Design Blog
Thoughts & Musings
I was recently really humbled to be featured at the age of 20 by Los Angeles Business Journal as one of their 20 in their 20’s business leaders in the year 2020 (thats a lot of 20’s).
Everyone on the list is doing some amazing things and I’m really lucky to be featured among this amazing group of young leaders.
Check out my interview with Mediha DiMartino of the LA Business journal below:
https://labusinessjournal.com/news/2020/jun/15/20-in-their-20s-joel-joseph-kaushal-saraf/
My friend Michael and I after the USC Demo Day Pitch Competition.
Last week I had the amazing opportunity to showcase my startup Atomus at the University of Southern California’s Demo Day event. The event brought together over 500 cofounders, investors, and students from the Los Angeles community together under one roof to show the amazing startups USC has produced.
Check out this article about it here: https://dot.la/usc-demo-day-2020-2645075471.html
One amazing thing about this event is that it really brought together the Trojan Family. Many times when working on a startup its really easy to get buried in the trenches with work. Events like Demo Day give you the feeling that you are not alone in building your startup and there’s a family of others around you willing to help.
Tim Ellis, the cofounder of Relativity Space, and I after his keynote speech.
One major highlight of the event was the key note speech by Tim Ellis, cofounder and CEO of Relativity Space. Relativity 3D prints rockets which is absolutely crazy. During his keynote he talked about his experience as a student entrepreneur starting his company including a crazy story of how he got his first investor, Mark Cuban, through a cold email. He then presented the most recent deck Relativity had used when it had closed its 140 million dollar Series C round.
One thing he emphasized during the presentation was how influential going through YCombinator, the famed startup accelerator, was in his journey building his company. After the presentation when I had the opportunity to pitch my company to him he was so impressed at the problem our team was solving in the 3D printing space that he offered to write me a letter of recommendation to YCombinator. This was probably the highlight of the day given how involved in the 3D printing space Tim is.
Some other major highlights from the event included seeing other startups in the USC ecosystem. My 3 favorites from the event were:
1) Hatch Credit - A free way for college students to improve their credit scores using existing subscriptions like Netflix, Spotify, and rent payments
2) Rally - A social media platform that allows users to be directly connected with the social issues that they care about.
3) Volv - A modern news app that consolidates each story into 9 seconds. This is so well designed I’ve been using it on my iPhone everyday since Demo Day.
Overall I had an amazing time at Demo Day 2020. Special thanks to the amazing team at Troy Labs and James Bottom for putting this event together.
I had an amazing experience getting to pitch my startup, Atomus, on stage at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was amazing being one of the youngest people, if not the youngest person, on stage at the conference.
It was absolutely crazy walking through the aisles of technology companies presenting their technology. I actually got lost a couple times inside the convention halls given the sheet size of the buildings.
I had an amazing time at the USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase this weekend. Now in its 13th year, the USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase is held annually during Trojan Family Weekend. Student teams earn a spot in the Showcase based on their demonstrated success at creating scholarship with consequence by coming up with creative, viable solutions to global problems. During the daylong event held at USC’s University Park Campus, student teams present and pitch their innovations, inventions, and startup ideas in all disciplines for awards that help them develop their ideas further.
I had the amazing experience of talking to a host of experts from patents, technology, and commercialization proving why my team and technology was pioneering the most innovative technology at USC. More over the judges got an inside the scenes look to some of the really cool applications of our technology with the military and commercial industry, as well as an insiders look into our team’s technology and why exactly our patents and trade secrets on our core technology are so disruptive to the industry. Some of the distinguished judges who are extremely notable in the field my team is disrupting and I had the pleasure of speaking to and fielding questions from included:
Dr. Randolph Hall - Dr. Randolph Hall leads USC’s $900 million annual research enterprise, overseeing research advancement, administration, and ethics. Hall’s experience includes serving as the founder for two national research centers, the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism, and the National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research. Dr. Hall is Professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is the author of Queueing Methods for Services and Manufacturing. Hall served as chairman of the University Industry Demonstration Partnership, the national leader in developing standards for industry funded research in universities.
Julia S. Metcalfe - Previously Julia spent 8 years at Facebook. She spent her last year at the company spinning up a product team in the Applied Machine Learning organization, focused on democratizing data annotation to meet the needs of the ever-scaling use of machine learning across the company. She spent her first 7 years at Facebook leading the Product Experience Analytics organization for monetization products. She founded this team and scaled it to 60 people across 5 offices, evolving the discipline from operations to analysis and product management. Her team changed how Facebook understands fundamental advertiser needs by developing data-driven insights that help focus the organization on building trustworthy products.
