Ladders Scale Castles
Leaping Across Hardware, Cities & Metaverses
To engineer ← “ingeniare” + “ingenium” (Latin) = To contrive cleverness
The greater the risk, the greater the reward — if you persevere. That‘s what I‘ve always been told, anyway. But I’ve also been told that in a career one should focus on becoming an expert in one thing. Sell one service, become known for one vertical, climb the career ladder — as if there were only one way to approach life.
The thing is, I‘ve played a lot of video games. In those games, a lot of the time, you climb one ladder only to find out it doesn‘t lead you as high as you‘d like to go. You need to shift over to the adjacent ladder in order to reach higher. Yeah in the jump you‘ll go down a few rungs, but in the end, it will leave you with more potential and a better awareness of how to climb because you‘ve seen what lies below and crossed that chasm without trepidation. You took the risk of leaping, and you received the reward of perspective.
This is how I‘ve approached my career. Why specifically? Because from before I can remember, I‘ve been fascinated by the opportunity to build new worlds. Building a new type of civilization takes more than a siloed view, so I‘ve set out to see as many ladders as I can, bringing the most value I can, and to find what opportunities exist in the betweens.
The Catalyst
It all began in DisneyWorld when I was 10. I had been to Six Flags countless times, but this wasn‘t just an amusement part. This really did feel like another world. From the decorations at the hotel to the technology which helped you enter through the gates (the likes of which I had never seen before), to the waiting areas for the rides and the themed nature of the restaurants, every detail was a step closer towards making the fantasy of teleportation a reality.
I asked my father why we didn‘t have technology like they had. Why did we have to use flimsy cards to enter the subway rather than a wristband like a watch? He told me that because it was a closed ecosystem, and they could pretty much charge any price they wanted, they could experiment with new product offerings in a closed environment. It was like a laboratory for the union of art and science. I then signed us up for every Imagineering immersive available.
Later that year on Christmas, I installed The Sims on my computer for the first time. In a fictional universe of my creation, I was able to escape my cold, quiet house for the essence of what I imaged back at DisneyWorld. It became immediately apparent to me that a combination of these two worlds, the physical reality of parks with the digital landscape of software, was going to be the future of the world. So I set a goal to learn how both of these spaces were engineered into our lives, to one day build a combined space of my own vision.
The Ladders
From where I stood, there were 3 types of ladders that could be chosen, each in different colors, of course, to prop up against the walls of my future envisioned castle of success. One was construction itself — how the buildings and the infrastructure they rely upon are erected to allow us to live our daily lives. The next was manufacturing — how all the things we used were created starting from the industrial revolution. The last was software — the atoms that would form the infrastructure of the digital world so popularized by The Matrix.
Over the next 20 years, I picked the colors of these ladders carefully, laying them where I thought best at the time. Sometimes I picked ground that was a bit too soft and the ladder came falling down, but I was always able to jump over to another one in time and find my way to a solid hold.
I‘ve recently found a plastic cup with a string attached to it, and I hope speaking these lessons of my effort will reach another cup so someone else can hear about the journey and have the courage to make a leap themselves. I‘ll be writing a series on each to help you all, as well as some on the training I needed to make the leaps successfully, such as people operations.
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But first, here are the very summarized stories of how I learned the lessons, to give a teaser of what’s to come and the context of the experiences I‘ll be projecting throughout. (They‘re written in the order of the first ladder laid down. Their ordering is interspersed, due to when the opportunities arose, so it would be quite convoluted to write the summary in a more chronological manner.)
Manufacturing
There have been two main ladders I’ve climbed to learn manufacturing. The first was my high school, which was spun out of Princeton University by a few professors using a clever hack of the No Child Left Behind Act. It was a free industrial and electrical engineering magnet school in New Jersey. There, I learned six-sigma quality control, just-in-time supply chain management, and poka yoke design philosophy all before I could drive.
