Building Bluetooth Made Easier: SimpleBLE & Lessons from Neuralink

Transcript

• Steve Statler 0:00

  Welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. This week, we have an amazing, unexpected conversation where we explore the questions, what's it like to work for Elon Musk, how do his companies achieve so much with so few people in such a short amount of of time, and how do you get Bluetooth to work inside someone's body as part of the neural link system? This is actually not the main subject of the podcast. It's kind of a gem that

  I fell upon in my conversation with Kevin DeWald, who's the founder and principal at simple BLE, and I agreed to interview him, was approached by him and his team, and what he's working on is a really cool project For anyone that's building Bluetooth Low Energy Systems. Simple BLE offers a great way of getting things done faster, and it leverages the experience that Kevin got working as part of the neural link team, fusing the sensing and motor functions from human beings with with Bluetooth. So I love this. You go into a conversation, you expect one thing, and you get something completely different, and it's one of the reasons why I love doing this podcast. So this is kind of a bit of an Easter egg in the interview. The first part of our interview does focus on simple BLE, which if you're a geek and interested in ambient Internet of Things, and how to connect the physical world to AI and the cloud, that will be of interest if you are fixated and interested in how Elon Musk runs his companies, and how neural link works, and how they get so much done, then you'll need to fast forward into the second part of the podcast to get that in the meantime, I'm enjoying my life. Post williot. Williot was a wonderful company pushing back the boundaries of battery free Bluetooth technology, and I left it after almost eight years to start up ambi. And things are going well. Tons of people engaging us about this AI app and network with fundraising if any of you have contacts in the VC community that you think would be interested in fusing the real world with llms and making AI omniscient, understanding everything, everywhere, all at once, then point me at them, or point them at me. That's it. I'll let you listen to the conversation with Kevin. It's a great one, including his music selections, his his three songs that have special meaning to him. So do stay till the end, and thanks for listening. The Mr. Beacon ambient IoT podcast is sponsored by Willi art, bringing intelligence to every single thing. So Kevin, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. Thank you for having me. I noted that your marketing budget is, well, what was it? A sandwich and

  Kevin Dewald 3:38

  a paper? Three bucks. Yeah. Three bucks. Yeah, very

  Steve Statler 3:41

  good. Well, I'm pleased to be part of that. Let's do our bit and ask you to tell us what is simple. BLE what's the company that that you're heading up? Yeah.

  Kevin Dewald 3:53

  So this is a project that started almost five years ago. At this point, to give a bit of a background, I've, I've worked with Bluetooth since I was a college student because it was a, I mean, it's a great protocol. You can do great things with it. And unfortunately, what happened was that every time I wanted to develop something with it, I was running into some limitations around the availability of good software libraries to use Bluetooth, in particular, when it came to desktop environments, there were no good solutions around it, and most of the ones I could find online were either abandoned or in the process of being abandoned, and or wouldn't use the technologies I needed them to use. I mean, most of my programming is C, C Plus Plus, and there were no good libraries that were also cross platform and would be helpful, and there was basically none of that. And after dealing with these problems for so long, I decided, okay, you know what. I'm doing it myself. I know what I want, I know what I need, and I'm gonna start working with that. Okay. I

  Steve Statler 5:00

  think so much of what entrepreneurs do is that it's like frustration. The world should be this way. It's not. No one else is going to fix it. I guess it's going to be me. I'm going to do correct? I mean,

  Kevin Dewald 5:09

  yes, and that's, that's how it started. I mean, I, I it's not a project that was born, I would say out of love. It was born out of spite. It's so you're like, it can't be that something this simple is so complicated, it just can't and it drove me crazy. And, yeah, it took, it took a lot of effort. The initial implementation was Linux only. I had done some like, past attempts with as part of one of my previous jobs, but we never like the the whole like vision was born after a bit after that. And the the goal here was mainly to think, okay, what are the reasonable use cases you would have for Bluetooth, basically scanning for devices, connecting, interacting with Services and Characteristics, and then and having a simple way of doing it, because not having to worry about all the abstractions of the operating system, because every OS implements it differently, not only at the sort of API layer, but also the architectural layer, is a little bit different. So for example, Linux has this concept of, you have an adapter and a peripheral, and the adapter connects to the peripheral. On Mac OS, for example, you have the adapter, you scan, you find peripherals, but then you tell the adapter, hey, connect to this peripheral. So the end, the notification that the peripheral successfully connected comes from the adapter as well, not from the peripheral and Windows as well has its own like, mess around, like win RT, and every OS has its own layer of abstractions around that, and the way they implement is, like, completely different. And it didn't seem and for me, was, was like, Okay, there's no reason for this to be so hard. There has to be an easier way to to deal with this. And in the end, it was just about, okay, let's design the API first. Let's think about what what I need as a user, and then handle all the painful abstractions in the back end and to make it completely transparent. And again, this was a project that I was doing for for myself, to help me at work, and it's, it was mostly about like I was solving my own need. But interestingly, I wasn't the only one. So more people started like, like, you started using it, getting involved, and it became a, I don't want to say a big thing, because it's not a big thing, but it became a thing. I mean, if you're looking for like, cross platform library, especially for desktop, we're the only ones. It's actively maintained right now. We have Linda, Linux, Windows, Mac, OS, iOS, we're finishing Android support, where we have bindings for C plus plus C Python. We're adding bindings for JVM, and we can we're thinking about expanding this to like more languages and environments, and it's only because we thought about this very thoroughly early on that we designed a very simple API where everything else can be built upon easily. One thing I did notice that was part of my frustration here is usually what I've noticed is that engineers, when they're building products, they usually push complexity to the user say, Oh, I don't want to have to deal with this or think about that. So I'm just going to give you all the options and you figure it out. And in reality, that I think it's actually a bad thing, because turns out 80, 90% of use cases would work pretty well with sensible defaults. You just need to think what those are, which is not a trivial task, and you find some limitations, but if you have that, then yeah, sure, you can do whatever you want, and you have all the you can like, once you have a very simple thing that everybody can understand and use, adoption becomes easy. And why would you use something else? I mean, we've had this discussion. For example, there's another Python library that does, I mean, it's pretty good, but it's built around, like, fully async interfaces. So every time you if you need to use it, you're dealing with async IO runtime loops and all that. And there's some, I mean, that imposes some additional complexity, especially if you want to run a very simple program. Why have you? And also, you're responsible for handling the run loop. It's not handled by the library itself. So you have to think about all those things. And you can, you can run yourself into a situation where you go into a deadlock. All that is, again, just because the design is limited in that way. And again, just by thinking how, what's a, what's a good, and again, simple way to do this and to how, how do people derive value? You from this, building that, and then dealing yourself with the complications around it, in which, yes, sometimes, if you look at the insides of simple beauty, things are very complicated. Because, again, we have a very we have a very strong contract that we that we keep, and sure the OS has to fit into the contract. And sometimes the the abstractions on both ends don't fit very well, so you have to really think, Okay, what's the best way to do this in a way that's clean, doesn't crash, etc, etc.

