 Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. Very excited to still be at CoFest, the Congress on the Future of Engineering software, for our second annual partnership with them. We are now speaking to Joe Walsh. Hello. Hello. Thanks for coming on to the show. Well thank you very much for having me. This is gonna be a lot of fun, very excited. Joe's background is crazy interesting. He spent nine and a half years, it still is, the CEO and founder of Intrinsim, which is developing next-gen engineering applications, shorter development cycles, and leveraging innovative technologies. He has also spent four years and still now is the CEO and co-founder of Assess Initiative, which is bringing together key players in software tools for model-based analysis, simulation, and systems engineering to expand use and benefit of these tools. Joe, before we get into that, which is going to be super exciting, I want to ask you about your journey. How did you get to the point where you're at today? Where did the fascination for engineering software come from? Tell us about this journey. Okay. Actually my journey is very unorthodox. I started out as an engineer, as studying engineering, architectural engineering in school, with a specialty in structural analysis. Then I was actually acting as a structural engineer for about eight to ten years, in more and more that developed into understanding how to use finite element analysis, how to use numerical techniques to do the analysis, and to do the structural engineering. Then one day I basically woke up from that environment and I was irritated with the company I was working for because I got the best rating ever and they were going to give me the same raise as the guy who did Terrible, and an opportunity came along to become an applications engineer for a systems integrator. So it was an interesting opportunity. I jumped at it partially because of previous frustration, but partially because it was something new and different it was talking to people. And I was a rare engineer that I was good at talking to people. So I decided to jump on it and then I was going to learn sales and I was going to be in a sales environment doing the technical support. Quickly the CEO's idea of selling was going out to the golf course and waiting for customers to show up. So I figured out if I needed a job I better figure out how to do sales. So I picked up a book by Zig Ziglar and taught myself how to do sales. Then shortly left that company and started my own consulting company working on very complex engineering problems that people were having trouble solving. And then I was actually invited to head up for a UK-based company, the North American entry of their finite element products. And then a year afterwards the CEO called me in and said I'm going back to the UK, why don't you take over as CEO. So I got to be a CEO of a two million dollar a year software company at the age of 30. So it was very interesting, very dynamic and two weeks later I was sued by our shareholders. We immediately had a major cash flow problem, had to let go eight people. So it was a whole experience and baptism by fire. And spent three years doing that, turned the company around, got it working well and then moved on to another UK-based company and set up operations there and brought their product to the North American market. So it was a matter of understanding the technology, the application, and having to learn marketing, sales, accounting, financials, all in order to make it work. So I couldn't hire, haven't afford an accountant anymore. So I had to learn all these principles, all these concepts. Went back to my own consulting company where I decided I was going to go back to being an engineer. And then I said, so I went to all the major companies and said give me your near impossible problems that the big guys can't solve. And that, I almost starved to death for three years. And then it turned out that Goodyear and NASA called me on some problems and said we've got some that won't solve. Goodyear had a great one, said we've been working on it for 18 months. We're willing to give you a try. Bad news is you get six weeks. We've had an army of 10 people working on it for 18 months and we haven't been able to do anything. You got six weeks. And so we went ahead and did the project. It took seven weeks and at the end of the project they called me into their finance department and said you can't leave without signing a retainer for the next three years. And we don't know what you're going to work on, but you're going to work on these things. So that then led to working on interesting projects for very different companies. But the company's technology he was based on decided to sell itself. I could see the writing on the wall and so I applied to be to work for a friend of mine who I knew ran an ad in a paper for someone to run Southeast sales for component software for ACES solid modeling. So I called so I called up and said you want to save a headhunter's fee. He called me immediately with a he had the plane ticket in my hands and told me I was hired when I got there. So I took over sales for Spatial and it was the first time I've ever done just sales. So it's been part of what I did. So I learned okay how in my wife you all did me why are you trying to do sales you're an engineer. I said I want to find out what I can do. So we actually led and built the best sales track for the next three years. And then I went on to head up the became worldwide VP of worldwide sales for IronCAD and then VP of business development for eight years for Symetrics doing automatic mesh generation technology. And then founded Intrinsim the key thing on the the component software technology from Spatial and from Symetrics what it taught me was we had to deal with hundreds and hundreds of different business models. Every customer in the component software model had a different business model so therefore was learning how to adapt to business models and that really taught me an understanding about where technology and business lie and how they cross into each other and how business people rarely understand technology and technology people rarely understand business. So that was the the reason for founding Intrinsim in the first place and although as you mentioned we do engineering applications and things in Intrinsim own zero IP. Zero intellectual property we do have a technology broker model or we actually broker technology to other software vendors and we manage the licensing but it's like a real estate broker we don't own the house we don't own the IP we do it all with other people's intellectual property and that then led to okay we met enough people and we saw things happening that the assess initiative made sense to try to see we saw some opportunities where the entire having coming from the simulation space we saw that the although growth was occurring there was a huge opportunity because engineering simulation can actually drive huge the major business objectives and it wasn't being utilized but people were beginning