SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Technologist David Bombal has a one-hour interview with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton. The interview covers a range of topics, starting with the big questions about unit availability and when more stock will be available.
00:00 - Intro: Tough Environment
00:07 - Intro: Eben Upton hacked the network as a kid
00:40 - Raspberry Pi shortage (stock availability)
07:22 - People say that you're not looking after hobbyists!
10:12 - Raspberry Pi OS is backwards compatible
12:37 - The pain affecting all of us
16:33 - The origin of the Raspberry Pi // How it started
23:16 - Eben hacked the school network // Creating an environment for young hackers
32:05 - Changing the Cambridge and the World
35:00 - African growth and plans
40:03 - General purpose Computer vs iPhone vs Chromebook
43:28 - Possible IPO and Raspberry Pi Foundation
44:50 - The Raspberry Pi RP2040
48:33 - How is Raspberry Pi funded?
49:10 - How is the next product decided?
50:22 - Raspberry Pi Foundation sticking to its roots
51:17 - Advice for the youth or anyone new
56:01 - Changing roles // From tech to business
57:08 - Do you need to go to university? // Do you need degrees?
01:00:05 - Learning from experiences
01:01:44 - Creating opportunities
01:05:05 - Conclusion
No transcript is available and Eben does speak very quickly. Also published on YouTube if you do not have the obligatory LBRY account to block the algorithmic "recommendations".
Previously:
(2023) You Can Build This Raspberry Pi-Powered, 4G Linux Phone
(2023) Raspberry Pi Just Launched a Handy New $12 Tool. Here's What It Can Do
(2023) Raspberry Pi Powered Compute Blade Makes the Cut
(2023) Raspberry Pi Produced 10 Million RP2040s in 2021, More Pi Stores Likely
(2022) Raspberry Pi 5 Not Arriving in 2023 as Company Hopes for a "Recovery Year"
(2022) Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-Pandemic Levels in 2023
... and many more.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @10:57PM (7 children)
Everyone is gonna hit some kind of road bump at some point.And the question is, what infrastructure do you have to support you, and what infrastructure do you have, you know? I grew up in a lovely town. My father was an academic, you know, it was, I had a lot of privilege as a child, you know, so I don't wanna talk about too much about privilege, but I had a very, a wonderful privileged, blessed childhood.But a lot of people don't have that. And so you'll find if you grow up in Cambridge, your school will be besieged by volunteers to run afterschool clubs. If you're 30 miles north of here up in Norfolk, maybe you don't, maybe your school has nobody who is interested in running an afterschool club, you know, you maybe have no volunteers in the community.That's one of the reasons why engagement with teachers is so important. I come from this kind of anarchist kind of approach to this where, you know, everything I did was like, let's hack the school network. Let's go to a club. Let's go to an afterschool club and then go to the pub afterwards.You know, I come from that kind of world. And when I came into Raspberry Pi, that was the ethos that I brought with me. And probably, you know, we talk about the various ways in which our thinking has matured. And one of the ways is the idea that that is an incredibly, that is the product of an incredibly privileged background.To think that that is a viable strategy for all children, everywhere. And actually that engagement with the formal education system. The formal education system is the thing that gives people the underpinning, is the thing that gives people the backstop, the guarantee that they will get some exposure to computing.If you go and look at the computer industry, we hark back to the 1980s and it was a wonderful time. But if you go and look at the diversity of people in the computing industry, middle-aged people in the community industry, it's all people who look like me. It's all people, you know, it's white men from middle class backgrounds.Why is it white men from middle class backgrounds? Because those were the people who were messing around with computers in the 1980s and 1990s. You know, by engaging with the formal system, yeah, that's the only way that you're gonna reach the people. That's the only way that you're not gonna continue to perpetuate the demographic weirdness of our industry.And yeah, it's great. Yeah, I hope we always have lots of like, you know, people who look like me in this industry. But I hope that we also, well the, one of the interesting things when you look at the people who are participating in Code Club, for example, which is our the foundation's program for 9 to 13 year olds, it looks a lot more like society.You know, over 40% of the people going to Code Club are girls at a critical age, 9 to 13, at a critical age where girls often disengage a little bit from, you know, society. Something in the culture tends to, at a point where girls are often performing as well, or better than boys, something in the culture starts to tell girls that this is not for them.If you are a school which has a large number of deprived children, if you measure deprivation by the proportion of people who are entitled to free school meals, subsidized school meals. If you're a school with a high index of deprivation, you are slightly more likely to have a Code Club than if you're a school with a low level of deprivation.What that means is, if we kind of look 20, 30, 40 years into the future, there's real opportunity, there's real chance that if you were to walk out into an office, into a computing office, that the people you would see would be in all dimensions, much more representative of society as a whole. And that's gotta be a good thing, right? These are amazing opportunities and we have to make sure that, yeah, the two angles, one for individuals, they're amazing opportunities and we have to make surethat people have access to those opportunities. Two, we're an industry that's massively hungry for talent and we can't afford to let some pool of talent sit idle, sit fallow, you know, we can't afford to not discover that great computer programmer who happens to be from some underrepresented background.