  Steve Statler 10:29

  So it seems like the one of the things that you bring is uniformity, consistency across different operating systems, which I imagine just makes things simple for people to understand. But what are the what are the potential users or customers for this that when you see them, you're like, you'd be crazy not to be using our product? And what are the ones where, you know, maybe it's an edge case, maybe we can help a bit, but it's less How would you just define the sweet spot? So

  Kevin Dewald 11:02

  I think the sweet spot comes when you as a company are building an SDK for your product. I think because right now, most companies that build Bluetooth pro products are only focused on mobile, so they have to maintain an android version of the SDK and then iOS version of the SDK, and they're not. And you can tell by using both apps they're different code bases, and sometimes features that should be that are available in one or not in the other. And you have to, because, again, you're you have to make this split, because there's no, no solution around that. And if you just integrate the communication part into your library and then handle everything else, and then you build your business logic on top, it becomes a lot easier. So I would say that's the primary use case. It's like, Hey, you can you sort of generalize that logic into it, which is what most of our customers generally do. They have some application, and they want to wrap it and then use it across multiple platforms. But also this now opens up the possibility of using your device on a computer. So you can now have a desktop app offering these things, you can have, like more complicated versions, and there's an interesting example here, and Nordic semi they, I mean, they. They are the micheus of this, the NRF 5253 and now 54 like, it's a very popular Bluetooth chip. All their like, for example, their DFU libraries, they're built for DFU is, sorry, a firmware upgrade. Their Firmware Upgrade libraries, they are built for separately as an Android and an iOS package. But if you use their client, their app on desktop, it doesn't work. You have to get a specially flashed adapter that they have to run it if you want to use it locally instead of using your computer hardware. And this is one of the products that we're having the sort of very early, early stage to like, okay, package this and just, hey, here's your device. You connect to it, you can upgrade it, and it just works. And again, it just builds around this idea is like, why is the desktop environment so neglected? And I think it is because it's, it's hard to do the these kinds of, again, it's already hard to do this on mobile platforms, but you're sort of forced to because that's your main contact point with your customers. But now you can also add desktop platforms. You can think of new use cases, more powerful use cases, because now you have a device that is not power constrained. Can maintain connections for longer. And also because of that, if you want to automate stuff, for example, say you're building a medical device, you can now have a test bench where a computer automatically runs your tests with your device without any sort of human intervention. You don't need to have an app emulator or to simulate like someone like clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking like you can just make it work, and you can do it at a scale that otherwise is not possible.

  Steve Statler 14:00

  No, I'm interested in who's using it, any specific or abstracted to protect the innocent examples of people using your I

  Kevin Dewald 14:10

  mean, there are quite a few medical devices, medical device companies that are using it. That was the thing that also shocked me the most is like by by the time we reached year four, and sort of guessing from the like the comments and people like reaching out, it's like, oh crap, there's a lot of companies using this for medical devices. And also that was something unexpected. But also we've had, we've seen cases in entertainment security, like devices, for example, for scanning passports, stuff like that. And the list just goes on automotive as well. There are a few names, I mean, on the website, you can sort of see one, a few of our

  Steve Statler 14:49

  biggest No, I saw fender that that attracted my idea. So, so what does How do you use? It's with a guitar or an amplifier or I. Yes,

  Kevin Dewald 15:00

  it's for one of their amplifiers. I don't know the exact model, but, but yeah, they are. They're very, I mean, they're actually, they've been very, very happy with the results, because the I like the way they present about is like they're musicians first engineers. What they care about is building, like, great musical product. That's what they do. That's their focus. You when you talk to them, you can see the spark in their eyes when there's like, showing Hey, we're doing this and that. And for them, Bluetooth is just a thing they need solved. They don't need to spend months and months of time maintaining multiple apps and all that. So, hey, it's just there. And the fact that we can help them is very valuable for them, and they've been very grateful, and also have provided great feedback on how, how we can keep improving things so that they get more value out of it.

  Steve Statler 15:49

  Very good. So tell me a bit more about the the next level down, about the the facilities that you offer, and you use a buzzword that is very familiar to BLE experts, GATT, what's what's gap so

  Kevin Dewald 16:08

  gat is the the general attribute table. Basically the way Bluetooth works is, when you connect to a device, you're you present a series of services and characteristics, which you could consider talking from a sort of, sort of an internet based viewpoint. It's like, okay, these are like, endpoints or URLs where you can, like, interact and send data back and forth. So for example, if you have a heart rate monitor, there's going to be, there's a service for Heart Rate Monitor features, and one of those characteristics within that service is going to be heart rate. So when you read that characteristic, the value you're going to get is the heart rate, which, for standard services, like, for example, heart rate, the units and everything is already defined as part of the standard you just connect to a device. You know what it is. You know how to read it, and you can just parse it. That's how, for example, when you when you have one of these devices and you connect it, you connect to it with your phone, your Apple Health, can automatically, like, grab the data, store it and show it to you later on. Because, again, all this is already standardized, and it's a, in my opinion, it's a great way of like, building devices, because you can isolate functionality for every specific endpoint. Of course, there's some limitations around how much data you can send, how you use if you have large blobs of data, how you can transmit them over. But in the end, it's for, I would say, 90, 99% of all applications that you can think of that require like some sort of mobile connectivity. As this one is more than enough,

  Steve Statler 17:40

  pretty good. And what is central mode? And what is peripheral mode? Okay, so

  Kevin Dewald 17:46

  central mode is when that when the device you're operating initiates the connection to another device you're the on a sort of low level what what's happening is the device that actually sets the timing for communications is the central one. So basically, ble works by communicating over like pre, pre specified, like Windows or time slot. Okay, we're going to talk here, we're going to talk again in, say, 15 milliseconds at this other like frequency here, and then sort of move back and forth. And all the timing for this is controlled by the central so it's usually the device that initiates a connection and interacts with a peripheral. Peripheral mode is the other side of this of this engagement, you're a device that accepts connections, and usually you're providing some sort of service to the central device, for example, your heart rate monitor, blood pressure, or whatever other thing you can think of. Interestingly, you can also, once you're connected, the central can also offer services and characteristics to the peripheral. For example, one of the most common ones is the name. So for example, when you've paired with a device and the device tell you or you're paid with Kevin's iPhone. Kevin's iPhone was actually a property that the phone present as a central presented to the peripheral, and the peripheral actually stored when, when bonding was happening.

