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The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla - HAARP, Chemtrails and The Secret of Alternative 4 - Chapter Two Alien Signals in the Night
Excerpts From the personal memoirs of Nikola Tesla The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment; so much, that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts. In attempting to give a connected and faithful account of my activities in this story of my life, I must dwell, however reluctantly, on the impressions of my youth and the circumstances and events which have been instrumental in determining my career. Our first endeavors are purely instinctive promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older, reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies. Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor. This was due to a number of causes. In the first place I had a brother who was gifted to an extraordinary degree; one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain. His premature and unexpected death left my parents disconsolate. We owned a horse which had been presented to us by a dear friend. It was a magnificent animal of Arabian breed, possessed of almost human intelligence, and was cared for and petted by the whole family, having on one occasion saved my dear father's life under remarkable circumstances. My father had been called one winter night to perform an urgent duty and while crossing the mountains, infested by wolves, the horse became frightened and ran away, throwing him violently to the ground. It arrived home bleeding and exhausted, but after the alarm was sounded, immediately dashed off again, returning to the spot, and before the searching party were far on the way they were met by my father, who had recovered consciousness and remounted, not realizing that he had been lying in the snow for several hours. This horse was responsible for my brother's injuries from which he died. I witnessed the tragic scene and although so many years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force. The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison. Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself. But I was far from being considered a stupid boy, if I am to judge from an incident of which I still have a strong remembrance. One day the Aldermen were passing through a street where I was playing with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen, a wealthy citizen, paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me, he suddenly stopped and commanded, "Look in my eyes." I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when to my dismay, he said,
"No, not much; you can get nothing from me. You are too smart."
My mother descended from one of the oldest families in the country and a line of inventors. Both her father and grandfather originated numerous implements for household, agricultural and other uses. She was a truly great woman, of rare skill, courage and fortitude. I owe so much to her good graces and inventive mind that I can still today see her wonderful features etched upon my mind. The Inner Mind Made Real In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted, could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomenon. They seem to have been unique although I was probably predisposed as I know that my brother experienced a similar trouble. The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed. To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnessed a funeral or some such nerve-wracking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it from my innermost being. I also began to see visions of things that bore no resemblance to reality. It was as if I was being shown ideas of some cosmic mind, waiting to make real its conceptions. If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come. I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem. I have managed to reflect such a picture, which I have seen in my mind, to the mind of another person, in another room. To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images. It was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my "reel" had run out as it were, because I had seen little of the world -only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings. As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them. They gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; of course, in my mind. Every night, (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys, see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations. This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radially opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea, he finds himself unavoidably engrossed with the details of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained, but always at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be examined beforehand, from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done, is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money, and time. My early affliction had however, another compensation. The incessant mental exertion developed my powers of observation and enabled me to discover a truth of great importance. I had noted that the appearance of images was always preceded by actual vision of scenes under peculiar and generally very exceptional conditions, and I was impelled on each occasion to locate the original impulse. After a while this effort grew to be almost automatic and I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect. Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression. Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way. In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automation endowed with power of movement responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly. The practical result of this was the art of "teleautomatics" which has been so far carried out only in an imperfect manner. Its latent possibilities will, however be eventually shown. I have been years planning self-controlled automata and believe that mechanisms can be produced which will act as if possessed of reason, to a limited degree, and will create a revolution in many commercial and industrial departments. I was about twelve years of age when I first succeeded in banishing an image from my vision by willful effort, but I never had any control over the flashes of light to which I have referred. They were, perhaps, my strangest and [most] inexplicable experience. They usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or distressing situation or when I was greatly exhilarated. In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time and seemingly attained a maximum when I was about twenty-five years old. While in Paris in 1883, a prominent French manufacturer sent me an invitation to a shooting expedition which I accepted. I had been long confined to the factory and the fresh air had a wonderfully invigorating effect on me. On my return to the city that night, I felt a positive sensation that my brain had caught fire. I was a light as though a small sun was located in it and I passed the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head. Finally the flashes diminished in frequency and force but it took more than three weeks before they wholly subsided. When a second invitation was extended to me, my answer was an emphatic NO! These luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when anew idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being of relatively small intensity. When I close my eyes I invariably observe first, a background of very dark and uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night. In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears, to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines, at right angles to one another, in all sorts of colors with yellow, green, and gold predominating. Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes on the left, leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert gray until the second phase is reached. Every time, before falling asleep, images of persons or objects flit before my view. When I see them I know I am about to lose consciousness. If they are absent and refuse to come, it means a sleepless night. During this period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits, some of which I can trace to external impressions while others are unaccountable. I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals, but pearls would almost give me a fit. After finishing the studies at the Polytechnic Institute and University, I had a complete nervous breakdown and, while the malady lasted, I observed many phenomena, strange and unbelievable. Nikola Tesla - Born July 9/10, 1856 From Tesla's own writings we can observe that he had a unique mental capacity that few of his fellow human beings have ever hoped to achieve. It is no wonder that when Tesla was faced with an event as mind-shaking as the revelation that humans may not be alone in the universe, he faced it head on. Tesla's atypical way of facing and dealing with the unknown has lead some to speculate that his true parentage may have originated from beyond this planet. This suggestion is not new, in fact, Tesla once confided to one of his personal assistants that he often felt that he was a stranger to this world. Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. Born in the village of Smiljan, Lika (Austria-Hungary) in what is now Croatia. Tesla's father was an Orthodox priest; his mother was unschooled but highly intelligent. A dreamer with a poetic touch, as he matured Tesla added to these earlier qualities those of self-discipline and a desire for precision. Margaret Cheney, in her book: Tesla: Man out of time (1981), noted that Tesla as a child began to make original inventions. When he was five, he built a small waterwheel quite unlike those he had seen in the countryside. It was smooth, without paddles, yet it spun evenly in the current. Years later he was to recall this fact when designing his unique bladeless turbine. Some of his other experiments were less successful. Once he perched on the roof of the barn, clutching the family umbrella and hyperventilating on the fresh mountain breeze until his body felt light and the dizziness in his head convinced him he could fly. Plunging to earth, he lay unconscious and was carried off to bed by his mother. Tesla would later write that this incident was the catalysis for his unusual visions. In her book Return of the Dove, Margaret Storm states that Tesla was not an earth man. On page 71 of her privately printed book, she says that the space people related that a male child was born on board a spaceship which was on a flight from Venus to the earth in July, 1856. The little boy was called Nikola. The ship landed at midnight, between July 9 and 10, in a remote mountain province in what is now Croatia. There, according to prior arrangements, the child was placed in the care of a good man and his wife, the Rev. Milutin and Djouka Tesla. Supposedly, the space people released this information in 1947 to Arthur H. Matthews of Quebec, Canada. Alien Signals in the Night Arthur H. Matthews was an electrical engineer who from boyhood was closely associated with Tesla. Matthews claimed that Tesla entrusted him with many tasks, including the Tesla interplanetary communications set that was first conceived in 1901, with the objective of communicating with the planet Mars. Tesla had suggested that he could transmit through the earth and air, great amounts of power to distances of thousands of miles.
"I can easily bridge the gulf which separates us from Mars, and send a message almost as easily as to Chicago."
Due to pressures of other research at the time, the first working model was not built by Tesla until 1918. In 1899, Nikola Tesla, with the aid of his financial backer, J.P. Morgan, set up at Colorado Springs an experimental laboratory containing high voltage radio transmission equipment. The lab had a 200 ft. tower for transmission and reception of radio waves and the best receiving equipment available at the time. One night, when he was alone in the laboratory, Tesla observed what he cautiously referred to as electrical actions which definitely appeared to be intelligent signals. The changes were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they could not be traced to any cause then known to him. Tesla elaborated on the subject of Talking With the Planets in Collier's Weekly (March 1901):
"As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble efforts. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance traveled. "It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles. "I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth... My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me. "The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. "The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was sometime afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. "Although I could not at the time decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals"
This incident was the first of many in which Tesla intercepted what he felt were intelligent signals from space. At the time, it was surmised by prominent scientists that Mars would be a likely haven for intelligent life in our solar system, and Tesla at first thought these signals may be originating from the red planet. He would later change this viewpoint as he became more adept at translating the mysterious signals. Near the end of his life, Tesla had developed several inventions that allegedly could send powerful amounts of energy to other planets. In 1937, during one of his birthday press conferences, Tesla announced:
"I have devoted much of my time over the years to the perfecting of a new small and compact apparatus by which energy in considerable amounts can now be flashed through interstellar space to any distance without the slightest dispersion." (New York Times, July 11, 1937.)
Tesla never publicly revealed the technical details of his improved transmitter, but in his 1937 announcement, he revealed a new formula showing that,
"The kinetic and potential energy of a body is the result of motion and determined by the product of its mass and the square of its velocity. Let the mass be reduced, the energy is reduced by the same proportion. If it be reduced to zero, the energy is likewise zero for any finite velocity." (New York Sun, July 12, 1937, pg. 6.)
A Fear of Aliens In the Tesla journals that he uncovered, Dale Alfrey noted that by the 1920's Tesla had grown confident that he was able to make sense of the strange radio broadcasts from space. However, soon afterwards, Tesla began to expressed great concerns about beings from other planets who had unsavory designs for planet Earth.
"The signals are too strong to have traveled the great distances from Mars to Earth," wrote Tesla. "So I am forced to admit to myself that the sources must come from somewhere in nearby space or even the moon. I am certain however, that the creatures that communicate with each other every night are not from Mars, or possibly from any other planet in our solar system."
Several years after Tesla announced his reception of signals from space, Guglielmo Marconi also claimed to have heard from an alien radio transmitter. However, Marconi was just as quickly dismissed by his contemporaries, who claimed that he had received interference from another radio station on Earth. There is some public confirmation in the validity of the lost journals and Tesla's belief in extraterrestrials and the importance of communicating with them. As noted earlier, Arthur H. Mathews claimed that Tesla had secretly developed the Teslascope for the purpose of communicating with aliens. The late Dr. Andrija Puharich interviewed Matthews for the Pyramid Guide, May-June & July-Aug. 1978. This interview revealed for the first time Matthews connections to Tesla. Arthur Matthews was born in England and his father was a laboratory assistant to the noted physicist Lord Kelvin back in the 1890s. Tesla came over to England to meet Kelvin... to convince him that Alternating Current was more efficient than Direct Current. Kelvin at that time opposed the AC movement. In 1902, the Matthews family left England and immigrated to Canada. When Matthews was 16 his father arranged for him to apprentice under Tesla. He eventually worked for him and continued this alliance until Tesla's death in 1943.
"It's not generally known, but Tesla actually had two huge magnifying transmitters built in Canada," Matthews said.
"I operated one of them. People mostly know about the Colorado Springs transmitters and the unfinished one on Long Island. I saw the two Canadian transmitters. All the evidence is there." Matthews stated that the Teslascope is the thing Tesla invented to communicate with beings on other planets. There's a diagram of the Teslascope in Matthews book, The Wall of Light.
"In principle, it takes in cosmic ray signals," Matthew's said.
"Eventually the signals are stepped down to audio. Speak into one end, and the signal goes out the other end as a cosmic ray emitter." Matthews' diagrams of the Teslascope make little electronic sense. No one has ever confirmed the reality of the device. Matthews claims, however, that he built a model Tesla Interplanetary Communications Set in 1947 and operated it successfully. He suggested that due to the sets limited range, he was only able to contact spacecraft operating near the earth. He had hoped to someday build a set capable of communicating directly to the planets.
"Tesla had told me that beings from other planets were already here," related Matthews. "He was very afraid that they had been controlling man for thousands of years and that we were simply test subjects for an experiment of extremely long duration."
Matthews did not share in Tesla's convictions that aliens may not have the Earth's best interests in mind. His opinion was that if extraterrestrials were so advanced as to be able to travel from solar system to solar system, then they must also be socially advanced and peace-loving. Matthews eagerness to continue experimenting with the Teslascope was indicative of the early days of the so-called "modern UFO era." By the 1950's, contactees such as George Adamski and Howard Menger were writing books and lecturing to eager believers about the almost god-like space brothers. These UFO occupants claimed to be from almost every planet in the solar system, with Venus and Mars being especially favored. The space brothers preached a form of "New Age Space Religion," with Utopian descriptions of their home worlds and denouncement of mankind's warlike ways. Tesla would certainly have felt vindicated by his earlier claims if he had lived long enough to experience the modern UFO era. He mentions in his journals his frustrating attempts to interest those in the government or military about his theories. Apparently Tesla's letters went unanswered - the question remains whether or not his ideas were seriously considered or if he was thought of as simply a crackpot. Circumstantial evidence points to a certain amount of expectation by the United States when the first UFOs were sighted during WWII. It could be that Tesla's ideas had more impact, albeit secretly, than Tesla ever imagined. https://i.redd.it/0ppkohbx72e61.gif Nikola Tesla had suggested that he could transmit through the earth and air, great amounts of power to distances of thousands of miles.
"I can easily bridge the gulf which separates us from Mars, and send a message almost as easily as to Chicago."
