You have a dream…
You have a dream. I know you do.
The trouble is, it is really easy to get discouraged when that dream is far away. It is really easy to get discouraged when people laugh at your dream, or worse, have no idea what you are talking about.
They say, “if people aren’t laughing at your dream, it’s probably too small.” (But boy, this is hard to remember this while they’re laughing.)
I had a dream about open source chemistry. Open source is clearly a better model for many types of software projects. Open source hardware is officially a thing. Why couldn’t I find any examples of open source chemistry?
The initial feedback from my professional community was skeptical. But I’m a stubborn guy.
By sharing that dream, I had the opportunity to meet John Lilly, the former CEO of Mozilla, where he was in charge of the world’s first open source consumer product, Firefox.
By sharing that dream, I had the opportunity to meet Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems. (Speak Java?)
By sharing that dream, I was awarded a Phase I SBIR grant from NSF. (The program manager told me I was “a romantic”.)
Whatever happened to my dream of open source chemistry? Long story short, I realized that the simplistic model I had just couldn’t create the change that I was trying to make. As my friend Josh Aas, who runs Let’s Encrypt, told me: “open source is a means, not an end.”
The point I’m trying to make is this: even though I have made zero tangible progress on my vision of open source chemistry, the interactions that I’ve had along the way have been immensely valuable to me and to polySpectra.
If open source is just a means to an end, maybe I needed to be thinking about the end instead.
What I have since realized is that the dream I have is not about open source, it is about access. It is about democratizing access to advanced manufacturing. It is about lowering the cost of innovation in physical stuff. It is about helping designers, inventors and engineers make their ideas real.
What would that end look like? I’m calling it The Anything Store.
The Anything Store is a long ways away. I have some ideas for how to get there, but for now my plan is simply to share the dream. To me, it is really the same dream I had before. It is the dream that I was trying to dream with open source chemistry. I have no idea what will come of this dream, but I am very sure that it will be nothing unless I share it.
Do you practice dreaming? Do you practice sharing?
Happy MLK Day!
R
