Fashionable Futurism Designed By Amanda Parkes

Join us in meeting biomedia designer and fashion technologist, Dr. Amanda Parkes. We learn about the journey of Dr. Parkes and her Los Angeles roots that stood as a foundation for her to really discover her passion. As Founder of Skinteractive Studios in Brooklyn, New York; Dr. Parkes dedicated her career to creating amazing ways in “smart materials” that change people’s day-to-day life. Listen in on this inspiring conversation, and learn what makes Dr. Amanda Parkes truly remarkable.

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WE DARE TO DESIGN INCLUSIVE FUTURES,TODAY. WE DON'T RUN FROM EARTH'S PROBLEMS, WE RUN TOWARDS THEM.

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Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:13  
I've always believed that everyone has a story, and that everyone's story has value. I'm Joanna Pena, basically, the host of designed by a new design bias documentary series that recognizes the changemakers, Imagineers, and inventors in steamed science, technology, engineering, arts, math and design. As I have traveled the globe and collaborated with some of the world's leading scientists, artists and mathematicians, I know that daring to design the future today. All Begins with a vision, and a narrative of a hopeful future. I invite you to join us on a journey of discovery, finding the voices, and magic makers, changing the very shapes of our future.

Unknown Speaker  1:08  
When I think about Amanda, I think of her is the queen Kamehameha of all things design, when it comes to like the intersection of fashion design and tech, Amanda, you've had such a remarkable career. And so much of that career has had this really interesting interchange between technology and human factors, and fashion. You know, it's so very rare that you meet someone who has actually had a responsibility for bringing those things together. One of the things that I would love to explore is where did you come from, because great creators like you don't come out of anywhere they're usually made over time. And then I think some of the second things is really about what are the things that you've learned on this journey? Thank you. And first of all, thank you so much for inviting me, I feel truly honored. I love everything that you're doing with this organization and could not be more excited and supportive, to be here and to share my story and hopefully share, you know, share a lot more with others

Unknown Speaker  2:13  
as we go down this path. So yeah, I've had a, I guess, a bit of a, an unconventional career. But in hindsight, it makes perfect sense, of course. But I do think that, you know, a lot of it, that I am now working, combining fashion and material science and technology and engineering came from a lot of things that were always present in my personality and what I cared about, and it was sort of just about chasing them down, sometimes not really knowing exactly where they were going to lead or if I was making a good decision. But really, there was like quite a bit of kind of trusting your gut in a lot of those situations. But I think, you know, if you like just I grew up in Southern California, and Redondo Beach, and a cute little surf town. What probably a lot of people don't know about me is that my parents are Northern Irish. And they were very much part of the, you know, immigrant class coming over of kind of a strange of immigrant class, you know, sort of white white immigrants. But my they were from, you know, Northern Ireland at a time of trouble. And my dad left when he was 18, and went to Africa was actually supposed to be born in Africa. They were going to settle there. My mom was in nursing school and my dad was building villages anyways, so they end up leaving Africa for various other tumultuous reasons and went to Canada and then ended up in California. So it was, um, yeah, I definitely feel of various cultures, even though they might, you know, it might not I might not look like

Unknown Speaker  3:46  
mixed mixed culture. But, you know, Northern Ireland is definitely a very a world away from from LA, I think I always kind of had a bit of all those things. And however they were coming through, I mean, when I was a kid, I remember being like six or seven. And I've always been very obsessed with color and very sensitive to it, like highly, highly sensitive to it. And I used to drive my mother crazy, where I'd go for, like, you know, nine months to a year where I would only wear one specific shade of yellow, and then I would switch it into purple or, you know, I just I was I was very, like had a highly attuned and obsessive aesthetic sense as a kid. But, you know, it was also just like a kid who was like, pretty good at math and stuff and actually really liked it in a way that I think I was lucky because my parents were incredibly supportive. And I, they ended up you know, I was in public school until I was 11 or 12. And then managed to get into the private school on full scholarship. And so I just had an incredibly supportive time from that period on but I do remember a time, like in fifth and sixth grade where it was, I mean, people told me afterwards, but it was like, Oh, she could go one way or the other. You got to get her some stimulus or else she's getting

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
You know, start rebelling or something, right? Like being bored is a very dangerous thing to like a 10 or 11 year old. That's fantastic. I certainly can I can relate. When do you feel like you knew that you were an inventor?

