Latest / What's Your Problem? / Making Electronics Better

Transcript

Making Electronics Better · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem,
0:27
Speaker 1: the show where entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're
0:30
Speaker 1: going to change the world once they solve a few problems.
0:34
Speaker 1: My guest today is Anna Katrina d Letski. She's a
0:38
Speaker 1: mechanical engineer who started her career at Apple, where she
0:41
Speaker 1: worked on the Apple Watch that was responsible for we
0:46
Speaker 1: call it packing the suitcase. So the industrial design team
0:52
Speaker 1: makes beautiful surfaces of like what it's going to look
0:55
Speaker 1: like on the outside, and the product design engineers figure
0:58
Speaker 1: out how to get all the parts inside that suitcase.
1:01
Speaker 1: If you will, you got to get all the parts in,
1:04
Speaker 1: and then you know that product needs to be robust.
1:08
Speaker 1: When Anna was working on the watch, she saw a
1:10
Speaker 1: massive problem, not just with the watch or even just
1:13
Speaker 1: with Apple, but with all of electronics manufacturing. The problem
1:17
Speaker 1: is this electronics manufacturing is incredibly inefficient, incredibly wasteful. And
1:23
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about consumers throwing devices away. I'm talking
1:27
Speaker 1: about the manufacturing process itself, what happens before the product
1:31
Speaker 1: even leaves the factory. So Anna left Apple and started
1:35
Speaker 1: a company called Instrumental to try to solve that problem
1:39
Speaker 1: in our conversation. Anna laid out the problem really clearly
1:43
Speaker 1: when she explained what happens when a new device is
1:46
Speaker 1: about to go into production. It starts with a sort
1:49
Speaker 1: of practice build, when a few hundred or a few
1:52
Speaker 1: thousand devices are assembled as a test. If you're part
1:55
Speaker 1: of a team of engineers working in your cushy office
1:58
Speaker 1: in Kupertino, this is the moment when you and your
2:01
Speaker 1: team have to go and actually see this thing you've
2:04
Speaker 1: designed being built. You'd all get on a flight and
2:07
Speaker 1: you'd fly in earlatest China. It's where a lot of
2:10
Speaker 1: stuff is built, although today maybe it's somewhere else in
2:13
Speaker 1: Greater Asia. And then you land in a city, and
2:17
Speaker 1: then you'd get into a factory van and you might
2:20
Speaker 1: drive for an hour and a half or two hours
2:22
Speaker 1: out into a very rural part of China, and that's
2:25
Speaker 1: where you'd have a massive manufacturing center. And then we
2:29
Speaker 1: would be there for about ten or fourteen days. What
2:33
Speaker 1: is the point of you being there. I'm there trying
2:35
Speaker 1: to find issues, find problems, find parts that aren't fitting,
2:40
Speaker 1: find quality issues with parts. So like we expect there
2:44
Speaker 1: to be problems and quality issues with the parts, Anna said,
2:48
Speaker 1: she's not allowed to talk about specific preproduction problems they
2:51
Speaker 1: had with the Apple Watch, but she did give me
2:53
Speaker 1: a hypothetical source of problems the antenna. So, okay, picture
2:58
Speaker 1: of factory with hundreds of workers packing all these tiny
3:01
Speaker 1: little parts into the watch. One of those parts is
3:04
Speaker 1: the antenna, this tiny little thing the sizes of like
3:07
Speaker 1: a one inch piece of dried spaghetti, and it has
3:11
Speaker 1: to go in there just right so that the watch
3:13
Speaker 1: can talk to the world. If the antenna isn't just right,
3:16
Speaker 1: the watch doesn't work. Yeah, So let's say hypothetically, you
3:19
Speaker 1: at the end of the line, you have a pile
3:21
Speaker 1: of units that the antennas don't work. The antenna's really challenging.
3:24
Speaker 1: It's like near a lot of metal and antenna's a
3:28
Speaker 1: metal don't don't mix, and so the antennas don't work.