  Steve Statler 19:14

  So if I've, if I've got, like, a heart rate monitor that I've strapped to my chest for to measure when I'm going for a run, that would be the peripheral and the Okay, be the central. Okay, yes.

  Kevin Dewald 19:26

  The thing, the main difference in functionality between central and peripheral is, when you're acting as a central, you expect Services and Characteristics to be provided to you, while as a peripheral, you are the one presenting these to the world. So you need to have a way of that's why functionally is different for a simple VLE in one mode and the other. Because for peripheral, you need to say, Oh, these are the features I provide. And you, you're responsible for sending the data for that, for those, for those services. So

  Steve Statler 19:57

  a Bluetooth beacon got to get back to that. That as that's, that was the genesis of this podcast. That's, that's an example of a peripheral,

  Kevin Dewald 20:04

  correct? Yes, the beacon is a case of a peripheral device where you don't, usually don't connect to it, so you only rely on the advertising process to x exchange information. There are some, I mean, you have both. You have, like, advertising and scanning advertising being just the device saying, hey, and this, and here's some data. Scanning is the central seeing that advertisement saying, Hey, I think you have more information. Can you send me that, please? And you have, like, sort of a second advertisement packet where you can send more data over. But, yeah, but in most cases, when it comes to, like, beacons, you handle, you deal with non connectable devices,

  Steve Statler 20:43

  yeah, which is why they can scale and they're so good for public spaces and so forth, where, like shopping malls and airports. So I noticed that you offer consulting as well as license the software. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you decided to package and price what you offer, and I'm interested in how many of your customers end up using your consulting services, and how important is that it's obviously a good source of revenue because there's always a shortage of talent. But I'm interested, as an entrepreneur, would you say it was important to offer consulting in order to get adoption of your product?

  Kevin Dewald 21:26

  Not really. So there's a bit of history here. Simple BLE started as a fully open source project, and basically once I left neuralink and switched jobs to another company that was not focused on embedded devices, mainly, I'm now working on AI as everybody else, my sort of, my focus on working on on simple BLE sort of faded away because it was, it felt less important. It was less relevant to my work, so I wasn't spending that much time with it. And I noticed, like, very quickly, as I stopped being as involved, like quality started to decay, like features that, for example, Android support was something that I've always wanted to do, but now I didn't have the time, or now they have the interest in doing it. And a friend basically suggested, hey, usually if you get paid to do something, you'll feel more motivated to do it. And his idea was, why don't you, like, switch the license to something that is like, more restricted for commercial use, basically requiring to purchase the license instead of just using it for free. And you see, what happens if nobody buys it. There's no basically, the trend was going to still be the same. But if there's interest, okay, you know, there's something, someone cares about it, and it makes sense to invest more resources into it. And it's been a bit of a bumpy ride. I'm not going to become a millionaire by selling a Bluetooth viriders, but it's a it's been a very, I would say the process on its own has been a lot more interesting in like learning, okay, what is necessary to grab a small project like this one and actually put it out commercially. The way I describe it is simple. BLE is not like a big software Corporation. It's more like your, I don't know your corner bakery, like very small shop we have, we do a few things. Everything's like very it's not industrialized. It's a handmade, organic, natural, if you want to sort of describe that, I mean, it's, it's as we're it's a small project. I've been able, thanks to the commercial offering, to bring some people, at least part time, into the into the ecosystem, and we've been able, thanks to that, this past year, we've been able to dedicate almost another 1000 hours of work into the project, and some additional things that we're working on, like, hopefully in the future, might pan out as, like, bigger features. And this was all thanks to all these companies that believed in us, trusted us, and wanted us to, like, actually help them solve the problem with Bluetooth, because it's not a it's not a done deal, and we have and it's even in cases where our other libraries exist, we've had clients just asking us, Hey, I'd rather use yours because it's it's better, it's simpler, and have someone to talk to that will actually respond if I need help. The the consulting part was basically just the thing we threw on top. It's like, Hey, okay, we're selling the licenses, but at the same time, someone might need extra help. Let's offer that we basically, we divided it into two tiers. It's there's we've got what's called a simple BLE consulting tier, which is, hey, I'd like to use simple BLE for my application, and I need help integrating it, or I need us. I need a feature for simple BLE. That's how peripheral support was actually, was actually born. It's like, hey, I need this feature. You seem like the best one to do it, so I want to hire you. And the advanced BLE is more for things that are BLE related, but are more these are more focused on like, things that don't necessarily involve bl, a simple BLE itself, where there's more about like, okay, research. Search or, Hey, I have, I'd like to test some integrations with this product. And I want to know, I want you to reverse engineer the API, things like that, so it was more about it's for basically the rest, where we're not as we need basically more, more resources to focus on. But usually, most of the consulting we've sold has been around simple BLE itself. Revenue wise, it's been more or less half and half. So Consulting has been a big part of it, but at the same time, it's also the thing that has been the most work intensive. So ideally, we'd want to, I'd like to focus more on licensing, because it's, it's something more more stable. And as we've evolved, we've also, like, improved our license for this process to to make it sort of easier for, like, continued support and all that. And we Yeah, and we think it's a and we think also in terms of pricing, we sort of eyeballed it a little bit around, okay, what are other offerings? What's the what's your cost on doing it yourself? And we also, again, it's not about becoming millionaires with this. It's mostly about the the experience, and to basically make sure that the costs are covered in the library can continue growing. So we try to keep it as fair as possible. We we have a sort of a startup tier that is designed to be free. It's like, sure you signed the license, but it's free. The idea is for you to get just to get used to it, to get involved. We also get to know you, to understand your use case, so that we can build better features for you. And then, as a company grows, we have like two different tiers that sort of follow that that sort of growth,

  Steve Statler 26:32

  pretty cool. So you've experienced firsthand the evolution of the open source approach, anything that you would like to say, or any observations on where open source is headed, it seems it's so central to what we do, but I assume it's not static. In terms of, it's