Unknown Speaker  5:16  
I think and this is such an LA story is, I remember the first time I found out that there was this job at Disneyland called being an Imagineer. And that there was somebody whose job it was to invent all the rides and all the mechanisms and that like design Toontown, I just, I was like, just obsessed. I think that was like the closest I've ever come to a job that was both creative and technical in my world. And I just kind of knew, I think, you know, I'd always I love building things and painting things. And you know, my dad was, you know, you had done a lot of construction in furniture building. So I knew that all that stuff was there. But I didn't really know that there was this, like, there were jobs that that did these things. But what's interesting to me and I, I've heard this from a number of inventors, designers and technologists, particularly in the invention space, right, which is, I didn't know someone would pay me to do that. Right. Yeah, I think there's a piece of that. I'm not sure I was at cognizant of that at the time. But, but that the, I think it was more of the realization that yeah, this stuff didn't come out of nowhere, like somebody had to make it and somebody did it. And there's a job behind that. I think there's something kind of fascinating about that part of the world, when kids start to understand, like, all the things that are in place in the world have been built by someone. Absolutely. So when you think about it from that, you know, journey from your kid, and then you you get to school, tell me a little bit about what was that first selection? Like? Yeah, so I mean, I was really lucky from, like I said, from seventh grade on, I got into this amazing private school and I, we had this really cool crew of neighborhood friends, they were actually all immigrants, like, so there was a couple that was Armenian, Iranian, German Canadian, just like a really lovely mix of core friends, we're still super good friends, all of us. And the all the families had like two daughters, within two years of each other, it was kind of it was it was kind of, like, just really kind of magical in the sense what I think about it now, but we ended up going, I ended up being able to go into this private school with them. And this was, while it was a very elite la private school, it was also very liberal and progressive, there was a lot of kind of value system there. That was about just kind of creativity and independence, wherever that wherever that was coming from. And also, I think the school as I mean, I loved High School, which is a really, like, people don't say that, at least not out loud. And I also was, I mean, I was super happy in high school. Like, I had great friends, I was the homecoming Princess, I had the cute boyfriend, like all that stuff. It wasn't but I also had incredible stimulus intellectually. And I was really a giant nerd. I remember like, you know, taking voluntary math tests at lunch. And I don't know, I think that there was there was just a bit of a fluidity there. I didn't have to choose so much which person I needed to be with a small school. And it was, it was kind of cool to be smart, I guess, which I do know how incredibly rare that is. And, but so I think that there was a lot of just, just openness there. And I, you know, for QA there were but there was also the same point, like a really incredible amount of pressure about getting into college and all the all the stuff that I think, you know, everybody feels and

Unknown Speaker  8:55  
yeah, and then, you know, Stanford, I discovered product design, which is now the D school, the Stanford D School, which is, of course, really well known in the space. And I was, again, exceptionally lucky to have David Kelley as my original advisor, like, met him when I was a freshman, like, you know,

Unknown Speaker  9:11  
but I do fully understand that feeling of just that helplessness of like, you're working so hard to get somewhere and then it can all be sort of taken away or whatever, because of just because of, in retrospect a very small financial thing, but at the time, the thing that entirely governs your life. Yeah, so, um, you know, got through then was doing all the, you know, mechanical engineering coursework, etc, etc. and about, you know, halfway through, I started to realize that,

Unknown Speaker  9:41  
you know, it's really they're teaching us so much about how to build engineer lab, you know, code like, you know, bits and bits of everything.