3:32
Speaker 1: What you have as an engineer is test station results
3:36
Speaker 1: that say this signal is low. It could be an
3:39
Speaker 1: eighty percent tissue, like eighty eight out of ten don't work.
3:43
Speaker 1: It could be a you know, point one percent issue.
3:46
Speaker 1: You only have one that doesn't work. It made a
3:48
Speaker 1: thousand and nine hundred and ninety nine of them work,
3:51
Speaker 1: But what's wrong with this one? Because if you make
3:53
Speaker 1: a million, what's wrong with that one? If you make
3:55
Speaker 1: a million, one in a thousand is a big problem, right, yes,
3:58
Speaker 1: exactly exactly, And so in development you care about every failure. So, okay,
4:04
Speaker 1: so you have this problem the antenna doesn't work whatever
4:07
Speaker 1: often or once in a while, what do you do?
4:10
Speaker 1: We would gather up those physical units, which is non
4:13
Speaker 1: trivial to get all those units in one place in
4:16
Speaker 1: this big factory, and then we would very carefully start
4:20
Speaker 1: to rip them apart to try to get more data
4:23
Speaker 1: about what's wrong with these units? Why don't they work? Now.
4:26
Speaker 1: One of the things that's interesting about antenna specifically and Watch,
4:30
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen a teardown of the watch, is
4:33
Speaker 1: when you're taking it apart, you could very easily be
4:36
Speaker 1: destroying the evidence of the thing you're trying to find. Oh,
4:40
Speaker 1: like you just budge the antenna a tiny little millimeter
4:43
Speaker 1: or whatever, and that matter, yes, and it matters. And
4:47
Speaker 1: so you might try to take some X ray images
4:49
Speaker 1: before you disassemble, so you have some idea literally there
4:53
Speaker 1: you have an X ray camera, yes, which is like
4:57
Speaker 1: a three dimensional X ray, And then you take them apart,
5:02
Speaker 1: and you'd very carefully try to figure out what was
5:05
Speaker 1: going wrong. And sometimes those things are obvious. You open
5:08
Speaker 1: it up, it has no antenna in it, So that's
5:11
Speaker 1: why the antenna doesn't where. Sometimes it's very obvious. Sometimes
5:14
Speaker 1: it's not obvious, and like, as a skilled engineer, you're
5:17
Speaker 1: looking at it, You're like, I have no idea, And
5:20
Speaker 1: then you start looking at the process. You go, you walk,
5:23
Speaker 1: you know, fifty meters up the line to look at
5:25
Speaker 1: where they're putting the antenna's in, and you're watching that
5:28
Speaker 1: process and trying to see is there something happening here?
5:31
Speaker 1: Are there like are there screwdrivers swinging across the line
5:35
Speaker 1: that are like going to hit the parts and knock
5:37
Speaker 1: the antenna? I mean, I feel like there's sort of
5:39
Speaker 1: two layers of problems here. Right. There's the fundamental problem of, oh,
5:44
Speaker 1: we manufactured a million of these things and we know
5:47
Speaker 1: ten thousand of them are going to break, right. That
5:49
Speaker 1: is just a straight up problem. There is also the
5:55
Speaker 1: like engineers like you have to go fly to China,
5:59
Speaker 1: you know, stand on an assembly line and just hope
6:01
Speaker 1: they catch things, hope they figure out where the problem is.
6:05
Speaker 1: Not even they're looking for problems, they don't even know
6:07
Speaker 1: their problems are yet, Like I would go to a
6:10
Speaker 1: build and it would be a successful build if we
6:13
Speaker 1: left the build with one hundred issues in a spreadsheet
6:16
Speaker 1: of different things that we needed to fix. So that
6:19
Speaker 1: was the success. Like, the more problems you find, the better.