How to Get Started in Robotics / Education, Career, and Technical Questions / Wiki Development Thread
Hi Everyone, happy 2021 and good riddance to 2020! We (the moderation team) are working on updating the wiki with better guides and resources. With that in mind, I've put together the wiki in this thread, and would like your help in improving it. Please post any robotics questions you have, and any recommended resources, in the comments. They can be career, educational, technical, beginner or expert. I'll be updating this post based on the comments, so it's a work in progress.
How to get started in Robotics
Advice for everyone
This will be difficult. Robotics is the combination of a variety of skills (Electronics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science etc), none of which are easy themselves.
Don't work alone. We highly recommend working as part of a team; you're more likely to succeed, and you'll have more fun with friends.
Start small. When making your first robot, follow a guide to build something that someone else has already done. Keep it as simple as possible. Once you succeed, then you can expand and make it better.
Do your research. It will help you make a better robot, it will help you solve problems before you hit them, it will save you money, it will save you time. Especially when you are starting out, every problem you encounter will have been solved by others countless times, and there's probably a great answer to your question online.
Document your work. Keeping a logbook full of notes, diagrams, a to do list, will all help you remember what your were last working on, and help you solve problems. Taking photos and videos will be great for your social media, career portfolio, and are fun to look back on years later.
Keep it simple.
Budget your cost. Total up the cost of all the electronics, software, materials etc you'll need, then double it. The more robots you build, the better you'll get at pricing them. But seeing as you're new, expect to make mistakes. Mistakes are good because you learn from them! But they can often be expensive, when you need to replace parts.
Budget your time. Build your robot asap. A robot is an ongoing development process. You build it, test it, modify it, test it... until your deadline. Too many times have I seen (and been a part of) teams who spend far to long designing and prototyping brilliant ideas, only to leave themselves with no time to actually build the thing and make it work. So build your robot as soon as you can, then start coming up with clever solutions to your problems.
Advice for kids (Under 12s) and the grown ups of kids
If your desire is to build robots, you can't go wrong with a Lego Mindstorms kit. It's expensive, but it lasts for years, there's a massive community behind it, it's compatible with lego, and the FIRST Lego League is a competition designed around it. It's recommended for ages 10+, with support from a parent a younger child could still have fun with it. For younger children, check out the development kits in the resources section. There are kits for younger ages, that are easier to build and program, and others which focus on different robotics skills, such as electronics, mechanics, coding. We strongly recommend robotics as a group activity for kids. Check out the competitions in the resources section, and talk with your parents and school teachers about starting a club. By working as part of a team you will be more likely to succeed, you will learn more, and have more fun in the process!
Advice for teenagers
Similar to the advice for kids, we strongly recommend getting involved with a robotics club at your school, or talking to teachers about starting one. Robots are complex and expensive, you'll be able to learn more while having fun if you're part of a team. Take a look at the competitions in the resources section. Competitions are great because they streamline the robot development process, by providing dedicated parts and software, as well as clear rules and objectives for you to work towards. If you are looking to build your own robot, please understand that robotics is a multidisciplinary skill, and you shouldn't try to learn all those skills at once. When powering your robot's motors , you could learn the electronics and build your own motor driver, or you could buy one pre-made online cheaply. The choice you make depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Low level hardware control
To build your own robot, start with a microcontroller such as an Arduino. Like the name suggests, a microcontroller is used to control stuff. It can read data from basic sensors, such as buttons, encoders, IMUs, it can control simple things like LEDs, motors, servos, and is programmed in a language close to C++. Using an microcontroller and other cheaply available parts, you can build a two wheeled robot with simple sensors, and then program it to navigate around on the floor. A microcontroller can control stuff easily, but it doesn't have a lot of computing power, so it can't process data from a camera, for example, but (to simplify) the code runs fast.
High level hardware control
A microcontroller is great for controlling hardware which doesn't require lot's of computing power, but what about when you do need computing power? What if you want to put a camera on your robot? Answer, you need a computer. More advanced sensors, such as cameras and Lidar use a USB cable and are too complex for you to write all the code needed to use them from scratch, so they come with pre-written code, called a library. OpenCV is a library for computer vision, doing stuff with cameras. The code can be written in C++ or Python (Python is easier). Get yourself a cheap USB camera, install OpenCV, and have a go at using it to detect colours, or recognise faces The next step would be to put the camera on your robot, but useless you're building a robot big enough to carry your laptop, we suggest you buy a single board computer (SBC) such as a Raspberry Pi. You can connect your microcontroller to your SBC via USB, and then send data and instructions back and forth.
Design and build
If you can afford a 3D printer, you should buy one, such as an Ender 3. If you have access to a laser cutting machine at your school, lasercut 3mm plywood is also a cost effective robot construction material. You can also buy construction kits such as Matrix which are expensive, but will last many years.
Low level Electronics
You can build great robots using the above skills which are mostly computer science. To take your skills to the next level, learning some basic electronics will allow you to build your own sensors, learning in greater detail how the electronic parts you buy work. You can buy a breadboard and electronics starter kit of parts, to get experimenting with the foundation concepts of electronics. If you find yourself good enough to have a circuit design you want to use on your robot, you can go further and design your own printed circuit boards (PCBs) using free software such as KiCad or Eagle and then commission them using companies such as JLCPCB or PCBtrain.
I want to study robotics at university (Undergraduate Robotics)
Pre-requisite maths
There's no way around the fact that mathematics is an integral part of robotics. Robots use mathematics to process the raw data from sensors into valuable data, use data to form an understanding of the world around them, make decisions based on the situation, and then act on them. Fortunately, computers will do all the hard work for you, but you need to understand how the formulas work, and how to apply them. The universities you apply to with prioritize mathematics skills above all else when deciding between applicants. The mathematics to try and learn before university include: Differentiation and integration, quadratic and polynomial equations, Newtons third law and SUVAT equations of motion, moments, statistical features & probability distributions. These will set you up well for university, if you can handle them with confidence you'll be able to take on the harder stuff as well. You probably won't learn everything, but the more you do, the better.
Applying for University
Pure robotics degrees are rare, but increasing in prevalence as the field becomes more important in society, and as more companies seek professional with cross-disciplinary skills. As stated in "Advice for everyone", robotics is a combination of different skills. The perfect roboticist would have separate degrees in electronics, computer science, and mechanical engineering, plus a masters in data science, and then all the robotics specific education, plus another masters in the area of robotics they specialize in, such as marine science (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles), aerospace engineering (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), or behavioral psychology (Social robots). That's about twelve years of study, excluding industrial placements and internships. With that in mind, many people choose to study one of the three main disciplines as their undergraduate degree (Electronics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering) and then transfer into robotics, either with a masters, or straight into industry. Others will study courses similar to robotics (mechatronics, electro-mechanical engineering) and then transfer. These are valid career paths. Pure robotics jobs aren't as common as jobs in electronics, computer science, or mechanical engineering, so if you aren't dead-set on a career in robotics, this path prepares you for a steady career in industry, and you can choose to pursue robotics at a later point in life. Below is an overview of the key skills that you should expect to learn as part of a university robotics degree. All universities list the course syllabus on their website, giving information about the modules you will study over the years. They might not teach everything here, they might not teach it to the standard you need, they might teach other stuff that is actually more valuable. At this point, it is for you to do your own research. You can always join the Official Robotics Discord and ask for further advice.
Content of an undergraduate robotics degree
Electronics
Analogue
Basic electronics components such as op-amps, resistors, diodes, capacitors. How to generate signals such as sine, square, saw tooth, and triangle. Semiconductors, the bipolar-junction transistor (BJT), the junction field effect transistor (JFET), and the metal oxide silicon field effect transistor (MOSFET).
Digital
Common logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, NAND, NOR, NAND). Truth tables, timing diagrams, karnaugh maps. Boolean algebra, and how to perform logic simplification. CMOS vs TTL. The binary and hexadecimal number systems. Binary coded decimal, gray code, ASCII. Combination logic devices, cascade multiplexers, de-multiplexers, decoders, half and full adders, and comparator devices. Latches, flip flops, counters, and state machines.
Principals
Formulas such as ohms law, time period, voltage and current divider, voltage and current gain, resistors and capacitors in series and parallel, capacitor charging and discharging. Direct Current (DC) principals including Kirchoff's laws, Thevenin’s theorem, Norton’s Theorem. Alternating Current (AC) terms such as period, frequency, instantaneous value, peak value, peak to peak value. Average and root-means-squared values of sine waves. Phasor diagrams, phase shift, amplitude, phase vectors. Inductors, inductive reactance. Capacitive reactance. RL, RC circuits, and RLC series and parallel resonant circuits. Three phase supply, star and delta connection. Electromagnetism, I-H relation, right hand rule, magnetomotive force, field strength, flux, permeability. Ampere’s circuital law, transient effects in inductors, mutual inductance. Transmission lines and co-axial lines. Electrostatic fields, coulomb’s law, electric field lines, superposition theorem, gauss’s law, electric energy & forces. Magnetic fields, back emf, work done through force. Faraday and Lenz's laws.
Computer Science
Computer Architecture
CPU, RAM, ROM, Input/Output, address bus,
Hardware control
Use of C/C++ to program a microcontroller. Handle digital inputs and outputs (I/O) for devices such as leds and push button switches, liquid crystal displays, and serial communications. Handle analogue I/O using Pulse width modulation (PWM), digital analogue converters (DAC), and analogue digital converters (ADC) Pipelines, Bus structure and operation, fetch/execute cycle, branching 7. UART Serial comms 8. Analogue to Digital and Digital to Analogue Converters 9. Advanced Serial Comms (I2C and SPI) 10. Memory devices, simple instructions 11. Interfacing to memory 12. Reset, Programme Counter and Stacks microcontrollers, single board computers, FPGA. Interface with a sensor board, program an LCD screen
Programming
Variables, print, "hello world". Condition statements such as while, if, if-else, and condition operators. Iteration using a for-loop. Control digital I/O devices such as leds and push button switches, aware of high, low, and floating conditions. Use a potentiometer or light dependent resistor to red analogue signals. Design flowcharts. Polling, blocking, sleep, wait, interrupts. Pulse width modulation (PWM), digital analogue converters (DAC), and analogue digital converters (ADC). Understand signal sampling, hysteresis, and noise. Strings, arrays, and structures. Functions with parameters and return types. Constants, global and local variables. how do computers work? RAM, CPU etc von neuman, risc, cisc TTL and CMOS serial communication protocals (I2c, SPI, USB, CAN, RS485 etc) Finite state machine, boolean algebra, fuzzy logic threading, data buffers,
Motor Control
Brushed DC and H-Bridge, Brushless DC and ESC, Servo motors, Stepper Motors
logistic and linear regression, supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, multi-layer perceptron, activation functions, CNN, RL, U-Net segmentation, dataset construction, hardware deployment
I want to get a Masters or PhD in robotics (Postgraduate Robotics)
I want to change careers and enter the field of robotics
What does it take to become a professional roboticist?
Basics Skills
These are the skills absolute needed if you want to work with robotics.
Mathematics: basic calculus and algebra is advised to start learning about robotics
Programming: If you want to give some intelligence to a robot, learning a programming language will be a necessity: C, C++, Python are the more advised programming languages for robotics but more programming languages you know, the more assets you can bring while developing robotics software.
Electronics: If you want to start your own project with hardware, you should start learning basic electronics and build your skill with some basic projects !. Tutorials are plenty on Youtube or hardware stores sites like Adafruit or Sparkfun !
Education
University. Pure robotics degrees are hard to find, but similar courses such as Mechatronics or Electro-Mechanical Engineering do exist. Call the universities you're interested in and ask about what courses they offer.
Online Education. Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, Lynda offer a wide variety of courses related to robotics, from Python for beginners, to Machine Learning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to ask a good question
If you're reading this, it's probably because your question got deleted. It was likely vague, or lacking in prior research.
What is a Robot?
According to wikipedia "A robot is a mechanical or virtual agent, usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by a computer program or electronic circuitry. Robots can be autonomous or semi-autonomous and range from humanoids to industrial robots, collectively programmed 'swarm' robots, and even microscopic nano robots. By mimicking a lifelike appearance or automating movements, a robot may convey a sense of intelligence or thought of its own." Or put simply, a robot is a machine capable of making decisions based on the analysis of it's environment, and then acting on them.
Are Robots going to kill us all?
No, don't be silly. As this XKCD explains robots are no match to their human counterparts. A War games scenario could occur, but I'd sooner trust Windows Vista over most of the worlds politicians when it comes to our nukes. Hopefully, robots will take over the world one day, by freeing us from the drudgery of our nine-to-five jobs!
Why don't robots in real life look like the ones in science fiction?
Science Fiction writers design their robots to be interesting and appealing to people that read their books or watch their movies. They aren't that concerned with how useful the robots are, more with how useful they appear. In contrast, real-world robots are designed to be useful first and foremost, with aesthetics as a secondary consideration. Further, science fiction isn't limited to existing technology. If a motor would need more torque or a battery would need more energy to accomplish a task, a writer can ignore these limitations. In reality, problems like these are at the core of why robots aren't as fast, precise, or cheap as we would want them to be.
Will Robots eventually steal all our jobs?
