2023. Reflections and Updates

About time I gave an update.

Well hello there.

It's been a while since I've published any updates. I never realized how much work it was going to be to will starforge into a sustainable existence. I mean good grief, it was truly a gargantuan amount of work. We grinded on this for basically a year straight before we broke even. That one quote comes to mind, "we do things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy." Yep. That certainly applies here. But now, we did it, it exists, people want it, and I'm overjoyed to offer it to them. It's become my new normal. and that's taken quite a while to adjust to. I mean, not even 18 months ago I was just a nascent college freshman building rockets for poorly-defined reason(it was fun lmao) but now I've got a business, staff and customers, I mean, good grief it was just a lot to adjust to. I just feel completely different. Old Ismail is no longer. I've been trying to put it into words for maybe 4 months now, but haven't come up with anything great, but I guess this is as close as I'll ever get.

But here we are, I think I've now finally gotten adjusted and have interesting things to say about this whole ordeal. For a while I was just really just hanging onto the boat, trying desperately not to fall off. But through all the bankrupcy scares (3x), the big projects, the stresses, customer demands and worries, we somehow came through it all intact and are steadily growing. Currently we have over 130 paying members, several A&M student orgs working on large projects, 8 absolutely cracked staff, and the biggest concentration of engineering talent in the city. Most of our members are students, and mostly engineering students out of those. I guess the most striking thing about having done all of this is the sheer amount of just wildly smart people who've been just silently cooking in solitude. Now we're working to connect cracked engineers with other similarly cracked engineers. I personally have gotten a huge kick of getting to know the people who walk through our door, there's some crazy stories in there.

In no particular order:

* a guy built a oneWheel from scratch + custom software

* a handful of prolific car builders

* a guy who build EUCs, dirtbikes, onewheels etc, insanely prolific

* a guy built his own cnc router, stored it in his bathroom for a while, built a 7 axis robot arm, works on ml shenanigans, now staff

* one guy came in, finished building two guitars, then proceeds to build a roadbike into a motorcycle, also now staff

* one guy is building software + hardware infrastructure for crypto-verified NFC tags 

* a handful of custom ebikes, gas-bikes, electric vehicles shenanigans

* one girl designed, made and will sell custom golf clubs for women

* one guy built his own high-fidelity speaker from scratch and will sell them to compete with JBL

* one guy was casting metal on his balcony

* one guy built a small liquid biprop in hs and fired it in his backyard (bro is wild)

I mean, and the list goes on, it's insane. And it prompts me to continuously think about what we're going to do with this rather rare collection of talent going forward and what our priorities are.  Our loyalty is first and foremost to our customers, the students. I think the best thing we can do is help those who are prolific and talented be even more so and connect them to people like them. I think we're seeing it in real-time that these people are able to pull off projects that they would have first considered out of scope without our help and support. I mean, I think I was targeting this when we named it Starforge Foundry instead of Starforge Makerspace. But everybody calls us Starforge anyways so that gets lost on people. 

Quite frankly, I'm not terribly interested in artsy/crafty things. I want people to work on insanely cool side projects that could one day amount to something cool, useful and interesting, or help them develop their own skills and character to one day make something of their own that is cool, useful and interesting. 

One thing I realized was that we've made a culture where the meta is to build cool projects and we celebrate and encourage that. That's not something that people will see further on in their careers. It's almost never the case, so the more we can make sure these people can cook now, we can probably save them from becoming NPC engineers at BigCo.

I'm not interested in helping everybody learn to build things. I'm really only interested in enabling those who truly care to make something meaningful. I'm far more interested in helping the outliers and connecting them to other outliers. I'm most interested in supporting the winners. I mean, sure, I'll help whoever asks and pays for it happily, but my priority is mostly in helping propel ambitious and talented makers get better at what they do and produce their best work. My point is, if you don't really care, Starforge isn't the place for you. If you're in this for status, you're wasting my time and your own, you're never going to be that guy. 

It's not really the nice thing to say, but Starforge isn't really for everyone. You basically have to teach yourself and figure out what your goals are and then figure out where we can help you. If you don't know what your goals and priorities are, there's not much I can do for you except stick you on a larger project, which granted, can be good sometimes. What I want is most of all though is to help the best get even better. 

The best as I define them are prolific creatives and builders who work on tons of side projects. Going forward, I'm most interested in bringing out the best in people and creating a space where people can run more experiments faster, meet people similar to them, grow and learn continuously. 

While writing this I had an idea for an app we could write that wouuld let you input your interest, then would build you a profile and then the AI would give you a warm intro to somebody building a similar project, hopefully spurring you both to talk. Nascent idea, may amount to something idk, spur of the moment thing. Similar to the Socratica Symposium app-thing, but different.