- I love that, I mean, the story, if I understand it correctly originally was you were at Cambridge and you noticed like the student applicants were going down and Cambridge is obviously very different to like, people perhaps in Africa. You've been in Africa. - Yeah, yeah. - What you've created has fulfilled that.'Cause they've, you can tell the story obviously much better than me, but like the applicant numbers went up, but you've also affected the whole world. - Yeah, it's amazing how moderate the vision was, I suppose, you know, that we were... - To what its become. - Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, we thought well, we'll build a thousand units and we'll get them into the hands of the right thousand kids, and then if a 10th of those apply to study computer science at Cambridge.We went from, we wanna find about a hundred kids a year to come to Cambridge to study computing. And we were down to about 200 applicants. I mean, that's incredible, right?
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @10:59PM (6 children)
In 2008, if you wanted to get your kid into Cambridge to read physics, the best way to get 'em in was to get 'em to apply to computer science and then switch once they're here, right.You know, there aren't many courses at Cambridge that have a two to one application ratio, right? And so this is a really simple ambition, you know, give out a thousand computers, get an extra a hundred applicants. Oh, now we've got 300 applicants for a hundred places. That's really a material change.Now what's actually happened is devices gone out in vastly larger numbers than that and they've gone out in a vastly more disorganized way. It's not that kind of like rifle shop that kind of like, so let's go snipe that population there. Let's go get these people. It's very broad, very broad deployment of units.Only a small number of which got into education, but that small fraction is still vastly more than a thousand units. Last year we had about 1500 applicants. It's gone from being one of the easiest courses to get into to being absolutely one of the most challenging courses. People should still apply. We do still need talent, but it is certainly very challenging.And we've seen that. And that's not just us, that's not just us, that's all of these other people who woke up at about the same time and realized there was a problem and tried to solve it. All the people who started afterschool clubs, all the organizations that started trying to train teachers.The government's curriculum reform, I mean we have an incredibly better curriculum. You compare the curriculum, the very office skills centric, ICT curriculum, that we had back in 2012 that was then disapplied and replaced by this completely insane, well designed computer science curriculum from about 2015 onwards.So you see all of these things have happened and they've all had a contribution. But the net, the aggregate effect, Cambridge has been measurable in this kind of, sort of sevenfold increase in the number of applicants between 2008 and about 2019. And you see that mirrored everywhere else. You see that mirrored elsewhere in the UK, you see that kind of resurgence elsewhere in the world.Raspberry Pi I think has been an important part of it. But the interesting thing is that our ambitions have grown as we've succeeded more, we've got hungrier, we haven't got less hungry, we've got hungrier. And so the question is, you know, can we do, okay, we've done it for Cambridge, can we do it for other institutions in the UK? We've done it in the UK, can we do it in other developed world countries? We've done it in the developed world.Can we do it in low and middle income countries? You know, one of the things I'm absolutely most excited about at the moment is our impact in Africa. I've had a chance over the last six months to go to Ghana, to go to Kenya. I'm just back from Morocco. And you just see this level of desire, this level of hunger for the opportunities that general purposes computing brings, the economic opportunities, the educational opportunities, the chance for advancement for the individual, the chance for advancement for a country.We went to, very lucky, went to the, in Morocco, went to the University of Mohammed VI, Polytechnic, about halfway between Marrakesh and Casablanca. This huge, these vast buildings, this enormous technology university that's been built over the last 10 years really on the greenfield side in Morocco. And just that ambition.You talk to the people there and you see that there is the ambition not to catch up with what we have here in the UK, what people have in North America, what people have elsewhere in Western Europe. But to leapfrog over it, you know, a real desire to kinda seize control of their sort of technological destiny, and to do that not just for one country, not just for Morocco, but to share that advancement with all the countries in North Africa and in sub-Saharan Africa.From day one we've always had a very strong reseller presence in South Africa. And sort of, for a long time, Africa for us really meant South Africa. I think it's the case for a lot of technology companies, right? Africa really means, maybe South Africa, maybe some of the countries in North Africa, maybe Egypt, but, you know, certainly other bits of francophone North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa not really figuring on Mike Buffon who's our chief commercial officer.He said, I went to Kenya with him, October last year and we did a panel and he said, yeah, he's had roles at a lot of, before Raspberry Pi, roles in a lot of electronics companies, distribution companies for 30 years, all of which have global in their title.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @11:01PM (5 children)