to realize it and we realized that engineering simulation isn't it's only growing eight nine percent a year which is four times as fast as any other engineering software but we felt felt they could grow significantly I'm being facetious by only eight to nine percent a year this is for over 30 years and so the the idea was that we could really build that there really was an opportunity for an inflection point for dramatic growth of that entire industry and so I decided to that it was too big for any single player too big for the big software vendors too big for the end users so I created the assess initiative as a consortium to bring together the people to enable that significant growth yeah this is such a cool story so going back to when you're finding yourself at like using and getting used to from an art from an architectural perspective getting involved in the engineering process and then seeing sort of that you can also pick up as an engineer business skills and sales skills and then you had multiple sort of examples of times that you meshed the technology and the business side of things together and we're able to that's a very very important skill super important and then there's a lot of of of talk in you know in Soka Valley and other places in the world where you see that you know maybe coders and sales people just are you know kind of on different wavelengths and stuff like that but I think it's very important to be able to find that that that overlap and how to make sales relatable to technologies how to make technology even more relatable to sales and business so that's a thing that you mentioned I think is extremely important to to embody and that really adds that multidisciplinary perspective of when you know how to you know build rapport with humans as well as you know how to program a computer these are very interesting things to to know how to do both of and then actually with you know going all the way up to to intrinsic even before that you obviously have had a tremendous amount of experience it doesn't I don't even know what is this like 35 years something 40 40 years of experience yeah so that's when that's when you really know that you've you know you're not even at you know you're at like 2x or 3x mastery level in a field and that's that's really important and then to continue this this this very humble prince this humble first principle as you continue going it's just going to you know ramp things up even further down the line but at intrinsic which you just mentioned there let's start with this where you said that your and I want to back up prior to intrinsic in which you you were explaining how you know you don't own any IP but the it almost acts like a platform that people bring on their services to and then you license out those services but maybe before even before that which I'm sure you're going to correct me and everything but before that teach us about you know give us give us a little bit more on those like 20 years of time especially those last you said there were two periods where you were VP as well at two like multi-year organization what was going on there it was a little bit um it's very eclectic background it was a very opportunity driven and it was very much um listening to the passion and the challenge and learning to grow and it was constantly about oh there's a whole new role let's let's figure out how to apply engineering analytical principles to the new role so applying the approach you would do to a very complex engineering analysis problem actually turned out to make accounting very straightforward and easy applying that to sales actually turned out to be very very effective you think of sales instead as a highly non-linear problem but with a non-linearity is the people's personalities so it's totally unpredictable so it becomes there is actually a class of engineering problems that you solve that are that sort of things so applying those same principles to psychologist applying engineering principles to psychology to sales processes to things was actually very challenging and very interesting and it was very um let's say opportunity driven very eclectic and constantly a learning experience and so it was all driven by the the desire to keep learning and and so everything was a new experience including legal things some of the things you learn aren't wonderful you learn and and every experience teaches and that whole process there wasn't a here's my five-year goal here's my ten-year goal it was I'm going to get through today and and learn something from it and tomorrow we're going to grow from that and following the vectors at the point in time that made the most sense most sense when when when you speak about taking engineering principles and bringing them into psychology that is such an interesting field that we've you know we've talked about on the show quite a bit is how can you potentially even map out human experience you know in a in an engineering mindset type of way can you what are computational properties of consciousness these types of thought processes so okay so now let's now take us to you know all you know this this this last thing that you're mentioning about engineering simulation and the importance of that I'm very excited to talk about that but as you as you find yourself doing in Trinsim and you're learning on both the you know business as well as the technology side of things you were mentioning there's different these different really cool use cases across businesses that you're kind of working and building rapport with them seeing what they need giving them the right tools and solutions to teach us about what that's been like okay well in Trinsim was an experiment or still is an experiment and the experiment is on the idea that this eclectic background that I had that actually took me into the different areas so it took me into the marketing into the sales into the business into the finance into the legal as well as staying in the technical and it also so my experience also that had me connected up with all the technical people talking about all these issues all the time so at in Trinsim I came to the realization that there was a break in general between business and technology people would have great business models needed technology they needed to feed the beast people had great technology couldn't figure out how to take it to market so it created in Trinsim under the principle of connecting worldwide business and technology and the idea is it would be limited only to the engineering software space we wouldn't sell to anybody else only sell the engineering software vendors but what we would do is we would provide two different sorts of aspect we would go find some interesting leading edge technologies that they could license as components that they can embed inside their software okay this would be like an add-on to CAD no it would be like the rendering engine in CAD it would be like the solid modeling engine in the CAD it would be like the finding element mesh generation in the CAD it would be so the end user would never see