I was racing cars and had that success I really didn't like myself as a person right and but as I started to like get away from you know pretending to be this angsty person I started to like feel better about myself and have more confidence then I started realizing like when I stopped being like a punk kid you know the world out there you know isn't going to treat you bad they actually start treating you pretty nicely and and that was a really great transition so this computer store was awesome it started to take off I wouldn't be undersold I would actually lose money to make sure that I stole business from my my ex-business partner and it got to the point where every Wednesday we would get our shipment of parts we'd have a line out the door and I start hiring people and we're breaking down pallets of parts and we're handing parts to people and building computers and I was hiring more people it was so exciting moved into a bigger space and we're all like young kids at this point I'm in my 20s I'm hiring lots of like computer enthusiasts that was one of the things I learned is hire like people that are enthusiastic about the business and it was just explosive growth everyone was getting on AOL everyone was getting into games and 3D cards and I started expanding having more stores and it really had this family vibe to it and I just I thought this ride would never end it was just getting ever bigger and bigger and so at the same time this allowed me to start to pick up some of my favorite things to do building electronics and now I had some money that I could do some more complicated things and this is where my story becomes a little non-linear because this phase kind of overlaps into my next phase of my career as well but I started building things I started building lots of things for fun like little circuit boards that did things like drove video displays or made sounds I started like reverse engineering some of the old Commodore chipsets I started going to events where I could show this stuff off and it was super fun and I started learning a lot about serious engineering at this point I met a couple mentors along the way got introduced to a lot of industry legends who turns out that in time we became friends with a bunch of these people got to meet Wozniak and some of the original Amiga folks like Dale Luck and some of the original Commodore folks and Intellivision folks and a lot of these folks became my mentors and my sounding board as I was starting to get more serious about electronics but in the same time I was still writing high on the computer store and it wasn't for me to get too serious about all this electronics stuff until year 2000 comes along and like business is going crazy up to year 2000 everyone's replacing their computers because they're going to explode on day one of year 2000 and day two in year 2000 sales dropped off like a brick and in six months my computer stores were hemorrhaging money like crazy heartwarming part of my career it was so rough at the time but I think back now on it so fondly you know I was always very transparent with my personnel about what was going on it's like this does not look good we're in trouble we have to do things and so people voluntarily left the company we started trying other things we started selling cell phones and trying to do network gaming centers and to keep the company alive but it eventually got to the point where it was unsustainable and I just couldn't take it emotionally anymore having to like see my friends leave you know one at a time and so I went to the managers of the various stores that I had and I said okay here's the deal I'm out I'll give you the inventory of the store if you want to run it and give it a go if you can manage to make it work fine some day if you feel like it you can go back for the inventory but it's yours we immediately closed down three of the stores there wasn't enough interest two of the stores continued on and you know the two stores went on for quite a while one of them eventually folded but I was just in Canby, Oregon recently and drove past and one of the stores is still there it's amazing they changed the name a little bit they have a new logo which was maybe a better a good decision but they made it so kudos to them it's amazing they made it through that bloodbath and survived up till today so here again I go back to my father I'm like what should I do my computer store is completely failed and of course he gives me like the safe thing to do and he's like alright you're still young go back to school get a degree you know get your life back on track and what do I do? I'm like nah I can do this you know on my own so I started going to Silicon Valley and meeting people and so I still had some money left over from the computer stores and so I started flying to different conferences and I'd go in the conferences and I'd shake everybody's hands and this is where I started meeting some of these people like Wozniak and some of these people that I idolized and got to know them and also met a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and uh so I started interviewing for jobs like I want to do this and I had this I had this duffel bag full of circuit boards that would I bring to the interview and I'd like to throw them out over the table like here's a board that does this this one has a processor I emulated an FBJ and this is that and I was just getting no after no after no no one would believe that a high school dropout could do it I started getting desperate for money I ran out of money I couldn't fly down there as much so I had to start taking the Greyhound bus from Portland where I lived at the time and I had to ride this Greyhound bus for 12 hours to go to these events and if I had to do an interview I had to drive it down and eventually I got a big break and this gentleman