Ben Sinclair is a wizard who builds amazing technology just for fun. This episode is hilariously awesome as The Bens chat about their special origin story. We open the gates on the evolution of FliteBrite, building an electronic serving system, and a beer festival app. Laugh with Ben and Sinclair as we have fun connecting jokes with WWDC23, astronomy, web2 vs. web3, OpenOpen, being present as a parent, building as co-founders, and staying professional over pinball.
Cross-checking helps to determine distance, maneuver around obstacles, and identify rogue objects. Alongside the math, a triangulated team increases dependability.
Diversity of thought, talent, and real skills add synergy to accelerate progress and increase a team’s confidence when a problem is attacked from multiple angles. This nimbleness is leveraged as co-founders create a culture that makes each person feel significant.
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Building alone is easy.
Team up to make it fun.
On the prowl for co-founders? Consider triangulating a hipster (customer experience), hacker (technology), and hustler (business development). When these complimenting archetypes also blend hints of founder-market-fit, a timely curation gives any team exponential capacity.
To find missing links, connectors become connected. So show up and be quick to make interesting introductions. When the first degree of contact lacks obvious opportunity, remember it’s the second and third degree of connectivity that delivers precision. Over time, generosity in an entrepreneurial ecosystem expands and tightens engaged networks. Instead of forcefully recruiting co-founders, the open-ended activity of a serendipitist will have us colliding with friends we simply haven’t met yet.As teamwork begins, bonds that have formed naturally will support lasting collaboration with people you respect. That said, established trust is not an excuse to get complacent.
To nurture the power of triangulation be honest and transparent from start to finish. Every story ends, so don’t avoid difficult discussions. When structuring a business, agree on the terms, leave space for change over time, and maintain an operating agreement to ensure clarity with less tension. A commitment to abundant communication helps each team member remain attentive to details.
Professionals will take it further—inviting responsibility, then keeping the promise. For any idea maze, we take the blame, willingly give credit, and celebrate in style.
Lone wolves move fast but the expanded capacity of a team helps an odyssey go far. When a fun, long-term cast plays long-term games together, the chemical reaction can be an affinity toward work that feels like play. Cheers!
I crashed my first star party!
Most people have never heard of a star party, so let me set the scene. The Iowa Star Party is a weekend gathering of people all curious about the cosmos. Dark skies improve long range visibility, so to avoid light pollution, the middle of nowhere is ideal. As I arrived to the Whiterock Conservancy Star Field, there were different camp sites lined up, each with 1-3 telescopes setup. The astronomy equipment ranged from homemade to expensive and I enjoyed learning more about astrophotography. It was nice having a friendly host (Cheers Sinclair!) who had our camp on point, excellent equipment, and knew how to effectively lock into endless celestial objects. During the afternoon, you could tell everyone was just waiting for the evening sky to roll around. We sipped on some brews, went on a hike, listened to a talk from an astronomy professor, won the raffle prize, and then the heavenly show began!
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Welcome back to school! This week’s episode of You Don’t Need This Podcast features a caffeinated conversation with a special guest who spent 20 years in the classroom and is now redefining retirement. Enjoy!
Our first stop was a setting crescent moon. It’s hard to align a smartphone’s three lens camera into the sensitive eye piece of a telescope, but it’s not impossible. Objects are a kabillion miles away and everything is always moving so the photos aren’t great, but I enjoy trying to trap time in creative ways. I also captured nightlapse footage and while it may be amateur hour, my short highlight video is entertaining and it leads me to my first observation. Different people enjoy the moment in different ways, but when content creation is habitual, extending an experience becomes an option. Capturing those photos/video is required, but the extra effort shines through a willingness to review, edit, and stitch things together so it can be enjoyed and not just lost in a mountain of media.
My second observation is that we are all weird. Not an alienating type of weird, but a weird that challenged the status quo and what it means to be normal. Normal is boring and as I listened to the experience and passion of veteran star gazers, I’m reminded how easy it is to find a tribe of people who care about almost anything. This level of nerdery is inspiring and can be found no matter the focus, so never stop exploring.
The third observation is through the lens of pure wonder. It’s hard not to be astonished by countless stars surrounding you. I’ve enjoyed many cosmic experiences, such as this trip to Lowell Observatory in Arizona, but I had never felt the spherical movement in our night’s sky or seen the nebulosity of our Milky Way. Along with staring up into the seemingly infinite universe, looking through a telescope never got old. I saw Saturn’s rings, multiple moons and colored bands of Jupiter, meteors, satellite trains, binary stars, globular clusters like M13, and distance galaxies that blur like eraser marks on speckled black paper.
I thought I’d feel more spiritual throughout the evening’s exploration, but it was more fun, relaxing, creative, and scientific. While I have more thoughts on many fronts and I look forward to doing this again, my last observation is more of a hypothesis. Space is for everyone and I believe almost anyone would enjoy an experience like this.
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Forget the social media facade that is Threads. My first BlueSky post (web3) landed while I was at this star party, right before we crashed at 3AM.
Based on the latest scientific estimate, our universe is 13.8 billion years old.
I don’t know about you, but over the past decade, I’ve been especially fascinated by the cosmos. If you’re over 30 years old, it’s almost like cosmic curiosity didn’t exists when we grew up. Perhaps I was a bit sheltered by a religious upbringing, but in high school, the narrative around space only focused on our own solar system. I don’t even remember talking about our place within the Milky Way galaxy.
This now feels like such a myopic perspective based on what we’ve learned. As scientific understandings expand, I can’t help but to wonder…
✨ How is our evolving understanding of the universe objectively taught to kids?
🏫 What are educational paths to astrophysics?
☯ Can cosmology and religion co-exist?
⚖️ At what point does arguing become a waste of time?
🧬 Can biotech pause, protect, or extend humans for space travel?
⚫️ How long would it take to arrive at the closest black hole? Who’s going in first?
🧠 How might the field of psychology better prepare us for the neon future?
🤖 Does digitized consciousness unlock time travel by leaving the limitations of a human body behind?
🧮 Where does quantum computing fit into the landscape of cosmic exploration?
👽 It seems statistically impossible that extraterrestrial life does not exist.
⏳ If life on earth has only existed ~25% of the total time our universe has existed, that sure leaves a lot of time for distant civilizations to evolve.
🪐 Considering the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, do we know how fast our solar system is moving and in what direction?
⚡️ Unless it’s to find a more sustainable source, it feels careless to fuel energy using resources that won’t last.
🔬 Can nanotechnology alter the input of an energy source at a subatomic level to dramatically transform the output?
🧪 Will material science support deeper exploration?
🌌 Visiting, even colonizing Mars feels like an important exercise, but somehow starts to feel trivial.
🔭 Does seeing deeper fuel urgency?
🚀 Action may require sacrifice, so how can we encourage and celebrate those who lead the way?
These are extraordinary things to think about, but such concentration can quickly feel overly theoretical. In practice, perpetual learning, comfort within complexity, and a willingness to think again feels essential. Through such a curious lens, perhaps the most significant opportunity we have, is to aspire toward an existence which exceeds our imagination.
I talk often about collaboration in business and within entrepreneurial ecosystems, but when we put our delicate existence into perspective, it’s hard to think that anything besides collaboration allows us to survive.