To para-phrase a post by ThatInternetGuy Humans weren't born to do jobs. Ultimately, we should be doing what we love and money shouldn't be the barrier. Robots replacing humans in doing all jobs is the ultimate goal in any society. If one day robots can autonomously manufacture our food, clothes, houses etc, it will leave us free to pursue the finer things in life. People will still be needed to design clothes, paint paintings etc, but unemployment would no longer be viewed as a bad thing, instead as a normality. However, none of us can predict the future, and it's worth pointing out that people thought that we'd all be out of a job when the machines replaced the production of cloth in the 1800's, the same thing was said about the rise of the production line, and again for computers. In reality, new machines create new jobs, and improve our quality of life along the way.
What kinds of questions are asked at a robotics job interview?
Looking for advice (CST/CIT) after 15 years of industry experience
Hello good folks, I expect it to be a very long post to please bear with me. Looking for some insights, ideas and advice here regarding one of the computing diplomas at BCIT. I apologize for my long rant in advance but I believe that mentioning my background and concerns in detail would probably get more informed and targeted thoughts from people. I already have my Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from overseas but it was back in 2005 when graduated, so it's a bit dated now. I have been working in Telecommunications industry ever since so I easily have about 15 years of work experience. Even though I was introduced to the concepts of programming and coding back then, I didn't pursue it afterwards and you could say that my programming skills/exposure at this stage are zero. My main line of work has been the operational and network integration side of the Optical fiber & Microwave Transport and Broadband networks (mainly Ericsson). The related hardware, its integration on to the Network Management Systems using networking/routing protocols, network service provisioning (2G/2G/4G-LTE) and protection schemes using layer 1 and layer 2, troubleshooting and customer support, plus a bit of a project management mixed in. I landed in Canada early last year but haven't been able to find any work related to my background, yet. Had a couple of interviews and some LinkedIn research and that's when I realized that the market here is totally different. I almost aced an hour and a half interview (at one of Western Canada's big Telecom/ISP company) but what I lacked was the Python coding/scripting/automation knowledge/experience which eventually cost me that role, which was a good senior position with some $75-$80 per hour. Needless to say, I was heartbroken, failing the only interview I got in so many months and being financially broke. Many friends and acquaintances suggested that I should get a Master's degree from Canada because the employers prefer locally verifiable qualification/experience, but to be honest, being out of touch with the studies for so long, I was not mentally ready to go back to school and then the idea of getting burdened by a hefty loan didn't excite me either. But looking at the market situation now, which has been further devastated by this stupid Covid, I finally made my mind to go for it and look for the suitable options. Now for the BCIT diplomas. For my Fall 2021 plans, I have been extensively researching into them for a few days now and I found that the CST has kind of a cult following ... followed by CIT and then CISA. Keeping my experience in mind, it's easy to say that the CST wouldn't be for me, but I am not too sure. I now want to venture deep into Cloud Computing/DevOps, Network Security, Virtualization and Software Defined Networks but software development also picks some of my interest. I am targeting companies like Cisco, Telus, Microsoft (not as a FT developer though) to name a few. One of the difference I noticed between the curricula of CST and CIT is that in the 2nd year, the CST provides a detailed multi-course specialization into Cloud Computing/DevOps, which is unfortunately missing on the CIT side with perhaps only one generic Cloud Computing course in the 2nd year. Is that true? At least that's what I could make out of the online course guide. Also, there's no course on Data Centers and Software Defined Networks in any of the diplomas which is also a concern. So many programs and colleges now have revised their syllabus following the latest industry trends. You can look at this diploma program from Sheridan College in Ontario as an example to have an idea what kind of a course balance I am speaking of (https://www.sheridancollege.ca/programs/internet-communications-technology#tab=courses). I would love to be proved wrong about this, however, but I feel like BCIT syllabus is due for an update. Please chime in with some thoughts about it. Maybe the courses mentioned online aren't giving me a very good picture and these topics might already be covered? I definitely want to learn good and solid programming skills (mainly Python as a scripting/automation language) to complement other areas but I guess I don't see myself as a full time developer. So, looking at this, people might say that CIT appears to be a better match than CST, provided I get in CIT what I am looking for (mentioned above). I will be doing some IT certs on my own on the side. At this stage, would anyone of you advise me to go for the CST and why? I wouldn't shy away from the basic jobs after graduation but my main aim would be to of course do something that complements my background and experience in a solid way, also keeping in mind the emerging tech trends. I mentioned Sheridan College because as a new immigrant I can move to either BC or Ontario from Saskatchewan. But BC is my preference because I want to stay close to the mountains. Some would argue that Ontario and GTA has a bigger job market which is kind of true (and perhaps they have much better thought out diploma options as well) but I keep hearing from people that Vancouver isn't too bad either in terms of the tech jobs? I am even thinking of getting a second Bachelor degree (or even a Master's) but not sure how the things play out in the long term. For now, I have to get work. After that, if I look at UBC/SFU, would they consider me as a Master's candidate after my previous B.Eng degree and a BCIT diploma? Or would I have to go through the second bachelor route? With my previous GPA and a very old overseas degree, I don't think a direct Master's admission would be likely. What do you guys suggest? Finally admissions. Pretty sure I had very good marks when I passed out of high school back in 2000 but my GPA wasn't too good coming out of the university in 2005. Do you think I can get into the program? Also, a very important question, is it true that BCIT would prefer a local BC applicant over someone like me who would be applying from Saskatchewan? If true, should I give a friend's address (who lives in BC) in the application to increase my odds? My concerns for student loan also depend on the answer to this question. Should one be a resident of BC to get loan from there? I eventually plan to move to BC if I get this admission but not at this application stage of course. Would appreciate if people share some insight on this. I still have many jumbled up thoughts and questions in mind but the post has already gotten too long. I would really appreciate if people take some time out to read this and come up with insightful answers. Thanks a bunch in advance.
"We'll want to minimize the amount of our tech they can get their hands on before full capitulation," Intelligence Officer Rouel noted. "To go from undetectable from a distance to an orbital communications relay network in only five hundred years suggests a remarkably high innovation score." Admiral Crassock flicked an ear tuft and nodded. "The less we give them to reverse engineer, the less we'll bleed. Are there any other warning flags?" "No, sir," Rouel answered. "They launch their satellites with chemical rockets. Even first generation counter-grav is more cost effective, so we can reasonably assume they don't have it. Since you can't do FTL R&D on a planet's surface without destroying it, no counter-grav means no FTL, which means no reinforcements. A separatist colony would have retained enough tech for an outward facing system defense network; a penal colony would have an inward facing one. Since this system has neither, this must be this species's homeworld." "Has there been any change in the habitability report since the original survey?" the admiral asked. CRX-4 sat right in the sweet spot of the habitability assessment, with most of its landmass in the subtropical zones, but enough temperate and arctic real estate to ensure that over 90% of galactic species could live there with only adornment grade protective clothing. Only a handful of the most extreme outlier species would need more than class three environmental gear to survive somewhere on the planet. The only reason no one had snapped it up when it was first discovered was that its location was simply too remote to be practical. But borders had expanded in the intervening centuries, and now the Wingover Heromancy was close enough to claim the planet and defend that claim against any contenders. "Surprisingly little," the intelligence officer answered. "They must have had their industrial revolution at an atypically low population benchmark, and learned how to clean up after themselves fairly quickly. Another indication that they have an abnormally high innovation score." "What about their physiology?" Admiral Crassock asked. "It won't constrain their combat effectiveness as much as it would for a less innovative species, but it must still influence their tactics." Intelligence Officer Rouel nodded. "Here, we have visuals on them." He flicked a command to the display, but then began reading off the data anyway. "Mammalian bipeds, hair sparse except on the top of the head and a few other locations that vary by individual. Moderate sexual dimorphism--subtle but enough to render co-ed sports competitions impractical for any but strictly recreational purposes. Very conflicting reports on strength and stamina, suggesting that they have a use-it-or-lose-it physiology. Atypically high resting metabolic rates, even for endotherms." "Meaning that a middle of the sleep cycle surprise attack will have to be perfectly executed in order to retain the advantages of a surprise attack?" the admiral interjected. "Precisely," Rouel answered. "Viviparous with a gestational period of nearly a year and roughly two decades to maturity. Birthrate appears to inversely correlate with wealth, which suggests a lack of innate control over their reproduction. It's difficult to determine their typical lifespan--hereditary and environmental factors apparently can alter it by as much as 50%; the current primary suppression of their life expectancy appears to come from a tendency toward extreme recklessness in their adolescent males." "That will make ground combat...interesting..." Admiral Crossack said. "I think i'll tell the training officers to put their most creative minds on designing the practice scenarios for the ground units." "With a combination of innovative and reckless, i'd suggest putting the truly diabolical minds on the air unit training scenarios," Captain Hussend said, his reptilian muzzle parting in a grin of malicious glee. "Looking for an excuse to pull out that black box scenario?" Admiral Crossack asked the captain of his fleet's contingent of planetary troops. Returning his attention to the intelligence officer he asked, "Do we have to worry about attempted MAD?" "FTL research is noisy enough that we'd detect it long before they managed to weaponize it." Rouel answered. "As much easier as that is than using it for travel, it's still far from easy. They do have fission reactors providing some of their power. There's no evidence that they ever tried to weaponize that technology, however; we'd see fallout scars if they'd done any testing. I'd still recommend seizing those nuclear power plants and any fuel processing facilities as quickly as possible." Admiral Crossack nodded. "Unless you find something else before we arrive within targeting range of the planet, i think we'll remain in stealth mode until we're in position to take out all of their satellites simultaneously. Their ground based sensors should be sufficient for them to realize we have orbital superiority. If that isn't enough to make them surrender, it will be Captain Hussend's turn to call the shots. Do we know what they call themselves? If we're going to demand that they surrender sovereignty of their home planet, we can at least do them the courtesy of using their name for it." "They call themselves 'humans'," Intelligence Officer Rouel answered. "The planet they call Ferrari. Oddly, it's the same in all twelve of their languages; perhaps it was inherited from some archaic language that is no longer used." --------------------------------------- The initial attack went off perfectly. All of the satellites around Ferrari disintegrated within a few seconds of one another, with no wasted shots from the WHN ships. Almost as soon as they realized that all of their satellite communications were down, the humans began evacuating their civilians toward a series of massive underground bunkers. "I can't tell if that's an overpowered communications laser, or a weapons test modulated to carry data to give them plausible deniability if it fails," the Communications Officer reported when the humans finally replied to the Wingover Heromancy's surrender demands. "Retaliation will make them assume their weapons are strong enough to damage our ships," Captain Hussend predicted. Intelligence Officer Rouel concurred. "My recommendation would be to politely ask them to dial back the power on that laser as it's clearly intended for communication over much longer distances. Imply that it's merely signal degradation due to overexposure, not anything that threatens to actually damage our receiver." Admiral Crossack considered the suggestion for a few moments and then told the communications officer, "Do it." After some negotiation with the humans over optimal signal strength, the transmission settled on the image of a human in what appeared to be their civilian formal wear. "President Chen, of the Faction Arbitration Council," the human identified himself. "Since you're asking for our surrender rather than simply glassing the planet, you must want it intact, which means you're going to have to come down here and take it. It would be easier to negotiate a land for tech swap--except that none of us has the authority to order everyone else to stand down. You'd have to negotiate with each faction separately if you want the whole planet. And since you opened with an attack, even if it was just on infrastructure and not personnel, rather than a diplomatic contact, half of them are going to insist that you're nothing but thieves and bullies, no matter how big an empire you might happen to have behind you. "The short version," President Chen continued. "If you want this planet, you're going to have to come down here and take it." "If we refrain from firing on your evacuating civilians, will you refrain from salting the Ferrari?" Admiral Crossack asked. "Salting the--?" the human President's forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle out the phrase. "You mean, 'salting the earth'?" "Isn't that what i said?" Admiral Crossack asked. "I understand that the connotations of synonymous words can vary, but the denotation should be similar enough for understanding. And every terrestrial species calls their planet some cognate of Fertile Soil or Solid Ground. It requires relatively advanced astronomical knowledge to realize that the planet beneath one's feet has anything in common with the wandering stars in the night sky, after all." The human's eyes widened, and then his face went curiously blank. He just figured something out, and he's weighing the tactical considerations against the strategic ones, Rouel guessed silently. "We won't start an atrocity contest as long as you don't," President Chen said. "Not all of our cultures agree on what does and what does not constitute war crimes, but as long as you refrain from targeting civilians and don't use biological or chemical weapons, they should all remain within the parameters of what most warriors consider an acceptable level of occupational hazard." "What's the most common opinion on eating your kills?" Captain Hussend asked, displaying his mouthful of large