Unknown Speaker  9:52  
And there wasn't enough to me I was thinking I don't know what else has been built.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
I don't know why we're building this or, you know, I'm not sure I was actually planning quite that way. But I'd always loved art and you know, design and everything. And I'd been taking some art history class on the side. And I kind of started taking more and more in any kind of design history class, I could take and try to understand, you know, the history of engineering, it's not exactly because engineers don't have time to learn all that, really. And so it's taught as a form of history, but not as engineering history. So I started kind of doing that as much as I could. And I ended up double majoring in art history, which, which the school was not happy with, to fight them. Pretty hard on that, but I felt very kind of fulfilled in that way to that. Okay, now I am having a little bit more about understanding on both sides of the aisle in it. And I wrote my senior honors thesis for art history about the Memphis movement, which was 1980s design. I'm not even sure I knew exactly what I was writing at the time, and how much it was sort of inspiring me further. But I remember at the time, I sort of advisor was like, this is really, really new. But I think that it was because I wasn't thinking like an art historian, I was thinking like,

Unknown Speaker  11:11  
what like, what do engineers need to know about the history of why things are built and what is built and why they look, the way they were built, you know, this, there is an aesthetic part of it, that determines our behavior, and determines our kind of models of the world. That's how things kind of got started. And then, and this was, um, you know, this was in the the.com, boom, where like Stanford was kind of just you could just come out and just basically print money. You know, those kinds of early jobs at Google and Yahoo, and that kind of thing. So I do remember feeling like I didn't really belong in my major, but I also remember feeling like there was a when we got out and trying to put this tactfully people who were not that talented or qualified. Were getting really pricey jobs. And I was like, What is up with the world.

Unknown Speaker  12:04  
So I ended up applying for various things. And I got a Guggenheim Fellowship, which was way harder, getting all those other things and went to Italy to go work at the Guggenheim in Venice. I basically fled Silicon Valley at the height of the first wave, because I just didn't feel comfortable being there. I didn't, I don't know. I mean, I still like I'm sort of coming to terms with all of how that that manifests itself. in me, that's kind of that's where things went. And then I ended up working in the art world, and in Italy, ended up staying at the museum for almost a year and then ran the American million at the Venice Biennale, I stayed in Venice, and then moved to Italy and was working in some galleries and then made my made my way back into engineering through the Science Museum where I started working as a exhibit developer, as well as a

Unknown Speaker  13:01  
kind of like an exhibition analyst, which is kind of like an anthropological position, which was super interesting. You find out crazy things when you watch people use exhibits. So yeah.

Unknown Speaker  13:16  
And then from there, ended up back in San Francisco

Unknown Speaker  13:20  
for like, what is what was absolutely a dream job at the Exploratorium. So designing exhibits there, which is, you know, the original art science and human perception and I got to my job was everything from come up with exhibit concepts, working with all the you know, PhD scientists, and I was specifically working directly with a neuroscientist on a single visual perception collection and then design it coated build it solder the, you know, well, the table like, you were just doing everything. Yeah, so that's a, that's a that's a good place to be when you're 24. So, anyways,

Unknown Speaker  13:57  
you look back then, and, and I say, then, you know, it wasn't like, we're all ladies now. We're in our prime, right? We're talking 1015 years, maybe 20 years at most ago. Were these a man telling you, you have everything to use your assets? Right. And I don't To be fair, I don't know if they use those words. But it was like that was I think that was how to get this done. Yeah, well, let's brainstorm how to get this done. Like let's solve this problem. Right. And, and that's, you know, and you can't, it's hard to sort of deny or like, you know, be sort of outrage at this idea of people trying to help you in this way. So yeah, so those, those are the things I find to sort of complicate my head about all this stuff.