And the first time he went to Africa was in January last year.- It's crazy. - It's incredible, right? - Yeah, and there's so much talent and young talent. - Absolutely. - So many young people. - It's a young continent, right? - Yeah. - It's a young continent. A couple years ago, just before the pandemic, but we hired a chap called Kenan Colo, who's based in Lagos.He was introduced to us. We were very lucky that we have, so John Lazar, who's the chairman of the foundation is a South African originally, has a real focus on kind of, I guess entrepreneurial engagement in Africa. And he was able to introduce us to Ken. Ken joined us as our strategic partnership director in Africa.And really what he's been doing since he joined us is actually not, some of the aspects of how the market works are different in Africa, but really what he's building is infrastructure, which feels very familiar to us. What he's doing is he's building reseller networks. The thing that's powered the adoption of Raspberry Pi in our kind of existing core markets is this network of about a hundred approved resellers who we, you know, we regulate their pricing.You know, we require them to sell at no more than a certain price. We provide them with access to our products at a favorable price. We provide them with clickstream, you know, so if you come to our website and click on buy for a product, we will geolocate you and send you to an approved reseller in your local geography.So the approved reseller's kind of the heart of the Raspberry Pi, kind of outbound operation. We haven't had those in Africa. And what we've been doing is country by country booting up very familiar looking AR networks. The way that those ARs do business with their customers is often different from the way that you would do that in the UK, the way that we get product to them is often different.There are often some logistical challenges, taxation challenges, duty challenges of often getting hardware to them. But what they're doing is very familiar, what they're doing. They are just approved resellers. We were in Morocco in March, onboarded and approved, onboarded an approved reseller who looks like they were about to become our largest approved reseller, kind of almost from a standing start to become our largest approved reseller outside in Africa, outside of South Africa.People who've been actually selling Raspberry Pis for a long period of time, but not as an approved reseller and that's, non-approved resellers is fine. There's nothing wrong with non-approved resellers. It just means these are not people where we, this is somewhere where we don't regulate the buying experience.And so you take somebody who's been actually a passionate advocate for Raspberry Pi for a number of years, but outside the tent, you bring them into the tent and you give them access to supply and you give them access to pricing and all of a sudden these things, they explode, and they're exploding because they're a little bit like Raspberry Pi in the UK in 2012.There is latent demand for these products in the African market. And all we're doing is we are dropping well-developed in obviously products which are vastly more sophisticated than our 2012 era product. We're dropping these products into a, like putting a crystal in a supersaturated solution. You drop them in bang, you know, suddenly you're accessing this enormous reservoir of demand.It's amazing. - I mean we, the the computer industry needs more and more people. I mean... - Oh yeah. - And what you're doing is you're empowering all of these people to learn. I wanted to ask you, you use this term a few times today, and I've heard you use it before, general purpose computing versus say an iPhone.What's the difference and why is this so important? - We are really passionate advocates for general purpose computing, so a general purpose computer is a (indistinct) machine, right? It's a thing that can do anything. You can program it to do anything. You can sit in front of it, and you can program it to do anything a computer can do.- Are you, you were thinking people would use it for games and then you use this example of cucumbers or something like that. - Yeah, that's it. And that's the lovely thing about general purpose computing is how, you unlock creativity when you put general, if you put special purpose computers out in the world, all they can be used for is the thing that you intended them for.So you put a games console out in the world, it gets used to play computer games. You put a, you know, a mobile phone out in the world. It gets used to, yeah, make phone calls, run apps, but fundamentally run apps that other people have developed somewhere else.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @11:05PM (4 children)