reptilian teeth. "In extremis only," President Chen answered. "There are a few superstitions that hold that eating hearts or certain other organs can be a way to appropriate your enemy's virtues, but far more of us regard it as a way of declaring your enemy to be an animal rather than a person. Cannibalism as a last ditch alternative to death by starvation will generally be overlooked, but ritual practice is not tolerated." Captain Hussend nodded. "That is a common consensus among most polities and species as well. I suppose that any trophy taking would best be justifiable as preserving DNA samples to determine who is dead and who is missing once the war ends?" "Oh, the nerds are going to love you," President Chen muttered. "Is there anything else we need to discuss, or is it time for you to either reconsider your invasion or else 'bring it on'?" "My troops are already dropping," Captain Hussend answered with another toothy grin. --------------------------------- "Woah, hey, there's no need to get nasty," Pedro said as his eyes locked onto the tray of surgical implements. "I'm a civilian. I've got no reason not to spill the beans." "Civilian," the mantis looking interrogator scoffed. "You killed at least forty of our soldiers, and crippled over a dozen more." "I'm just a guy trying to defend his home. If your people had just obeyed the 'no trespassing' signs, nobody would have died," Pedro responded. "In any case, it's your medical condition that's responsible for any nastiness," the interrogator informed the human captive. "The squad that dug you out from under that landslide thought they were recovering a corpse for autopsy. Growing replacement organs for your ruptured ones was straightforward enough, but your species is violently allergic to all of our existing bone glue formulations, so your broken bones are going to have to heal the slow way. I'm told that broken ribs are even more painful than a fractured thoracic plate." "Convenient," Pedro said. "You get to dose me with enough painkillers to keep me from guarding my tongue and still claim you're just trying to help me." "Quite convenient," the interrogator agreed. "Also a useful argument against those who claim that compassion is nothing but a waste of resources. May i have your full name for the next exchange of survival records?" "Pedro Fook. I'm seriously tempted to give you the correct spelling instead of the one English speakers will pronounce correctly, but i'm too tired for that game." The interrogator paused to listen to what the linguist was telling him through his earpiece and then clacked in amusement. "Very droll. I can accept that a civilian would have sufficient motive for attacking our troops, but i find your effectiveness implausible." Pedro answered, "Why? Hunting the free-range livestock gets us kill training. Paintball games give us tactical training against opponents as smart and creative as we are. Wilderness hiking and camping gets us survival training. And VR lets us familiarize ourselves with the stuff that would be too dangerous to do for real." "But how are you coordinating your attacks?" the interrogator asked. "We aren't," Pedro answered. "We're spread out enough that we aren't likely to get in each other's ways; and we all grew up reading the same books, watching the same movies, and playing the same games, so we all have fairly similar ideas as to what tactics are likely to work in what situations. We don't need to win, we just have to keep harassing your people enough to prove we haven't abandoned our claim until the military gets here. If you had a prior claim, you should have planted a flag or left a beacon in orbit or something, so we'd have known we needed to negotiate instead of just moving in." "Habitable planets are far to precious to be left in the hands of those who can't defend them," the interrogator replied. "There are a few interstellar species so xenophobic that they will glass a planet that someone else beat them to. If you can't keep us from taking it when we want to preserve it, you'd have no hope of keeping them from destroying it." "You still could have tried negotiating first and attacking second," Pedro replied angrily. "Counter-gravity tech would be well worth sharing a planet over. Possibly even giving one up if we could have come to an arrangement regarding the people who have put down roots too deep to be willing to move to a different one. Too late for that now, though." "You have no FTL," the interrogator said. "How would you leave, and how could you have come here from somewhere else." "Why do you think we--ohhhhhh..." Pedro suddenly realized, "You never did solve the energy discharge from getting it almost right problem. You had counter-grav, you could just do your research and development in deep space where failures wouldn't destroy your planet. We had to focus on miniaturization instead, so the energy release was small enough to contain, until we could consistently get it right. Then we scaled back up until we had something suitable for a mass transit system. By the way, the emergency evacuation portals can be weaponized, so i'd advise against backing us into any corners. And our home planet isn't on this network, so even if you manage to capture a control unit intact, you can't get all of us!" "Do you know where it is, in spatial terms?" the interrogator asked. Pedro started to shrug and them stopped when his ribs objected. "Galaxy cluster on the other side of the Great Attractor from here, if i remember correctly. We've got at least a hundred planets scattered across a dozen different galaxies, as best the astronomers can tell. There's one that's suspected of not even being in the same universe." "What does Ferrari translate as," the interrogator asked. "Did anyone notice that paved track with the freestanding garage near my house?" Pedro responded. "That car in there, that's a Ferrari." The translator listened to something on his earpiece and then said, "Four-wheeled ground vehicle, internal combustion engine--used for recreational racing?" Getting a nod from Pedro he went on, "The car is named after the planet?" "No," Pedro answered. "The planet was named after the car; the car is named after the guy who founded the company that originally manufactured it. No clue what the etymology on his family name is." "I see," the interrogator said. His insect-like anatomy and stridulatory vocal apparatus didn't prevent him from being noticeably disturbed by what he'd learned. ------------------------------------- "But everyone calls their planet 'Dirt'," Admiral Crossack objected once he finished watching the recording of the interview. "But they're not from here," Captain Hussend said. "It would have been obvious, except their method of getting here flies in the face of everything we know about FTL tech. We've got enough seismic surveys now to know those bunkers are nowhere near big enough to hold everyone who went into them. Not even with true stasis tech or physiology that would allow for adult cryofreeze. Can't swear on the former, but we know they don't have the latter." "A pity this Pedro never studied enough physics to explain how their portals work. He can tell us what they do, but not why," Intelligence Officer Rouel said. "They probably sent anyone who did have that knowledge home in the first wave of evacuations. A pity we didn't know to stop them." Captain Hussend disagreed. "Just as well we didn't. If that portal tech really does have the same energy discharge problem as conventional FTL, they have at least planetary, and possibly system scale, MAD. Firing on evacuees would have been a disaster." "And Pedro thinks they've sent enough shuttle parts through that portal for them to reverse engineer the counter-gravity tech," Admiral Crossack said glumly. "Doesn't know enough to guess how long that will take, or which direction they'll try to hit us from once they have it. I suppose i can't really blame him for not bothering to study astrography with the way their portal network ignores physical distance, but it's blasted inconvenient for us." "And President Chen still insists that negotiation is impossible until their military arrives in force--no one currently on planet has the authority or the firepower to force all factions to abide by any agreement," Rouel noted, equally glum. "We need to crack one of those bunkers open, see what's in there." "Already in planning," Captain Hussend said. "And i just ordered it moved to the top of the priority list." That was when the bunkers in question exploded. A number of blunt conical projectiles erupted from each site, propelled by an unholy mixture of chemical rockets and conter-grav. "Those missiles have shields," one of the point defense sensor techs reported. Captain Hussend's pupils went to full dilation and he lunged for the fleet wide communication toggle. "All personnel, stand by to repel boarders. Projectile loadout, not concussion." Admiral Crossack stared at the captain in consternation. "That firefight is going to be a nightmare for damage control." "If they can survive that kind of acceleration," Hussend waved a hand at the display that was tracking the missiles' progress, "and be able to fight afterwards, then while concussion injuries may still be a nightmare for the survivors' nearest and dearest to deal with, they won't do us any good." "Notify me as soon as all of these presumed boarding missiles have either docked or been destroyed," Admiral Crossack told the sensor officer sorrowfully. Then he turned to the main console and began reciting a lengthy series of authorization codes, concluding with, "Assimilator boarding protocol to standby." "You think they're that dangerous, sir?" one of the other ship commanders asked on a private channel. "MAD only works if it truly is mutual," Admiral Crossack explained. "We don't know how many planets these humans have or where they are; we cannot allow them to have that information about ours. A species that scores as high as this one for both aggression and innovation is not something we want to have to fight a defensive war against." Even with the deranged acceleration produced by the hybrid drive systems, it was several long minutes before the boarding missiles began impacting against the orbiting ships. The smaller, faster ships had been sent racing away from Ferrari. Half of them immediately headed to various WHN stations to relay the information acquired so far; half of them loitered on the fringes of the system to see how events played out. The larger ships, however, needed too much time to bring their main engines up to full thrust to escape the attack via distance. The human soldiers from the last of the boarding missiles to arrive were greeted by an automated sounding, "Assimilation boarding protocol activated. Detection of any breaching charge will activate the self-destruct on all WHN ships within one astronomical unit." "What did we do that spooked them that bad?" a human from a different boarding party wondered. "If that translated correctly," the squads senior member answered, "they're using a protocol intended for somebody else. Still, we must have spooked them at least a little to go with one that all-or-nothing." "I'm getting painted with a sensor laser," a third man reported. "Can they eavesdrop on us without cracking the radio encryption?" Admiral Crossack figured it was time to offer his proposal. "If you refrain from penetrating any further into our ships, we will withdraw to the fringes of this system until we can negotiate terms for retrieving our planet-side personnel as well as your own return. We will also order our ground troops to return to and remain in the currently existing fortified positions for so long as there are no attacks on those positions. Is this cease fire acceptable?" "You will refrain from attacking the positions we currently hold?" one of the human boarders asked. "We will," Admiral Crossack answered. "Terms accepted." ----------------------------------- Negotiations went as well as could be expected when the humans were reluctant to allow enough Heromancy shuttles near the planet to lift all of their personnel at once and the WHN officers were reluctant to leave a contingent of the size they could lift at one time on the planet alone. The boarding parties, in contrast, had been returned as soon as the humans could satisfy themselves that the shuttle was not booby trapped--neither they nor the WHN was happy about the active self-destruct contingency. Eventually a compromise was reached in which the last of the Heromancy bases on Ferrari was to be converted into an embassy. It wouldn't actually attain that status under Heromancy law until the Council of Winglords formally recognized at least one of the human governments, and required a Winglord's presence to attain at least consulate status--but nothing prevented the humans from granting it formal diplomatic recognition in the meanwhile. President Chen and Admiral Crossack sat facing each other in one of the lounges of the future embassy. "Exactly how much authority do you have to negotiate?" President Chen asked. "Officially, none," Crossack answered. "Treaties must be ratified by the council and negotiated by a Winglord. Unofficially, i should be able to give you reliable guidance as to what terms will be acceptable and what will not. How much of a courtship dance will be required to get those terms accepted, i can't guess until i know which Winglord will be conducting the official negotiations." "Seems strange to give you the authority to start a war, but not to finish it," Chen observed. "Ordinarily," Crossack explained, "a Winglord would have been dispatched as soon as we realized the situation was anomalous. However, they happen to be in the middle of the once a decade Grand Conclave, the one time when Winglords whose disputes cannot be reconciled by legal means are permitted to seek normally illegal forms of redress. Any Winglord not participating still wants to be there to keep an eye on those who are." "Normally illegal...such as dueling?" Chen guessed. "Precisely. I was able to attend the last Conclave, and the preparation rituals, intended to preclude cheating, are so humiliating that it can be safely assumed that the participants were not going to be satisfied by anything less than blood." Crossack added, "Technically it's not limited to Winglords, but the requirements for ordinary citizens to challenge anyone are much more stringent. The conventional wisdom is that the less one has to lose, the less likely one is to be deterred by death and dishonor." "Hmm, i suppose i can see the logic in that." A communication device pinged, and President Chen looked at the display. "What is a Voice, among your people?" Admiral Crossack's ear tufts straightened. Finally, for good or for ill, he would know what was to be. "Both a courier and a seal of authentication. They make no decisions, but they speak with the authority of the full Council of Winglords. They are generally superlative specimens of species that have powers of persuasion or coercion, which is another reason they are so rigorously trained to be bearers of law only and never lawgivers." "I see," Chen said slowly. "If she's coming with an arrest warrant, like you were speculating about a few days ago, we're willing to offer you asylum." "I find exile more unpalatable than death and dishonor combined, but i am honored by your willingness to have me," Admiral Crossack said. "I am a bit puzzled by it, however. I was the one who ordered the attack on your world, after all." President Chen shrugged. "You only fought with those who wanted to fight, and the conter-grav tech we captured is more than adequate compensation for the infrastructure damage. And the special ops teams that boarded your ships were flattered by the fact that you felt you had to pull out your worst case scenario contingency to stop them. The penultimate contingency apparently wasn't good enough. Er, i hope that was your worst case contingency." "Worst case for contingency triggers," Crossack agreed. "There's self-destruct every ship in the system now, and trigger a system sterilizing solar flare, but those are direct triggers, and the latter is for scenarios that so far remain purely hypothetical. And the problem was that your people only needed to capture one ship, while i had to keep every single one out of their hands." "Your people haven't figured out that the counter to a gray goo scenario is to build nannites that eat nannites?" Chen asked rhetorically. "What are the Assimilators, anyway?" "The reason we don't do implanted technology unless there's no viable alternative medically and keep augmented reality to the absolute minimum needed for non-lethal training," Crossack said. "As