So far I’ve brought two successful products all the way to market. Unfortunately I didn’t take 100% control of the process until my most recent invention.
IoT Grow-Box - Designed and sold IoT enabled grow-boxes back in 2015 timeframe. Company went public (Through IPO, not reverse merge / SPAC) and crashed and burned hard due to finance issues. The product itself was dope and there are still a few out there. (Anybody remember Cabinet Grow / CBNT?)
NDVI Camera for Grow Rooms - The Growcamera ™ - somewhat gimmick but still useful tool for monitoring plant health. Used NDVI imaging to capture photosynthesis activity. The company and all related IP was acquired by a publicly traded company and to my knowledge never got brought to market beyond the initial 30 units I built. However, was a successful exit.
Vape-Jet - Vape-Cart Automatic Filling platform using extremely accurate fluid dispensing technology. Also incorporates IoT technology / platform for remote support. Machine-vision for aligning cartridge and allowing filling directly to foams without an alignment jig. This is my current company.
Before that I mostly dabbled in space-tech / satellite operations. Of note I invented a way to simplify calibrating earth stations path delay for more accurate ranging. (Determining how far something is away from you, measuring over time, and building an orbital model from the distance and look angles.)
10000% - I’m working on building the maker factory now. Hopefully if it gets build someone will come =)
My educational background is a mechanical engineer.
We make shit that never existed before. That’s the job, really.
I’ve built machine learning systems to predict things that were supposed to be impossible to predict - good thing I wasn’t aware of the impossibility before I started.
I’ve built automated systems to handle vast amounts of data and processes that saved my employer 10x my salary every year for as long as they’re in business.
I’ve got two patents pending.
But I don’t consider myself an inventor.
I’ve done some cool shit. But only because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. If no one surpasses my achievements I’ll be sorely disappointed in the human race.
Mostly when you get right down to it I’m just bolting together shit other people have made, or tweaking something or having an intuition that something might work well with something else.
There is nothing new under the sun and everything is a remix. The connections are usually there if you know how to look for them.
Which is also probably why I’m not a fan of copyright and the concept of IP in general.
This is a good series, though the fact that there is a 2015 HD remaster that I’ve never seen - and that I believe I was still a chef when I first saw this - tells me that it was a long fuckin time ago that I saw the original. Apparently the original came out a decade ago so that checks out.
Watching this is actually one of the things that pushed me towards my dislike of IP as a concept.
Here’s a book on the subject if anyone is interested.
I don’t feel that I’m selling myself short.
I think that creating things is something that I think is baked into human beings. That’s how we go from Mesoamerica still using weapons with obsidian blades to billionaires having their own personal space race in… 2000 years?
Creativity and invention are what has helped our species has become what it is, for better or worse.
Nearly every human has the capacity to create things of one form or another. Many of us do things that have never been done before on a regular basis, entirely by accident and without ever knowing it.
On rare occasions, those happy accidents are useful.
So what if I make things? To me, that doesn’t make me an inventor. That makes me someone who likes to poke at reality and see which way it jumps.
I have a small biz license for a sole propietorship I filed, I think you get more features with that license. I haven’t noticed any difference from the student license really
Kool on the drone! A dispensary tool of the future?
I don’t have soft wear skills, and relied on team members who did, but designed and built equipment that interfaced with and was controlled by computers. I also wrote the system logic, from which the soft wear engineer programmed.
In the cannabis industry, sometimes you are at the right place at the right time and I was able to secure the services of the same soft wear engineer that did most of the programming for Microsoft’s Pentium IV and a builder who built me the control boards around a chip, around which I built the control interface to those.
Do you do both mechanical and soft wear? What sorts of things will the DrLoud brand include? Equipment, or product?
Im not too sure what products Ill be selling yet, I want to be like Microsoft. I mostly want to create products for the cannabis consumer. that may or may not be a cannabis product. Ill also love to get into equipment making but im thinking thats too far off for me.
Man GW you have done it all.
I did learn software and hardware skills. but Im mostly gifted in software. I need to practice more hardware skills so I can build my own solutions.
But as an engineer i struggle wearing my business man hat vs my creators hat. Do you feel the same?
With your background, you might consider process control and automation, which I predict we will see more of as our industry catches up following prohibition.
Hyperbole aside, I tried to stay abreast of new technology and push it before retirement, but I’m old and had a lot of time to fit it.
Alas, you touched on my Achilles Heel, I have successfully supervised/managed businesses for others, but have more fun creating than I do managing a business day to day, especially my own where more of the boring duties fall in my lap.