The second has been my most recent: living in factories building new process lines. At first, I did this with AR in Europe, but electronics don’t get made there because of global supply lines and electronics are the future of connected worlds. So, it was in Shenzhen, China that I made the bulk of my vertical movement on this ladder, designing out IoT device and automotive component processes for innovative companies in Europe. My biggest learning here was not actually the implementation of the academics I previously acquired, It was how to work with China, a culture so unknown to us in the West. (Much of what we hear is also propaganda. Tim Cook knows what he‘s doing.)
Construction
Construction is a beast of a ladder, especially if laid in New York City. I have flashbacks to sitting around a table in the basement of St. Patrick‘s Cathedral with known pedophiles, mafia bosses and presidential aids discussing the color of carpets. But I digress. That, combined with their unrelenting fear of technology, is why I made the leap to another ladder. How I got there was because of my university, The Cooper Union.
I had the honor of studying civil engineering at the US‘s most difficult school to get into, and one of the only ones with no tuition. There I learned how to build the physical world we live our daily lives in from the masters who built and maintained New York City. From urban transportation budgets corrupted by the MTA to explosion proofed foundations designed by the FBI, to passive cooling techniques developed in Ancient Rome and to rammed earth construction perfected in old West Africa.
The real gem of what they taught us at Cooper was how to master root-cause analysis. This manifested itself into our curriculum — Why use AutoCAD to engineer a building when the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed without so much as a calculator? This is the key of all engineering, and without this infrastructure of knowledge, which is arguably more important than the infrastructure of daily life, I don‘t know if I’d have been able to hack together the rest of the ladders in my life. Especially as the fabrication of modular construction and charter cities are starting to become more prevalent in the public eye.
Software
Every video game, every bit of communications, every connected device, they all need software to function. It touches every part of our lives and is the backbone of the Metaverse. It’s also the easiest to have access to, get up to speed in, and scale-up. So these ladders are most numerous along the walls of the castle of my career.
In selecting them, I’ve tried to pick ones with challenges I had rare skills to tackle. Most software development, as the industry has come to promote, follows an agile project management philosophy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate and have worked with it a lot. There’s just a time and a place for everything, and since I came from a waterfall project management background of industrial and construction processes, I thought I should try to tackle the issues that arise when these two methods need to work together. There’s always chaos where two worlds collide.
With this frame of mind, I’ve helped engineer WebRTC, the telecommunications protocols which have proven invaluable during Covid and which will form the basis of how users talk to one another in the Metaverse. I’ve produced virtual environments using automated photogrammetry processing built on top of Epic’s Unreal Engine, so the structures of our real world can be replicated and preserved as digital locations for our enjoyment once teleported away. And I’ve spent many years building communities around machine learning, which will help the software improve itself and is in desperate need of diverse training sets to quell systemic issues currently plaguing the real world.
What’s Next
I’ve recently decided to leave my peaceful home in Munich, Germany to lay a ladder in front of my castle’s gates in New York. I’m going to make sure this ladder is made of steel. Because I’ve been on so many others, I’d like to help people as many talented individuals who haven’t had the opportunity to understand them to know what to do when they’re faced with challenges. Together we can build an even stronger infrastructure to a connected future.
How this manifests is to be determined. Serendipity has always been my trusted guide. My current conversations are Operations and Strategy Direction roles at a few companies bridging these gaps themselves either because they’re large enough to or because they have a portfolio of subsidiaries in need of the structures to grow. If my story or any of the knowledge that’s to come resonates with you, please reach out. We can find a way to bring value to each other. I’m sure of it.
In the meantime, I’m working on a few side projects to learn about the food industry (a ladder-type I have not yet purchased!) and to help anyone looking to jump across cultural chasms themselves. In these changing times, we all have a blank chapter ahead of us and a pen full of ink to write with. Let’s make sure the grip is comfortable enough to write a beautiful chapter of prosperity.