6:22
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a success because you found it because
6:24
Speaker 1: you know the problems are there, and you're just worried
6:26
Speaker 1: that you're not going to find. Yes, that's like your
6:28
Speaker 1: real nightmare problem if you're like a design engineer, right,
6:32
Speaker 1: the one that like you don't know is a problem
6:34
Speaker 1: until you've shipped a million pairs of earbuds or something.
6:37
Speaker 1: The technical term for that is an escape. So that's
6:40
Speaker 1: a failure that has escaped the problem escaped the factory. Yes, yes,
6:44
Speaker 1: and so escapes are what essentially then cause returns and
6:50
Speaker 1: if we go back to that waste, yeah, which is
6:53
Speaker 1: hugely costly. Right, it's bad for the reputation of the
6:55
Speaker 1: manufacturer because it's like, oh, it's a crappy product, bad reviews,
6:59
Speaker 1: not a reliable problem Amazon, bad reviews, and you've got
7:03
Speaker 1: to like refund the money, send the person a new one.
7:05
Speaker 1: So it's costly on many levels. Yes, yes, and so
7:08
Speaker 1: returns should be avoided, and you avoid returns by reducing escapes,
7:13
Speaker 1: and you reduce escapes not only by figuring out all
7:18
Speaker 1: the things that you can possibly test for. And so
7:21
Speaker 1: that's why there are testations on the line, but the
7:23
Speaker 1: testation can't test for everything. Did you just live in
7:26
Speaker 1: fear all the time of missing some terrible problem? I
7:34
Speaker 1: don't even know how to answer that. I think that
7:38
Speaker 1: a good engineer is a paranoid engineer. So for me,
7:42
Speaker 1: as an engineer, I thought it was kind of silly
7:45
Speaker 1: that there is so much luck involved. You just have
7:47
Speaker 1: to get lucky and catch the problem before it goes
7:49
Speaker 1: into production. Luck like that, yes, and so you're trying
7:53
Speaker 1: to find you're relying on luck to find things that
7:56
Speaker 1: you can improve in development. And then there's also like
8:00
Speaker 1: the scramble and the heroism that happens when you do
8:03
Speaker 1: have a problem that everybody learns about. Oh, we have
8:06
Speaker 1: this problem. So then you have this fired drill where
8:09
Speaker 1: everybody flies in tries to figure out what's going on.
8:12
Speaker 1: There's tons of freneticism and activity, and this just seemed
8:15
Speaker 1: like a waste, Like why is it that we're so
8:16
Speaker 1: reactive versus proactive? Why is it that like I don't
8:20
Speaker 1: have access to the data that I need as an
8:22
Speaker 1: engineer to actually proactively solve these problems. I have to
8:25
Speaker 1: go and like hope versus No. After the break, Annah
8:30
Speaker 1: launches Instrumental, a company that's trying to help engineers solve
8:34
Speaker 1: the problem of finding problems. Help him go from hope
8:38
Speaker 1: to know. That's the end of the ads. Now we're
8:49
Speaker 1: going back to the show, So just a reset here.
8:52
Speaker 1: Anna has landed a job at Apple, the company where
8:55
Speaker 1: engineers dream of working, this amazing technology company, and yet
9:00
Speaker 1: she decides to leave. So I asked her in the end,
9:02
Speaker 1: what made you quit your job and go start this
9:05
Speaker 1: new company, Instrumental. I can share some thing that that
9:10
Speaker 1: you can use, but it's maybe it might be a
9:12
Speaker 1: little sideways to what you're talking about, but it's the
9:14
Speaker 1: true reason I started the company. So about a year
9:18
Speaker 1: before Apple Watch shipped and the world knew that it
9:21
Speaker 1: even existed, I actually had a personal tragedy happened in
9:24
Speaker 1: my life. My husband was killed by a drunk driver.