I met him at a trade show he's like you seem like the right type of person for my company can you come back in a week and interview I'm like yes I can do that which means another Greyhound bus ride so I get on the Greyhound bus I go down I start the interview they cut the interview off early after one or two interviewers and I'm walking out of the building dejected and I see him walking up the stairs and he's like where are you going I was like I don't know they cut off the interview and he's like have you talked to so and so and I'm like no I didn't talk to so and so and he's like come with me and so he takes me back up and he does a panel interview which was super fun and he just unilaterally hired me and I took this super serious I'm like this is my chance and I worked my ass off and I did a good job and from that it led to other opportunities and I started getting this reputation of like the person you go to that's going to work so hard they're just going to get it done I was very common for me to fall asleep in the office because I'd spent the entire night just trying to get this tough problem taken care of in fact I was taking advantage of quite a bit early in my career some of these things I did for like $12 an hour you know it was ridiculous but it got me going and got my reputation going then I had a huge opportunity a toy company contacted me they're like we saw some of the stuff that you're doing we've been trying to reverse engineer the Commodore 64 and put it all in a joystick so you can have all of your favorite Commodore 64 games in a little joystick you can plug in your TV can you do an ASIC for us a chip microchip and I didn't know how to do a chip but I was like sure no problem and so I got to figure out how to design this chip without ever having to do one before in a very short amount of time like 8 months so we had a team of us it was like about 5 of us I was doing all the hardware all the chips all the prototypes and then we had about 4 people working on the software we were all Commodore fanatics we loved it somehow more mentors entered my life I found some chip design mentors they helped me through the process we got the chip done we were late we had to get it done for Christmas so the toy company put all this faith in me and they ran hundreds of thousands of chips without testing them through the foundry millions of dollars and then they sent them to China for assembly I get this angry phone call after the chips get there angry New Yorker screaming at me like these things don't work you need to fix it you know you cost us millions of dollars I was like oh crap what do I do and I was like do I run to Mexico and I was like but they threw me on a plane I went to China I got there I found out that they had redesigned my circuit board and threw away a bunch of the components and it actually worked after all when I was at the factory we hadn't told the toy company that we had been adding extra stuff to this toy we had gone outside the scope of the toy and we had actually added extra games to the system and we also added documentation how you could open it up and download your own games to it and hack it and the toy guys lost it they were mad they were like you're never going to work with us again you can't tell anyone about it so I came back to the United States and I talked to my friend who was like really savvy about doing blogs and things like that well you know you've lost your chances in the toy industry do you want to just tell the world about it anyway I'll make a fake blog that makes it look like a factory worker figured this out and have all this back history to make it look legit and you can get it out to the world oh yeah why not I'm done for and so he made this fake blog he managed to get it on the front page of slash dot which was popular at the time and this particular toy was being sold through QVC sold to grandmas and grandpas and it wasn't being promoted as like a retro throwback thing it was more of a get it for your grandkids type thing and it was on this home shopping network called QVC and when it launched they sold out in a week and QVC was calling up the toy company like what's going on why are these things going around the world like 50% of them are going to non United States addresses and that was my first experience with viral marketing oh jeez I'm running out of time can I go over I better move anyway this toy became super popular put me on the map and the people still hack it today which is amazing and I'm super proud of it and people had me sign their device all the time with that all these news stories came out it was super interesting I had never had like worldwide press you know people were trying to contact me people were trying to find me they were calling my father my friends were sending me screenshots of Google analytics saying that I I beat Santa Claus in search results on Google things like that it was crazy made me very uncomfortable and at the time but that launched my career into some pretty amazing things I worked on all kinds of things like video compression chips I worked on robots telepresence devices lots of toys got to work some at new tech one of the companies that you know it was like a dream company when I was a kid on the Amiga and really opened a lot of doors there's so many stories I could tell about you know start-up life in the meantime I started a company my company a YouTube channel where I started giving back so I tried to mentor virtually and so I started doing hundreds of videos about hardcore science and putting them up free on YouTube this was like super early in the YouTube days had a lot of fun got a lot of attention with that met a lot of great people like an upper left corner is Sylvia every year we take a picture together she does this meta picture we take pictures of each other when we go