it he'd never even see it as an add-on it's core functionality but it wasn't developed by the software vendor okay so so the Intel inside of software would buy the yeah and embed it in in yeah AutoCAD interesting so that then your and your friends that started that company that went through you would get paid and you would get a percentage of exactly interesting okay so so what we did is we set it up and said okay we know technology people need to go to market we know people who need technology so we'll start there we made that connection so we we acted as a broker acting between the connecting the right people together and then we said okay now that we have this part of the business going now we're going to turn around and say well actually there's several other people who just need good business consulting good marketing consulting good positioning good messaging how do they actually explain their market how do they take their product to market and so we started that thinking primarily focusing on smaller and medium-sized businesses the larger software vendors found out about it and they didn't want us to develop their strategies they wanted us to vet their strategies so we work with companies from like Autodesk we work with companies like Siemens and we work all the way down to the two maintenance people in the garage we don't there's no difference we'll work on projects as big as everything it takes to go to market or as small as we need help with this presentation is we fill whatever the gap is including building websites whatever it takes and so we build a very we have a very virtual company and we build in we have resources we can bring in to build in whatever needs to be filled very small team that is core and then we build out as we need to for every project all the way to we're actually working with another company so we can do all the way to sales and so it's all about what are the gaps how do we fill those in how do we make the people more successful interesting all in engineering software all in engineering software only so the idea was there we couldn't have a broad space and a broad offering yeah yeah so either needed to have a broad space in a in a very narrow offering or we needed to have a narrow space and a broad offering yeah so we went with the narrow space and a broad offering very cool very cool so then you ended up becoming the one-stop shop for engineering software that's right then that's kind of what now and we've also because we do this with so many people thing we're also the one-stop shop for well we don't know exactly what we need we want to talk to someone about manufacturing simulation yeah so we're the connector the connector too yeah yeah okay well now this is so cool i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm running all of these ideas of what this looks like you gave us an idea of what one of the one of the ways that like a a CAD software company would want to license through you one of the cool the additions that they'd embed into some of the algorithms they'd embed into their CAD software and then the user wouldn't even know wouldn't even know and then then the that's one example give us other interesting examples like that from IntranSim okay so the one example is that we have a portfolio of about eight different technologies where we use it we call a technology broker model when we do the licensing where it's all embedded inside no one sees it no one knows anything about it and was that the majority would you say of the of IntranSim is doing stuff like that it's actually about half and half right now it's a little bit more than half that's the slight majority is still doing that technology licensing the other half is go-to-market consulting where people we will sit with them and have a brainstorm session about where are you what are you trying to accomplish where are you going what's it take to get there and how can we help you get there so this may include things like we work with CyR ungenerative design I'm trying to refine their message and how they can better position against the competition and how to create a unique position that they can leverage for go-to-market and awareness we love hosting them on the show they're incredible they are incredible yes and we like working with them to help out their technology but we work with probably we we worked with over 60 companies on that aspect already so far and so we work with any and we also and we work with with companies for instance to do complete awareness campaigns social media campaigns press releases collateral and basically whatever it takes to fill that position so in one side we're working with the the whole idea of saying okay I've got good technology I need to take it to market and the other side I've got market I need tech I need more technology to fill it in and the third interesting twist is we're also working with larger companies now on basically being the voice of reason where they will bring in all their people and explain the strategy and why it's so wonderful and we'll tell them this is great this is great here you're drinking Kool-Aid that's nonsense and because we've been doing this because we know everybody we can get away with that oh yeah and there's actually value to our calling them on their stuff so so the last part would be if they do have their technology and their business kind of properly structured then you would come in and say that this part's great this part is needs help etc okay now with give us a give us a because if the other 50 percent almost is on helping engineering software with their business strategies give us an example of what that looks like because you said the scales anywhere from the full go to market all the way to the deck right yeah what we've been seeing happening more and more often now is people basically have really good technology they don't understand the target markets they don't understand who's going to buy it they don't understand how to message to those people messaging and positioning are really key they don't understand who the competition is or or what the positioning is against the competition so we help clarify all that sort of information we help them it could be we could stop there or but more and more often it's becoming we then help them make the collateral whether it's the powerpoint presentation data sheets whatever is appropriate videos whatever is appropriate to convey that messaging and we become very thematic and consistent about that messaging and we teach them that idea of repeat repeat repeat for marketing and you know for marketing 101 and we repeat that again and so that we really get that home to the engineers where we're successful with that is we can actually under when they talked us about their technology but why they love it we actually have the technology background that we can understand their technology so they trust us when we talk about what to do with marketing that's right that's right and so we geek out to build rapport exactly so so we built that bridge between the technology and classical