best anyone has been able to tell, the Assimilators started as a faction in a VR role playing game. Somewhere along the line the species that originally created the game switched from external device full immersion VR to cyborg tech augmented reality and the players started LARPing. Sometime after that, they stopped their practice of only cyborg modding volunteers who wanted to join their club and started modding anyone they could catch." Crossack grimaced and continued, "As long as they needed a full surgical suite to perform the modifications, they were strictly a law enforcement problem. Unfortunately, before the last of them could be hunted down, they got their hands on some kind of replicant nano-tech that lets them infiltrate a neural link into a person without that person's knowledge." "There's no such thing as a person with a direct brain-computer interface who isn't one of these Assimilators," Chen asked for clarification. "No," Crossack sighed. "Any network they manage to link into, any person directly connected to that network immediately gets converted. How they do it, we're not sure; the leading hypothesis is that they've managed to create a computer-based intelligence with persuasive or coercive powers of a type and power that require a person to either take the Voice's Oath or else accept lifetime quarantine. But we just don't know. The good news is that as long as you keep your tech at arms length, it's perfectly safe, or at least they can't do anything that a conventional hacker couldn't. But it does mean that we can't infiltrate their network to figure out what in the seven blue perditions is going on with them. There are some aspects of a neural link that an external interface just can't mimic." "That could be a problem," President Chen said. "Thankfully, we can't run cable through a portal--it gets cut anytime there's a power blip--but we've got way too many people with medical implants. Your people don't happen to know how to repair spinal cord injuries, do they?" "Some species yes, others no," Crossack answered. "In our efforts to provide medical care to POWs of your species, we found that the treatment had to be provided immediately to be effective, and that which treatment protocol would work varied by both the cause of the damage and idiosyncratic factors. We had to guess right on the first try for treatment to work." "Figures," Chen said. "Any vaccine for their nannite infiltrators?" "A vaccine...for nannites?" Crossack asked in surprise. "Why not?" Chen asked. "Any sufficiently advanced nano-tech is indistinguishable from biology; so why not borrow a page from the bio-control handbook?" "I don't believe there's any such thing," Crossack answered slowly. "Many species can induce sufficient sensitivity to trigger a lethal allergic reaction, but that means walking around with a lethal allergy to many common structural and medical materials." "That would be problematic," Chen agreed. "I need to pass this information about the Assimilators along as quickly as possible. Excuse me for a few minutes." "Of course," Admiral Crossack said. Once President Chen had left the room he stood and began pacing. Curiously, knowing that a Voice was en route and that he would not have to wait much longer to have his hopes and fears regarding his future resolved was making the delay harder rather than easier to endure. After a few laps of failed attempts to resign himself to further waiting, he went to the door and asked the officer guarding it to find out how soon the Voice was expected to arrive. "The Voice's shuttle has landed and the humans are trying to figure out what size and type of escort is appropriate to her rank," the officer reported. Then he blinked and flicked his tail in confusion. "Sir, a Voice is her own escort, isn't she?" "The humans don't know that. A Voice speaks with the authority of the full Council of Winglords, but the humans have no official relationship to the Wingover Hegemony until the Voice delivers her words--assuming she has been given words to that effect." "Precisely, Winglord Crossack." Crossack turned to face the new arrival. The female was tall and so ethereally slender that she was nearly translucent. "Voice Laurelliana," Admiral Winglord Crossack said, having met this particular Voice before. He started to bow, but then the implications of her greeting caught up to him and his ear tufts straightened so hard they nearly snapped. "Wait, what--?" "For recognizing that the impossible was possible in time to avert disaster, for valuing the welfare of the Heromancy above your own pride, for a lifetime of exemplary service, you have been granted the title of Winglord and a seat on the counsel." Admiral Winglord Crossack needed some time to reply as he first had to persuade his throat to stop trying to swallow itself. At last he said, "I am well aware of how badly things could have gone if i had been any slower to admit that the humans must have some other, unknown means of bridging the distance between worlds--but i would have thought that barely enough to buy me an honorable retirement, given that i lost a war i chose to initiate. Then too, i would never have arrived at that understanding so quickly without Captain Hessend and Intelligence Officer Rouel, and their many subordinates who had the wisdom to recognize which reports required immediate attention." "You followed standard procedure to the letter until it was made clear that you were not dealing with the kind of situation which that procedure was intended to cover. You therefore cannot be faulted for initiating the conflict. You were also able to admit that the inconceivable had occurred. To not only be able to stretch your thinking to accommodate what was previously unknown and unimagined, but to do so in time to keep defeat from becoming disaster--this is a capacity much needed in a Winglord, and rarest to find. Many prepare for the impossible; but how can anyone prepare for what he cannot imagine?" Crossack nodded, conceding the point, and the Voice continued, "Many admirals find it almost physically painful to yield overall command to the captain of their ground forces and be relegated to providing fire support. Many of those who have no difficulty yielding command are reluctant to reclaim it when the priority returns to space-side operations, preferring to avoid responsibility. But you have never shown any hesitation in either direction, preferring to let the responsibility rest where it can best be fulfilled." Crossacck shifted and flicked an ear tuft and said, "It helps that i trust Captain Hessend's judgement." "And you never once have tried to claim the credit for your subordinate's efforts," Voice Laurelliana smiled at Crossack. "Eh, stolen honor is not," Crossack replied. "Many say it," the Voice said. "Few live it. The appropriate commendations for those you cited credited with identifying the anomalies here have already been issued. The Vaerins claim to have solved the regeneration resistance problem in draeliks; if Hero Hessend chooses to risk the as yet inadequately tested treatment, the Council will cover his expenses." Hero fits a lot better on him than Winglord sits on me, Crossack thought. "I can't predict whether Hero Hessend will take that offer. He keeps his own counsel when it comes to his injuries." "Is something wrong?" Voice Laurelliana asked President Chen, who'd returned partway through her conversation with Crossack and had been staring at her ever since. "You look much like the description of some of our more insidious legends," Chen told her bluntly. "As unlikely as it is to be anything other than coincidence, it is still difficult to keep the resemblance from inducing significant levels of paranoia." "At least you prefer to lance the boil at once rather than dance around the issue while it festers ever deeper," Laurelliana said, dropping her gaze to indicate that she was speaking as herself and not as a Voice. "Long and long ago, or so it is said, while we were still planet-bound, mine and certain of the other will-bending species dealt with those who abused their powers by exiling them to another world. Your portal network suggests that this is not so impossible as we had thought. If your species has suffered from predation by one of our outcasts, i wouldn't blame you for being paranoid where my kind is concerned." "The conspiracy nuts are going to have fun when they hear that," Chen said with a sigh. Voice Laurelliana lifted her head again. "The council wishes to extend formal diplomatic recognition to your people, but we are suffering from some confusion as to which entity we should be extending that recognition to. Some clarification as to your political structure is needed." "Ah," President Chen said. "I can see how it might. Each of the factions on this planet is considered a sovereign nation, although they're a bit more easy-going about their borders than was, or for that matter still is, customary back on earth. The Faction Arbitration Council is precisely what the name says, a neutral forum in which the factions can hash out their differences and save face by accepting a compromise suggested by a neutral party instead of their opponent. We have no real authority, but we do provide a place where you can address all of the factions at once." "It sounds as though you have all of the responsibility of a Winglord, and none of the power," Voice Laurelliana said. Chen shrugged. "I may only have the authority of a debate moderator, but most of the time that's all i need. As for the times when it is not sufficient, well, the prospect of imminent destruction tends to have a remarkably clarifying effect on everyone's priorities." "I suppose it would," the Voice said. "Whose military did you call in?" "The Liberation Hegemony doesn't claim sovereignty over any but it's native States, but they do provide military protection and economic assistance to anyone who abides by what they regard as the minimum standard of human rights. Which usually works out in practice to 'you can have whatever laws you want as long as you make it easy for people who don't like your laws to leave'. Which is why you never see a planet on the Hegemony network with fewer than seven factions--easy to leave requires that there be a compatible place for you to go." "So we can treat with your Faction Arbitration Counsel as a planetary power, and this Liberation Hegemony as a regional one?" Voice Laurelliana asked, and then added "--to the extent that that's a coherent concept with the way your portal network allegedly ignores distance." "Yes," President Chen said. "There's also the Golden Bureaucracy Bloc. Don't buy anything from them without reading the fine print, and never take out a loan from them. The only reason they aren't ruling us all is that the Hegemony is perfectly willing to apply Alexander's solution to Gordian red tape." "Cultural reference," the Voice said. "Not clear from context." "Sorry," President Chen replied. "Gordias was some guy who tied a really complicated knot and said that the man who untied it would rule the world. Alexander came by a while later, looked it over, and used his sword to cut it apart. After he went on to conquer a larger chunk of the world in less time than anyone before him, the locals where Grodias left the knot decided that this counted as 'untying' it." "So keep it simple, and in good faith, when dealing with the Hegemony, because you never know what they might decide is underhanded enough to void the contract?" Crossack guessed. "This system of yours...works?" the Voice asked uncertainly. "As well as anything else we've tried," Chen answered. "Mostly due to the fact that most of us have gotten too lazy to want to bother proving that we could run other people's lives better than they can. MAD helps keep the peace, too, of course. Although, the fact that exile is always an option does tend to leave people favoring lethal forms of self-defense." "Now that would explain a lot," Winglord Crossack said. "I should go mention that detail to Hero Hessend--he's a bit sore over the fact that it was your civilians bleeding his men so hard."
I was desperate for a job. My bank balance was giving me dirty looks. Why should it be any different? I was living on a cash advance at 27% interest and I wasn't sure if I should go to Tijuana for 19 Coronas or take a flyer off the six story walkup in Brooklyn where I dwelt. I was about to flip a coin when I got a LinkedIn notification on the new phone I could not afford. This was odd because I had turned off notifications. All notifications. I just wanted some; peace. and. quiet. The LinkedIn notification went a little something like this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey Kenneth. I know you'd beperfectfor a once in a lifetime opportunity to help humanity and grow wealthy. Hi Kenneth, Hope you're doing great! But word on the street is you may not be... Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Korinna Klaus. I represent a private equity backed startup that is looking for a software engineer and architect with extensive startup experience. You've been recommended to me by a mutual colleague and I have to say: I AM IMPRESSED. Your background is a perfect fit for this exclusive opportunity with my exclusive client. Kenneth: This is not your normal startup. We sought you because you have a reputation as an out of the box thinker who's willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. And since I KNOW you're a no-nonsense DOERr (sic) who tells it like it is; allow me to do the same. Money is NO object. Repeat. This client wants you and all you have to do is name your price. No screening. No background check. And a handsome signing bonus. I mean hey, Ken... what have you got to lose? Due to the sensitive nature of this opportunity please call me on my direct mobile at the number below. Yours truly, Korinna Klaus Head of Talent Acquisition FFC, LLC (Phone # redacted) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I looked at my dog Rudder. He was counting on me to bring home the bacon. A roach crawled out of the sink full of dishes and empty Guinness cans. "I've been here too long" I said to the empty room. Wrong turn in Albuquerque The whole thing stank like a weekend in Tijuana. I was not what you would call an expert architect or software engineer. I mean I could muddle through but I was what you call an accidental programmer. You see when I was young... I had a Dream FREE COMICS FOR CHRISTMAS - 1992 I was finally back in Park Slope after a seven year exile. The momster had made good on her promise to have me out on my ass the day I turned 18. I had managed to make it through five years of SUNY, a year of law school and then when I saw my life flash before my eyes on one sunny afternoon in Camden New Jersey I knew I had to do something else with my life. After a shitty job working for a ghoulish estate raider in the South Bronx I got a phone call with a "once in a lifetime" opportunity. It was my Dad Herman. The same Dad who let his retard wife slam the door in my face when the momster put me on the streets. The same Herman unit who let me sleep in a comic book store in the tenth grade for 26 days until the truant officers got involved. "Just hear me out. Mickey and me got the comic store right on the corner across the street from Kings Plaza. It's gonna be a gold mine. I know you're smart. I want you to run it. We can make millions!" I had needed a job and Herman did have good weed so what the fuck; in for a penny, in for a buck. The Big Light Bulb A month later I was running the comic shop and one day while perusing our distributor's monthly catalogue I had a vision. What if....?? What if I started a club? What if I charged a yearly membership and gave a cool membership card. And every month my club members would order in advance from the same catalogue as the comic shops? And for a discount? Just like a comic store. I should also add this was 1991 and comics were going through one of those Game Stop, real-estate, dotcom, tulip, comic book bubbles with 5 separate holofoil Robin #1 bullshit gimmick manufactured collectible covers guaranteed to put your kids through college; or more likely to sit in a dusty long box in your attic with all those Turok #0s with the chromium whatsis. Good times. So I tried out my idea for a discount advance purchasing club in the comic shop and one day 25 people joined for 25 clams each. On the way home I stopped at my boy Foz's place in Chinatown and showed him the wad of cash. "Wow dude." Foz said as he packed me a binger of the shwag. "I wanna advertise in the whole Marvel line in November with a Christmas ad. It's twenty-five thousand clams but if we get a few thousand people