  Kevin Dewald 26:53

  definitely not static. I mean, one of the recent trends is like more projects going down the commercial route. And I think it's actually a very positive thing, and probably a lot of people are going to be very angry at this point. But the reality is that for especially niche projects like simple BLE there isn't enough interest from large companies, let's say Microsoft, Facebook, Google, et cetera, to sponsor them, because their bottom line is not affected by this, so they have no reason whatsoever to put money aside from maybe the generosity of an employee that's willing to be your champion inside the company. And the reality is that, because of that, lots and lots of projects of this size end up becoming abandonware on GitHub. And we did a sort of very preliminary study, and I think around 60% of projects of the sort of same, same type have been abandoned for more than a year. And you look at the code and it's you sometimes it's very good, like, great ideas, very interesting, but you just need a bit more to, like, get it to the point where it can, can reach that. And we haven't seen any, and it's not basically, I would say, from all the open source ecosystem, there's that specific niche that is currently very underserved. And I've been talking with people in the industries, even open source industry like canonical, and they acknowledge that, yes, there's a small portion of projects that are important, they add value, but they're not big enough, big enough for anybody to actually care about them. And right now, those projects are screwed, as simple as that, it's like, unless they find a source of funding, they will eventually die out and the RE and because of this, the sort of the parent company that we that we built for simple BLE, we call it the California open source company. The overall mission here is not just to serve simple BLE but to help other projects that are in this stage to go from like fully open source and not no resources whatsoever, to go commercial, to the point where at least some additional work can go into it, and the developers can manifest their vision to its fullest potential. Interesting.

  Steve Statler 29:01

  So with open source, it seems like if it's a really niche product, then people want to if they're giving their time for free, they want to know that this is important and that they're impacting lots of things. And if that's not the case, then why bother? Whereas you if you find a niche market that's willing to pay then, then it's worth paying attention. And maybe the converse is true. If you've got something which is free and lots of people are using it, then you there's more motivation to keep on making it free, because you're doing something of consequence with your life,

  Kevin Dewald 29:43

  yes, but it goes even beyond that, because if you make a project that becomes really popular, like millions and millions of users, you fall into a category that I call too big to fail. Basically, so many people depend on what you're doing, including big companies that it's. Better for them to sponsor you, because otherwise their own revenue stream will be affected. But in a case, I mean, simple be at least a good example, sure. I mean, there are other ways to do this, and they're not as painful, but there is a there's sort of, there's value there, but it's not as great, and it also doesn't affect any big company's bottom line? Because otherwise, yeah, sure, they'll spend like a couple 100 more engineering hours on on this feature instead of just purchasing our license, but they can still do it. And you end up in that kind of situation. But when it comes to a small developer in a project, it's not just the oh, I want to see. It matters. It's also the relationship you have with the people using it. Because, for example, before going commercial, I've had companies reach out to us asking, Hey, I would like, I want this feature. Can you do it? And when you tell them, sure, but it's, I don't like, 200 hours of work. Are you willing to pay for it? You hear crickets. It just goes to you, they don't want to get involved. Or it's even worse, sometimes they demand fixes. Or what, like, I this broke. I mean, this is breaking production. Why can't you fix it? Or, like, I don't, but you don't work on this. So there's also, there's also always, like, it's the positive side from the user, but it's also a very toxic component here. And when you're some all, most of these projects have just one or maybe two developers, and they're doing it on their free time, and they spent maybe 1000s of hours on this. It's, it's very easy for for a project like this to fall out of grace, even for life circumstances, because, oh, I don't know they need to. I don't know one developer wants to move to a bigger place. So they need a big, bigger income, and they cannot use this time for that. They have to, like, get a different job or something else. So it's, I think we're losing a lot of people to this situation. And there are lots of very small, niche problems that you that every time you sort of face them, you realize I thought this should be easier. This can't be that hard when you're when you're developing on something, and that's the sort of indication that, okay, something's going on there. And sometimes solutions exist and like, oh, the approach was great, but they stopped maintaining it, I don't know, three years ago, and I cannot use it, because technology has moved past. Yeah. That's the sort of the saddest thing. And we, we really want to fix that. We really want to find a sort of balance. And again, it's not about getting rich. It's about like making sure these things are sustainable. Because in no other industry is free stuff, pretty much right, as with the software industry and sure for for certain companies, again, like big companies sponsoring projects, for example, I think meta did a great job by open sourcing react, and a lot of their internal tools are also open because now they've standardized whole industries around their own technologies, which is great, and that makes sense, but it's Not but that same scheme doesn't apply for smaller projects. Because, I mean, sure, a couple people can learn some simple BLE but I'm not going to become an industry standard. So it's not realistic. Kevin,

  Steve Statler 33:10

  I been really interested as I've been learning a bit more about you your business at one of the things that fascinated me was your connection with Argentina. So that's where you did? You spend your entire, early part of your life in that country, or what's the story there? Yes,

  Kevin Dewald 33:27

  that's correct. So I was born there, and 1991 so 30 plus years ago. I don't want to know the exact number at this point. And yeah, I did most. I Well, I graduated high school and did my university studies there, and then I moved to the US just before the pandemic. So that was I got to the US, I think, a month before lockdowns started and all that. And it's been a very interesting journey to see everything that has happened since, I would sort of call them humble beginnings, yeah, when, when I was just a student, and like, dreaming of everything that that's all the things that cool things that were happening all, all over the world, and to be able to get somehow involved into that, it was a, I think it's a really big, uh, sort of thing that my, my younger self would be very impressed.

  Steve Statler 34:19

  Yeah, I I grew up in England, as you can probably tell from my accent, and I kind of looked at the planes flying towards America, and looked at all the American TV, and saw all the inventions the goings on in Silicon Valley. And, you know, back when I first came over, the internet didn't exist. But there were the there were the newspapers in Silicon Valley, and you can look at the adverts for this is who Apple was recruiting. And just that, just being I felt like, oh, man, I've arrived. So I imagine you must have had a similar thing of seeing this ecosystem from afar. What was that like for you? Yeah,

  Kevin Dewald 35:00

  it's, I mean, I've since I was young, I was always connected to the tech world in one way or another. So I would follow news coming out of here closely. But it's a very different experience to actually living in that space, to seeing it firsthand. I mean, it's, it's still a weird thought to say, Oh, I'm driving past that building. Oh, Facebook is there. That's where they make Instagram. Oh, there's Oracle. I don't know. I mean, all the tech companies are pretty much all here. So it's like, and you recognize all the brands, and back back then they would seem like something that's so far away, like, so out of place from where you're from, and to just be there and see, okay, there's the building I can walk in and say hello to people. And it's that, I think, is a sort of experience you don't really, you don't really get until you go through it. If you're born here and you, and this is a common thing, you don't understand how, how much of a privileged position it is to be close by to where things happen, and all the, for example, right now with all the like autonomous robots and self driving cars, you see them on the street. They're there. They're not just a video clip. You see on your screen. They're there. You walk past, you see a way more go by. You see self driving teslas. You see robots. It's that part is still, I mean, I'm mind blown, and I've been here for four years at this point and almost five, and it's still, like It blows my mind.