marketing and it's not we're not doing anything on marketing than any good marketing firm would do is just we get the guys over here to believe us and that they can communicate and we can communicate to them and so all of a sudden we know how to market their technical features where it might they might spend six months trying to figure out how to explain that to a classical marketing team we'll get it in an hour yeah that's great correct correct give us give us an example of how a tech of really strong like engineering software company is is maybe struggling with the business side of things and then how you come in and and have you know like you said the geek out the friendly build rapport and then you can really just you know synthesize into making really concise and powerful go-to-market statements and and to get the right clients yeah so we've got two active cases we're working on right now one is sire or we're doing exactly that and other is a is a company called PSRE which is about piping research and they do piping simulation software and they do an exceptional job on that and we've been working with them about right from the beginning and how to grow markets there and how to message it and how to position it we actually went all the way back and told them no your product structure is wrong we need a whole new product structure because this product structure makes sense to your engineers but not to any buyer so that we go all the way back to defining what should the product structure look like what should the pricing look like what should the structure look like how do we're going to sell this in different parts of the world and building channel uh agreements for resellers with a whole nine yards and then basically going ahead and helping the messaging and right now they're currently very successful in building an international distribution channel whoa yeah the everything from the from how do you do reseller agreements and international sales all the way to how is the product structured for for people to purchase give how how does most engineering software get purchased through enterprise clients it's a mixture of things it depends on the the engineering software can be your buyers can be anywhere from a few consulting company to a large enterprise company to depend on the industry aec is a bunch of you're selling to architects and engineers there's a bunch of small contractors so you'll get subcontractors you you basically have a supply chain of major oems in the automotive and aerospace industry with with multiple tiers of of suppliers so you sell to different levels of the supplier chain when you get to industries where engineering software isn't as mature it's more of you're selling to whoever's a who's whatever willing to listen so that like if we're looking at manufacturing and you're looking at the major manufacturing people usually it's people who can invest in it they fall into two categories they either can have enough resources to invest or they're really trying they're small and they're really trying to be innovative and create a niche by their being by their innovations so that leverage the engineering software tools oh my goodness okay so so your walk your walk you're giving us these great examples of of both with of engineering software being very technically advanced but needing assistance on the business side or being interestingly enough potentially business savvy but not having the right technical but what does that one look like so in that case for instance um we licensed several different technologies to companies where they turn around and say okay we're we have a great analysis software but it really can't read in data from catea or from solidworks really well so we'll provide them the technology to read from data kit or solidworks or they may turn around and say oh we've got a really good algorithm for solving but we don't have a mesh generation tool so we'll provide them the mesh generation tool and so we provide a variety of different tools that can fit inside and it's a matter of they they find a technology gap and they then go to the point we're saying it's not a core technology it's not what really makes them difference but it is a key technology that they need to have and so that becomes the market where we can help them fill those key needs where they don't do development instead license and integrate yeah yeah license and integrate and and in this way they can fill their needs with what they may not have known technically exists on an engineering software side because you act as a liaison that understands what they need that seems to be a reoccurring theme with what you know what you kind of worked your way into on the business and tech side is being able to be that that one-stop shop which is so cool so okay what what with Intrinsim plus now Assess Initiative which you can explain here in a moment what has been the the overall the connecting points because it kind of makes sense that everything that you've been learning with Intrinsim now you're you're basically trying to take the best key players from the deep for the engineering software process and put it into the initiative that is that's actually correct so that my background as I said started out in structural analysis and those sort of things and I've always been although we we broadened out in Intrinsim to do all the engineering simulation and the other jobs where I was running sales and business development it was any engineering software the the symmetric was simulation still is mesh generation so that my passion and my heart and my experience in background really is still engineering simulation I work with everybody in the engineering software space but engineering simulation is is the sweet spot it's also an area where we have extra unique capabilities very few people who understand that technology and application at all can even talk marketing never mind understand it and so that that that was a unique situation and I sat that actually I was invited to give a presentation at a conference by a friend of mine and I asked him what he wanted me to give the presentation on and he said whatever you want so I gave it on the the role of simulation was changing the engineering simulation was changing and it was really changing because it's becoming about business drivers not about technology drivers up until that time all advanced no not cloud no it's the idea for engineering simulation up until that time it was things like the cloud it was things like generative design it was things like automated mesh generation all these things were driving broader use okay now all of a sudden there was a change and that change was because now there in the 2008 2009 time frame when we had the downturn in the economy everyone wanted to know how to be more competitive they wanted to understand how to be more creative how to be more innovative how to reduce cost how to reduce risk and very quickly people said the way you do that is understand your product and and process performance better and how do you do that engineering