to join we could make crazy jack bro!" Skip to the important part.... After a lot of drama and ragging on his shwag Foz decided to take his last forty thousand bucks left from an inheritance of four hundred thousand pounds he blew through in just under three years. "I'm in," he said and he was good as his word. My father finally agreed to leave the comic shop and his retard partner Mickey and go big. Two Months Later I couldn't handle all the business. So we brought in all our friends from college as partners. One of them, Lou Toast, was supposed to write the software cause handling hundreds of comic book orders without computers was threatening to put me in bankruptcy before I was barely airborne. Three Months Later: Software bug and thirty thousand dollars of orders goes POOF Toast had a bug in the order processing program he wrote in FoxPro. Bam, just like that when our order to our distributor Heroes World was due he informed me, "Ooooh. It's all gone. I put the order in RAM and we had the blue screen of death and well, I gotta go meet Boy George." What. The. Fuck. True story. I told that motherfucker you sit your Boy George hardon back down in that seat and find me my comic book orders or so help me I'm gonna shove those Vienna sausages on your desk so far up your ass Boy George is gonna taste 'em backwards. I loved Toast like a brother. And nobody cared if he was out of the closet either. But this was serious business and if I didn't get my order in we would lose our discount and take a bath and maybe the fat lady would sing before the first act was complete. Toast and I brawled. Wren and Foz pulled me off him. I apologized. I felt awful. I told him it was wrong and I was sorry. He sat back down, did not go to presumably see Boy George and tumble for him. We all typed the orders back in the Lantastic of 386s and somehow I dodged that bullet. However, I had a bigger problem. I needed software and I had tried everything. Hired a consultant who had created an app for the stores called, ACES. Adaptable Comic Entry System. It sucked and the dude always had an excuse; pneumonia, his mother jumped off the cloisters; name it. And here I had already paid him thousands; for nothing. So I hatched a plan. I would lock myself in Foz' apartment in Park Slope for 3 months and learn how to program. I made a deal with Toast to stay another few months and help me take over the computers. I bought a book called Mastering FoxPro for Windows 2.5 and my descent into hell began. Eventually I took over and was able to automate the entire business in a few years. We moved to a warehouse on Long Island and suffered through the.... COMIC WARS The mid 90s was an ugly time for retail comics. The decade had started with almost ten thousand comic shops and scores of distributors and healthy competition. Then some yahoo at Marvel Comics decided to buy my distributor Heroes World and cut out all the other distributors from about 35% of their monthly gross. It was a FUCKING DISASTER. So after scraping by and falling deeper into debt year after year, unable to find financing, unable to successfully diversify I found a bankruptcy lawyer and I went belly up. I was thirty years old. DOT COM BOOM EARN $175 an HOUR - JAVA EXPERTS WANTED Yep. I went from one bubble bursting straight into another. No I didn't make $175 an hour and I could never figure out Java. I found some FoxPro consulting work and for the next ten years I tried to learn it all. Visual Basic, SQL Server, ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Javascript, JQuery, NodeJS, MVC, and I kept working a year, finding myself unemployed for three to six months until I finally found an okay spot at the Bank of New York. And then another Bubble; Sub-prime debacle. After struggling to stay employed I finally found my spot and worked hard and by 2008 I talked them into paying me $800 a day. I was forty. I figured if I could just stay there it would be all right. The Big Recession - All consultants must go. Easy come, Easy go. So.... I was out of work. Another bubble had burst. And then me and my best friend decided to launch a startup. Only I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. You see I never wanted to be a programmer. And yeah, I could program, and I could understand the deeper concepts but I could never hang with the real geniuses. Face it Kenneth. You're just a hack. So yeah, I created a music service just as the RIAA was successfully suing every music startup like Grooveshark right out of business. And I found myself 45, out of work, and deep in debt. Hibbity hobbity back to consulting. Oh I could say I landed on my feet. I got a job as an architect straight away at Bank of America but three months later they did a re-org and I was told if I was in Charlotte they would have kept me. So the day before Thanksgiving they cut me loose. But my manager met me in the city to take back the laptop and buy me a pint of Guinness. He looked me in the eye and said, "It's death by a thousand cuts." I went to Southeast Asia on a lark for a couple of months and came back and found more work at Bank of America in Jersey City. Only the consulting company I was hired through was cut from their preferred list and my contract could not be renewed. And then there was the 18 months at the Mossad psycho company where the owner kept talking some shit about pushing concrete barrels up a hill and I should work 18 hours a day if I was a man like him and well, it was fun watching his face melt in meetings but eventually the LSD stops working. So I did what any other single maniac having a perpetual whole life crisis . I saw my Aunt in Tampa, drove to Fort Lauderdale to see my best friend and business partner who was just as deep in debt as I from our last venture. We had one idea left. A restaurant app my buddy thought up. We were going to make a developer who had worked for me at my last job as a partner and let him develop it but at the last minute his employer in Noida made him an offer he could not refuse and the kid begged off. So I found myself in the Dominican Republic pounding away on the keyboard desperate to learn the Google Cloud, master Angular and NoSQL. You see as a programmer I am always a frustrated freshman. But when you need software and you ain't got two nickels to rub together you make do with what you got and what I had was me. So I sat in that mold infested luxury hotel room on the beach and I began coding. Five months later I found myself in Mexico City in a run down apartment with no screens on the windows and a white female cat for company. I had gotten tired of shooing the cat out and it kept freaking me out when I opened the bathroom door at 3am to take a piss and saw the cat sitting there like a dog its green eyes shining up to me. One night while I was sleeping the cat put its paw on my chest and said, "they're coming for you." I was sure I dreamed it the next morning. I drank a lot of Mexican beer, the cat always close by watching. I kept coding and then I came back to Brooklyn. I had done it and all on my own. I had even written a business plan and created a pitch deck. I would hire a professional to polish it and then maybe, just maybe I could make good for once in my life. Get me and my partner in the black; for once. Just for variety. NOT TO BE And then the pandemic hit. Nobody going to restaurants. No business travelers. No nothing. So I did what any other hard boiled shitty hack developer would do. I borrowed yet more money and kept trying to learn the latest skills. Docker containers. AWS Fargate. Azure. .NET CORE, Lambda expressions, and on and on ad nauseam. It was a curse. And all the interviews with the endless technical questions that I spent endless time memorizing. All because of comic books? Boy George? The Napster? Who. The. Fuck. Is. Ruining. My. Life. MEA CULPA At a certain point you have to come to grips. Here I was in about to exit the sunnyside of my 50s if such a thing could exist. I can't compete with the new wave of young modern developers who seem to know everything while I find myself continuously debugging and cursing and never able to compile the Microsoft sample github. Basically I was a mess which brings us to last Thursday. Hi Kenneth. I know you'd beperfectfor a once in a lifetime opportunity to help humanity and grow wealthy And here I am about to go belly up. I mean they keep knocking me down and I keep getting up but its been 50 years of broken home to foster care to mom to Dad to step-mother slamming the door in my face to sleeping in a comic book store in Bay Ridge and shucking rock for Joe Rockhead all the way to SUNY ghostwriting, law school drop out, comic jock, software consultant, music app wanna be, unemployed single and having to wear glasses and shave my head. This is what is referred to as... A Revolting Development So I did what any other down on his luck red blooded American man would do; I called Ms. Klaus. "Hi Kenneth!" It was as if she was somewhere in her office looking at her watch and mumbling, "In 3, in 2 and ..." as I punched her digits. "Hi Korinna. How are you?" "I am FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC! Thanks for asking. But this isn't about me. This is about you Kenneth." "Well what's your once in a lifetime offer?" "Yes. Good. Good. Good," she said. I said nothing which is something I wished I had learned to do long ago. "Sure. Sure. You wanna know. Well I am going to tell you. We are running an entirely remote team launching a new technological service to a very exclusive clientele. A very bigly clientele if you catch my drift." Did she just say, "bigly???" "A very well heeled clientele if you know what I mean," she said and let it hang in case I wanted squeeze the Charmin. "I'm listening," I replied. My dog Rudder sniffed his balls and knit his eyebrows and gave me the, "I got a bad feeling on this one Dad," look I was all too familiar with. Rudder was rarely wrong but I was rarely in a position to be choosy. I was an accidental programmer in a world I never created and each year that passed burned my ass worse than the one before. "Kenneth. We are far along in our platform and we need a 'can-do guy'. Someone who can communicate. Tell it like it is, if you will. Are you following me?" This was starting to sound like some government grade A bullshit. "Well I've been working in Angular and I am okay at .NET and SQL but I still have to spend a lot of time on Google and StackOverfl-" "Never mind that Kenneth. Tune in to what is happening here." "Okay." "We know about you. We know you came up hard. We know you made it through uni with high grades despite eating shrooms and acid and smoking weed incessantly. We know you were a ghostwriter. We know you witnessed a murder in Camden when you were in law school and had a breakdow-" "OKAY!" I interjected. "I don't know what kind of bullshit scam you're running Karinna, Kristina,, or whatever the fuck your name is but yeah, you're right. We are in a fucking pandemic, I am trapped in an overpriced closet the last 20 years and I feel like a goddamned retard everytime I take a technical interview. As a matter of fact, I am probably the last person you want to lead your startup." WHOAH. THAT DID NOT SOUND LIKE ME. I NEVER SHOWED..... F.E.A.R. This time it was Korinna who interjected. "No you don't listen with your mouth Kenneth. That's your mistake. What? You think you're special. 'Poor poor pitiful me?' Well fucking Linda Ronstadt can't do concerts anymore and the world is fucking gone full blown Dr. Strangelove and you think being an iconoclast makes you special? Well I have news for YOU; it does! And we want to hire you. Today. Now." I was going to tell her I had to think about it a bit. I wanted to talk money. But I didn't feel right. My palms were sweaty. My vision blurrier than usual. I took off my glasses and for a second I could see perfectly. Like when I was young. It was a vision. Like the vision I had the night when I was 5 in 1972. Right after I learned about betrayal. They had conned me into getting my tonsils out by telling me that I could eat all the ice cream in the world I wanted. But that was bullshit because my throat was so raw that the ice cream cut like a knife but fuck YOU--Bryan Adams; it did NOT feel all right. So shove your na-na-na-NA-na-nahhhs right up your ass. I remembered the Barbie face that materialized on my wall. Clear as day. Like an HDTV of the future. Only it was real and Barbie looked sexy AF. Only her smile changed. Pearly whites morphing into slime covered triangular gnashing machines. Eyes blood red crying tears of the same. And the laugh. It was the laugh that said you're whole world is about to change son. And you here have proof. A premonition to last your entire life. Like Sisyphus, Like Icarus... No matter how high you fly you'll always come crashing down. The room spun. I felt the small hairs on my neck raise. I felt that Sunday night adrenaline dump hit my blood stream. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Can't fight. Can't flee. Just another Manic Monday coming your way. Just like any other day. Only you will keep losing. Endless unfulfilling meaningless to your existence. The women will see you as a compendium of check boxes on their to-do list. Over and over. The eternal return. Like Jorma's roommate Professor Manchester said, "Those olives WILL call to you in the middle of the night...." I rubbed my eyes. I-I was crying. Blood. Rudder got up in my face and began licking it.... "Ken... Kenneth!! Tune in." I had forgot all about the Klaus bitch. I was entering Coronaryville USA; populate; ME. WTF?!?! My. Mother. Was. Back. And you're gonna be in trouble... Hey nah... hey nah.... It had been 35 years since I had cut bait. The bitch with the fast right hand. The hair puller. The avocado face monster who was always revoking my privileges and giving away my pets and sabotaging any shred of joy I might experience on this planet. "I told you. You would fail. Just.Like.Your.FATHERRRRRRRR..." My father Herman. Yeah you remember him. He who incidentally caught a heart attack and was found by my stepbrother with one hand in the air which was misinterpreted as a, "GTFO of my room," due to their OscaFelix ongoing Sanford & Son drama. Truth be told he got a little ripe there in the end. God my fucking life flashed before my blood stained eyes. I wanted to fight. Korinna said, "You have to hit rock bottom Ken." And then I saw everyone ridiculing me. Ostracizing me. Bringing me to the gallows pole. I pissed my satin pajamas. The ones I had been wearing all week as my funk got industrial strength. I. Felt.My.Mouth.Seal.Shut. I could not speak. I could not scream. "You don't listen with your mouth," Korinna said. I cried harder. I wanted it to stop. It was like coming down off of all the cocaine in the universe. Mel Brooks anxiety would need a year of the endo to match the altitude of my anxiety. I wanted to die. "If you kill Rudder it will end," Korinna said. I saw Rudder. Lapping my face. Whining. And then something odd happened. It was like all the moments of clarity and enlightenment I ever experienced came together to let me see it all as an illusion. The fear. The mindless reaction. Kill me. Don't kill me. But shit or get off the pot. The audience is growing restless; trust me. "You've got the job!" Korinna cooed. "What?" "Check your bank account Kenneth. Your business account. We've deposited a retainer for your first month." I checked my bank balance. I was bucks up. Enough to not only get me out of debt but my partner too! Almost to the penny. I felt fear turn to relief; or was it greed? "You felt it? Did you not?" "What was that?" I asked. "That Mr. Kenneth," Korinna said, "was the FEAR FREQUENCY. People are paying us a pretty penny for exclusive use of this very cutting edge technology. It makes dependency injection look like a hammer and anvil." I ain't proud to say I took the job. That was four months ago. You won't believe this and I don't blame you. I don't expect you to. I still don't. I don't even quite know what I am doing all the time. I am monitoring three offshore teams. I believe the current state of the world has been induced or incited or catalyzed by the fear frequency. I don't know how it is possible but after every project we complete; particularly with the team from Yerevan; the world grows a little darker and my bank account a little bigger. I tried to resign a few days ago and the nightmares began. They gave me another raise and put me on probation. Korinna reminded me of the company's HR motto; FEAR IN-FEAR OUT So next time you feel that free floating anxiety, the next time you start making decisions; life decisions; remember the frequency Kenneth; the fear frequency.
