Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours.
It’s a daunting leap, but with the promise of rich rewards for those that stick the landing. That very leap is one that our own Dave Rowntree made. He came to Supercon 2024 to tell us what the journey was like, and how he wound up working on some very special shoes.
The Journey
Dave’s talk begins right at the start of his career. He graduated from college around the turn of the millenium, and headed right into to the big game. He landed a job at Phillips Semiconductors, and dived into what was then a rapidly-developing field—digital television! He quickly learned a great deal about embedded programming, but found the actual electronics skills he’d picked up during his studies weren’t being put to much use. Sadly, redundancies struck his company, and he was forced to pivot to stick around. A spot opened up in the IC test and manufacturing support group, and he jumped in there, before later decamping to a fabless semiconductor company as a test engineer. He then used his education and experience to leverage a leap into the design side of things, which brought the benefit of allowing him to join the royalty program.
Things were on the up for Dave, right until the redundancy train came around once again. The inconvenience, combined with a lack of jobs in his field in the UK, pushed him to consider a major lifestyle change. He’d strike out on his own.
At this time, he explains how he tangled with the many challenges involved in working for one’s self. Not least of which, the difficulty of actually establishing a functional business in the UK, from bureaucratic red tape to handling the necessary marketing and financials.
He found his first jobs by working with so-called “innovation companies”—which provide services to those looking for design help to bring their ideas to life. These companies generally lacked engineering staff, so Dave’s services proved valuable to this specific market. It provided Dave some income, but came with a problem. After several years, he realized he had no public portfolio of work, because everything he’d worked on was under a non-disclosure agreement of some form or other.
Eventually, he realized he’d ended up in a “box.” He’d become “the PCB guy,” finding his work stagnating despite having such a broad and underexploited skillset. This didn’t sit right, and it was time for change once again. “I’m just thinking I don’t want to be a PCB guy,” Dave explains. “I want to do it all.” Thus was born his push into new fields. He built an arcade machine, art installations, and kept working to push himself out of his comfort zone.
Eventually, something exciting came down the line that really inspired him. “Some guys wanted me to build something, and it was totally oddball,” he says. “They wanted me to put an airbag in a basketball shoe.” The concept was simple enough—the airbag was intended to deploy to protect the wearer if excessive ankle roll was detected. Building the shoe in real life would be the perfect opportunity for him to stretch his abilities.
Despite his initial misgivings around the idea of putting explosives in shoes, the team behind the idea were able to twist Dave’s arm. “If I want to break out of the box of being just a PCB guy, maybe this is it,” he thought. “Why the hell not!”
The rest of Dave’s talk covers how the project came to break him out of his design funk, and how he’s tackling the difficult engineering problems involved. Even more joyously, he’s able to talk openly about it since there’s no NDA involved. He compares plans to use pyrotechnic devices versus stored gas systems, tears down commercial shoes for research, and even his journey into the world of scanning feet and making his own force sensors. As much as he was leveraging his existing skill base, he’s also been expanding it rapidly to meet the new challenges of a truly wild shoe project.
Dave’s talk is an inspiring walk through how he developed a compelling and satisfying engineering career without just going by the book. It’s also an enjoyable insight into the world of weird airbag shoes that sound too fantastical to exist. If you’ve ever thought about leaving the career world behind and going out on your own, Dave’s story is a great one to study.
Boots, stiff?
This should be a ‘failure analysis’.
The failure was going into a marketing (read ‘Bullshit’) space (shoes) with a tech approach.
Doomed!
You can’t ‘STEM’ successfully in art, ego and bullshit dominated market spaces.
e.g. Compete in vodka with a genuinely better product and no marketing budget.
I know, I know, pure ethanol and water.
Science not art.
Solved problem.
I digress, but you get the point.
You don’t even have to get into all the reasons this is dumb product to decide not to invest time or money in making a new sneaker…
Which NBA player’s name is going on it?
Got placement in few rap videos?
‘Influencers’ bribed to wear them?
Engineers know how to look at problems via multiple mental lenses/squints.
One of those needs to be ‘business’.
Just don’t get carried away.
Down that path lies madness, MBAs and lobotomies.
Not in that order.
Also airbags on your shoes is just a silly unmarketable idea.
Let people have their fun.
I don’t know, Sigma Aldrich sells vodka for $173 a bottle, and seems to be doing quite well for themselves.
Doing something new doesn’t require it to be marketable, intelligent or even a good idea. If the “rocket doesn’t fly”, just change it towards something else, and at some point it will become a success. Just ending something because it wasn’t a success on the first try is a reciepe for disaster. Noone hits the mark in the first try.
I speak from 30 years of experience in development. A product can be a total flop if you sell it as one thing, but a success if you sell it as something else. So an engineering success can become a marketing failure, not because of the engineering, but because of marketing.
What I can say with certainity is that no-sayers, critics and generally negative people should do something else. It is ok to be critical of something, but be constructive critical – have an idea of how to improve something you see as “unfit” into something that works. If you don’t have anything positive to add, then keep the f..k away from both prototyping and innovation.
There is a whole industry dedicated to separating ‘inventors’ from their money.
That industry includes a significant part of the patent lawyer population.
I personally have saved a couple of friends retirement funds from big hits.
One of them thought he could compete with proctor and gamble, get space on supermarket shelves, w something he saw in Europe, wanted to patent in the USA.
Product was basically: ‘Yeah, Germans are nuts that way. Bet it sells even better in Switzerland.’
Even he knew the ‘Inventor support’ people were scams.
But he was talking to an ‘inexpensive’ (read bad and unqualified) patent lawyer, and that lawyer was working on extracting a low 5 figure retainer at the time I interfered.
Should I have told him ‘Go for it’?
I have actual inventions that I don’t patent and employers have patented my work in the past (I’ve seen the process, 1 patent is useless, shotgun over specificity, 10k$+ per small gauge shystershot).
I understand that a patent is just a certificate allowing you to spend even more money on lawyers later.
If you don’t have a litigation budget to go with it, it’s useless.
A patent search just puts you on the hook for extra damages should you be infringing on some deep pocketed scumbag’s ‘I patented using computers’ claim later.
None of these people had any engineering chops BTW.
No idea how patents work in the real world.
My life’s ambition…To invent a new crime.
I won’t be satisfied unless more than 50% of the sovereign nations in the world quickly make whatever I eventually do illegal, after it becomes public.
I also have to get filthy rich in the process.
Not listening to ‘no-sayers, critics and generally negative people’…
GD ‘Computer fraud and abuse act’ makes anything a federal judge doesn’t like retroactively illegal.
Is complication.
PostIpsofacto postSchmisofacto says the federal judge, as he waggles his wig, just so…
Can’t even tell if this is AI generated.
I’m gonna invent something that fills the holes in p-type silicon. My transistors keep showing up half-empty; feels like I’m getting ripped off.
Bender from Futurama has already invented burgle-larcen-arsony… but taccording to the show that happens in around the year 3000 so you have almost a thousand years to commit lots of prior art.
Unfortunately, just like patents, most new crimes are just the same old crimes appended with “…on a computer.”