simulation so it became two steps away from all of the major strategic initiatives of every company in the world and the executives are beginning to realize that so I made a the presentation is about it's about business drivers and that's going to change the dynamic of how we do engineering simulation and that we have an opportunity in this realization to actually change the world and in of the at least the simulation world which does then because of what simulation does it will change the world and I gave that presentation I did that and the result was the person running the session says we need a whole congress on that I agreed I grabbed Brad Holtz and we decided to put it together yeah we made it happen and then ever since then the assess initiatives take on its own life and it really is now a very passionate thing by hundreds of people saying okay how do we really make engineering simulation contribute more benefit to the users more benefit use but also really change the dynamic and the paradigm of how we do engineering and how we do design so that we become function driven design and performance driven design rather than shape driven design okay all right here's here's this here's this key so now now tell me if I'm if I if I'm getting this right so when you when you when you start off with a a that that that there's this you know we had things like cloud and we had these other we're trying to maybe we're trying to maybe push algorithms in to all these different types types of processes when maybe what we needed to do was actually look back and refine the algorithms to make them more engineering simulation capable so that then the when they get broadly applied to the world that they are more effective so that when when you're like you were just describing that there is this there's this desire for a really powerful simulations to be able to find the best fit for an a for a function uh in the engineering design and then when you find that that can then go and live really robustly in the industry but what the challenge is it wasn't about the algorithms the algorithms have been developing for years quite nicely but that it was a matter of pushing the algorithms the the challenge is if there was a poll to do more or as I described to people the poll was so or is it's in the process of coming because executives are becoming aware of it so the challenge I put to the analysts is to say okay don't tell me how you can do 10 times more analysis in the next three years tell me how you're going to do 10,000 times more because that's what the demand is going to that's what people are going to be asking for our own success says wait a minute why don't we do this everywhere but the challenge of doing it everywhere isn't about the algorithms well the algorithms are about 95 percent complete nothing's ever 100 percent complete the challenge is that the level of expertise required to use the algorithms well is way too high to do good CFD analysis of an automotive vehicle and understand the drag you're typically talking a PhD plus five years experience before he's allowed to actually set up and run any designs that would actually any simulations that would actually truly influence designs we can't build that type of person fast enough yeah yeah and that's the realization is that we that the level of expertise required to run this super advanced technology is so high we can't possibly ever have enough so now we have to go a next stage and not dumb down the technology because we tried that 20 years ago we have to actually make the technology smarter so the level of expertise that's required is lower interesting yeah yeah I'm following now which is why companies like SciArt are aiming to make generative design accessible to collegiate levels exactly at the early stage design where so they can understand design concepts and in a way that they don't really they need to understand the engineering problem but not the details of how the engineering simulation works yeah yeah in today's classical engineering analysis world you can't do any real analysis on anything other than the basic toy problem unless you really understand not only the physics the problem that you need to know the numerics about how everything works and so it's the level required level of expertise is too high to really democratize and so we have to actually we have to find a way to embed intelligence to make software smarter to make it so that more people can use the tools that have less expertise they're still good engineers they're just not specialized analysts yeah and so we need to move this to a broader audience to make influence more decisions interesting but the idea being so cool so so one of the questions we ask is is people say well why do you want to do that and you say no no why why isn't it been stronger first because why do you want to make dumb design decisions this is about making informed design decisions with the physics performance understood with each design decision yeah yeah it takes some odd 35 years to mold the human that can do what potentially what a democratized engineering simulation software can can do exactly and then this is so cool because then you can the high demand of the exponential technology hockey stick of all of the different robotics and automations that are happening globally is able to actually be fulfilled by bringing down the level of expertise that is required in order for engineers even in at the collegiate level to be able to to to run these engineering simulations at the same time i'm curious to hear your thoughts it is it is it's giving it's democratizing engineering simulation capabilities and we're able to explore more uh uh funk funk ideal functional fits in different areas which is extremely important at the same time isn't then the um like a an an organ the the the the organizations that create the optimal engineering softwares isn't it then just kind of just maybe 20 30 100 however many people are are building this more of like a black box technology are they then the only ones that really then kind of understand it no basically what happens is it's impossible to capture for all the general application it's impossible to capture all the variances and nuances that have to go through so it's more about their building tools where the expert users of today can embed their knowledge for their team so there's very specific company knowledge is very specific industry knowledge so this isn't this cannot be done by a software vendor just building out saying oh we just do all these decisions for you no it has to be instead building a whole platform and a whole approach that enables the people to embed their own knowledge in their own understanding of how they make decisions okay okay and okay so that then becomes the expert's role is to create this platform of knowledge rather than running day-to-day analysis yeah yeah okay okay so then so then the users of the engineering simulation are able to embed their own examples of use cases that they need and they're leveraging this because then they they don't