Unknown Speaker  14:43  
But I think the one thing that was interesting is I ended up with some really close friends that were grad students at the time that were that were male and I'm still friends with and that I think, kind of took me under their wing. I did not have

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
Have, I almost knew no female grad students? I mean, there were there were very few. But it's funny, I've reconnected with some of them now. And they, I think they were they've been like, they were like, why didn't we know each other better that there was a, that was a weird thing too, which was like, it's not that we were like, you know, put against each other any or anywhere thing. I just think that there now there's a bit more of a like, hey, women should kind of stick together and, or whatever, just kind of be aware of each other in a way.

Unknown Speaker  15:33  
I don't remember that, that much.

Unknown Speaker  15:38  
That feeling that but I do feel like I got very lucky with a couple of male friends that turned into mentors that were that, you know, really, kind of, they kind of took care of me, they looked out for me, you know, in a bit of a way. I think they kind of you know, so that was

Unknown Speaker  15:58  
gotcha. So, you touched on something that I think is so you know, I was looked at the things that you made, even in the early days, I've been trying to make a certain couple of things since the time I was seven. Right? And you do this over time, and you don't realize I certainly didn't realize it then realize it now. But I would love to kind of dive deep into you happen to bring up the stiletto? Yeah, right. And I look at our inventions, as you know, as babies because they become ideas that grow over time. Right? They sometimes they're this germination is something that you see, and you tried three or four different ways and maybe in iterations and you call it different things. But, but inevitably, you're still working on that thing. Right? Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about

Unknown Speaker  16:49  
why the shoe?

Unknown Speaker  16:51  
Well, okay. I mean, I think this is actually a really interesting point from a psychological place, because I didn't really ever intend to work on this shoe on, right. So I love shoes, as everybody who's ever met me knows. And I think I've always thought of them as sort of like just this perfect hybrid of, you know, feats of engineering, they need to be structural, they need to be soft, they need to be hard and to be beautiful. They need to operate, you know, all these things.

Unknown Speaker  17:22  
And they're also kind of mysterious, like and how they're made. I mean, not not to me anymore, but I do still that shoe manufacturing is fascinating. Like the machines I go into it. Anyway. So you know, I've been super just kind of in love with them. But I think there is this piece that comes from, you know, being a very serious engineer in the sense that like, Okay, I have a Stanford mechanical engineering degree, I'm a serious engineer, serious engineers don't make shoes. Right. And this is, you know, something that a little bit, you know, my mom still to this day is like, you're you have a PhD from MIT. Why do you work in fashion? Like, there's this kind of just this mental model of like, that's not important engineering. Right. And, and so, there, I think there was still that kind of bouncing around in my head. I mean, I've gone off I was working all these science exhibits, which I love to death.

Unknown Speaker  18:17  
And that I, you know, came after after I left the exporter while I got into MIT when I was still at the Exploratorium, mostly because I very specifically, I was not trying to necessarily go to grad school, but I met my advisor, and who, who wrote she issues a huge mentor and hero of mine, who was working on what is called what he had named tangible media, which is physical digital interactivity at the time, it was, how do we actually like fuse the two worlds. So now it's the IoT, it's a million other things. But you know, he wrote the original paper for this in 1997. And

Unknown Speaker  18:53  
so we just clicked and in the strangest of ways, because he's like, this crazy, fiery Japanese man, he's tiny. He's, you know, like, people are terrified of him. And like, you know, we're really good friends. I mean, we've had our, you know, whole series of battles, but we always understood each other in some kind of, I think, some some very basic way about what we want to get done. And one of the things that I really loved about him was when, you know, he would have a million people come interview to be in our lab, and this is, I mean, it's, it's, again, one of those crazy things where it's like, Yeah, I got really, really lucky but then it's about, Okay, so what's the, what's the mental model where people would show up and try to impress them with how good they were a coating or electronics or whatever. And I was just like, I need I got these ideas that I know here, I can't make them and here's how I'm thinking about all these bigger problems in the world about science, communication, about education about you know, like, neuroscience, whatever and he wants as a as I think, is a really

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
Good, responsible model for academics, he was looking for people who knew how to think. Right, he's like, we can get lots of other undergrads and people around us to, you know, make that happen. make that happen. This is like, this is like teaching someone how to be a leader. And so if you saw that you could, you know, knew how to think you could stand up for your ideas and talk about them in a way that was cohesive and had a plan. That was, that was a thing anyway, so.