You know, play content that other people have created, not create really meaningful content yourself.When you make an appliance, you bound the things that people do with it. The point about general purpose computer is you can do literally anything. So, you know, when I conceived a Raspberry Pi, I didn't wanna put the GPIO header on there. I didn't see what the point was of the GPIO header. And Pete Lomas, one of my co-founders designed the Raspberry Pi 1 and he said, "Well, you've got these GPIO pins on the chip, we should bring them to a header." And I'm like, "Are you sure? You know, I'm not sure how robust those pins are, you know? What if someone sends static shocks into them with their finger?" And sorry, you know, I wasn't designing it. So I yielded to his enthusiasm for it, And of course, yeah, thank goodness. I mean, if I hadn't then, you know, my vision that this was, that people were gonna use, you know, I suffered from a paucity of vision.I thought that because I use my BBC and (indistinct) to write computer games, that's what people would do with Raspberry Pis. And it turns out the majority of what people in education do with Raspberry Pis is physical computing. They do robotics, they do sensing, they do monitoring, they do those sorts of things.And that's what gets people excited. So you see it's the power of general purpose computing. General purpose computing doesn't have to exist. As I, I think I said earlier, there was a period of time when the general purpose computer just happened. If you wanted to play computer games, the cheapest thing you could make and give to somebody to do that happened to be a general purpose computer.And then over time, people found ways to make both technical and business model innovations, enabled the rise probably of, you know, certainly the 16 and 32 bit games consoles were a combination of technical and business innovation, which kind of nibbled away at a big fraction of the deployed base of general purpose computers.And there's really no reason why that nibbling won't continue until there are no general purpose computers. I mean, the Chromebook is a fascinating example of this. You know, what was the remaining citadel really of general purpose computing until Raspberry Pi came along. The reigning citadel of general purpose computing in the consumer world was the PC and the Mac.And those were largely laptops. And that felt like a very secure citadel. But of course the Chromebook is a really interesting attack on that. People have managed to figure out a way to make an object that looks a lot like a laptop, can do most of the things that consumers want from a laptop. And yet it's not really a general purpose computer.And so Raspberry Pi, you know, we will always make general purpose computers. There is no point in us making appliances. That's not what we're on the planet for. We've sold 50 million of them, right? We put a lot of general purpose computers into the wild and we're just passionate advocates for it on all fronts.Both as an educational tool, but also as a platform for OEM customers, for industrial customers to innovate around. - Eben, I've heard rumors, and I think you've said it on other interviews about perhaps a possible IPO? - Yeah, I mean we, you know, I have this piece of paper I reach from time to time that says we look for when people ask that question, you know, we always look at ways of funding the future growth of our company.We looked at the possibility of doing an IPO, we invested a little bit of money. I think you can see this from our accounts. We invested a little bit of money in I guess 2020 calendar, '21 in understanding whether an IPO might be a track we could go down. the semiconductor shortage in two problems with doing an IPO for the business.Certainly in that sort of timeframe. One, the shortage makes it hard to be predictable. It makes it hard to understand what the business is gonna do and what does the market want. The market wants predictability. And the other thing is just generally there is this notion the markets are closed. By this time last year the markets were closed.There was a huge amount of IPO activity in 2021. And then there was really no IPO in London, there was no IPO activity really in 2022. So that's not really something that we have been able to pursue. I mean, I'm not saying it's something we won't come back to. I mean, it's a potential path in particular, it's a potential path for the foundation to realize some of the value in the trading company in Raspberry Pi Limited.So it's something, I mean, it's an interesting, it was an interesting journey, you know, investigating. It was an interesting journey, we've met some great people, had some great conversations, and it is something that, you know, it might be something we'll come back to in a few years. - You've developed your own custom silicone, is that right? - Yeah, that's right.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @11:13PM (3 children)
So 2021 January, 2021, we released Raspberry Pi Pico, which is a lovely look, it's a lovely product. But the thing that's really interesting about it is it's the first time we've released a product where the core silicone was also designed at Raspberry Pi. So we talk about it being a board that has two Raspberry Pi logos on it.It has a logo on the board and it has a logo on the chip. Now, that turned up at a really interesting time for us. It turned up just as the supply chain challenges were starting to bite in our core business. We talked about mitigations, we talked about trying to find our enthusiast community, other things to be enthusiastic about, other things to be involved with during this kind of difficult period, being able to offer a platform in PICO and RP 2040, which we knew we could make as many as we want, you know.There was no problem if you want 10 million Picos or 10 million RP 2040s, I can probably deliver them to you pretty quickly. There's no real constraint on my doing that. So having a long constrained platform during this difficult time was nice. RP 2040 is a lovely chip. Our team here did an amazing job designing it.It's very nearly perfect in a way that, you know, an application processor, the big chips that go into the big products can never be perfect. They're too large, they're too complicated to ever be kind of perfectible, you know, they're extremely good, but they're not perfect. That chip is within its kind of design envelope, is pretty much as good as it could possibly be.And it's very kind of satisfying to have been involved with and to be shipping a product based on a piece of silicon that's just, just right. You know, something that's based on