to events like Maker Faire I got to show the world like things like how you could do microchips in your garage or do electron microscopy and because of this YouTube channel a company called Valve software started recruiting me very aggressively I was very happy at my current gig that I was doing but they started showing up at various events like Maker Faire and saying like hey are you Jerry Ellsworth we'd like to hire you I'd be at a pinball collecting event because I collect pinball machines and like I wanted to start playing pinball next to me like hey you're Jerry we're from Valve do you want to come work with us I'm like Valve I don't know software company and so Gabe Newell the founder of the company flew down to Portland and took me out to lunch and he's like hey you know this is serious I really want you to come up and just meet the team will you just indulge me and come up for an afternoon and I'm like okay I'll fly up for an afternoon he promised me that it wasn't an interview and that was a complete lie because as soon as I got there they stuck me in a conference room another panel interview which I love them but it was like a whole room of people like rapid fire like alright we're going to make a game console how do you do it and I'd be like oh I'd go to this OEM and like it was a really fun riffing session and I swear he must have done some kind of nose signal and then everyone just got up out of the room and left and he's like come with me Jerry and he took me down to the fourth floor the building that they're in and he's like this whole fourth floor is yours hire whoever you want bring all the best people and this is what I want you to do he's like I want you to make a gaming system that brings everyone together in the family so they're playing games together in the living room he's like does that sound interesting unlimited budget like oh my goodness I don't know like you're springing this on me and then they're like well can you stay overnight and think about it and we'll talk to you about more tomorrow and I'm like well I didn't bring any toiletries I didn't bring any clothes he's like oh we'll take care of that so they took me down to their swag room and started giving me like valve t-shirts and then they drove me by like stores so I could get like underwear and toothbrushes and stuff and I came back the next day wearing like a left for dead valve shirt or something it was hilarious and how can I say no to that and so that was amazing I put together this dream team we started researching everything about games we hooked people up to electrodes and we read their emotions we fed it into games to see if we could make games more fun we read people's you know facial expressions with cameras and fed that into games we made alternate controllers we did we ceded all of the virtual reality stuff out there like learning through learning from us how to build virtual reality systems but that's where I got the augmented reality bug I invented an optical technique there trying to make an AR system that turned the optics inside out so you could use a game board to do augmented reality so you could open up this game board on your table and play a game and it was super popular people would come through and play on my AR system for hours and we had a whole team around it but valve decided that they didn't want to go down this path their internal DNA was just too strong for hardcore games so they proceeded with doing a VR system called HTC Vive based on a bunch of stuff that we all worked on so I found myself outside of Valve with a bunch of the AR folks and we started a company called Cast AR and I actually bought the technology from Gabe Newell it was kind of funny the day that I went to talk to him after being let go I'm like first I was going to go chew him out for it but that didn't last I got emotional about 30 seconds into it I'm like oh I can't believe you're killing my project it's so good it does exactly what you say you can play AR on the table and it brings people together and the best thing I ever said during that meeting was like you should just sell it to me and he said sure and you know I took a lot of lawyers and stuff but we ended up buying the technology for $100 and starting this company and so Rick and I and some of the other folks we spent months bootstrapping this company we got prototypes going they were kind of rough at first and they got better and better and we got the company off the ground and things were looking really good I started making a bunch of mistakes at this point I was scared I didn't know how to run a venture backed company I'd never done it before I'd never been a CEO before so I started outsourcing those tasks all the management of the company which was a huge mistake the visionary of the company should never hand the keys over to somebody else and I learned the hard way and then we raised a bunch of money virtual reality was hot, augmented reality was hot, Andy Rubin from Google came in and just gave us $15 million and overfunded the company and that's when things started really going sideways with it we lost focus on tabletop gaming we started being pushed in all these different directions like medical imaging and military and just all these crazy things instead of staying focused and then came the constant stream of celebrity executives and executives out of big companies that just got installed into my company and I found myself for the last year and a half of the company just kind of sitting in the corner they didn't want anything to do with my input and they were just running the company and sure enough the company creates a huge crater in the ground they burned through all the money doing all kinds of crazy things like paying expensive wages to the executives and bringing in firms to change the color of the glasses and kind of