Unknown Speaker  20:24  
So the point was, when I got to MIT, I was working in this group that was all about, you know, physical, digital computing. And yet everything in the entire group and was, was made of metal, wood or plastic. So there's no texture, there's no softness. And the group at that point, I'd had a one to two women in its history is this was they've been around for about 15 years, I am still the I was the first woman that made it all the way through the Masters and PhD. There. There's been a few more since Luckily,

Unknown Speaker  21:05  
this is no, you know, not specifically saying anything about my advisor. I mean, it's, it's a rough place. And, you know, like, there's a whole other kind of level of stories there. But um, you know, there's something to be said that, if nobody in the entire lab knows anything about textiles, or knows how to use a sewing machine, you're not going to end up with a whole lot of like textile interfaces, right. And that's, it's a stereotype that has, like, absolutely been harbors that,

Unknown Speaker  21:35  
you know, supported with evidence, in the sense that I used to, you know, we'd have this crazy, amazing machine shop at MIT Media Lab. And, you know, they're mill, like 4d mill, everything CNC controlled, also had fantastic sewing machines and embroidery machines that never got touched. And I used to run, like workshops to teach all these incredible engineers how to sew. And I remember so clear the number of times that they would be like, Oh, my god, there's a second thread in the bottom of the machine. Like, yeah, that's how it makes a knot. And like, I mean, these are really brilliant engineers. And so you know, those, those are the kinds of things where I was like, here really does matter that I'm here.

Unknown Speaker  22:25  
Those kinds of stories. Anyway, so getting to the shoe, I was I did start working on some fashion projects, my advisor was not at all into this, he was fighting me the whole way. And we've since come to peace with it. And he's, he's been very, you know, very thankful and supportive of the influence that I did have over the group just by me just fighting with them about stuff, basically. And,

Unknown Speaker  22:49  
and I was determined, I ended up like, curating and producing these runway shows in my free time that were like, you know, kind of secret and then they ended up blowing up. And, you know, we had the fire department, God called the Mila basement because we were having a runway show of wearable tech. You know, we had a piece of astroturf to astroturf runway, I'm not kidding. We got $500 from MIT Arts Council, we had an astroturf runway, and the building was shut down. Because some people Shut up. I mean, this was like, people cared. And it was fun. It was, you know, it was stuff that I still hear people got, wouldn't it be amazing if this and I was like, did you should definitely look at this project from 2006. You know, like, for reals. And it was like, you know, we didn't we didn't have Arduino fully functioning at this point in date, somebody built that, right. So so that kind of stuff that was like, I like, I do love this stuff. And I care and I knew what I was doing. And so I did end up building a bunch of shoes there. But again, I think it was like, This is the side, this is my side project. A real thesis is about actual robotics. Right? actual, like, the real mechanical in activity, I did end up working at the end on a lot of material behavior, textiles, like I did push it into the direction, but you know, six and a half, seven years, it took me, you know, that's that was that MIT for that long, and it took me a really long time to get there. So I think that's the first the first form of anything that you should obviously follow. Like, you know, I did, like, bits and pieces of my dissertation. I absolutely love but, you know, I probably just should have been making shoes.

Unknown Speaker  24:25  
Anyways, no, not really. But you know, because then I would have been too sick of it to actually work on afterwards. But the Yeah, the point being that after I got out of MIT, I started this other algae biofuels company, and we can talk about that in a minute. But I didn't go straight into this. But

Unknown Speaker  24:45  
what is interesting is that the way so the founder of the shoe company who was at was you know, she was actually

Unknown Speaker  24:54  
like the head of recruiting for SpaceX. So she was very much a

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Like, a kind of HR business type person. And she is, but she, she was also obsessed with shoes. And she had come to this idea of like, oh, why? Why do I work in a company where everyone around me makes the best robots in the world. And I'm walking across these factory floors in agony in these high heels and started asking the engineers around her, like, like, why am I Why do my shares hurt so much? And none of them had any idea how shoes are made? And she's like, that's issue anyway. So so she so what I think is interesting is that obvious, I knew that this was a huge problem. I was just like, oh, that's not serious. And there's something in the back of my head that wasn't like, let me start this shoe project. So she found me ironically, through one of my Stanford mentors, who was like, Oh, do you know anybody who you know, knows about shoe engineering? And he was like, Yes, I do. I know exactly the person. So I think it was it needed to be brought back to me in a way that she was like, I've got like an astronaut and a bunch of like, aerospace engineers willing to work on it, but they don't know anything about how shoes are made, or whatever. So I remember really specifically, in the early days of that, like going through with them and teaching them about the difference between a stiletto on a pump

Unknown Speaker  26:21  
and a wedge. And then you know, when we got when you crack open, like like regular shoes up and down the chain, like Lois to all the way up to lead protons. There's this crazy metal shake in the middle that is the same. It's a it's it's literally a medieval piece of technology. It's been it's like a forged piece of steel. And they're like, what is this doing in here? And the rest of this is cardboard like this, it doesn't make any sense what they were just their minds were just like, blown that this is inside of this beautiful, incredible object. And I was like, no one's ever touched it like not since this was like, as advanced as we got, like, when the sola was born. And I was like, Oh, yeah, and I've been like, I've been working with a guy who is like the grandson of the guy who invented the first stiletto, like I had, like, I was like, deep into, like northern Italy. This stuff, right? Through Sergio.

Unknown Speaker  27:14  
And it was just, they were just, like, mystified that this, they're like, this is just an open engineering problem. And I was like, yeah, there's a lot of these that are I think, you know, women centric, or whatever. So they were like, let's do it. They're like, but how does? How are we ever going to test it?

Unknown Speaker  27:30  
Right, that was also the funny thing where I was like, Okay, well, great. I can design and test this thing. Anyways, not that, you know, you can't make still that we, you know, make shoes and men's sizes. But anyway, so that so the stiletto thing. And I think the one of the biggest points for me was that on it, it was to, like the lesson learned was, okay, all this thing, all those ideas that have been like percolating in your head that maybe at the time didn't seem serious. Were they not serious? Just because they were girly? You know? Like, did did are they do? Did you were you trained to not take them seriously, because they were like, women's problems or like, and now I just, like retraining my brain to think about them as opportunities that have been under evaluated because you know, men don't experience them. So, but that was one of the things that

Unknown Speaker  28:25  
that to me, I'd love to like, let's dive deep into like, I think that's an interesting space. Right? Was it because they simply didn't see the world from our point of view? Or, like, Are these the new opportunities spaces, right, because clearly, men have been creating products. And I think that's even in like feminine products, like juice and tampons and pads. Like, for whatever reason, or broads, let's start there. Right? Things like that. Yeah, right. But not just things we were in our body or on our body, you know, that are incredibly intimate.

Unknown Speaker  29:01  
But why wasn't it taken? Seriously? I think that's a really important question to examine.

