 Got it My name is Boyd and I'm an engineer or as my oldest daughter puts it I am a nerd I've built I've built things ranging from highly-scaled applications and the data centers they run into they run in to Complex developer systems that span the world to full-on operating systems And I am not gonna bang on about those things because you can look it up Instead I want to talk about What are the first principles that I operate on and that I try to do my projects in a little bit about what I'm working on here? And then a little on how we can work together So let's start with first principles The first one is build for the future Every single project where I've purposefully tried to make predictions about world where the world is going in the time Frame and how long I think it's gonna take me to build whatever it is. I'm doing it always works So in other words if you start a project and it's gonna take you two years to do it Don't build something that would be competitive and interesting and relevant now when you start it Build something that's gonna be competitive and interesting and relevant when you finish it Right and this means taking some measurements. Let's say you're doing an energy system Look at the trends and predict. What's the cost of energy gonna be in two years if you're thinking computer systems Well, what's the cost of chips going to be in two years if you're thinking networking? What's the cost of data gonna be in two years and that it changes your designs and you end up starting something that wouldn't be competitive right now, but you're ahead of everyone else when you get there number two really important Before you start building stuff and every engineer gets super excited about things Engines are cool, and I don't care if it's a mechanical one or a virtual one You can't start working until you know what problem you're solving and this is hard You've got your big problem for your enterprise or whatever Then each feature each product each feature in the product They've all got to have a problem that you hold in your head as you write it and as you build for it You know when I advise companies and I go in and I say hey, let's talk about your tech I always start by just asking questions until I know what problem they're solving and usually They learn what problem they're solving in the process and by the end they realize Oh, I need maybe 50% or 25% of the tech. I actually thought I needed So understand the problem you're solving before you finish and even before you even start building your solutions next Every solution you do also creates problems Every single one You have to know what they are you have to account for them and the goal is That the problems you create are smaller than the problems you solve right My favorite example from this week has actually been what Samantha was describing with little yellow bird She's got a clothing company and she's making uniforms and she's doing stuff with fabric and she went and Calculated well, how much carbon am I doing by sourcing from this place? What's the damage? I'm doing by getting my dying done in that way, right? She's thinking about her external costs that aren't immediately relative You know, they're not the same as the problem she's solving for her customers But they matter in the equation in this part's a little bit of a challenge on the other hand I haven't heard a single person who's representing blockchain talk about their costs. I Haven't heard anyone talk about the carbon load I haven't heard any discussion of if I take an action with a blockchain that causes a ripple effect of other actions What are those and which are the ones I'm using and which are the ones I can avoid? that math matters as I figure out if my solutions are overall Creating bigger or smaller problems than the ones I'm trying to solve all right, I Also spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about culture There's cultures that we're born into there's cultures that we join and in the corporate world There's cultures we get to create and those are kind of fun Right. There's how often do you get to build a culture that lives beyond you or your time at a place? I like to think that culture is your exit strategy now the point of a culture is that it embodies and it reinforces those other first principles Right and the rituals that you build in your culture the annual performance review the daily stand-up meeting How did they relate to your first principles? Are you talking about your external costs? Are you talking about the problems you solve on a regular basis and this? Builds momentum within your organization whether or not you're there and keeps things going in the right way So these are my main four first principles and there's more, but only a five minutes So what am I doing here? This is my new company. It's Crichton Industries spent a lot of time thinking about the name Crichton and we can have a discussion about that It's certainly nerdy and that's kind of on purpose Right Scott what one and zero that kind of indicates binary all that stuff but as I was thinking about what impact can I have and what's the biggest problem I can solve with just who I am It's well, it's all your problems and what are the platforms I can build that helps everyone else? Solve the problems they're trying to solve and not everybody you have to pick and choose you can't solve every problem So if you're building a system that assumes there's a device Whether it's on a solar panel or it's on a tree tracking rodents or it's up in space If you're building devices where there isn't the human nearby to reboot it and handle errors and all that that's the space I'm interested in so and kind of techno speak. I'm building an operating system aimed at IOT devices and What I'm trying to solve is error recovery What happens when software things go bad? How fast can you recover? How can you keep critical systems running while say if the sensor is rebooting itself? How do you keep going and layer in a put a bunch of security in at the same time and it's a way deeper discussion than just a minute Okay, last thing is how do we work together? I'm exploring my new relationship with New Zealand and this is how you reach me and I'd love to talk