Dr. John Wetherell - John Wetherell, Ph.D., is head of Pillsbury’s San Diego Intellectual Property group and firm co-chair of the National Life Sciences Group. Dr. Wetherell has 25+ years’ experience closing IP deals and securing U.S. and international patents for life science companies. He handles IP acquisitions, licensing and transactional due diligence; prosecutes patents; performs patent infringement and validity analyses; freedomto-operate opinions; and provides strategic IP counseling. Dr. Wetherell has written and lectured extensively on patent law, strategy, and related transactional issues for many organizations and institutions around the world.
Along with a dozen or so other judges. Fielding questions from these experts in the field really made me think on my feet and respond back with some of the exciting reasons our team was excited about our technology. Overall I had an amazing time at the event.
I had a great time representing the University of Southern California at the Starts H4D Conference. This conference brings together some of the brightest graduate students from top universities and major problems faced by the Defense and Intelligence Communities.
List of Schools Competing
Georgetown University
University of Southern California
The Ohio State University
Duke University
University of Texas at Austin
Stanford University
University of Colorado Boulder
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Southern Mississippi
Johns Hopkins University
The University of Virginia
Columbia University
The University of California San Diego
Colorado School of Mines
James Madison University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Boise State University
The University of West Florida
National Defense University
Defense Acquisition University
United States Air Force Academy
United States Military Academy at West Point
In the finals last week we were narrowed down to 6 top teams out of more than 100+ plus graduate teams. The Department of Defense flew all of us out to San Francisco where we presented in front of a panel of Venture Capitalists. After a really really intense pitch competition our team came out on top. But it was extremely close.
My team from left to right with the prize money: Kaushal Saraf M.S. Computer Science ‘20, Joel Joseph B.S. Computer Science ‘21, Varsha Varadarajan M.S. Computer Science ‘20
I had a great time this week being on a panel of engineers answering questions about life here at USC for a special group of socioeconomically disadvantaged high school sophomores who want to learn what life as an engineering student.
All of them laughed at me when I told them of my experience of taking a ballroom dance class with some of my friends last semester and how due to my horrible dancing skills I accidentally dropped my partner. But honestly it was a pretty good analogy for studying engineering, when you start your going to be really bad. Probably not as bad as me as a dancer, but still there’s gonna be times where you stumble. But overtime you keep working at it and through a lot of practice at hackathons and with homework assignments.
My team with General Patreus after our presentation
I had the once in a life opportunity this year to present my team’s work in front of General David Patreus. While I’m super excited about what I’ve been working on for the last couple months and the presentation my team worked on for the General, given some of the operational data that was military specific to our project I can’t share our entire presentation.
So instead I was asked by the university to write about the lessons I learned as the outlier in the room. As a 19 year old it was amazing having this opportunity. Even more humbling was the fact I was the only undergraduate and student under 25 who was in the room, let alone in front of the general presenting.
Don’t Take the Criticisms Personally - Patreus is probably one of the most knowledgable men in the world when it comes to new and emerging technologies. When he thinks a team is not working on something useful he’s very blunt and straight forward about it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. An example of this happened to the team presenting right before us. As soon as the deck was loaded onto the projector and even before the team could say a word, Patreus was very straight to the point. He told the team, which was working on detecting drones near AirCraft Carriers and creating a ML model to determine the certainty the drone was armed or had explosives, that he had just invested in a company that not only did the same thing better but also had a novel way of taking the drone down. I think the quote Patreus used to wrap the presentation up was pretty telling toward his approach which was “A good leader doesn’t keep the staff guessing when he knows the answer.” The meaning behind it was that General Patreus doesn’t have people reinvent the wheel to find out there is already a major problem with their approach.
Be Prepared and Confident - I think this is probably the biggest thing a lot of the teams really struggled with. One of the other team members after presenting literally told me that he felt the General smelling his nervousness before he even got out of his chair to present. After the first presenter on the first team who presented had his nerves get to him and forgot his presentation, all the presenters in the room definitely got a little bit more concerned. More importantly For me personally I was definitely the least qualified person in the room. All the other teams presenting had teams of 5 comprised of a mix of graduate and PHD students. Meanwhile team which was presenting only had 3 students including me, where I was an undergrad. But to be honest being under-qualified has really never stopped me from doing anything, and this was no different.
