June 2019 newsletter
Ryerson university
In my last newsletter I talked about a project with Ryerson university tackling the lockheed martin alphapilot challenge to create an autonomous racing drone guided entirely by computer vision, and even after just 2 months working on it I’ve learned so much. I’ve had to learn to solve almost every new task as it comes, take on parts of the project I didn’t even know existed and even adjust my eating and sleeping habits to get the absolute highest output from my time. I couldn’t have imagined half of the challenges I would have when I first took this on but as with any project no matter how thoroughly or intricately you plan it, it’ll always take 3 times longer than you predicted, require 3 times the effort and cost 3 times the money. If anything it taught me that you need to learn how to learn roll with the dozens of punches a project’s going to throw at you.
Meeting Steve Mann
In a world where hundreds of people are inventing ways to simulate entire worlds, inventing incredible new ways of communication and inventing methods of transportation better than anyone’s ever seen, the word inventor is surprisingly underused. Very few people want to classify themselves as purely “makers” even though having the mindset and skills of one is one of the most essential pieces of building a company, and this month I got the chance to meet one of those people who did. I got the chance to meet Steve Mann, one of the founders of modern wearables and someone who’s been working with BCIs before BCIs were even considered a field. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve met and taught me a lot about doing rather than saying at a young age and having that be the thing that differentiates me, not how well I can present or sell myself.
Meeting people at Airmatrix
One of the biggest problems drones are going to face within the next few years is the fact that there are going to be so many of them with no management or way of avoiding collisions and surprisingly not a lot of people are working to solve it, but this month I got the chance to meet some of the few that are. Over the past few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to talk to people at Airmatrix, one of the first companies to build a network of aerial highways for drones to navigate through cities in places that don’t put people or important property in danger. The entire experience taught me a lot about finding important problems and that even though something may look feasible or obvious, it’s probably not an opportunity worth pursuing unless you go deeper than anyone else has. Looking forward I’m going to be focusing a lot more on figuring out problems no one else can and starting to help Airmatrix out with some of their engineering work, both things I’m really looking forward to and planning on releasing a lot more content about soon.
Overall, June’s been a month I got to focus a lot on making the things I’ve been talking about real. I got to learn from some of the smartest in robotics who’ve been doing this for decades, figured out a lot on my own through days and nights of trial and error and helped set up even more for the future. Over the next few months I’m going to be focusing on validating a lot of the problems I found with aviation over the past year and doubling down on projects to get the knowledge to build real solutions, which a lot of CEOs would tell you is the most important part of founding a company.