9:28
Speaker 1: Oh my god, and I was twenty seven, he was
9:31
Speaker 1: twenty seven. And I realized that life is precious and limited,
9:40
Speaker 1: and you don't know when your last day is going
9:42
Speaker 1: to be, and so you want to be proud of
9:44
Speaker 1: the days that you have and how you spent them
9:47
Speaker 1: and the impact you could have on others, and also
9:49
Speaker 1: reevaluate the justification for my existence on this planet. And
9:55
Speaker 1: I decided that Apple is great. I'm glad I was there,
9:59
Speaker 1: but it can't be my life's work for me. I
10:01
Speaker 1: felt like I needed to do something bigger. And the
10:06
Speaker 1: big problem that we all need to solve is how
10:09
Speaker 1: we build stuff is so wasteful. That is a more
10:13
Speaker 1: meaningful direction. And there is a big problem that I
10:17
Speaker 1: know that I have some intuition about how to go solve,
10:20
Speaker 1: And so I took what I understood as like, wow,
10:23
Speaker 1: it's like really hard to find and fix these issues.
10:24
Speaker 1: We're wasting so much money, so much physical stuff. We
10:28
Speaker 1: are pumping so much chemicals into our rivers, we are
10:32
Speaker 1: burning so much energy. We are wasting human lifetimes of
10:36
Speaker 1: time doing things that don't matter. It's just wasted, and
10:45
Speaker 1: we need to figure that out. We need to change
10:47
Speaker 1: how we build, We need to change how we think
10:50
Speaker 1: about building products. So this is like a little maybe
10:53
Speaker 1: sappy for your audience, but this is the true reason
10:57
Speaker 1: that like really made the change of thinking about away
11:02
Speaker 1: from thinking about, oh, my job as an engineer, I
11:04
Speaker 1: make stuff too. Oh, my job as a human is
11:08
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do the things we need
11:12
Speaker 1: to do better. So Anna decides she's going to try
11:15
Speaker 1: to make electronics manufacturing better, more efficient, less wasteful. And
11:21
Speaker 1: to do this, she and an engineer she worked with
11:23
Speaker 1: at Apple decide to start a company. They call it Instrumental,
11:27
Speaker 1: And when it started, they had one big idea. Instead
11:30
Speaker 1: of forcing engineers like Anna to frantically run up and
11:33
Speaker 1: down the assembly line hoping they'd spotted every potential problem,
11:38
Speaker 1: they would put dozens of cameras up and down the
11:41
Speaker 1: line to capture the entire assembly process for every single device.
11:46
Speaker 1: It's the idea that there is value in this data
11:50
Speaker 1: that today does not get collected, and so the actual
11:54
Speaker 1: core pieces, Let's go get all the data. That's the
11:58
Speaker 1: that's the core innovation here. Let's go get all the data.
12:02
Speaker 1: The data in this case is visual data. What does
12:04
Speaker 1: everything look like as this phone or this watch or
12:08
Speaker 1: whatever is getting put together? Is that right? That was
12:10
Speaker 1: the first data set that we went after was the
12:13
Speaker 1: image data set, because there isn't one. So we're creating
12:17
Speaker 1: a data set that didn't exist before. And as you know,
12:20
Speaker 1: as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
12:23
Speaker 1: When you take a picture, you don't need to know
12:24
Speaker 1: in advance what you're going to be looking for in
12:27
Speaker 1: the picture. It's a very high resolution data set, and
12:31
Speaker 1: then you can come back with twenty twenty hindsight and
12:34
Speaker 1: look at the picture and be like, oh, like, here's
12:36
Speaker 1: a problem in that picture. And so that was the
12:39
Speaker 1: initial concept of like, we need to find where these
12:41
Speaker 1: issues are, which means we need to see them. We
12:44
Speaker 1: work in the physical world, so we need to see them.