  Steve Statler 36:30

  Yeah, I heard someone say that some of the greatest film cinematographers are foreigners who then decamped to America, and the reason they were so good was that they still had a sense of wonder about the landscape and everything you're seeing it for, almost from this childish perspective, either. And I certainly feel the same way the palm trees never get old for me, although Argentina is pretty what's what's the what, what's the geography of Argentina like compared to California? Oh,

  Kevin Dewald 37:07

  so the weather here in California is more or less similar to where I'm from, the city of Buenos Aires, although down there it's a lot more humid, both in the summer and the winter. But generally, like, the temperature range is more or less the same. There's no snow. Humidity is different. But aside from that, and also, it's a lot sunnier here in California compared to down there, but geography wise, Argentina has pretty much the same features as you would find in the US. I mean, there's both, like, you've got glaciers, deserts, rainforests and everything in between. So it's a beautiful place to go and visit. You can definitely like, just by, I mean, it's, I think it's a 10th biggest country in terms of matters of surface. So it's a very big place. It's very empty as well. The entire country has the population of California, but 1/3 of that is concentrated in its in Buenos Aires and the metropolitan area around it. So once you leave that area, it's very sparse. There's not much there's a lot of nature. There's not much civilization going on. So you can drive for hours and hours as a famous route that goes towards the the Andes Mountains, where you're driving for, think, around 10 to 12 hours through a desert, and the road just goes straight through the middle of the desert. And most accidents there happen because people get bored, fall asleep and just like, drive off the road. So of you have that those sorts of environments where there's like absolutely nothing for like miles and miles and miles and miles.

  Steve Statler 38:44

  So was it difficult to get into the states or not for

  Kevin Dewald 38:49

  me, I was very lucky to find a company that was very interested in hiring me over so short summary is a project that I worked on during my for my graduation that ended up becoming my first startup. Well, that project won down in 2014 2015 sorry, and by that time we so it's sort of I shelved everything. I had everything there, but I found a company working on the same thing in the 2020s and I basically reached out to the CEO and CTO, saying, Hey, I know exactly what you're building. I know how to build it. Have all this expertise. Bring me over. At that point, I was convinced I wanted to come, to come to the US to live. And basically they were like, they saw the potential, and they were, like, very eager to bring me over. And thanks to that, they basically, there are few interesting visa programs, especially when you're collaborating with universities that can you hear fast. So what I was working on was, I was working for them, but also helping as a for. The exact name of the title of basically, like guiding practical assignments for students for the UMass Boston. So both things were happening in parallel. You must Boston is a great program to help startups in Massachusetts to, like, recruit talent from abroad by basically co sponsoring the visas and all that. It's a very interesting program, by the way, and it's very and that was basically my, my step in. And once I, once I got in, I sort of moved along from what was

  Steve Statler 40:30

  the technical hook? What was it that your startup was working on? So

  Kevin Dewald 40:34

  the my first startup was a company built around measuring electrical signals from the forum from this area here to recognize hand gestures. So the very basics we had was like, move your hand up, down, open your hand or close your fist. Those would generate very specific electrical signals on the forum that we could measure, and we would use that as a sort of input for computer, phone, video games, etc. That was the sort of vision that we had in Interestingly, despite the technology being available for so long, there haven't been many commercial deployments of this, even the ones that meta, for example, has been pushing after purchasing all the the IP from a product called Mayo for the company name. But all that is still like in like somewhere around it, we also did a whole bunch of development around just recognizing gestures based on IMU, so move, just movement without any electrical signals. And that is like sort of slowly coming in, but I'm at this point, I don't really know why this never happened. There is a, I know there's a company that I follow on LinkedIn that every once in a while they post like, similar demos to the ones we were doing, like, almost a decade ago at this point, and it's still not a product, and honestly, I don't know why. And to come to answer your question, the company was doing something very similar, but measuring electrical signals in the wrist instead of the form, but conceptually, everything also was the same.

  Steve Statler 42:03

  So this, this seems like this put you on a trajectory to to work at neuralink, right, correct. I mean,

  Kevin Dewald 42:10

  I'm, I do have, most of my professional experience has been around embedded devices talking over Bluetooth with some connection to biological signal processing because of this and that and that, I think, was sort of the entry, the entry into an early also for my second startup, I had a bunch of experience like dealing with more complicated problems, like lots of devices. As a matter of fact, the project I presented for when applying a neuralink was how we solve the communication between our sensor gateways and all the sensor networks that we would deploy for this company? I'll go into details, maybe a bit later on. And, and, yeah, it was mostly, I would say the thing that they liked was that I was a good Gen, yeah, good generalist that wasn't afraid of jumping into any kind of difficult problem, and was versatile enough to figure out, okay, if I need to learn something or or Yeah, or just enhance my skills to be able to solve a problem, I would easily be able to do it. So for anyone who is like willing to apply to any any new VLANs, companies in general, is as long as you're good at what you're doing, you're definitely getting in. That's the key point. I would say, Okay,

  Steve Statler 43:28

  so the secret is, be good. Yes,

  Kevin Dewald 43:31

  you'd be surprised at how how easy it sounds, but how hard it is. I mean, I've interviewed people who had, like, 1015, years of experience on top of my years of experience. And sure, they were very good at a very narrow topic, but the moment you shifted the focus outside of that, they would just fall apart and dealing with a very complicated device as a brain implant, you need to know about those topics. You need to understand about how RF works, how control systems work, yeah, I don't know. I forgot what else I mean, signal processing in general. I mean, you're dealing with biological signals, okay, so any sort of processing around that good handling of statistics, because some things, some some algorithms, are statistical in nature. So you need to determine, Okay, how, what's the best way to do this and to understand the physics of it? Because you're dealing with, well, electromagnetism, heat, so all those things matter. So you need to, you don't have to be totally proficient, but you have to be, I would call it conversational. In all those topics, you need to know. You need to understand what the what the core concepts are, how to communicate, how to at least operate with them. Very

  Steve Statler 44:43

  interesting. And so how did you get the job? You became aware of the company, and you went to their website and applied, or what was it? Yes.

  Kevin Dewald 44:52

  Surprisingly, yes, I knew nobody there. So this was like, right in the middle of the pandemic, the height of all that I had.

  Uh, at my past job in Boston, I was sort of, I fell a little bit. I was liking the company with less once I basically once I joined internal politics were a bit too much for my liking, and the company was shifting its focus away from bio signals to more, let's say defense kind of oriented projects.