necessarily need to know a lot of the is it like partial differential equations it's exactly what it is is partial differential equations and so that they don't so what they're looking at is if you can take the experts of today to leverage that knowledge and embed it in a environment where that knowledge isn't required and instead leveraged then they can allow people with less expertise to run things the challenges come in that we need to still make sure that the analysis is accurate enough we need to make sure it's credible enough we don't you know garbage in garbage out is how do we avoid the the garbage in garbage out problem how do we make sure that it's all still works correctly how does it support the digital twin initiatives how does it actually go all the way from systems engineering all the way down the detailed engineering so we're actually trying to do not trying to take the what we've been doing in the past and embed that knowledge and make it usable we're trying to actually do what we want to do in the future in a two totally new different way yeah yeah the this is so cool the the democratization is is now it almost it almost changes the the way that we can teach new children that are being birthed into the world about how they can get involved in engineering absolutely don't necessarily need to know by hand all of the in repetitive mathematics that's correct and then that makes it as long as they know the basic of the mathematics what we should be in in my opinion we should be teaching in engineering is not the mechanics to sit there and and re derive the equations over and over again under creative it's understand the principles of the equations understand the concepts of the physics you need to understand physics really well to do engineering you need to understand math reason reason well but you want to but it's concept driven and it's the concept and then the application so you can determine the application of those concepts you don't want to be adding redefining and how two plus two equals four over and over again so we we need to get out of the building blocks and engineering a much higher net we still don't want to be deriving partial differential equations over and over again it's been done once you understand the concept now how do you describe the physics problem how do you describe what you're really trying to accomplish once you understand the concepts we've gotten caught into a stage where people believe that in order to understand the concepts you needed to be able to derive everything uh-huh yeah yeah that is in my opinion is false it's all about understanding the concepts of physics the concepts of engineering and then applying the creative side as you mentioned to the design interesting so let's see if we can then maybe make it as a visual as there's there are principles of math and physics to make engineers and then those con conceptual understandings of engineering from there is all about applying that creatively to problem solvers and problem solving interesting okay cool cool so then a lot of maybe like con academy in these democratized educational tools for engineering should really need to be focused on the the principles right and then leveraging tools like we're talking about that i've embedded intelligence to actually show the the instantiation of those principles yeah yeah interesting okay that would be so cool to i wonder i wonder if there are actual is there an actual then point like child great they're already doing so much self-learning nowadays so is there a really kind of like a super highway to of what well the stem initiative is trying to work toward that super highway and actually um the the right initiative isn't the stem initiative it's the steam initiative correct with art yes and then as well for the creative creative portion because without the creativity you're not doing engineering you're just doing math and physics um so that you need to have the art in there for the creativity steam yeah so it's all the steam which is going to power things which is a good analogy but it it is all about that so that's there um but i think we're still struggling on the how do we get the people who have graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering how do we get them to do really productive work on leveraging the capabilities of engineering simulation tools today because normally that person doesn't even learn about engineering simulation tools until they're getting a phd so it's we're even working at that higher level on the the expertise gap now the steam initiative is helping we don't have the tools ready to actually play put simulation into that yet we want to but we're long we're still trying to get it down to the bachelor's level degree and we're gonna keep working it it has to be work further and further down yeah yeah oh wow it would be so cool to see young young kids under 10 years old applying assess initiative well the robotics and the first robotics is one of the areas where they do that and they do a lot with actually physics based simulators but they're they're quasi physics and games but it's the beginning so that someone can actually say well if I did this how would it behave and they're developing that understanding and so that is starting to happen there's a lot of room for growth there it's just beginning all that whole steam initiative is actually very embryonic the first robotic stuff is very young it's all but but it is both those are great directions they're both great things to go in and the earlier we can get people thinking about problem solving and understanding principles of how things work the better yeah correct and I think getting it down younger and younger is really and getting it actually better understood by every age is really about let's get out of the details let's not learn by road anymore let's not learn how to do math that's not learn how to do addition by doing 50 addition problems let's learn how to do addition by talking over the concept of how addition works repeatedly until the concepts understood then we only need to do three problems because either we got it or we didn't yeah yeah yeah the giving real world examples that drive understanding of concepts and then and then I love how you point to things like first robotics we love them we've mentored there for a while volunteered there for a while and interviewed there multiple times their leadership and and there's nothing more profound at times like this is just when you see 13 to 17 year old teams of just girls that win the highest level awards at the competition and and then I think to myself they can teach me so much that I don't know about engineering like that is awesome the other thing is about that activity is look at the passion in their events look at the passion in the kids it's just amazing when they're given this opportunity to learn they just are all in they really it really gives them a whole new look on life and they get an understanding of problem solving which now all of a sudden engineering isn't scary anymore engineering isn't