12:46
Speaker 1: Remember I was talking about the antennas, where you had
12:48
Speaker 1: to carefully take them apart, and as you took them apart,
12:51
Speaker 1: you'd sometimes damage the evidence you're looking for. Well, if
12:54
Speaker 1: you have images of them as they went together, then
12:58
Speaker 1: you don't maybe have to take them apart, or you
13:00
Speaker 1: maybe have additional data about what they looked like as
13:03
Speaker 1: they were going together. But you don't know which ones
13:05
Speaker 1: are going to be failures in advance, so you take
13:08
Speaker 1: pictures of all of them and then you have the
13:10
Speaker 1: ones after the fact that ended up being failures. You
13:13
Speaker 1: have those images. So that was like the first idea.
13:15
Speaker 1: So the basic ideas. You take pictures of the whole thing,
13:18
Speaker 1: and you identify, you know, whatever, the serial number on
13:20
Speaker 1: each say, watch each device that's going down the line,
13:24
Speaker 1: and then if there's one device that doesn't work, you say,
13:26
Speaker 1: show me all the pictures of that one, and then
13:28
Speaker 1: you say, how is that one different than all the
13:29
Speaker 1: ones that do work in the pictures? Yes, yes, But
13:33
Speaker 1: it's not just about figuring out what's wrong once you
13:35
Speaker 1: find a problem, right is It also about getting better
13:38
Speaker 1: at finding problems in the first place. So discovery, we're
13:41
Speaker 1: able to solve the discovery problem for our customer. We
13:44
Speaker 1: built algorithms that look for anomalies, and so what's an anomaly.
13:50
Speaker 1: An anomaly is something that's different from the other ones.
13:54
Speaker 1: So if you build a population of units, they should
13:56
Speaker 1: all look the same, Okay, a bunch of devices, right,
13:59
Speaker 1: The ones that look different are probably interesting, and so
14:03
Speaker 1: we build algorithms to find the ones that look different.
14:07
Speaker 1: And that was kind of the first offering that we provided,
14:11
Speaker 1: And so our customers were able to use that combination
14:14
Speaker 1: of the photo record with the algorithms that would highlight
14:19
Speaker 1: automatically the things that were different and interesting, and they
14:23
Speaker 1: were able to use that to find issues. Basically, one
14:26
Speaker 1: of these things is not like the other, yes, exactly,
14:29
Speaker 1: So like, oh, this one's bent a little bit, this
14:32
Speaker 1: one's the parts supposed to be black and it's white.
14:34
Speaker 1: Is that a problem? Maybe not? Maybe we highlight those
14:37
Speaker 1: things and then the next piece is okay, well what's
14:41
Speaker 1: causing like problems? Okay, so you've built a system that
14:45
Speaker 1: is better at identifying for finding problems. So now even
14:49
Speaker 1: if a device pass all the tests, your system will say, well,
14:53
Speaker 1: you want to check out this one missing screws because
14:55
Speaker 1: it just looks a little different missing screws. Okay, so yeah,
14:59
Speaker 1: like that missing screws, there's no screw tester. You're right,
15:02
Speaker 1: like missing screws. Devices will actually miss screws. I'm so
15:06
Speaker 1: naive that I'm like, well, surely a device wouldn't be
15:07
Speaker 1: missing a screw, but one hundred percent, it's like one
15:11
Speaker 1: of the top ten defects in production is missing or
15:13
Speaker 1: extra parts, extra screw just to make up for the
15:17
Speaker 1: other one that's missing a screw. On average, they have
15:19
Speaker 1: the right number of screws. Yes, on average they have
15:22
Speaker 1: the right number of scares. So we need to be
15:25
Speaker 1: able to find issues. We need to be able to
15:28
Speaker 1: help engineers fix them, and then we need to help
15:31
Speaker 1: them make sure they don't come back. Those are kind
15:33
Speaker 1: of the three things that we have to do. So okay,
15:36
Speaker 1: those are the three key things Anna's company does to
15:39
Speaker 1: solve this big problem and to tile those pieces together.
15:42
Speaker 1: She gave me a case study, a case study from
15:45
Speaker 1: a company that was trying to build a webcam and
15:48
Speaker 1: the company was having trouble with the antenna. The antenna, which,
15:51
Speaker 1: as Anna told me about earlier in the interview, is
15:54
Speaker 1: this crucial part that is surprisingly hard to get right.
15:57
Speaker 1: They always fail. There are very sensitive parts, and all
16:01
Speaker 1: of our connected devices really rely on their antenna performance.
16:04
Speaker 1: So you don't think about it, but you know it's
16:06
Speaker 1: an important part. And so we had a customer who
16:08
Speaker 1: had failing antennas and they were able to take that
16:13
Speaker 1: group of that population of units and they were able
16:15
Speaker 1: to actively, like root cause it to three different things.
16:18
Speaker 1: And so this is actually the next piece of the puzzle,
16:21
Speaker 1: which is we need to find root cause. And so
16:24
Speaker 1: in this case, the customer was able to see a
16:27
Speaker 1: couple of different things. The first thing they found is
16:29
Speaker 1: a group of those failures was actually had to do
16:32
Speaker 1: with the alignment of a connector that was connecting the antenna.
16:36
Speaker 1: So the connector, if it was like shifted a little
16:38
Speaker 1: bit this way, it was good, and it was shifted
16:40
Speaker 1: a little bit the other way, it was bad. And
16:43
Speaker 1: this was very subtle. This is not something they had
16:45
Speaker 1: like a specification. This is a discovery. Okay, so the
16:51
Speaker 1: angle mattered and they didn't know that in advance. Okay,
16:53
Speaker 1: Now this is also maybe too much in the weeds.
16:57
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of reasons, and antenna can
17:00
Speaker 1: fail in a lot of different ways. So it's not
17:02
Speaker 1: just like, oh, if they're failing, they're all the same
17:05
Speaker 1: root costs. Actually, there could be a group of different
17:09
Speaker 1: causes that cause failures. So you have two different phones
17:12
Speaker 1: from the same build, both of which have the antenna
17:15
Speaker 1: that doesn't work. It might be a different reason for
17:17
Speaker 1: each phone that the antenna doesn't work, which makes it
17:19
Speaker 1: harder to solve. So you solve one problem, but then
17:21
Speaker 1: some of the phones still don't work. Is that what
17:22
Speaker 1: you're saying, Yes, yes, that's very common. They also found
17:26
Speaker 1: that the software version that they were using on the
17:29
Speaker 1: tester was also correlated to the failures, so most of
17:33
Speaker 1: the failures were from one particular tester, So in fact,
17:36
Speaker 1: it wasn't a bad antenna. It was a test for
17:39
Speaker 1: some of those units, not all of them. Some of
17:41
Speaker 1: them still had the connector coming out at a wrong angle.
17:44
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And then the last one on the same
17:47
Speaker 1: group of failures, in the same group of failures, there
17:50
Speaker 1: was another group of units where what the image based
17:54
Speaker 1: algorithms found as a high correlation to the color of
17:57
Speaker 1: the circuit board. And so color doesn't affect performance, but
18:02
Speaker 1: it was a different vendor. One circuit board was like
18:05
Speaker 1: a slightly different shade of a color than another, and
18:09
Speaker 1: so that means like the vendor of that circuit board
18:12
Speaker 1: was for one of the vendors that made that circuit
18:15
Speaker 1: board was more likely to have failing in it. So
18:17
Speaker 1: that gives engineers then three different things. They can go
18:20
Speaker 1: chase down. They can go chase down a process is
18:22
Speaker 1: year around the angle of the connector. They can go
18:24
Speaker 1: chase down like the drifting test station and work on
18:29
Speaker 1: calibrating the testations. And then they can go and investigate
18:32
Speaker 1: if there's something meaningfully different between these two vendors of
18:35
Speaker 1: circuit boards. So they're able to continue building, but they
18:38
Speaker 1: have now three specific things they can go do, whereas
18:41
Speaker 1: without instrumental they would kind of be guessing. So, like,
18:44
Speaker 1: what's the sort of frontier for you? What's the thing
18:46
Speaker 1: you're trying to do that you haven't quite figured out yet, Like,
18:48
Speaker 1: what's the next problem to solve? Yeah, I mean so
18:52
Speaker 1: it goes back to the reason for being for the company,
18:54
Speaker 1: the reason for being being that twenty cents of every
18:57
Speaker 1: dollar that's wasted in manufacturing, we haven't solved that problem yet.