This post briefly describes our journey from being an employee to a local lawn care business owner, then software business. If you’re a wantrepreneur, just starting out, landscaper, or SaaS owner, hope you find it applicable. 6 years ago, my SO and I (engineer and accountant) were grinding our 9-5 jobs. We knew we don’t want to be employees for the rest of our career. We realized the lack of good quality landscapers in our city (Phoenix) and decided to start a landscaping business. We had no prior landscaping experience and came up with a new way to get more lawn care clients through an instant price quote system. We calculate lawn maintenance pricing using some algorithm we developed. We built other software features to help manage our business, from booking, scheduling, invoicing to payment. It took us about a year to plan and build the software. Our local landscaping business has grown very well. We do have some client cancellations due to job loss. Our sales still went up 50% from 2019. We surpassed 28k service appointments with multiple crews focus mainly on residential yard, lawn care clients with decent margin (~20%). I made a post 6 months ago about our landscaping business (industry, operations, tips) if you want to take a look. Some hard work from our crews: https://imgur.com/a/iI4b4py Sales over the years: https://imgur.com/a/ttBb1dt
New entrepreneurs
If you’re a wantrepreneur or plan to start your business, don’t wait. You just need to start. As for ideas, you don’t need to look too far. What services, products you use frustrate you. Look up competitors’ reviews, the legit bad ones. Maybe you can offer a better solution that can delight customers and stand out from competitions. Finding an industry you’re passionate about is great. It gives you more drive but it isn’t necessary. We’re not particularly passionate about landscaping. You do need to be obsessed with customer service. Take the necessary time to research the market but don’t get delay by analysis paralysis. There’s no better way to learn the industry by doing it, making revenue. If you have a full-time job and hate it, strong suggest don’t quit yet and start a new business unless you have strong industry experience. Don’t tell your boss or coworkers you’re planning a business or doing a side hustle. It’s difficult to juggle time between your job and side business. Good time management is essential. Support from your family and friends is a plus. Some may not like your idea. Prove them wrong with your launch success. Don’t ignore your health too. You need a strong body and mind to be productive. You can only work so many 14 hours day. Eat, sleep well, exercise often. It’s good to take a vacation at least once or twice a year. What’re your tips to achieve work life balance?
Landscapers
We’ve learned a ton in the past 5 years about the landscaping industry. We run and manage the business, but we don’t do the heavy-duty work. My SO tags along often with the crew mainly to learn the trade and provide support. Phoenix summer is no joke. 110F are now typical in the summer. Few times my SO almost passed out in the field. Landscaping is hard on your body. A backpack blower weighs 20lbs. Wear it all day can’t be good for your back. Lawn mower can be hard to push if it isn’t self-propel. This is why you don’t want to work in the business. Have a system that works for you, so you don’t work in it. Job notification, service reminder, payment system, invoice generation should be automated. Hire the right people and delegate tasks you’re not good at to others. Challenge Managing clients and crews aren’t easy. We all have our fair share of client complaints, justified or not. Unfair bad reviews that aren’t your fault. It can ruin your day when you see one. Respond professionally. Many potential customers will read it and know who’s in the wrong. Some clients don’t pay, time away to follow up with overdue accounts. Landscaping business is quite seasonal. Luckily, Phoenix doesn’t snow, there’s plenty of work all year round. We met many local landscapers over the years. The challenge for them is not so much about doing the work, it’s how to get more clients, increase sales. Marketing Many use printed ads, flyers, doorhangers, thumbtack, angie’s list, homeadvisor. We rely mostly on our website, clients book online, and Google My Business (GMB) page. For most, GMB and a facebook page are what you need. Make sure both are done well. Post photos, updates regularly, encourage clients to post google reviews. Optimize your keyword on your website if you have one. Don’t use Yelp, try Nextdoor instead, we’ve been getting many referrals from Nextdoor lately. They started monetizing their platform with ads. Something to look into. Our business model focuses on residential clients. Some prefer commercial, HOA if you want larger contracts. If you go this route, you probably need to pitch to property managers, HOAs, or already have connections with them. Most commercial landscaping companies we know of have an annual run rate around $5M+. 15% net is a pretty good business. This comes at the expense of higher overhead/turnover of the crew and takes a long time to get paid. There’s also no guarantee you will get the big contract renewed so there’s some unknown factor you need to consider. Residential clients are more predictable if you have many routine maintenance clients. How’s your landscaping business doing? Any tips you’d share with us?
SaaS
About a year ago, we got a couple of FB messages from out of state landscapers. They saw our pricing website and asked how they could use something like ours. We told them we built it ourselves. They asked are we selling it. We knew our local business success largely thanks to our booking system. Get more clients, saves time, and get paid faster. This leads to the idea of making our software into a SaaS app and available to other landscapers. Maybe they can benefit from it too. We made a quick demo site and let some local landscapers try it. They all love it. Some already use similar software but it’s too complex for them with too many features they don’t need. I did some free trials on competitive products and feel the same. Market We looked further into the industry for home service providers software. Plenty of software solutions. 1, in particular, has raised $400M. They raised a series D round in 2018. They offer software to many contractor industries (plumber, electrician, landscapers, home cleaning, etc). This confirms there’s a market for it. Our advantage would be the instant quote system most other competitors don’t have. Our customers will have their own private label website, hosted by us, powered by the instant quote system. Their clients can book online. We started planning and development a few months ago. If our niche is successful, we’ll expand to other industries compete head on with others. If you plan to build a SaaS app, you don’t need to target a huge market. When you market to everyone, you market to no one. Pick a smaller niche you know well. Your niche makes it easier to target your audience when it comes to marketing and advertising. Focus your app’s benefits, not features. Show why your customers want it. It’s better if your app’s value prop helps customers make more money, get paid faster than something nice to have. Cost If the dev quotes you X number of hours, add 50% additional time as a buffer. Add another 20% of your own time to collaborate with them (questions, feedback, testing, deploy, ongoing support). If you go with the freelance route, you’ll get a wide range of quotes. It takes time to go through the interview process. Be prepared to spend at least a few weeks on that. The requirements need to be clear to avoid scope creep. You should have at least 1 final meeting to over every feature including testing, QA, live rollout. All should be agreed upon before start. Make sure you allocate extra resource after release. Your app will have bugs that need fixed. We did two revisions in 5 years. Development We don’t have any coding experience and are fortunate to be able to fund the dev ourselves. Even that, you still wear many hats. You are the project/product manager, tester, marketer, customer support. It’s better to have some knowledge about the dev process and project management. It’s very likely the schedule will slip but it’s your job to make sure it doesn’t become a multi-year long project. We use scrum framework to manage the project. Let your end customers use it asap even it’s just an MVP or limited feature app. The feedback will help you prioritize and plan the product roadmap. SaaS app has added complexity to the admin dashboard. Analytics, new signup, churn, customer upgrade/downgrade plans. You can build these tools in-house. You can also consider paid solutions to help you manage the SaaS business. Leads/customers will have questions about your product. Create good documentation of your app, how-to guides, self-paced training to help customers. Have a staging server set up to test new work from the dev. A SaaS app could involve many parties. Ours takes online payments for the landscapers from their clients. It’s very important that the payment system works. User case diagram helps when testing your app. Some features may need fast response and you will need to test it with the dev in real-time. You need to make sure the devs and you communicate often and well. We use slack. I don’t personally like it much but that’s what we have. If the devs lack communication or technical skills, fire them quickly, don’t waste each other’s time. Marketing I don’t have many insights on this as the app’s still under development. Our local landscaping business doesn’t need much marketing. We do have a small following on social media and plan to leverage it into the SaaS business. We started some content marketing and may do some paid ads. Still coming up with a strategy. We do have the buyer persona. I’m currently taking some social media marketing, and blogging courses. Need to find where landscapers hang out the most then decide on the channels. We may outsource that part of the effort. Any suggestions are welcome. 2020’s been difficult for many entrepreneurs. If you’re struggling this year, we hope 2021 will turn the corner for you. For those who do well in 2020, we hope your winning streak continues! For those who are launching soon, we wish you great success!
Deep Dive Research About a Collaborative Work Management Company Poised to Benefit off the Remote Work Trend. NYSE Listed.
TL:DR is at the bottom Hello, welcome to my second deep dive write up. My name’s Mark and I’m an accountant with a passion for investing. About two years ago, I used to work as an auditor at a public accounting firm and have been behind the scenes at many different publicly traded and privately held companies in the U.S. My goal is to bring my unique perspective from that past experience, my current experience working in a new role at a large corporation, and my understanding of accounting to help break down some of the most exciting growth stocks on the market today. I’m a long-term investor. I am focused on finding great companies and holding them for a long time. I’m willing to endure volatility, crazy price drops, and everything that comes with this approach as long as the facts that led me to originally invest and believe in that company have not changed. If you want to learn more about this approach. I recommend reading the book “100 Baggers” by Chris Mayer. Introduction I’m excited to share with you all my stock pick for this month, Smartsheet. I’m always looking for investment ideas. I run stock screeners with different criteria (mostly focused on revenue growth), scan Twitter, talk to professionals in different industries, and try to observe what products or services are getting popular with my friends and family. One of the best investment decisions I’ve made to date came after I talked to my friend about a drink he was drinking on the golf course. Shout out to you Celsius (CELH)! With that being said, you never know where your next good investment idea is going to come from. In the case of Smartsheet, I became aware of the company through a stock screener. I was drawn to the relatively small market cap ($8.6B), strong revenue growth (roughly 35%), and the fact that it’s a subscription business model (SaaS). Once I became aware of these facts, it cued me to take a deeper dive. The more I learned about Smartsheet, the more I liked. Management talks a lot about empowering people and that really struck a chord with me. In different roles I’ve had as a teacher, tutor, and supervisor, I’ve always found empowering people to be one of the most important keys to success. I will touch on this more later in the write up. Another positive signal I got about Smartsheet came unexpectedly one evening. I was sitting in the kitchen and my girlfriend was cooking dinner. I was watching an interview on my phone with Mark Mader, the CEO of Smartsheet. My girlfriend overheard the word “Smartsheet” mentioned in the video and said “Are they talking about the Smartsheet with the blue check mark?”. I had to Google their logo but yes, it turns out we were thinking about the same Smartsheet. I asked her how she knew about it. She said “My company just transitioned all of our work onto Smartsheet. I really love it. Our marketing department is really excited about it because it makes their job way easier and more enjoyable.” Hearing this just motivated me to learn more about Smartsheet. The Thesis Statement For every stock pick I make, I want to provide a quick thesis statement that can serve as a reminder for why I’m buying and holding that stock for the long term. I’ll always aim to make it just a few sentences long so it can easily be remembered and internalized. This helps during times when the price may sporadically drop and you need to remember why you’re holding this position. The thesis statement I have come up with for Smartsheet is as follows: “Smartsheet: A leader in collaborative work management (CWM) software. As the global workforce becomes more decentralized through remote work, managers and executives now more than ever need a tool to digitally consolidate their teams, projects and deadlines. Smartsheet is that tool and is innovating to offer businesses even more ways to get the most out of their teams.” I think this thesis statement really captures the essence of what Smartsheet does. If you go to Smartsheet’s website and look at the “About” page, you will find their “About” statement which says “Smartsheet is the enterprise platform for dynamic work that aligns people and technology so your entire business can move faster, drive innovation, and achieve more.” Notice how their statement emphasizes helping businesses move faster, drive innovation, and achieve more. In my thesis statement, I mention that Smartsheet is a leader in the CWM software space. But how do I know this? Well, a highly reputable independent research firm named Forrester conducted a study on the CWM space based off different criteria including collaboration, enterprise capabilities, UI/user experience, planned enhancements and number of customers just to name a few of the factors considered. I put the companies that were identified from the study in the order of their ranking below. As you can see, Smartsheet is firmly planted as a leader in the space at 2nd place. Let’s use our common sense for a second. At the beginning stages of a remote work revolution, do we want to invest in an up and coming SaaS company that focuses on providing firms with resources to digitally manage their teams, digitally manage work/projects, and digitally collaborate to get work done? I think the answer should be a resounding yes. But what about these other companies on the list. Let’s break them down 1 by 1:
Workfront was recently bought by Adobe. If you want to invest in Workfront, you’d have to invest in the much larger company of Adobe. It wouldn’t be a pure play investment into the CWM space.
Smartsheet is 2nd and of course, they are public :)
Wrike is private
ServiceNow – CWM is just one small piece of their total offerings. Investing here would not be a pure play into the CWM space. Also, the company is already quite large ($106B market cap)
Asana is public but just IPO’d on 9/30/20 about 3 months ago. We don’t have much data to track their performance as a publicly traded company. Furthermore, although they actually would be a pure play investment into the CWM space, they’re not a leader and rank behind Smartsheet in several of Forrester’s categories. Why invest in the 2nd best when you can invest in the best?