  It wasn't that wasn't really my, my thing, my, I mean, the reason I joined them initially was to help people. So then the first product designed to help people with ALS to communicate. So because usually they keep some sort of electrical activity, it might not be enough to actually move the hand or some muscles, but it's enough that you can actually detect it. So that was my initial attraction to a company. Hey, this is using technology I have, and we're doing like, good we're trying to help people. And when that was sort of like when the focus of the company was shifting away from that, I realized, okay, I it's not the thing I wanted to do. And a friend of mine actually told me, hey, neuralink is recruiting embedded engineers. Their description of what they're looking for is very similar to what you did. So why don't you apply? And I just applied online this, I mean, described everything like, went through the process, had a call with my boss, send me the sort of practical assignment to do it at home, spend a full weekend there's like, doing the best I could out of that. It was like, it ended up being like, I don't know how many 1000 lines of codes, like, I think 12 pages of documentation was, like, insane, but I really, I mean, I really wanted to get in. I really wanted to get in. And so it was that then phone call with my boss's boss, then they flew me over more exercises, meeting a larger portion of team, seeing the sort of the soft part of the interview. How do you How would you fit in with the culture? And yeah, once that was once they said, Yeah, we like you. We'd like to come here. We figured out all the like immigration paperwork to get transferred over. And I started working for them just after the three little pigs demo in September 2020,

  Steve Statler 47:00

  and what was that demo? I've seen the thing with people, but

  Kevin Dewald 47:07

  this was the first, like public demo showing that they could capture signals from from a live animal. And they did a live demo about it. So showing, hey, here's a big look. We the implant is connected to a sensory part that's connected to the snout, so every time they they poop, the snap that you could see the like the activity going on. And I was, unfortunately, wasn't able to attend, because I wasn't an employee yet. I was already here in California when all this happened, but I started the a couple days after, so I I even missed a very big party they had afterwards that. I'm still a little bit salty, but I'm not gonna lie about it. But yeah, it was, it was a great experience.

  Steve Statler 47:51

  And what was the test? What did you have to do in the weekend? What was the assignment they gave you? It was

  Kevin Dewald 47:55

  actually very simple. It's like, here's a temperature sensor. Write a driver for it, but with all but the thing here is, the constraint is, okay, this temperature sensor is working in a safety critical scenario where hardware can fail in any way. How do you deal with that? And that's when, that's when you actually have to start thinking the problem through first principles. It's not just what's wrong with the software, but what could be wrong with the hardware? What kind of communication could be basically, what kind of messages could go wrong? How could you detect them? What happens if a line goes up or stays up, stays down? How do you see it? How do you recognize it? What What information does the hardware provide? And you have to, like, diagram the whole all possible failure modes, and then say, okay, how can my software detect each one of them and build the whole driver around that? So for example, if you know you've if you detect that the system is crashed from what seems like a hardware failure, at some point, you should stop trying, because you might cause further damage. The thing is, things like that, it's that the test itself is not very difficult. I mean, any like fresh grad can definitely do it, but what sets candidates apart is usually how far they can think along this. These lines,

  Steve Statler 49:11

  amazing, amazing. I that, but my first technical job was writing device drivers, actually, and I wrote a book about it. I wasn't actually very good at writing the device drivers, but I thought the book was pretty good. So what did you end up doing at neurolink? What was your job?

  Kevin Dewald 49:28

  My job there was embedded systems engineer for the implant. So my role took like, working on the code running within the implant and all the SDKs, like SDKs and tooling around it. So because of the nature of this device, there's a lot of testing required, and we, we did automate a lot of it. And for that, you need, like, a big, like a big layer of software supporting all of that on the outside. The great thing is, a lot of this also translated to the manufacturing one. So we basically, like, we're very embedded into any sorts of activity around the implant. And it was also a great experience, because I had the chance to be involved in pretty much every aspect of the lifetime of an implant, from manufacturing to testing to even destructive testing. Those are fun. And, yeah, just and you basically get involved, and you learn about, okay, what are the use cases? What's the infrastructure, the scale of it as well? Because something that I don't know, many people realize from, like, what, what everything that goes into, like testing a medical device, especially something as novel as this, is how much you need to test because the thing I described previously, okay, you have to find out all the failure modes and understand why they can happen, how they can happen, how can you detect it? How can you mitigate them? Now imagine that, not just in a driver layer, but on a full device layer, on something that's very complex, multiple parts, and it's the same thing like there's some principles you can apply to make things safer by design. For example, I don't know the hardware being limited to like the hardware, on its own, cannot affect any damage because it doesn't have any way of producing damage or from the software layer to say, Okay, I'm going to assume that any in any communication will be compromised. So any, any command I receive, I will determine if it's safe enough before executing stuff like that. Does that sort of thinking that goes into it, and, of course, testing, because you have to make sure, okay, let's cause this failure and see if you're actually like following that and what can happen, plus also the scale of it, because you, when you're building something like this, you want to make sure that even rare accidents or rare failure modes don't happen, and the only way to do it is to test lots and lots of devices, because, let's say you have a failure mode that happens. I don't know, one in 10,000 you have to test 10,000 devices to find that one recognize, oh, this is a new failure mode documented, and apply all the fixes and mitigations across the the entire chain. So that's, that's more or less the kind of work that that happened there. It's about, okay, we need these features, and we need to test them, and every problem that comes up, we need to have a solution for

  Steve Statler 52:14

  and were you doing any work with Bluetooth as part of the project?

  Kevin Dewald 52:19

  I mean, yes. So the as I mean, as you all said multiple times, the idea is for this, for the implant, to become the Fitbit for the brain. And the main protocol that is pretty much everywhere and lets you do, lets you do that, is Bluetooth. It's the only one that is power efficient and has a decent enough throughput rate where these kinds of activities can happen. I mean, Wi Fi would be great if you could stream such a volume of data. But if, if an implement like that had Wi Fi, and probably the battery would wouldn't last more than, I don't know, 510 minutes,

  Steve Statler 52:52

  but you know, two point the the frequency that Bluetooth works that is famous for not going through water or flesh. So how do you overcome that?

  Kevin Dewald 53:02

  Making sure the antenna points out, not in, okay, it's, it's basically that there was, I was just tangentially involved in that, but, yeah, the team that designed the antenna for the implant is just something out of this world. They're like one of the most, one of the smartest people I've ever met. Yeah, and they do magic this, that's one of antenna design is one of those things where I'm not very, not very familiar, and seeing what they can do, and like how all these things affect the result that it's almost magical at this point. So, or alchemy?

