Building the future of aircraft charging at @jobyaviation, and building other things elsewhere.
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2017
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I get a ton of emails asking about how GEACS works, and why we made it.
Last year I did a podcast with @skyzeroaviation answering that exact question. Go check it out: youtu.be/fCxg_blSwgw?si=FqoO…
Building a modern CAD kernel that can compete with ACIS and Parasolid - to free us from the shackles of Dassault and Siemens - is one of the most important and underappreciated endeavors in technology.
If we are to have a true renaissance in hardware engineering, we need a new CAD kernel. The incumbents are seemingly unwilling to innovate.
We all need @zoodotdev , or a similar company, to be successful.
Robert Moses is largely viewed as a villain from today's vantage point, and that may be correct for his late career. But the fact of what he was able to build, in the face of such widespread regulatory and community opposition, is hard not to admire.
If we want mass public transit in California, we may need another Robert Moses type character that is willing to bulldoze through public opinion and criticism. As there doesn't seem to be a path to building new train lines that avoids pissing off a swath of people.
Should the complaints of a few stand in the way of the need of the many?
More than half of my custom part purchasing experiences with large US companies go like this. (Small US companies are better because I can call the owner on the phone.)
THIS is why many prefer to work with Chinese suppliers.
Rob Rowland retweeted
I want to buy american so badly it hurts.
But some of y'all make this shit as hard as fk.
Filtering who has the potential to be a great hardware engineer is tough and time consuming. Especially in the age of AI where it’s now so easy for people to fake it. Thank you Esther and Nain for going after a solution!
We’ve raised a $2.5M pre-seed to fix hardware hiring.
The most reliable way to know if an engineer can do the job is to watch them work.
In hardware, that’s been almost impossible to do at scale.
Colare runs simulation-based assessments that show how candidates actually work, in the tools they’d use on the job, before anyone books an interview.
We assess across:
- Mechanical (CAD, DFM, FEA)
- Electrical (PCB, schematics)
- Systems
- Manufacturing, & more.
Candidates solve problems from first principles.
Hiring teams see that across their whole pool, so engineers only interview people who’ve already cleared the bar.
We're already working with everyone from seed-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar aerospace manufacturers.
If you’re hiring hardware engineers, let’s talk:
colare.com/
GEACS-equipped vertiports coming soon to Florida, NYC, and Texas!
Joby is partnering with @travisk’s Atoms to build America's vertiport network.
Today, Joby and Atoms announced a definitive agreement to develop next-generation transportation hubs where electric air taxis, autonomous ground vehicles, and ridesharing converge, anchored by GEACS, our open-source Global Electric Aviation Charging System.
The work starts in Florida, New York, and Texas, the markets where Joby is preparing to launch early operations under the White House-backed eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), as well as California.
Full release ⬇️
Rob Rowland retweeted
The GEACS charging system is designed to enable the safe and efficient operations of all electric aircraft under development today. It allows for the rapid charging of multiple battery packs, with included coolant for thermal management as well as secure data offload.
Rob Rowland retweeted
Previous experience of my newest 12 manufacturing hires:
- donut shop worker
- accounting assistant
- elderly caregiver
- janitor
- bartender
- AI data analyst
- call center rep
- nurse at the VA
- associate at Dollar Tree
- hospitality associate (?)
- school custodian
- graphic designer
I'm asked all the time about "how will manufacturers find skilled labor as we scale and reshore" and the answer is we have to create it ourselves. Relying on someone else (a school, the government) to create skilled labor for you means you're gonna be waiting a while. Just do it yourself.
On-the-job training is the only way I've ever known how to hire. I think I was really lucky to come from a small town where OJT was common, and often the only way to learn how to do something.
We have a 19 year old running a $1M Matsuura MAM, and a 70 year old running another machine next to him. Both produce great parts. The labor supply is endless if you are willing to put in the effort.
Rob Rowland retweeted
A recent reflection, based on conversations with economists and policy leaders, is that there are two superficially similar but importantly different perspectives one can hold with respect to US manufacturing:
* Affinity for manufacturing and physical production is an anachronistic fetish, embodied by populists with outdated attraction to hard hats and clanging forges. A great deal of manufacturing has departed the US, which is certainly fine and probably even quite good. It's unpleasant labor, and countries ought to each specialize in their respective comparative advantages.
* Manufacturing is the ultimate network effects and economies-of-scale business. As services are substituted by AI, and as datacenter deployment accelerates, the relative importance of manufacturing is likely to grow. To think that one can pick and choose sectors in which one will excel ("let's win in drones but not in dishwashers") is a fallacy. Manufacturing is hence of paramount strategic importance. However, we don't know how to make the US the world's preeminent manufacturing power (given its cost base and given the current center of gravity in China) -- indeed, we don't know whether it's even possible -- and this is a significant strategic problem for the country.