Unknown Speaker  29:10  
So I think I mean, first of all, all of these are all the guys that I was working with on this are incredibly good engineers. And these are not at all sexist in any way. And the thing was that they had literally never thought about it, like it had not crossed their mind. And even if you talk to and this makes me really angry is like, male shoe designers. They try to tell you that women don't care about how the shoes feel. They it's like it's like a thing to wear it because it's painful. And that's like part of the thing and blah, blah, blah and there's no art there's nothing to be done about right. It's like there's a there's a weird like masochistic status symbol thing there. And I was like, Okay, I have very little respect for your opinion on that.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Cuz no one is as if you were being asked to walk around in these, like you're designing them and you don't care how they fit or feel at all like that. They would say that directly to me. And I'm, and they're like, there's no, like, there's no market for this because women don't care. And I was like, I was like, you probably do know, like three women like that, and we're your main customers. But let's like, yeah, let's let's be a little more realistic. So, no, absolutely, I think they're massive opportunity spaces. And I think we're starting to see that my God, like, so much now. You know, like, across, you know, just every, every product bra, third, lovespace eggs, I mean, look at all that look at all the things that are massively successful in this realm.

Unknown Speaker  30:46  
So I think that the thing about this too, I don't think that's very different and interesting is it is incredibly akin to problems like bridges and rockets in terms of like, structures and load balancing, and all these force dynamics and stuff that which was so was actually exactly the right match to work with SpaceX people and aeronaut. And that's why I think it was so interesting. I already knew Sergio, who was a former aerospace engineer, who is now this head to shoe research in London, and then it then the SpaceX thing came to me after that, and I brought Sergio and those guys together, so

Unknown Speaker  31:23  
yeah, so that, but no, no, that you're, you're, you're totally right, that there's, you know, this, like, What's that, quote, you know, there's a lot of money to be made from taking women seriously. And, but it's also about like us taking ourselves seriously. And but I think even you know, as we move through the process, with the stilettos,

Unknown Speaker  31:46  
raising money is a whole other thing. Like, we had all the engineers on board and fully convinced and and actually, almost everybody in our seed round was just like, guys from SpaceX. I'm not kidding. It's so they were just like, super comfy. They're like, yes, we want in on this, this is like an untapped opportunity problem, right. But then when you get into the traditional VC market, where, you know, they're like, Oh, you know, the typical thing where I'm sure you've been?

Unknown Speaker  32:17  
Okay, I should ask my wife about this. And, you know, let me like, they can't, you know, they can't test it. Like, I don't blame them entirely. But like, they don't, they don't know how to test it, what No, they're, you know, they're unable to test it. And then they're not really sure how to, like, research it. And so it's just kind of like a, an uncomfortable space. It's also like a consumer product, you know, there. It's not like a pure scientific research point of view. So there's a lot of things going on there where, and then you're a bunch of female founder, like, you know, all the things are stacking up female founders with with a female problem, walking into regular investment rooms is tedious. I mean, I would take the engineers any day over investment guys, we can maybe switch to that conversation a bit. But I think there's a lot more sexism and probably racism in money circles, and there is an engineering because there's something to be said about,

Unknown Speaker  33:17  
you know, meritocracy, that engineering is not entirely true. But there is, you know, something, something to be said about that being true. Like when you can when you're really really good at something people don't care not, you know, certainly has. Absolutely, that's been my experience completely, you know, I was for good or for bad. It throughout my career, I was one of the guys or at least concerned by one of the guys because, because I could because I could think as fast and move as fast as they could. And maybe faster in some cases, right?

Unknown Speaker  33:51  
I mean, my crew and my lab and I'm it like, I love those guys to death, they taught me so much. You know, we were all really different. And even they were different from each other. And, you know, but we were, we were bonded and kind of like, yeah, the way of thinking that, like the respect of the problem. And yeah, just that, that commitment to it, I guess. I don't know.

Unknown Speaker  34:18  
So, you know, that's, that's a really interesting insight. Because I certainly saw that

Unknown Speaker  34:25  
you know, I was always a little bit more in the design service tech services place and and the money people that I was dealing with were often bankers, right. And because you, you were often having to speak a completely different language to finance, right. It's one thing to be in the lab or to be in the design studio, inventing something or trying to get something done now to pivot and speak a language that is about keeping the lights on

Unknown Speaker  34:57  
that has that has the human life.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
that are kind of attached to it isn't, here's just what we need for making the product work, right. But this is how we we make a payroll. What was what was that? Like? Like, what, how did you make that pivot?