Next semester we're going to try something new. I've been digging into how the wealthiest student organizations have been funded and its pretty funny. These classes of orgs make anywhere from ($200k/yr - $1m/yr). Where that money goes is a question I have no good answer to, but I can tell you how they make it. 

Turns out the answer is career fairs. Career fairs are the way that industry and academia get together to help students get jobs and it's the best way to for companies to support developing talent. How a career fair works is the host of the event charges companies a couple hundred bucks for a table for a day or two at the event in exchange for resumes, to support the overall program, and the chance to talk to and recruit students. The real value add there on the host's end is how the students are curated and presented. For example, an EE company will go to an EE career fair hosted by the EE department to recruit EE students. 

We're going to do this a bit differently. We're going to have partially a normal career fair, but we'll tell everybody to bring their projects out, and the most promising ones will get tables showcase their work. This will hopefully let us build a feedback loop where we shine the spotlight on these students and encourage more personal projects and less large scale student teams. I will explain this in a bit. 

There will be student lectures and we're debating hosting a hardware hackathon as well. I basically want to put a showcase on the best students and build a feedback loop that encourages students to build their own projects for fun and experience. It's how I got started and how many of the best engineers I know started. 

Look maybe I'm wrong about this. Entirely possible. But I think this experiment is worth running as the returns would be rather large if it works and the losses relatively small if it fails.

I'm still thinking these ideas over though, so take this with a grain of salt. It's just that the current business model is barely enough to keep us alive, and I have a few problems that can be solved by increasing our revenue rather massively and I think this is how I am going to do it.

I mentioned the fact that I think personal projects > student design/competition teams. I've seen lots of student teams run, and what happens is 2-5 people do 50-90% of the work and learn the most, but everyone else is left with not much space to help or is forced to do busy work that does not actually matter or just doesn't want to help as much. I think that you can learn a lot more, in a much shorter time frame if you just worked on a personal project with a friend or two. You'll get to learn how to make something happen from start to finish, which is difficult. 

A few brief words on teams: work only with people you trust, if you have nobody, work solo. Working solo > working with a bad team. Be picky about your people. Work in person as much as possible unless there is literally no other option. The answer isn't nice, but most of the time, you don't need more people, you need better people. If your teammates do not care, just cut them. I promise you, it's not worth the pain. If they care, then you can go to the moon with them, but do not tolerate any committment issues.

Build something fun, something funny or interesting. Give yourself a reason to get excited about it. This is supposed to be fun! If even you can't get excited about it, pick something else to spend your time on. Do something, anything that would get you excited.

I know doing things on your own is difficult, and that's why joining a student design team often seems like a good idea. Sometime it is. But find a friend and you will both keep each other motivated and you will learn much more (10-100x more).

—

I mean, feels like starforge was basically a startup in hindsight.  I guess in a way it was. Now we're stabilizing, growing organically and finally not losing money every month. Feels great! I mean, I got exactly what I bargained for, what I was bargaining for however may be still unclear. In some ways it feels like I was really just swept away by the adventure. Feels like I was on an epic quest of small proportions.

Why did I start Starforge? It really was this strange impulse, I had no master plan then, I just wanted somewhere to make stuff and aggregate makers and interesting people.

That's it. Really, that's what we do in a nutshell. Anything beyond that is us moving the goalposts in response to having solidly achieved the original goal. We help people build their projects, in the belief that the best way to become good at engineering and to find out what you truly enjoy is to just make stuff. Our discord has like ~340 people in it and is fairly consistently active. People on campus know about us a lot more now and actively refer people to us.

I was in an advisor meeting and when I mentioned that I'd started Starforge, the conversation we had completely flipped. Turns out she had heard of it from the department head. Things like that. Now when I meet somebody new, chances are, they've heard of it. Pretty wild.

In short, it's going well, we're growing, gaining new members slowly but surely, more collaborations with student orgs. We've got a rover team, 3 go-kart teams, 1 liquid rocket engine team (not mine), a train team, and a few other smaller teams here and there. I'm really proud of the staff we've got, it's actually insane. How we hire is pretty simple, we simply watch our members as they use the shop for a period of time and wind up hiring the most talented and prolific ones. Usually they're more than happy to join as they get free membership and 24/7 access in exchange for 5 hours a week of shifts + other responsibilities on an as-needed basis. This has made our lives as directors a lot easier, as now we don't have to be at the shop for 20+ hours a week. More often than not though, we're there anyways because we love hanging out at the space and using it.

It's a really interesting space. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's hard to sum up. I love and adore it, as it's been nothing an absolute joy to run and has been a huge enabler, don't get me wrong. But I'm not completely 100% sure where I want to go with it in the future. I just kinda want to see what happens right now.

