Where are we?

People ask where my various businesses and projects are located. That’s a rather old-fashioned way of looking at it! While we have a small, brand new lab for ThumbSats in Ensenada, Mexico, in fact the project is run from all over the world.  There are amazing facilities at the National Facility for Innovative Robotic Systems at the University of Leeds in the UK, but again – a lot of the work is distributed.

We should use technology to become location-independent. Arriving to work after a frazzling one-hour commute is not the best way to begin the working day, and for us, people don’t need to do that. Many of our project team members work wherever they feel comfortable. I don’t care if someone is soaking up the sun on a beach or sipping hot chocolate in a chalet in the alps while they are working on my projects, so long as they are productive, and so long as that work is not preventing them from enjoying and benefiting from being in that unusual workplace.

So these days, I say that the Cloud is my office, and the world is my workshop. If it’s easier to have something built by somebody else who has chosen to specialize in that particular widget, that’s what I do. In the old days, that wouldn’t have worked so well, and that’s why many companies became vertically integrated – in many cases it was cheaper and better to carry out a lot of the activities in the supply chain in-house. However, with modern connectivity, transaction costs are incredibly low, and I have developed a certain skill at quickly specifying what we need, so the overhead of communication is minimal.