Stories are Helpful When You Have Data To Back up the Experience - I think the reason General Patreus really resonated with my team’s presentation was that not only were we able to share the stories of specific Marines who were facing the issue we were tackling, but because we were able to interweave the statistics and business intelligence that a lot more Marines were facing the exact same issue. One thing I really admired about the General was the fact he really prided himself about knowing the operational aspects and small details of the jobs the men he commanded. The second team that presented was working with the Air Force and State Department on Pattern of Life Data Analytics to help drone strike planners minimize civilian casualties. Patreus was able to bring up a lot of personal experiences of how small a lot of the screens were for the drone pilots, and how many times because there is not preset data on a drone strike location especially when the location is “hot.,” there needs to be multiple drones on station looking at multiple angles to best avoid civilian casualties. This kind of really spoke to the fact that even though General Patreus was really high up in the military, at heart he is still a soldier who identifies with the problems that normal soldiers face when doing their responsibilities.
Don’t be Afraid to Ask - One of the things I added to my bucket list after finding out I would have the opportunity to present in front of General Patreus was getting a photo with him to prove to my mom it actually happened. After Patreus was finished asking questions to my team and I (which was the last team presenting) I kind of saw my 5 second window to get around his entourage of suits who follow him and ask for a quick photo. To which he replied of course he would take a photo with my team. That’s actually how I got the photo for this blog entry, and how all the other teams presenting got their photos with Patreus. After the presentation a lot of other teams actually came up to me and thanked me for being brave enough to ask for the photo first, because that allowed them to come in after and get a quick photo. A little bit more on focus however was the fact my team was having trouble getting connected to a specific branch of the Pentagon which was helpful in our project. After Patreus was done asking a question on a related note, our team was very honest in where we were struggling getting connections to which he responded “speak to person X and tell him that David Patreus sent you.” That connection actually ended up being really helpful to our team.
In the end it was a really amazing experience. Our team got some amazing feedback which we are incorporating into our project for the US Marine Corps. The general’s comments for our group in specific was that he wanted us to expand our project focus from just a specific subsegment of the Marine Corps to all the different branches, and that kind of feedback from someone as experienced as General Patreus is the vote of confidence we need in order to think bigger.
I had an amazing time this weekend being a mentor at Athena Hacks, an all girls hackathon held in Southern California. It was really amazing to help a handful of the 400 participants work on their projects and trouble shoot any issues they ran along the way.
Me with the judges of HACK IOT
I spent this weekend at HACK IOT, the West Coast's first IoT-specific hackathon, working on some really cool technology with my teammate Kaushal Saraf.
The really amazing thing about HACK IOT is the huge amount of resources they have available to the teams. From raspberry pis to routers to even a handful of 3D printers for team to use. When trying to use some of these resources however I ran into a major problem - all of these devices used USB 3.0 but my MacBook Pro only had USB C.
The effort to move to a single port in USB C has meant that a lot of devices are a little bit antiquated in terms of their IO interfaces. This means that for the 40 million usb 3.0 devices that are still sold each month, the only way for them to be used by people with only USB C is through the dreaded dongle.
Now there’s a fundamental problem with dongles: no one has them when you need them. So in order to better address the huge transition from USB 3.0 to USB C my team built a solution that doesn’t require actual hardware to interface with a USB 3.0.
Essentially what our team built was a wireless usb stick using a raspberry pi zero . Now we can use any USB device like it was a wireless device without the need for dongles. In the process of making the device - I learned way more about USB and the differences between 1.0 2.0 and 3.0 than anyone should ever have to learn.
In order to hook this device to any USB only device, just plug it into the USB port. That’s all! The device we made automatically makes anything it is plugged into effectively wireless.
A really great example of this is the printer I use in college. Since its super old printer that only takes in a usb stick as an input almost no one can use it (more than half the people who use it have USB C on their computer). As a result there’s been a lot of talk around this printer, which works perfectly well, being replaced in the near future for no reason other than the fact that most people can’t use USB 3.0 to connect to the printer anymore.
The 5 dollar solution my team built this weekend effectively removes the friction point for users who want to see this printer replaced, and future proofs this device so its useful life isn’t cut short arbitrarily. I plugged in the prototype my team built into the printer’s USB 3.0 port today morning, let’s see what people think of my solution in practice and whether we can save the environment a little bit by not replacing this working printer.