  Steve Statler 53:42

  Yeah, yeah. Really arts antenna design team. And they were, like, I saw them as gods, really and interesting, quite gender diverse. So there's something about good antenna design that seems to be a really good fit to diverse teams. So what if you had to put your finger on how the team got so much done? I mean, this is a common theme in in the projects that wheelon does, is just kind of seeming to do the impossible and and, okay, maybe it's not exactly when it was promised, but it's also 10 times faster than anyone else thought was possible. So how, how does what's your perspective having worked in one of those teams, how is it that these teams get so much done and achieve things that no one else can do? I think,

  Kevin Dewald 54:33

  I mean, it's a great question. I think that it's a combination of two factors. So one there is that the talent and the sort of the skills of the person away. Elon, what usually says you have to hire people where skill to ego ratios a lot greater than one. So you want people that are very smart, very capable, but also easy to work with, so they can recognize when they're wrong and fix. Their mistakes, because there's nothing worse than someone being very confidently wrong. And that's one and the other one, I think, is personal accountability. The way I would describe it is, it's not that a certain team is responsible for a certain component part, whatever it's a certain person. So if anything happens with that, you know who to go to, you know who to ask, and that person is the one that will respond. And it makes sure that, because, you know, I'm responsible for this, you make really damn sure that it works, because otherwise, okay, you're the one who everybody's going to be looking like, Hey, what's up? So you there's a lot of if, if those, I would say, if those two bases are well covered, the rest sort of falls in line on its own, because it avoid, you avoid diluting responsibility, and you have people actually capable and executing on those responsibilities, I think that's pretty much it. There's no, there's no secret sauce aside from just finding good people and making sure they know what, what they're working on, which is something that in the past, I've seen, it's like, it's very It doesn't normally happen. I mean, culturally, we tend to say, oh, it's, I don't know. It's a firmware team. It's the hardware team. And I don't know. Let's ask someone. Someone shows up. Oh, I did not designed this component. I don't know. You have to find someone else. You have to, they have to ask their boss, or maybe that person left, or like, all those things at add up in terms of inefficiencies. And once you, once you have this in place, execution just happens. It's, it's, it's wonderful to see. It's like we would have the the sort of the cycle around this and Erling would be great, because you would see, oh, we have this really big problem that we don't know how to solve, and everybody's focused on that thing, and in two weeks it's a done deal. It's like, okay, sure, yeah, we got it. We know how to we know what we need to do. It's done. Mitigations, everything is implemented, and we move forward. And that sort of continuous like focus and improvement and going and going that keeps you, that keeps that basically gets you that far,

  Steve Statler 57:07

  and and then sort of project methodology, sort of stand up, meetings, sprints. And what I mean

  Kevin Dewald 57:15

  you, you talk. I mean, there's some, there's a bit of structure, but in the end, again, you're personally responsible for a certain part of a stack. You just make sure that you're the thing you're working on is important for the company goals, which you'll talk with your manager, and that's it. And your manager will basically communicate up and down to make sure that these priorities are correctly set. And they're also communicate up, saying, Okay, this is our status. This is what we're doing. This is how things are going. And that's it. In terms of, like, how much structure there's, there's not much, there's not more structure than that. So and again, you you know what you're doing. And by keeping things, by keeping, like, very small teams and very focused, you don't need to have that much overhead in terms of communication, because it's all all of this happens. You can keep it in your mind. You understand. You can keep in the entire state of your project in your mind. And you know, every time you go in the morning, you know what to do. You know you know where you're left. You know what to do, and you know what the plan is. You have a vision for what you're what you're working on, and that sort of continuity is, is great for for these kinds of things, because you don't again, it prevents the dilution of responsibility. Yeah.

  Steve Statler 58:31

  But how do you you know structure the project? Is there a Gantt chart? Are you, are you kind of doing iterative stuff, or status reports. What's none
  

  Kevin Dewald 58:43

  of that. It was just one on ones with with our manager, and it was things revolved around, hey, we need this feature, or we need to solve this problem. And it would be like, Okay, I'll start working on it. I'll, I don't know, depending on how complex it was, like, it's done here in a couple days, or maybe a couple weeks, and it's just status reports, like, hey, one way to look at it is how to when, when it comes to defining priorities is there was usually, there's usually a global priority, and everything stems down from that. What my time at neural link? It was okay. We need to get to humans. So this means going through like, building a device that is human grade and getting all the necessary approvals, and that was the main directive, that was the only thing that mattered. And every decision and every step you took was filtered by that. So, you know, okay, is this getting us closer to this? Yes or no, if no, okay, you should be doing something else and that. And if you can solve for that, if you can understand, okay, if for the company to the next existential risk, or the next goal is this, then it's very easy for everybody to know, oh, how I'm contributing to that, to the goal. And if you're not, if suddenly, hey, I'm not doing any i.

  So if you're like, hey, nothing that I'm doing is helping achieve that goal. Okay, it's a it's a good opportunity to talk to your manager and say, Hey, I'm not helping the company goals. So why don't we focus on something else,

  which is, I mean, it's pretty much the same thing that, the way he's done, he's manages all his companies, like, okay, there's an overarching goal, and everybody should decide their own goals based on that.

  Steve Statler 1:00:23

  Very interesting. So did you get to meet him?

  Kevin Dewald 1:00:28

  Yes, I was there for several meetings all hands. So he would come by, like, every once in a while. He's very tall. I mean, I'm, I'm not particularly short or tall, but he's like, like, more than a, I think, head and a half taller than me. Like, who means big dude, but, yeah, no, I mean, I would say he's

  as a boss. I would say he's one of the most reasonable ones I've had.

  He's, he's a very non bullshit kind of person. So it's like, Okay, give me the facts. Let's and explain to me what what you're doing, what the logic behind that is. He'll point out, Hey, have you thought about this? Have you tried that? And based on that, you'll, I mean, you'll provide the feedback, and that was pretty much it. I mean, he he would set ambitious goals, but he also knew, he knew exactly how far along to place them so that they would still be reasonable. It's like, okay, it's, it's because I've had managers in the past that have said, Oh, we need to do X, Y, Z, and it's like, you're basically asking me to do two years worth of work in a week. That's not going to happen. There's no way. But here would be something like he would be asking, Okay, this is a that says a four month long project that he's asking us to do in two, that kind of thing. And it's like, okay, yeah, it's hard. We're probably not gonna get there in in two, but maybe we can do it in three. And you push and you, because you're aiming for two Sure, deadlines slip whatever, but because you have that strong forcing function, it actually gets done in three and because everybody, and because, again, for all the things I mentioned before, you have very clear responsibilities of who's responsible of what. And because of that, there's no responsibility dilution, so nobody can sort of point fingers someone else. Oh, I didn't do it because this other team didn't do it. It's like, no, no, you know exactly who's doing everything. And it's sort of, again, it put it makes sure that all the like, everybody's pushing in the same direction. And you get to and you get to that, yes, very

  Steve Statler 1:02:38

  good. Well, I could talk to you all day about this, but we've got other parts of the conversation to do, and one of the most important ones is, of course, your three songs that have some meaning to you. So what was your first song?