unnecessary stuff instead of just shipping the first product and it was really sad I was devastated and then I'm sitting in the office by myself after laying off about 70 people and I'm sitting in the office and out of the blue I get a phone call from Nolan Bushnell the founder of Atari I maybe met him once I didn't even know he knew who I was and somehow he had found my phone number and he's like Jerry I'm a big fan I've been watching you for years I love what you're doing this is going to be a game changer you know it's sad and I could see with all these executives coming in they're losing control that this was not going to end well he's like I don't know exactly how to tell you to fix this but I just want to tell you if you want this to happen there's a way just go figure it out and so I went to all my mentors and everyone I started asking like can I make this work somehow it's such a great product and I started working closely with my mentors and they told me like you know you can actually buy all this technology back after the end of the company you'll just go up for auction and so a group of us got together and that's what we did we bought the technology and we started bootstrapping the company again but this time with extreme focus and we spent months and months we didn't even start hiring people or try to raise money we just wanted to make sure we had charted a very clear course of how we were going to be successful and in the meantime to bootstrap the company I got a call and an opportunity that was a lifelong dream I mean I'm a child of the 80s the space shuttle Haley's comment like I love space and so a friend of mine called me up and he's like hey I'm the CEO of this stealthy space company I want you to come up and design computers for us and I'm like oh no no I can't do that I'm bootstrapping my company and he's like you're the only guy the only person I know that can come through and get this problem solved for us he's like please come up and just visit me and so I'm living in Silicon Valley at the time and he's up in Alameda which is a little north of the center of Silicon Valley go onto this naval base I walk in the door and I see this rocket laying horizontally in this facility I'm like holy cow that thing's so cool and he's leading me around the facility and he's like yeah the guy that was doing our flight computers left they're not done we don't think they're even remotely close like you need to save us I'm like I can't I can't I'm starting my company he's like well here come take a look at this and so in this facility it was an old jet engine testing facility we had these giant rocket motors set up in these test cells he's like do you want to push the fire button yes so they count down and lets me push the fire button and the fire starts shooting out of this this jet engine I mean this rocket engine and the ground shaking and I'm like ah damn it ah it's like I have to get the company going in like five months so I'll help you but it's got to be done in this amount of time he's like I'll take it and so wow it was like an amazing compressed timeline but I worked with a really tiny team mostly software folks we built the flight computers and the telemetry system I did all the hardware on it on the computers all the radios and we we got it going and I took it up to Alaska and and launched it and then I I was like like I'm done here but this is what it did the first two times that they launched it happy to say it was never a software or you know electrical problem but eventually they did get it to get oh wait I put this picture you got to see this this is what happens to a flight computer when it's ejected from a rocket it has an unscheduled disassembly this was picked up like a mile away from the rocket and literally all the chips had fallen off of the part off the board and the the board is massively warped it's incredible but they did it Rocket 3 has a little my DNA in it and they made it to space so wow dream come true I don't think I would ever do that again it's so hard to work with the FAA and the launch facilities but this gave me enough time and enough time for our team to work and we got tilt five off the ground a lot of people ask us what the name tilt five stands for and we can never tell you this partly is an inside joke because at my previous company cast they are the executives wanted to rename the company about five times and they paid a lot of money to rename it and so we just chose a name that makes us laugh and we don't care what people think I'm the CEO this time I'm driving the vision of the company our goal is to bring people together in the living room sound familiar playing games grandma grandpa down to the grandkids our system is the AR glasses that you slip on they have a massive field of view so when you flip open the game board this magical world just springs out in front of you it allows multiple players to play together you can play board games and you can play traditional video games so if you've been hungry to play video games together you know you don't have to play multiplayer games apart anymore you can play it together on our system you can look across the table at your friends as you're playing the game it's magical this time we're super focused games games games and the other thing I learned from my previous start up was we were way too focused on the technology we were so excited about the plastic and the sensors and the images and things like that and we forgot that we have to go get a lot of games on the system and so you know most of our work is actually going out and working with third-party developers to have dozens and dozens of games and just a constant flow of games of all types and so it's so delightful for me like three years after such a traumatic event that we're now building these glasses and they're going out