geeky engineering is interesting yes correct yeah yeah so is assess initiative then democratizing engineering simulations the assess initiative is its vision is to significantly increase the use and benefit of engineering simulation yeah democratization is actually one of we found out in order to do that vision that's actually a key pillar but it's actually one of seven key pillars what are the other six the the we have to do a line the government in commercial and research efforts because they're thoroughly misaligned right now can you explain us well basically what happens is the the academic community in research for new technologies is disconnected from the commercial world and so they're developing in some cases they're developing they're they're building absolute magic in some cases they're building things that were already been deployed 20 years ago in other cases they're building things that is of no interest to anybody and there's no discussion in connection I shouldn't say no there's very little discussion in connection to the commercial world the government is got a whole different set of nomenclature terminology everything for the same tools and they're also rebuilding things that are also commercially available at much higher prices and this is done all the time with taxpayer with taxpayer dollars and the grants could be going to much different they could be going to advancing the technology rather than rebuilding the same technology it's been around for 20 years and this is a frequently reoccurring issue in government spending they will say no the answer is yes now there's certain groups like for instance we work with sandia national labs they do some amazing things on physics development they actually work with us on licensing some technologies they don't reinvent so there's certain groups that are actually leveraging very well but in general it's very common that they're doing something that's duplicate the big problem is each or each major vector doesn't even recognize that the other vector exists and they don't talk to them so they're all acting in isolation so one of the themes is we can't have that inefficiency anymore so we have to try to bring those together and teachers about the of course the other three it is but what what is the the thing that brings those first three together that's what we're wrestling with we have to we're wrestling with why would they want to come together we know that the current process of the being independent is inefficient and we're wasting time effort and money on in every single vector so could one's extreme of that potentially be how china has things yes set up that is one extreme that's not the extreme we're trying to recommend but that is one extreme where it is actually all one thing yeah yeah that's exactly right so they don't have that communication problem however there's different associated problems associated with that okay okay and that's that's one extreme and then I want to know what the ideal is and you said you're wrestling with that and it does there's a lot of perverse incentives as well in in the in the science foundation of science and I think those are we've done shows on that too that we are really working on on creating an incentive system that that is that is completely redesigned in very fascinating ways and you know like we were like you were saying that a huge principle of that is the democratization to get more people involved but okay teach us about the where did you have a do you have somewhat of anything that you can share about there are examples of what we call good examples of collaboration good examples of alignment good years done some amazing work with sandia national labs so as proctor and gamble done some some good work with sandia national labs as well as with laurence livermore national labs so there are spot cases which are exceptionally good and we're actually trying to build a compendium of these cases to put up as a sess and say here's what good alignment should look like good so we're in the process of building that compendium of use cases of good alignment right now and then that's almost as though you could take potentially some of the best processes from that exact use cases and then maybe make that as a that that's correct principle set but we have figured out that the one key common characteristic to all of them is a champion on each side yeah that really wants to make the alignment work yeah that's cool and so it isn't one side can't drive it it's got to be a champion from both sides that actually makes that work that's that's very profound and that makes a lot of sense the one champion on both sides from a from a let go from a on a research perspective to an industry side interesting interesting so moving on from the aligned theme the next theme is business challenges and one of the key business challenges is how how do we get the engineers to understand the business language yeah how do we get them to speak to the executives in terms of business benefits but also from the same standpoint it's kind of like okay what is an understanding of the real value proposition and what are the business issues that are going to be caused by actually trying to use broader how what are the real advantages how what does that enable and one of the key things that comes up is going to be cultural changes it's not just the technology change so we're working on that particular aspect there the third one is about credibility and that's all about hold it how do we actually understand whether or not the analysis that's been done is good enough for the decision it's trying to be used for on the principle that every simulation is done to support a decision that either has been made or will be made so is that simulation good enough for that decision yeah yeah so and that becomes today that's not as big an issue because it's the expert analysts running things and they'll tend to make it overly good enough because they're very conservative people but when we democratize it now all of a sudden this becomes critical yeah yeah because we can't rely on Bill just over killing it by the way we can't afford Bill to over kill it anymore yeah yeah so then the next one is generative design because generative design will enable simulation driven design so that the function that you want is actually going to decide the design rather than the geometry so one particular interesting story i like to tell is generative design opens up an opportunity where i come up with a new design a new widget and initially i have a very small volume so i'm going to build this with additive manufacturing i start to sell more and more of these actually additive manufacturing is not the most cost-effective manufacturing method anymore it might be an extrusion method i sell more and more actually i might want to do casting because i have a higher setup cost my lower cost per part so now i'm cast i'm doing casting because i'm selling millions of the widgets someone who bought the original widget orders a replacement widget he gets one its function will