the other team here, they've been working with microcontrollers for decades, individually, obviously within the organization.Raspberry Pi's been shipping microcontroller base products for a decade, you know, the core, not the core product, but the accessory products almost all have microcontrollers of some sort. Individuals have been involved with microcontrollers for decades. Everyone accumulates kind of ideas of what's good, what's bad, you know, what features did I enjoy in this microcontroller, what features do I wish I'd had? Really our RP 2040 is kind of a, I guess a consolidation of all those insights that members of the team have had over the years.All them consolidated down into this piece of silicone, obviously a piece of silicon that's on a fairly advanced process node by microcontroller standards on 40 nanometers. We get about 21,000 die out of each 300 millimeter wafer. One of the reasons why it's in good supply, get 25 wafers, it's half a million chips.Kind of the minimum unit of wafers that you'll get from a foundry is generally a cartridge 25 wafers is half a million chips. And so even fairly small supplies of upstream wafer starts, turns into a lot of inventory for us. - But you mean that raises the issue, like how do you fund that? I'm assuming it costs a lot of money to design all of that and rather than like just use merchant silicon.- Yeah, I mean RP 2040 I think was about my mental model of it. And it's always interesting to look in the accounts and see whether your mental model aligns with the reality is that it was a about a $5 million, - Wow. - About a $5 million program. - And you sell 'em for? - We sell 'em for 50 cents.- Wow. - Right? - It's a lot of investment. and we don't make 50 cents on each unit. It's not a thing that cost 10 cents to make. So you sell it for 50 cents, you wholesale it 50 cents, retail it between 70 cents and a dollar depending on volume. So you, you know, you gotta sell, if you wanted to make your money back on chips alone, you'd have to sell 20, 30, 40, 50 million chips.Now the interesting thing of course is we are in a privileged position because we also make Pico, we make the product that's built on the chip, and of course the margins on that, again, that's a $4 product for Pico, but the margins on Pico are substantially better than the margins on RP 2040. So you can kind of say, well look, I'm gonna pay this program back on the back of Pico, which I couldn't have done without it.And then I'm not gonna feel so bad about the fact that I'm only making 10 cents on an RP 2040. - How do you fund that? Is IPO an option? Is like private? Do you have private investors? - It's a little bit of a mix. I mean, historically Raspberry Pi is entirely funded by, it was organically funded.- Just from sales? Yeah, just from sales, just from profits on selling Raspberry Pis and accessories. So, you know, over the years, you know, we've returned between 30 and 40 million pounds to the foundation, to our shareholder, but we retain some of the profits we make inside our organization as well. And that's the money that's paid for things, programs, like Raspberry Pi 4, you know, Raspberry Pi 4 was not a cheap program.Pretty much like RP 2040 and Pico.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @11:19PM (2 children)
What we'll fund whatever we, when we decide what we're gonna do next, it's what we'll fund what we do next. - How do you decide what to make? Like you've been through so many different like, products, like, we've got some of them here, and some of them we don't.But how do you decide what to make? - We make what we wanna make, we make what we want ourselves. It's an unfashionable way of designing products, I guess. These days you're supposed to focus group everything to death. The nice thing about making a product that you want, that's another fruit company that's famous for doing this as well, right? - Yep.- If you make products that you want, then at least one person wants them. If you make products by focus grouping and by interpolating, the thing that I think is a killer in product design is where you have two, you identify two genuine pools of demand and then you think, wow, it'd be efficient if I could make one product that serves both these pools of demand.So you would interpolate and you make some products in the middle that lands between the two and these of no interest to either side. So you could, it's very easy if you do that kind of approach to make a product that has no customers. If you make a product you want at least there's one customer. And in practice there's a lot of people like me, there's a lot of people like the, oh, I'm not the, I, it's not like I sit down and design these products myself.We all sit down together and decide what we wanna build. There's a lot of people like us and that's why there's demand for Raspberry Pi 'cause we are an engineer-led organization that is designing products that are appealing to engineers. - I love that because I think a lot of people, especially the techy people watching will say that companies lose their way when it's all about sales.And it's no longer the engineers. - Yeah. And it doesn't always hit. I mean we, you know, we've had some products. TV hat I think was not the biggest success in the world. I mean, it's sold out. You know, we have the, you know, we always fairly conservative when, particularly when we do something which is novel, we're always fairly conservative about how many we make.And we do always trade out eventually. But we have a few products that took a few years to trade out the initial build volume. I think TV hat was the obvious example. And we have, you know, a recent, a good example of recent product, Global Shutter, the global shutter camera. I mean, it's an amazing product, but again, it's a product that has a very, it could be quite nichey.