to real users and developers and we get to play test all these games and there's just this constant stream of RTSs and board games and action games and puzzle games single player multiplayer it's like a dream control true this is like this is the thing I dreamed about you know since the early 80s when I saw Star Wars and and hollow chess or the Star Wars chess so anyway I know I've gone over my time I should probably put a pin in it here feel free to visit tilt5.com and also all of our development at tilt5 is on Linux our glasses also run on Linux that's the everything gets tested on Linux first so this audience is probably going to be pretty happy about that I don't know if we have time for questions I went a little over thank you very much Jerry you did go go a bit over time but the audience here was very vocal that you should go over so we stop it even if we wanted to and also judging by your whole story would really a clock stop you no that's you know that's my whole story right it's like people tell me I can't do something like I can't race cars I mean the number of people told me when I was like 16 years old you can't race cars that just emboldens me to do it or even with cast AR when it failed like I got so much negative press like she's a loser she failed she couldn't do it it was just like and then I just had this catalyst of like this industry legend saying you can do it I was like yeah I can do this and you know that kind of energy and having those mentors around you to support you you know is how you get through the low points in fact one of the one of the question was not a question was like saying not a question just really sure that I really really love your talk thank you and that's more or less the general mood from the thank you but we have some questions so maybe we'll go at least with one or two let's see be awesome I appreciate it Marco is asking today electronics are more style to tinkering on the other hand online resources to learn are awesome do you think today environment is more or less stimulating for young people to tinker I would have died to have the World Wide Web and all these resources I can't even imagine how much further I could have gone in my career if I would have had those resources I am so envious about you know a kid that's 12 year old years old today they can get online and start learning about whatever science and technology or art that they want to you know back in my day like to get a data sheet for a chip I would have to get on the phone and pretend that I was a secretary for an engineer because that's all I could get off ask and then I would try to convince them we were a real company and have them try to try to get them to ship me a data sheet or a sample part to this like podunk little town out in the middle of nowhere and sometimes it worked and most of the time it didn't now you can just like all these resources is great yeah it's totally totally different there is another question which I think you kind of answer but just to be sure will we be able to get the tilt fight losses and once working with Linux will we have an API to develop with it all right my co-founder always wants me to qualify this so there's so many variants of Linux so you know it has to kind of fit with what we're the current version of Linux we're using in the office so most of our develop most of the folks are using Ubuntu 20 I've used it on the latest drop of KDE so that's good news so I suspect you know it's those two are so close but you know I'm so impressed with the UI you know I'm what they call an appliance user right I'm not the hardcore Linux user although I have a lot of stories about actually did the configurations for this rocket and Linux on that and I have like an entire I could do an hour about interesting Linux and rocketry stuff but that's for another time I do appreciate since like half my tools are on Windows I just have to use them on Windows that the KDE environment feels so familiar to me it's I like it better than you know just the default Ubuntu installs and that kind of answer also the other question which was how are you finding the KDE Plasma desktop and what distro are you running so I guess it was the latest and greatest let's see about let's see it is Plasma 5.2 1.4 okay I think that's the latest and greatest almost the latest but that's really a matter of a few days so that's kind of still the latest from the practical point of view so that's why here on my workbench I actually hooked it up to all my ham radio gear I'm a ham radio operator and so using Linux and ham radio is not for the faint of heart but I did get everything working on Linux and so I'm Windows free now on my ham radio configuration so it's pretty cool I can control my radios from the desktop that's pretty nice to hear I know there are a lot of ham radio projects so that's good they are working properly okay there are no other questions so I guess we are at the end of the talk it was so fun I really appreciate letting me come and tell my long windy story I hope people didn't get too bored absolutely not they were ready to say it or the chat is already already applauding and happy when you say that you have a side story about Linux in Rockets that could take another hour I'm sure everyone is waiting for I should probably wait until Astra that's the name of the rocket company is taken over and SpaceX is no longer and there's no sensitive information but it was super interesting device trees the first time I've had to do that because we were making custom hardware for fun times story for next time perhaps yes yes anytime you want me I'll be here okay thank you again very much Jerry thank you Luigi for handling the questions and I guess this is the end of our of our track here so I'll do some housekeeping I guess to announce what's coming up in the following days