Monday.com is private
Microsoft – CWM is just one small piece of their total offerings. Investing here would not be a pure play into the CWM space.
Atlassian – This company does primarily focus on CWM but I have a couple problems with them as an investment. 1) They’re ranked way beneath Smartsheet. 2) They’re already too big for me to confidently say they can 10x (market cap already $58B).
Now that we’ve established that Smartsheet is a leader in the CWM space and that they’re arguably the best publicly available pure-play investment in this space let’s understand why this is important. Other than the obvious reason that we’re in the beginning stages of a remote work revolution, why is this important? Well, let’s take a look at this quote from Mark Mader, Smartsheet CEO, during the last earnings call (Q3 FY21) that occurred on December 7th, 2020: “Leaders are recognizing they need to shift more workloads to asynchronous work, work that is documented, automated, tracked with dashboards, and where priorities are clearly defined. They understand that by empowering their teams with no-code solutions that facilitate asynchronous work, cycle times will be improved, a deeper sense of ownership will be created, and prioritization and accountability will be insured. Smartsheet is ideally suited to help enterprises work more asynchronously to derive the benefits from doing so.” Key word here: Asynchronous. Asynchronous communication is different from Synchronous communication. Here is the difference: Asynchronous: email, message boards, dashboards, etc. Synchronous: video conferencing, chat, audio calls, etc. Any communication that doesn’t require a real-time response can be considered asynchronous, like the examples in the picture above. Synchronous communication is any communication that happens in real time, thereby allowing for immediate responses, see examples above. As part of my research on Smartsheet, I read an E-Book that was written by the original co-founders of Smartsheet, Mark Mader the current CEO and Brent Frei who is no longer with the company. They wrote the E-Book in 2007 just a couple of years after the 2005 founding. The E-Book is called “The Power of Done”. The moral of the book is that Mark and Brent noticed through their own experience, and through different research studies on work place productivity, that the rise in technology in the early 21st century was actually making employees less productive. This is a quote from their E-Book: “According to Basex, a research firm focusing on the knowledge economy, interruptions from email, cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging and blogs eat up nearly 30 percent of each day; on an annualized basis, this represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire U.S. workforce, or a $588 billion cost to the American economy.” They mention in their book that although there has been a lot of advances in work technology such as email, word processing, and spreadsheets, there hadn’t at that time been any great applications created for teamwork collaboration or task management. The fact that technology advances helped the world create tools to enhance productivity but also deterred productivity at the same time is what Mark and Brent referred to as the productivity paradox. They wanted to do something about it and thus they founded Smartsheet. How Smartsheet makes money At the very least, before you invest in a company, you better understand how they make money. In Chris Mayers’ excellent book, 100 Baggers, that I mentioned above, he continually references top line revenue growth as one of the main common indicators of a possible 100 Bagger. This isn’t to tell you that any stock I pick will be a 100 Bagger just because it has great top line revenue growth, but if I am looking at a growth stock to hold for the long term, revenue growth is one of the first things I look at. Before I talk about the revenue streams of Smartsheet, I want to share a little bit about the actual product that they sell to earn this revenue. Co-FoundeCEO Mark Mader realized that a lot of work in the corporate world was being done on spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. However, he realized that these spreadsheets were largely static and not necessarily used to their full potential. He wanted to help people get more out of their use of spreadsheets. As a result, we now have Smartsheets which is a cloud based platform that can be accessed by all employees of the company no matter where they are with live information about project statuses, meeting times and work that is assigned to each employee just to name a few uses. Users can choose their way of viewing this information with different views such as calendar view, grid view, card view, and Gantt view. The idea is that by enhancing the availability and quality of asynchronous information available to all members of a team about the status of a project, the tasks assigned, and the timelines, the less synchronous communication will be needed which allows employees to spend more time doing what they’re hired to do – get work done. Think about how wasteful it is to hire a highly talented engineer but then make him spend half his day preparing for and doing status update meetings and hunting people down to see where they’re at with their assignments. What if all this information was available for him, his managers, and his staff to see within Smartsheet without having to bother each other and waste precious work hours that could be used for coding, designing, and producing? That’s what Smartsheet looks to achieve. For Smartsheet, their means of making money is quite simple. As I mentioned earlier, they are a Software as a Service (SaaS) company. Whenever you see SaaS, that means subscription revenue and in my opinion that’s a very good thing. With a subscription business model, the revenue is going to be recurring every year and that type of reliability (combined with growth of course) is something you want as an investor. Smartsheet’s primary source of revenue is the sale of subscriptions to their cloud-based Collaborative Work Management (CWM) platform. Customers and potential customers begin their engagement with the Smartsheet platform by either signing up for a free trial, purchasing a subscription on the Smartsheet website, going through a sales rep, or they are exposed to Smartsheet by collaborating with a Company/Individual that uses Smartsheet. For subscriptions, customers select the plan that meets their needs and can begin using Smartsheet within minutes. Smartsheet offers four subscription levels: Individual, Business, Enterprise, and Premier, the pricing for which varies by the capabilities provided. Customers can also purchase connectors, which provide data integration and automation to third-party applications. The Connectors part of the business is something I find really interesting. Basically, Smartsheet has made deals with most of the top work productivity and communication software companies in the world to allow their customers to use those applications within their Smartsheet user interface. This helps position Smartsheet as the true “command center” platform while the products of the other companies become ancillary pieces. You’ll see this on the link above but some products that Smartsheet sells Connectors for include Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Jira Software, Slack, and Skype just to name a few. I think that being able to sell these Connectors as ancillary pieces to the Smartsheet user experience is so beneficial to Smartsheet because a lot of these companies that people may perceive as “Smartsheet competitors” actually become a piece of the Smartsheet platform and can be sold by Smartsheet as a supplemental revenue stream. This neutral angle that Smartsheet is able to come from by selling Connectors to their perceived “competitors” reminds me a little bit of how Roku (ROKU) is able to earn revenue off of selling a Netflix subscription on their platform. I think just the fact that all these big companies like Adobe, Jira, Salesforce, etc. allow their products to be integrated into Smartsheet shows that there is a high value proposition in the Smartsheet platform and that they would risk alienating their customers if they didn’t allow for their products to be integrated with Smartsheet. On top of the Connectors to third party vendors that Smartsheet is able to sell, Smartsheet is also able to sell upgrades to their own internal plug-ins. Smartsheet has some impressive proprietary plug-ins they can sell to their customers. For example, in May 2019, Smartsheet acquired 10,000ft which augmented their product portfolio by providing resource allocation and planning. The name “10,000ft” is meant to be analogous to having a high level view of your company and all resources available within your company and how to deploy them. Also, in September 2020, Smartsheet acquired Brandfolder, Inc. which provides a centralized platform to organize, discover, control, distribute, and measure all forms of digital content. Combining Brandfolder capabilities with Smartsheet allows them to create dynamic solutions that manage workflows around content and collaboration. This goes back to what I said earlier in the article about how my girlfriend had mentioned that her company’s marketing team was “really excited about Smartsheet because it makes their job way easier and more enjoyable.” She told me that before Smartsheet, her company’s marketing team had to constantly hunt down members of the creative team (photographers, graphic designers) to receive the latest photos, videos, and digital designs they were working on. She said it was a big pain for them trying to share this content over email and SharePoint. Now, all of the content is inside of Smartsheet and the marketing team can access it at any time. They can leave comments on the content, route to appropriate individuals for approvals, and have better insight into the status of all digital content that is being worked on. The acquisition of Brandfolder is really what allows Smartsheet to stand out in this department. Nobody really talks about it, but digital content is so important these days for companies in terms of controlling their brand image, putting out quality advertisements, and presenting their product in as positive of a light as possible. The fact that Smartsheet has a strong proprietary plug-in for this with Brandfolder is very promising. During Smartsheet’s FY21 Engage Customer Conference, Anna Griffin, Smartsheet Chief Marketing Officer said that the global annual marketing spend is $500B for companies around the world. She said the role of the marketing department is changing from sole content creator to Editor in Chief. All kinds of teams within companies these days are putting out content that effects the company’s brand. Sales is running social media campaigns, product marketing is putting out blog posts and podcasts, and R&D is teasing new product experiences in app. It can get really difficult for the company’s Marketing/Branding team to stay on top of all this without a centralized digital content collaboration platform like Brandfolder in Smartsheet. This is just one reason why I think Smartsheet has a lot of growth opportunities in the future. As you can see, Smartsheet has a lot to offer to companies with their core CWM platform, the Connectors they can sell, and the internal upgrades available such as 10,000ft and Brandfolder. On top of that, Smartsheet also provides WorkApps, a proprietary no-code platform that empowers users to build intuitive web and mobile applications that streamline business and simplify collaboration. There are so many instances within companies where an app needs to be built to streamline a workflow. Traditionally, companies need to engage their IT departments and the coders that sit within these departments to build these apps. This places a lot of strain on IT departments and takes away time they can be spending on more complex/mission critical projects. Mark Mader is aware of this and thus is heavily pushing no-code as a solution for companies now and in the future. He believes that everyday non-coder employees know their jobs/workflows best and thus if you empower them to build their own apps with a no-code platform they will produce better and more relevant apps to help get work done than an IT department employee who doesn’t even do the job that the app is being built for. Also, he believes this will reduce strain on IT departments and allow them to focus on more complex and mission critical projects. Here is a quote from the Director of Sales (Hina Patel) at a Smartsheet customer, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO): “I have been waiting for a solution like WorkApps that can give us quick and easy access to the content we need, when and where we need it,” said Hina Patel, Director of Sales Operations at Cisco. “The ability to take our Smartsheet assets, along with other tools we use, and package an entire solution in an intuitive app will make it even easier to drive active participation from everyone involved in the process, no matter their role.” As you can see, the value proposition of WorkApps and the Smartsheet platform appears to be high. Lastly, Smartsheet also generates revenue from Professional Services which is essentially providing training and customized consulting to Smartsheet customers that want to get more out of the Smartsheet platform. In the most recent quarter, Q3 FY21, Professional Services accounted for 8.2% of revenue. Here is the breakout from the most recent quarter: Subscription revenue = $90,890M for 91.8% of total revenue Professional services revenue = $8,043M for 8.2% of total revenue This is the end of my first article about Smartsheet. My goal is to drop Part 2 within the next week. The focus of Part 2 will be an in depth answer of the question – “Can we 10x from here?” TL:DR
This is Part 1 of my two part deep dive on Smartsheet (Ticker: SMAR).
This first part introduces you to (1) me, (2) the company, (3) my thesis on the company, and (4) digs into how they make money.
Part 2 (to be released later this week) will go in depth to explore the question “Can we 10x from here?”
Smartsheet is an exciting SaaS company that’s helping businesses be more productive and get the most out of their people
I am not a financial advisor and this is not investment advice. These are just my opinions to help facilitate learning and discussion.
Disclosure: I have no position in Smartsheet. I do plan to initiate a long position when the markets open again in 2021. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
industrial automation engineer interview questions video
Industrial Engineer Interview Questions. 1. Can you explain the critical path method? The interviewer wants to know that you are familiar with the critical path method and that you know how to keep vital projects moving in the face of adversity by using it. Automation is delegation of human control functions to technical equipment. Study about Industrial Automation Engineers Interview Questions and Answers. Common questions you’ll be asked during a job interview as an automation engineer. 3 With this article, we will continue with where our previous article, What are the leading Industrial Automation Job types? , closed with beginning the discussion on Automation Job Interview questions. 807 automation engineer interview questions. Learn about interview questions and interview process for 1,423 companies. Industrial Automation Engineers Interview Questions… PLC Tutorials We prepared an article for industrial Automation Engineers Interview Questions and Answers. Industrial Automation Engineers Interview Questions 1. Wha… Industrial Automation Interview Questions and Answers. Interview Q & A Industrial Automation. Topic Replies Views Activity; About the Industrial Automation category. 0: 1866: Automation engineer,DCS engineer Interview questions. 0: 6024: March 14, 2016 DCS Engineer Interview Questions - Fundamentals (Refinery ,Power Plant, Chemical Plant Industrial Engineering interview questions :- An Industrial Engineer analyzes and designs the whole system to integrate the components of people, machines, and facilities to create efficient and effective systems, which produce goods and beneficial services to humanity. Statistics are important to analyze the problem and controlling it for PLC interview questions. Interview Q & A. Industrial Automation. plc. sivaranjith April 2, 2018, 5:24pm #1. 1. What is PLC? Answer: PLC means Programmable Logic Controller. It is a class of industrially hardened devices that provides hardware interface for input sensors and output control element. The field I/p include element like limit 250+ Industrial Instrumentation Interview Questions and Answers, Question1: What are the process Variable? Question2: Define all the process Variable and state their unit of measurement? Question3: What are the primary elements usedfor flow measurement? Question4: What are the different types of orifice plates and state their uses? Question5: How do you identify an orifice in the pipe line? Looking for industrial automation engineer jobs? Then wisdom jobs will give you complete idea about your job and also supplies with frequently asked interview questions that enables you to face the interview without any fear. Industrial automation engineer design, program, simulate and test automated machinery and processes in order to complete the tasks.
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