- I was gonna say it's niche product. - Yeah, it's gonna be super interesting to a niche. And we dunno how big that niche is. And so we've been quite conservative about how many of those we built. Even though we really believe in it as a product, we have to not get ourselves in a situation where we sitting on a million dollars of stock, it's gonna take us 20 years to sell, right? You've walked a journey and I mean, you've shared some of like the products that you make are the products that you'd want.But like you've walked this road now and there's a lot of people watching that are perhaps starting their journey, or you know, they're inspired by you. Many people are inspired by you. What advice would you give your younger self, or someone who's starting out, you know? We've spoken about some of this offline and...- I have a general reservation about advice, right? The general reservation is that a lot of what's happened, a lot of what's happened to anyone who is successful in business is they've been lucky. And you can stack the deck and you can make your own luck. But in the end, you know, I look at the history of Raspberry Pi and so many of the things which were really, really meaningful to us were very contingent.You know, they didn't have to happen. It was somebody bumped into a guy, you know, Alan Mycroft one of our founding trustees bumped into Pete Lomas, another founding trustee who designed the first product, bumped into him at some conference at Imperial and took him for a walk in Hyde Park and told about what we were trying to do and recruited him that way.So, you know, you have those, you have those kind of, they're often personal relationships kind of happen stance. So, it's an important caveat. And anyone who stands up and says, I made it in business 'cause I'm a goddamn genius, is a liar, it's just, is a liar, is delusional. Yeah, I mean, you can stack the deck.I mean, things that have been good for us, getting onto things that have been good for me, getting in touch with the market early. People talk about minimum viable products. Building minimum viable products. It's easy to sit in an ivory tower and think about what the perfect product would be and spend years working on it.When really if you got in touch with the market, well there's nothing to stop you keeping working after you've launched that first product, you can keep working. You can keep fettling it, but you'll be fettling it in the context of having market feedback. And that's been very good to us. I do have an MBA and I'm quite an advocate for doing an MBA at some point in your career.It's a little bit like I'm an advocate for hacking on computers when you are eight years old and then doing a computer science degree. I'm kind of an advocate for founding a bunch of businesses and screwing them up and then to some degree and then doing an MBA. I'm much more of an advocate for that than I am doing a computer science degree if you've never put under a computer, or doing an MBA if you've never started a business, right.I found, I did the MBA here at Cambridge and I found there were a lot of really useful strategic insights, particularly about, you know, how you structure a business to be sustainable in the long run. How you manage talent, how you decide what work you're gonna do inside the organization and what work you're gonna do outside the organization.Companies are so ubiquitous in the world that people don't think very much about why companies exist at all. They're like, why can't we have a world which is just built out of free contractors, freely contracting entities that do commercial transactions with each other. And of course, you know, you have this tension, but that approach doesn't work, because you have transaction cost economics, right.You know, it's very labor intensive to constantly set up and tear down commercial relationships between freely contracting individuals. So to a certain size, corporations have an advantage because they, you know, they hide all that transaction cost economics. You just get a pool of labor, get a pool of talent, and then apply it to problems without having to constantly write new contracts and in above a certain size.Because inside a corporation you're effectively, it's a planned economy, right. And we all know planned economies don't work very well, right. On the one hand, why don't you have a whole sea of freely contracting individuals, on the other side, why don't you just have megacorp? Why don't you have, well, so union was megacorp, wasn't it? That didn't work very well.So there's a dynamic tension there. And so sort of understanding what you do inside your organization and what you do through contracting, what you do through third parties, understanding what sorts of innovation can be supported in a contracting fashion and what sorts of innovation really are best done inside the planned economy of a single corporation is an important, it's an interesting, I mean, just like with computer science, right? There is a body of professional knowledge.There's a body of theoretical practice associated with running a business and it's really easy to disdain it, right, you know, because, we have this kind of culture of the macho, you know, guy who started off, you know, Alan Sugar kind of character, you know, guys who started off running a, you know, selling stuff on a stall.Ends up running a big corporation, right. And never did a day's executive ed in his life. And that's great. And there are savants like that out there. These, the lucky people or savants out there who will kind of walk that road. But for most of us, I think that's an expensive way sort of talked about, you know, the cost of an MBA, you know, tens of thousands of pounds.An MBA is the cheap way to get business experience. The expensive way to get business experience is to start some companies, screw them up, learn the lessons. It might save you, you know, those MBA fees might save you and save a couple of companies the experience of being founded and screwed up. - You started like hacking when you were young, then you went in like hardcore tech, you were designing chips, really technical, and then like your role's kinda changed over the years.Now you're more business focused. - Yeah, I'm extremely business focused now. I try to keep up with the people we have. We have an amazing workforce here, obviously. Engineering workforce here is by far the highest average capability level that I've ever engaged with. And you know, I go out there and I have to try and help people understand what to do, think about what to do next.And that's kind of an intimidating environment.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @11:22PM (1 child)