be exactly the same it will fit in exactly the same shape it will connect the same way it won't look at all like the original part it will be a totally different geometry and that's because it's constantly been iterated on it's because it's been re-optimized to account for the the manufacturing process yeah which means it has different constraints its change of shape is is limited in different ways but it also opens up other opportunities so this thing that was all stringy and had threads going effectively that's probably not a good shape if i'm doing casting and so it'll be more consistent and solid and so that it's um so that the parts will change but the function won't yeah yeah yeah interesting these these pillars are really well thought out it shows the 40 years of expertise so cool um another summary of the pillars okay so the summary of the pillars would be the alignment pillar and then we have to have the business challenges we have the credibility we have the democratization issue we have the generative design issue we have the integration from systems level all the way down the detailed subsystems level and then we have the engineering simulation digital twins and i've heard this term now but i haven't learned it yet engineering simulation digital twins right please teach okay so there's been a lot of buzz about digital twins and in there the first thing we need to say is there's no such thing as a digital twin there are multiple digital twins and i won't get into a definition of a digital even what digital twins are because of the fact that they're very case specific there's very different types of digital twins for different purposes so what we did it assess is we said okay if we focus on just those digital twins that are used for engineering simulation in other words capture the physics performance and have the qualities of a digital twin so these are digital twins which specifically do their computer physical physics representations that tie to a physical twin and actually communicate information back and forth to that physical twin but their sole purpose is about the performance evaluation that is an engineering simulation digital twin there's other kinds of digital twins but we said we're going to focus on making a clear clean definition of what that is so people can get understand the characteristics they can understand how to implement it they can understand what it means it's not vague anymore okay is this is this a correct paraphrasing that there's uh engineering simulation that is running concurrently with an actual physical part in the in the world and it's constantly having a a closed loop feedback with that part iterating on that part making it better it doesn't have to be running concurrently it can be running on different time sinks and it's not a constant feedback but there is a feedback so there is information coming from the sensors on the physical device that may actually go to a systems level engineering digital twin to say actually i need to run these for analysis okay those may be run and they will give information back what they think it should be compared to the sensors and back and forth some of this will be as tightly coupled as you mentioned as a complete feedback immediate some will be totally different time scales where the simulation might be run once every six months or once every three months or once an anomaly shows up in this in the sensory data so that it it's going to vary on every case yeah yeah whoa so okay this is one aspect of likely many aspects of future technology that is entering into the and the engineering software space okay that was a really really strong conversation around what what what is happening did we do we miss something that you think is very critical to also mention no i think we've covered the main thing the only comment i'll make is the assess initiative came about because i had these eclectic background from various different things which led me to start the it's led me to start in trims him to fill the gap which showed that there was an opportunity in the for the market that even in trims him couldn't fill but it took a collaboration so each revelation led to another revelation and it was this combination of eclectic understanding broader perspective i would advise to anybody always find a way to broaden your perspective and that then led to saying okay there is this opportunity where we can make a difference and we chose to go after it i am so so much in agreeance with how on a very eclectic multidisciplinary background can lead to where you're at right now and that is such a crucial just it's very it's so important to pass along to younger generations is to to be able to have a desire for eclectic backgrounds multidisciplinary backgrounds because it can do really powerful things can be can be done when you can connect dots and novel ways at the edge of fields especially new sciences emerge so for the the young kids i would say if you don't know what you want to do find the one that you dislike the most and try it if you like it great if nothing else it will expose you to the things that are next to it you try those and you try those and it's the experience you're not going to sit back and say i really want to be an aerospace engineer because you don't really know what an aerospace engineer does until you actually start doing aerospace engineering so yes okay so you're passionate about aerospace engineering go there but actually pay attention to the other things that are next to it and learn and broaden and if any aerospace engineer who can think like an artist is worth a lot more than an aerospace engineer who could only think math and so this broadening of perspectives and including the the artistic perspective the psychological perspective the philosophical perspective these are key to advancing anywhere because if you can broaden your perspective you broaden not only your knowledge you broaden the the ability to see where the answers are and that is in many ways the future is being able to pair together philosophers artists with engineers and scientists and the ones that can potentially even drive some of the geopolitical oneness discourse that we absolutely this has been so fascinating we are very grateful that we got to sit down with you and you had to you got the chance to teach us about so much cool things well thank you for the time thank you thank you for coming on the show thank you such an honor such a pleasure thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode go and talk to more people about engineering simulations share it with your family share it with your friends and share with your co-workers let's get more people talking about this also check out the links below to both joe's work also check out the links below to co-fest congress on the future of engineering software and support the artists and entrepreneurs that you believe in go and support them in your community support them abroad like us as well our links are below give us a support and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon