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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, @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.