I try to stay current. I am not especially current. I live in fear of becoming less current. I'm still at a level of technical ability, a level of technical involvement where I can at least ask at least half the questions aren't dumb, which is good.That's a good ratio. If I can keep the ratio above 50%, then, you know, you sort of still feel like you're hanging on by your fingernails to the edge of technical relevance. And it's a great bunch. It's a great bunch of people. I mean, it's a wonderful group of people and of course, many of whom I've known for well over a decade now.It's a wonderful group of people to be doing innovation with. - Here's a nasty question, alright? Do I need to go to university? - Oh, do you need to go? Do you need to go to university? I don't think you need to go to university. I think there are some challenges. Society's got itself into a bit of a hole in respect of whether you need to have a university degree.And there's a risk that what's happening to degrees is they're becoming badges of conformance and badges of conformity. And that what you are saying is, I was prepared, here's a token, I was prepared to spend 50,000 pounds to buy this token. And what that token tells you is that I conform and what employers want, what a lot of employers want is people who will...All employers, I mean, it's a respectable want for an employer to want employees who conform to certain standards of socialization. And the real risk is that all we've done is we've created this token. And if you don't have the token, then people think, oh, you must be a bit odd. Perhaps you'll be a bit, you're a bit odd.Do I really wanna hire someone who's a bit odd? That's really dangerous place for society to have got to. So I think there's enormous value in degrees, and I don't just think that there's value in degrees, which are, I mean, my father was an English academic. I'm not one of these people who thinks that university is a training ground for employees, you know, and the only worthwhile degrees are the ones that couple directly into some transferable commercial employable skill.You know, it's a horrible way of thinking about education. And so I think there is enormous value in it. And in the particular case of computer science, I think it has value in the sense of a little bit like the MBA thing. I once met a guy who was working for a graphics company in Finland now Fins are amazing, a lot of amazing Finnish engineers.And this guy was working on a compiler for GL, the GL shading language component of the, the OpenGL driver that we were gonna license for the video call platform. And he had never been to university, amazing engineer. And he had written this compiler from scratch, and he had, through intellectual brute force, had invented, you know, all of compiler technology all the way through to the mid 1970s, you know, from scratch.He could have done a six week compiler course at university and not had to do that. And it would've got him to the state of the art in 2000, not the state of the art in 1975. So there are, it's important again, not to disdain the body of professional practice, and, you know, having respect for the body of professional knowledge can sit alongside having respect for and acknowledging the importance of practical endeavor as a way of kind of levering that.If you wanna go get a job in, you know, as an engineer in the community industry, yeah, it's good to get a computer science degree. At some point it'll save you effort in the same way it will save someone who wants to start an MBA will save a business person some effort. But it's not to say you can't get there the other way, but I honestly think it's a harder road.- I mean, I love what you said. You're talking from experience. Like you had some businesses, some of them didn't go so well, some of them went well. If you'd done the MBA, it's like learning from people who've walked that road before you. - I certainly, in terms of, you sort of think about going back to university.So I did my first startup when I was a third year here at Cambridge. I dropped out of the fourth year of the engineering program to run that startup, found a couple of things. One, I think like a lot of engineer led startups, we had a big pile of paper in the corner of the room. The government would send us paperwork and we'd put in the corner and ignore it, or our bank would send us paperwork and we were, you know, it was a successful business, put in the corner we'd ignore the pile of paper.And after a while we were actually based at London Business School in London and in the end we basically ran out into the corridor and grabbed a passing MBA graduate by the collar and said, if you come in here and sought down that pile of paper, we'll give you some stock. And that certainly instilled in me a very great desire to go and get an MBA, so I didn't have to do that again.You kind of have these, you have these experiences running businesses, which kind of make you alive to the stuff you don't know. So that's the kind of business example for my first startup. The technical example is I didn't have a computer science degree. I had lot of, I'd done a lot of hacking and I did an engineering degree, a physics and engineering degree here at Cambridge.And I was recruiting people into that business. Now I was just aware that they knew stuff that I didn't know.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday May 17, @11:25PM
