3rd Hardware Meetup: Speculative Design & Hardtech VC

We're back with another hardware meetup! This month we'll hear from a creative technologist using speculative design to imaging the future (he also has his own bicycling accessories brand!) and another actively investing in hardtech startups.

Special thanks to our sponsor Onshape (http://ptc.co/aY4S50GKQOM) for helping make this event possible. Onshape is a next-generation cloud-native design platform that speeds up product development. It’s an all-in-one system that combines CAD, release management, workflow, collaboration, analytics, admin tools, and an API with more than 50 engineering applications. Onshape helps extended design teams work together faster and helps executives make better business decisions.

Here’s the rough agenda for the evening:

5:00 - 5:15pm Mingling on Zoom.

5:15 - 5:30pm Welcome notes from our organizers and sponsors.

5:30- 6:00pm Julian Bleeker (https://www.julianbleecker.com/) is the founder of Omata (https://omata.com/), which makes a GPS for cyclists that fuses the analog with the digital, and Near Future Laboratory (http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/), a community and research group focused on exploring speculative futures through design. Julian obtained his BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and a MS Eng. in Human Computer Interaction from the University of Washington, Seattle where he worked as a research assistant at the Human Interface Technology Lab which was the center of R&D for Virtual Reality 1.0. He received a PhD from the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz where he had the unique opportunity to study the dimensions of technology beyond its instrumental utility.

6:00-6:30pm Andrew Chan is an investor at Riot Ventures (https://riot.vc/), an early stage “hard tech” fund based out of Los Angeles, CA. Riot Ventures’ second fund is a $100M seed/pre-seed fund focused on highly technical entrepreneurs solving tough problems in old, slow-moving industries. Riot is industry agnostic and invests in sectors from defense to agriculture and fintech for the physical world. Andrew holds a B.S. from Caltech in Geophysics and English Literature and prior to joining the team at Riot worked at NASA JPL writing software to model icy ocean world interiors.

6:30- 7:00pm Community announcements! If you have your own startup, an awesome project, or are looking for work in the hardware scene, now's your chance to share it with everyone. You'll have 30 seconds.

See you soon!