I have zero direct expertise here, but my outside view is closer to #2 than #1: it seems that the ecosystems and supply chains create strong gravity across the board. I also asked @elonmusk, who has clearly done more over the past decade to advance sophisticated US manufacturing than anyone else, and this appears to be his view. Most economists, on the other hand, are much closer to #1, and I don't think that the economics profession considers the absence of good ideas for reviving US manufacturing to be a problem of particular significance. (There are lots of snide epithets about the efficacy of industrial policy.) It seems to me that there's even some amount of backwards reasoning happening, where, because we don't know how to do #2, #1 is subconsciously a much more comfortable position to hold.
Talking about winning particular manufacturing sectors feels to me a bit like talking about winning individual biological research sectors or winning particular software sectors. That is: it seems that the strong default assumption should be that "the place that is best at biology research sector X will also be best at sector Y", and similarly in software, because the skills and inputs needed are so transferable. As such, my guess is that if the US seeks meaningful sovereignty or preeminence in any of drones, robotics, solar, batteries, pharma, etc., we need to bite the bullet, and win at manufacturing across the board.
Overall, I'd love to read more arguments for and against these perspectives, particularly from those with direct expertise.
Rob Rowland retweeted
My sleep scores during recent travel were in the 90s. Now back in SF I am consistently back down to 70s, 80s.
I am increasingly convinced that this is due to traffic noise from a nearby road/intersection where I live - every ~10min, a car, truck, bus, or motorcycle with a very loud engine passes by (some are 10X louder than others). In the later less deep stages of sleep, it is much easier to wake and then much harder to go back to sleep.
More generally I think noise pollution (esp early hours) come at a huge societal cost that is not correctly accounted for. E.g. I wouldn't be too surprised if a single motorcycle riding through a neighborhood at 6am creates millions of dollars in damages in the form of hundreds - thousands of people who are more groggy, more moody, less creative, less energetic for the whole day, and more sick in the long term (cardiovascular, metabolic, cognitive). And I think that many people, like me, might not be aware that this happening for a long time because 1) they don't measure their sleep carefully, and 2) your brain isn't fully conscious when waking and isn't able to make a lasting note / association in that state. I really wish future versions of Whoop (or Oura or etc.) would explicitly track and correlate noise to sleep, and raise this to the population.
It's not just traffic, e.g. in SF, as a I recently found out, it is ok by law to begin arbitrarily loud road work or construction starting 7am. Same for leaf blowers and a number of other ways of getting up to 100dB.
I ran a few Deep Research sessions and a number of studies that have tried to isolate noise and show depressing outcomes for cohorts of people who sleep in noisy environments, with increased risk across all of mental health (e.g. depression, bipolar disorders, Alzheimer's incidence) but also a lot more broadly, e.g. cardiovascular disease, diabetes.
Anyway, it took me a while to notice and after (unsuccessfully) trying a number of mitigations I am moving somewhere quiet. But from what I've seen this is a major public health issue with little awareness and with incorrect accounting by the government.
Rob Rowland retweeted
This morning, I was on the road with the Symphony engine team, shopping for scalable industrial capacity to build jet engine parts. "Getting that part will take 18 months best case," we were told.
Why??
The answer was a stunning revelation about the non-obvious ways China has hollowed out American industrial capability. And what it will take to reverse it.
It turns out the long-lead item in engine parts is tooling. By tooling, I don't mean screwdrivers or hammers; I mean precision custom industrial molds. These are as complex to design and manufacture as the parts themselves.
It used to be that tools were designed in the US, leveraging western-made software (like high end CAD), and then fabricated by talented artisan machinists.
China started by ripping off the CAD software licenses. This alone represented a double-digit percentage decrease in tool engineering costs. Add on top of that reduced labor costs, and quickly it became far cheaper to design and make tools in China.
American tool and die designers started losing their jobs—just as manufacturing became low-status in the US.
Fast forward a couple decades, and it's quick and easy to get tools made in China but slow and expensive to get them made here.
Worse, when we export tooling work, we exported the design of the parts themselves. E.g., the design of a jet engine part is right there in the mold that makes it.
I.e., the ability to rip-off western products starts with pirated software, leads to pirated products, and eventually leads to a complete ripping off and hollowing out of the American industrial complex.
Oof.
How do we fix it?
First, we need to make building things sexy again. This is where the work of companies like Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla, and Boom is culturally critical. But also: the best path is not to re-create capabilities of the past, but to invent the leap-frog manufacturing capabilities of the future.
These realizations about China make me even more motivated not just to invent new jets—but also make manufacturing sexy again and invent new and better ways to make things (in America).
Just unboxed my @LimitlessAI pendant.
Nice packaging. Fit and finish of the pendant looks good. Feels and looks premium.
Battery reported as 2% SOC upon first power on. Not good for battery health. Is standby power draw going to be an issue?
Imagine a future where robotics programming is as simple as setting hard limits on power and speed, configuring motor controllers and sensors (like vision systems), then letting a general-purpose AI take over. The robot starts like a newborn—awkward, flailing, learning its own limbs through trial and error. With some real-time feedback, via a human communicating with a chat interface, and some cameras it can use to watch it's own interactions with the world, it could learn complex tasks within its constraints.
If we can build a general purpose robotics control AI model, why not apply it first to relatively mechanically simple industrial robotics applications? Rather than going straight to humanoid robots?