You know, data structures and algorithms type stuff, compiler type stuff, digital electronics type stuff. And I was just aware that there was, there was clearly a missing chunk of stuff that I needed.And that's why I went back and studied the diploma here. That's why I came back and did the conversion course. That's what kind of drove me out of my first startup and back into academia. - I mean, this is a great place to work, or if I wanna go and work for No, it's not that, well I think the name and from what I've seen is amazing - We do fun stuff, right? I mean. - Yeah, exactly, I mean.- And it's the deepest of deep tech. There's not much tech this deep in the UK. - Exactly. - You know, there's a lot of, and you know, that's not to disparage the FinTech. There are people who are building writing software, you know, running consumer focused software. But, you know, there aren't many companies doing the super deep stuff here in the UK.- But how would I get here? - So what do we hire? They generally do have pretty good academics, but I wouldn't say that we hire, you know, we're not particularly Cambridge snobs. I would say we have as many people from York as we do from Cambridge. There are other universities in the UK compared to Cambridge and Cambridge produces some amazing graduates.But if you think about that, that trade off between practical and theoretical skills, there are other trade off points and there are for our needs, there are the universities that hit those trade off points in their courses a little better than Cambridge does. So when we're taking people from Cambridge, we're usually taking people who happen to have gone to Cambridge, but who were hobbyist programmers beforehand and who've got their hobbyist stamp, their crafts person stamp somewhere else.So we take people with good academics, but not necessarily, doesn't necessarily have to have to be Oxbridge. We only really take people, certainly into the hardware and software teams. We sometimes talk about have you ever written a computer program you didn't have to write, you know, one that you didn't have to do for your course, one that you didn't have to do for your employer.Did you ever build an electronic product or write a computer program you didn't have to write. So people who have demonstrated some kind of personal passion for this stuff, it's a pretty good discriminate at that, right? You know, that really does discriminate very well. And, of course, you know, one of the challenges is the over discriminates a little bit because what you're doing is you're discriminating against people who've had, who've lacked the opportunity to do that.And so to some extent what you're seeing with Raspberry Pi, it's a closed loop system, right? it's a, we kind of soup to nuts. You can see we're a foundation which is dedicated to giving every child the opportunity to discover that they like competing at a venue in our hardware platforms and our educational resources.A venue in which they can work on that. And that then makes it more justifiable. Will in due course make it more justifiable for us to operate this hiring policy, which could be seen otherwise as being discriminating in the bad sense, not discriminating in the good sense. - I see it a lot in like other fields as well, like technical fields.If you aren't prepared to put in your own effort and do your own thing, it's like, are you really actually, is this really what you wanna do? And I mean what you've got with Raspberry Pis, I mean obviously it doesn't apply to everyone, but for a lot of us, we have no excuse because we've got a device that we can hack on, or - Yeah, that's right.Play on or do something with. - And one of the wonderful things here is we now employ people, small number of people in their twenties who got their start on the Raspberry Pi. - That's great. Right, so that's, that closed loop system is now starting to establish itself and we've got more work to do to make it, to keep it going, to make it happen.But we're on the road now, which is, and earlier back to the idea that the computer industry, the workforce and the computer industry in 10, 20, 30 years time is gonna look a lot more like society than it does today. And that's gonna be in part, I hope because of the work that we've done with the foundation.- Eben, I really wanna thank you, you know, for taking so much time to talk to me, just for everyone who's watching, we've done a lot today and I really wanna thank you for, you know, taking all this time to share, but also to, you know, encourage millions around the world to change their lives through what you've created, but also sharing your knowledge.- Thank you. I mean it's weird, right? I've been working on this since 2006, right. You know, this is a, it's getting on for a 20 year endeavor now. And the remarkable thing about it is it's still good fun. You know, I'm an inveterate. Before we did this, I saw myself as an inveterate, doer of things for four years.I thought that was my time period for working on anything was four years. This is coming up to towards 20 now. So just wonderful to have a chance to chat about it. Thank you very much. - It's fantastic. And I mean, I just wanna say thank you for changing lives through what you've created. I mean, I'm from South Africa.You know, these kind of devices give people in places that are perhaps not as privileged, the opportunities to change their lives. So thanks so much. - Awesome. Thank you.