19:01
Speaker 1: What does that require? We need to change how we
19:04
Speaker 1: think about how we build things, how we design things,
19:07
Speaker 1: the process of iterating through that development process, the process
19:11
Speaker 1: of what happens when it goes into production, what happens
19:14
Speaker 1: when you return units? And what do we do with
19:16
Speaker 1: that information from your return as a consumer. And today
19:20
Speaker 1: we're really not doing that as an industry. Not gathering
19:23
Speaker 1: data in a meaningful way is that we're not gathering data,
19:27
Speaker 1: we're not thinking proactively. As an engineer. If I'm designing something,
19:31
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about, you know, the next build and production,
19:34
Speaker 1: but I'm not I'm not necessarily thinking about, like how
19:38
Speaker 1: can I develop this product's that I can capture the
19:41
Speaker 1: most data from it the fastest, the earlier in the
19:44
Speaker 1: process versus later in the product. Like everybody knows their
19:47
Speaker 1: data is valuable and there's stuff in there that could
19:50
Speaker 1: be valuable, but they don't know how to value it
19:53
Speaker 1: because the problems haven't happened yet. When they're on fire
19:56
Speaker 1: quote unquote and they are spending a million dollars a
20:00
Speaker 1: month on returns, they know exactly what the value is
20:04
Speaker 1: in the data that they don't have, Yes, but when
20:07
Speaker 1: they haven't started the program yet and they don't know
20:10
Speaker 1: what fires they're going to have, they don't know how
20:12
Speaker 1: to value having the data. And like preventing those problems
20:16
Speaker 1: in the first place, the vision is that that data
20:18
Speaker 1: is enough and then if you figured out how to
20:21
Speaker 1: harvest that data, you can actually build lines that improve
20:24
Speaker 1: themselves and then you eliminate the waste. So this new
20:27
Speaker 1: different way of doing things, like can you just tell
20:30
Speaker 1: me sort of specifically, like a few details, what would
20:32
Speaker 1: it be like, what would it look like, what would
20:35
Speaker 1: be happening in this world? Everything gets built cheaper, everything
20:38
Speaker 1: gets built with less waste. And when that happens, we
20:43
Speaker 1: have maybe we have cheaper products, we have maybe more
20:45
Speaker 1: profitable companies, we have less waste going into the world,
20:49
Speaker 1: less physical waste, chemicals and rivers, less energy use, less
20:53
Speaker 1: human lifetimes wasted, And it's just thinking completely differently about
20:58
Speaker 1: like that manufacturing actually is a machine itself, and that
21:02
Speaker 1: we need to optimize that whole process as a machine
21:05
Speaker 1: itself versus a means to justify the ends of like
21:08
Speaker 1: we need we need to get products out the other
21:10
Speaker 1: end of the line. In a minute, the Lightning Round,
21:15
Speaker 1: Anna tells us what mechanical engineers know about the world
21:18
Speaker 1: and the inefficiencies out in the wild that grind her tears. Now,
21:30
Speaker 1: let's get back to what's your problem? Great, let's do
21:34
Speaker 1: the Lightning Round. Are you ready? What's one piece of
21:38
Speaker 1: advice you'd give to someone trying to solve a hard problem.