Unknown Speaker  35:13  
Yeah. So I think actually, that's, that's a really good lead in because so what happened when I was finishing my PhD at MIT was I had, I was taking a bunch of stuff. The whole time I was at MIT, I was getting more and more obsessed about how things are made, what they're made of supply chains, like seeing a waste, just being disturbed by so many things, and realizing that there's data that can bring us more information on this, or why don't why don't companies understand this, like just a lot of just ideas that we're starting to kind of formulate about, you know, it that were in the air and now are of course, hugely, you know, important and popular, but

Unknown Speaker  35:55  
you know, so that was that was continuously on my mind. And I was taking different courses, etc, or taking one course on like sustainable architecture,

Unknown Speaker  36:04  
learning about all different kinds of systems there. And then a really good friend of mine, who was an optical engineer, and he was working on a technology that was about like, flashing light and like, like micro LEDs for new like, you know, screens for like, new highest resolution, high definition screens, and,

Unknown Speaker  36:25  
and I'm still trying remember exactly how this all came about, you know, like MIT, it's like a mishmash of work parties. I don't know what, anyways, but it turns out that there was this research from NRL from the 70s, that was looking at like, so all the ways that they were trying to look at growing like, for example, like plants, for battlefields, or even plants in space, and light structures,

Unknown Speaker  36:53  
that you could actually, if you flash lights incredibly quickly, like flash led that led a particular kind of led frequency, you could optimize photosynthesis, because you wouldn't over saturate it by having constant light, but it would still be getting a constant stream. So it was like there's there was theoretically an optimization frequency that at the time, they did not have led that can flash that quickly. They didn't have the control structure. And so we I was getting a little bit obsessed about algae as a medium for it's like a much longer story. But we kind of came up with this idea of like, let's try this. Like, let's like, like, Flash, like lights that this really specific rate at algae and see if it you know, works. Bank rolls them faster. And like neither one of us is a biologist like I was working on a bunch of material tech at the time. So I was doing some stuff with like living organisms and stuff. But I was very much peripherally and he was he was an optimizer. So we like, are like, okay, we searched. We tried it a little bit. But it was more like let's theoretically put all this stuff together. And then he's like, how about we enter the MIT 100k? Like, he was like, oh, like he he was graduate, he'd already graduated. And he was like working at a startup. And he's like, I can do this. Like, let's do this. So I was like, Okay, I'm in another like submarine projects, like, like my, like fashion show producing and stuff. I was like, Sure. So I remember we wrote this business plan. I didn't, I had never seen a business plan before I wrote one like, I remember, I was like googling it. I was like, What is a business plan. So we had to write this application and whatever, I didn't even know what ROI meant. I remember this. So specifically. And so but I was like, This is the theory of the company. And we're gonna build these boxes that can grow at you know, algae at higher rates, so they can compete with fuel, right, right with biofuel. And, you know, a little bit of math like, you know, like base financial math is sort of like science math, right? This you grow this much it cost this much, you get to a point that right? It's not, I mean, it's not rocket science of that, right? So we put this thing in, and I was like, okay, whatever. And then we get called back did it anyways, we end up getting to the finals. And we don't win the thing, because at this point is still just two of us. And we've been like, it was like the six weeks of the world's craziest mini MBA, where we're basically in with all these advisors who are like the most fancy people in finance, right? And they're asking us stuff about our deck. And like, literally, I'm just embarrassing myself, like, just hand over fist, like not like, they're using all the acronyms. I'm like, what does that mean? You know, like, What are you guys doing? Like people are getting angry at us. And one point someone got angry at me because I wasn't dressed up enough. And I started laughing because I was like, well, we were like, a rehearsal or something. And I was like, Oh, dude, you have no idea what it looked like at the presentation. Like he was like, it's kind of disrespectful that you follow and I was like, I came here from the lab. Like, like what you know. Anyways, so