  Kevin Dewald 1:02:51

  So the first song forgot the actual like the artist's name, but it's sung by by Odessa. That one is that song. Is the the cover song that neerling used for the first promotional video. Yeah, so I was basically what happened. I mean, they put out this video. I forgot exactly when I think, I think was already out when I applied, and when I and I remember, like, just those days before I joined it, it's I was playing that thing, that video and that music over and over, because coming from Argentina, ended up working at such a place, Was it, was it would, that would have, That was pretty much my, sort of, my past self streams like, Okay, I I made it. I got here. It's, it's happening. It's, oh my god, it's happening. And the, sort of, the the big shift in my career that happened after that. Because, again, once you, once you start working in such an environment, I, I'm, I can definitely say my engineering skills have improved a lot just by being surrounded by people who have done this for long enough and teach you how to think this way. It's not something that you learn in college. So you really need to be exposed to this kind of environment. And you do get and it's, for me, it was sort of intoxicating at that point. And it's, it's a very clear for me, it's a very clear reminder of the basically, that you can just do things, and even the things that seem insanely far away, you can actually get there. It can happen. It's a lot of work, but you can get there. And it's, for me, it's a it's, it's that reminder, it's, it can happen. Very

  Steve Statler 1:04:36

  inspiring, very inspiring. I love that. What a good choice. What about song number two?

  Kevin Dewald 1:04:41

  Song number two is something just like this. That one was the song. It's a sort of a bit of more of a personal story. That's the song that made me realize I will I wanted to propose to my wife. Okay? I had been with her in a relationship at that point for. For things like six or seven years, and I was in a trip, and I was in a trip with some friends, and they told me, Hey, I was there was basically some things going on in the relationship. And when I told them, hey, this is happening, the response was like, you're an idiot. She wants you to propose. Just do it. And I was so it was weird, because I was so dumb struck by that, like, Wait, really, that's what she wants. I missed that, but completely, like, fully, fully, to the point that, after I got by, it basically apologized. Like, okay, now, and once the whole thing was really a positive, okay, now I understand. Sorry, but it like, Wait, if it's when you're like, missing the hints, but completely and when, basically, when I came to realization, I heard that song. I was thinking at a, like, small hotel, and I was having breakfast when that song was playing on on the TV, like in the running area, and it sort of clicked. If you look at the lyrics, like, what are you looking something just like this. And it's sort of like it made that click. It's the it was this. It's this realization that, oh, you can actually like, it's okay. I really want to marry this person. I want to, I want to go through with it, and I'm gonna, I want to make this commitment, and again, just blasting that song over and over, like, sort of reinforcing that feeling and all that. And, yeah, we basically got engaged. I think was still a year after that. No, wait, no, no, no no, it was. I got engaged a few months No, I was gonna kill me. We got engaged a year after that, married a year a year after, so two years after, so it took some some time. And, yeah, we've been married at this point. It's gonna be five years now in July, and we now have a seven month old daughter. So, like, we've come a long way since then,

  Steve Statler 1:07:01

  and your wife's from Argentina as well, correct? Yes, I met her

  Kevin Dewald 1:07:06

  in college through a common friend, and we've been together since, I think it was our second second year. So yeah, it's been a huge, long, long journey. Looking at the pictures of us when we were that young, it's like, oh, man, time has gone by,

  Steve Statler 1:07:22

  very good. And what's song number three? Song number

  Kevin Dewald 1:07:25

  three was, it's a basket case by Green Day, although I had a few others that could fit into that, that role, like original prankster by the offspring. And basically, I like that song because it sort of symbolizes a bit of my sort of call it crazy nature, in terms of, oh, I always want to do things and like, there's always something happening, and I'm also a little bit of an asshole, so like, a reminder of that is also not a bad thing every once in a while. So I think those are, like good reflections of my personality, and I, I think they're a great way of showing what you are. Like, expressing that sort of teenage anxiety and like, oh, I want to try all these things, but everything's hard, everything's complicated, but I'm still gonna do it. I'm gonna mess up some people in the meantime, like, you just go and do it. I think that sort of spirit is the thing I was trying to convey.

  Steve Statler 1:08:18

  Well, you don't seem like a bad person. What's why do you why are you being Why do you say that?

  Kevin Dewald 1:08:26

  The way my friends put it is, I'm I'm as subtle as a brick to the face. I usually I this was something that sort of developed over the years, but I'm very I learned to be very direct, and I don't like when things are sugar coated in any way. So and instead of if I think you're doing something wrong, I'm just gonna go and say it. I'm not gonna sugar coat it. And for example, I've been I've been doing this, I've been helping some startups as an incubator here at UC Berkeley, that I collaborate with as a mentor, and sometimes you have to tell participants, or like potential entrepreneurs, Hey, your idea sucks. You should think of something else, and it I've had a few cases where I was the first person to actually tell them that, because everyone's like, no, no, your idea is great. You should keep trying. But you know, they're like, lying to them, because you can tell from a mile of from a mile away, the idea is bad. So I, I sort of doubled down on, like, brutal honesty. And hey, if you, if I think you're doing something wrong, I'm gonna tell it. And some people like it, some people don't. And yeah, fine when they get upset, but yeah, for those I'm definitely the the asshole kind of person.

  Steve Statler 1:09:45

  Well, I have a startup I want to tell you about later, but we don't have time to talk about it now. Kevin, this is, this is what been wonderful. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks very much for coming on the

  Kevin Dewald 1:09:55

  show. No thank you very much.

  Steve Statler 1:09:58

  So that was my conversation. Conversation with Kevin, really fused core, Mr. Beacon, geeky tech discussions, and the other side of Mr. Beacon, which is kind of bigger picture, what's going on in the world of startups. And I love it when both these things come together in the same conversation. So you're exceptional and you listen to the end. Thank you for doing that. Thank you to Aaron hammock for editing and pushing this out. Sierra Walden for doing her part in publicizing the show and getting it online. Do let me know if you have any feedback, any requests. In the meantime, enjoy the journey, stay safe and be nice to each other all the best you.