21:41
Speaker 1: I love that question. I love it. I had a
21:45
Speaker 1: science teacher in high school taught me how to solve
21:47
Speaker 1: hard problems because I was working on science research. I'm
21:50
Speaker 1: a science fair kid, and he taught me to break
21:53
Speaker 1: those problems down into manageable pieces. So like, if you
21:56
Speaker 1: can take smaller steps and understanding a problem and the
22:00
Speaker 1: small steps you can do, then it becomes easier to solve.
22:04
Speaker 1: So as somebody whose job is sort of to find
22:08
Speaker 1: errors and inefficiencies in the world. Is there some some
22:12
Speaker 1: domain something you encounter in your daily life that you
22:15
Speaker 1: just you really want to optimize inefficiencies in things that
22:20
Speaker 1: cause lines really irk me, like at the airport or
22:25
Speaker 1: in like a restaurant, like anything that feels like a
22:28
Speaker 1: non optimal like kind of scheduling and line that causes
22:31
Speaker 1: a line of humans. That is something that I that
22:34
Speaker 1: I noticed, and I just like really grinds my gears.
22:37
Speaker 1: Of all your patents, which one's your favorite, I'm gonna
22:40
Speaker 1: go with my first patent more because of what it means.
22:44
Speaker 1: So I share my first patent with actually who is
22:48
Speaker 1: now my co founder, Sam Weiss, and we met in
22:52
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine at Apple, and that's actually the
22:55
Speaker 1: summer that we invented our mutual. It was our mutual
22:57
Speaker 1: first pattern, and we had to build essentially a switch
23:02
Speaker 1: very similar to you know on the side of an
23:04
Speaker 1: iPhone there's like a little ringer switch that you can
23:08
Speaker 1: you can kind of down. So we had to build
23:10
Speaker 1: a switch like that that had a very small ford
23:14
Speaker 1: back there, like it needed to fit in a weird shape.
23:17
Speaker 1: And so that was our first pattern. That pattern will
23:19
Speaker 1: never see the light of day. There will never be
23:21
Speaker 1: a switch that has made in that design, but it
23:24
Speaker 1: was cool. That's awesome. What do mechanical engineers know about
23:29
Speaker 1: the world that nobody else really gets? That everything is
23:32
Speaker 1: imperfect and different from every other thing. Is there a
23:35
Speaker 1: particular piece in say my iPhone that is the one
23:39
Speaker 1: that is like has caused the most manufacturing problems, the
23:42
Speaker 1: most problems on the assembly line? Is there some piece
23:44
Speaker 1: that's like, oh, that piece is the one. I never
23:47
Speaker 1: worked on phones, so I don't know specifically, but in
23:49
Speaker 1: general in products, the antenna, anna, anything with glue, and
23:57
Speaker 1: anything having to do with water, So those are the
23:59
Speaker 1: three things. It's like. It's like the antenna's heart displays
24:02
Speaker 1: are hard too, but like, so basically everything. Is there
24:06
Speaker 1: some trick that mechanical engineers use when something isn't working,
24:10
Speaker 1: like a remote control or whatever. I always think about it,
24:13
Speaker 1: is it a hardware problem or a software problem. If
24:15
Speaker 1: it's a software problem, reboot it. If it's a hardware problem,
24:19
Speaker 1: I don't know, check the batteries. I make sure it's
24:21
Speaker 1: plugged in. Anna Katrina shad Letsky is the founder and
24:29
Speaker 1: CEO of Instrumental. I have a request for you this week,
24:34
Speaker 1: and it is this. Please let me know who you
24:37
Speaker 1: want to hear on this show. You can email me
24:40
Speaker 1: at problem at Pushkin dot fm. That's problem at Pushkin
24:45
Speaker 1: dot Fm. Or you can tweet at me at Jacob Goldstein.
24:49
Speaker 1: Today's show was edited by Robert Smith, produced by Edith Russolo,
24:53
Speaker 1: and engineered by Amanda k Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and
24:57
Speaker 1: I'll be back next week with another episode of What's
25:00
Speaker 1: Your Problem