Really the devil is in the details. Every couple of weeks the shop layout changes slightly, there's new people, new staff occasionally, and new problems to tackle (good problems, mostly scaling pains). As Michael likes to say, "we're still alive, still kicking." 

One last thing. I don't know how to put this into quantitative data, but our students and customers absolutely love us. Many many many times, they express their concern regarding if we were to not make it, as they want us to be here for the long term. Which, to be clear, I plan for Starforge to stick around for a very long time. Decades and centuries. When the news broke that our building is getting torn down this December (we knew this was coming), many customers expressed concern and worry about our future, but I assure them, we'll figure it out. We're going to move to a new building. I've got my eye on one, and am going to try my hardest to make it happen. Regardless Starforge is going to stick around and is growing.

That's really all I have to share on Starforge. If you have any questions just ask. We're going to be hosting a fundraising event sometime soon. I'll send out word prior. It's been a pretty profound vibe shift and I could probably write a book on our shenanigans so far, so let me know if I can answer any questions. 

Now my personal life updates.

Life has been, mostly due to the business, chaotic and wild. I've been trying to write a year in review about 2023 for maybe 4 months now, and yet 6 drafts later, I'm completely unsatisfied with anything I've written. I apologize if anybody has been waiting for that to drop, but last year was really quite mindbending. I mean, how on Earth do I explain what it feels like to go from a naive kid building rockets to a founder and director of an organization with hundreds of customers, a staff, and a collegiate engineering workload to top. It's truly a monumental task. I don't know how to say this, but I feel like I've aged 5 years in the past year. I don't think the same way, I'm more critical, more jaded, still excitable, capable of causing a lot more damage but also more capable in general.

I've become more confident, a lot more confident. I trust my gut a lot more, it's been correct so far. I'm a lot happier with where I am than I've been in a very long time. I guess actually now that I think about it, despite all the stress and work and failures, the past two years have been my favorite ever. For a bunch of reasons that I won't go into, but things have been incredibly good. I feel like a fish swimming in water now, as I quite enjoy the responsibilities and workload.

 I've gotten more clarity on who I want to be, which, wow that is a difficult question. I've been attempting to answer it for about 8 months now, possibly the most difficult of all time. I definitely want to be a businessman & engineer. The lines between those in my head are increasingly blurry. I realize that a strength of mine is that I can do both very well simultaneously with the right team. I think the distinction there is actually just not real or relevant. A good engineer has to have a head for economics, and a good businessman has to have detailed field knowledge.

  It's become glaringly obvious to others around me, and to me, that I'm not the kind of person who would be satisfied working a corporate job or working for somebody else. I keep reading Paul Graham's essays and his words resonate very deeply with me. I've realized that more often than not the answers were in front of us all along and yet it may still take a long time to see them.

It took me a long time, but I realized I didn't want to work in rockets. The reasons are a bit blurry, but it doesn't feel quite right. I've tried to psychoanalyze it and ehh, the conclusions were not clear lmao. I've spent a lot of time privately writing and it's been a great tool to help me think through some decisions. Walking, reading, writing, all have been combined together to allow me to tackle much more complex and multivariate topics than before. 

I think whatever I wind up doing, it will definitely be independent, led by me, and involve designing and producing new hardware, and the associated machine tools and factories necessary to make them. That's about as clear as I've gotten so far in terms of my long term goals. 

I don't plan on directing and managing Starforge forever, as I'd like to start a profitable company using Starforge as a launchpad, but I do plan on being in the background involved for a long time.

I feel like for the past 6 months I was thinking too much. You know what one lyric from that song Ride "I've been thinkin too much". Yeah that was me. Literally me. I could not stop thinking. Just thought and thought and thought my way in circles. I kept trying to think about what I should work on next and never actually built anything. What happens when I'm not building something is I spend my time obsessing about what I want to build or do next.

Then I had one too many weird oddball experiences and decided to stop thinking so much and wing it more often. Master plans often start with inklings of directions. You can't masterplan without a very well defined direction. 

I redid my day to day schedule a couple weeks ago and it's been life-changing. I blocked off my time in a specific way to where I force myself to be more efficient and deliberate with school, while also freeing up more my free time once again. And so for the first time in a year, I have the time to work on side projects and actually have free time. It's truly been a blessing.

I feel like I have more to say on this topic, but it's not clear what exactly. I just feel completely different. I mean, like this entire year was absolutely insane. It showed me a lot about who I am, who I want to be, and maybe more importantly who I've always been. 

I've always been fiercely independent. I was a problem child since I was in kindergarden. Now it finally feels like I have a way to channel that energy into something positive. I guess this is who I am. Well. I guess I'd enjoy that, I quite like this version of me.

Occasionally I sit back and I think about whether I regret having started Starforge, and I think about where I was back then and where I am now, the answer is a glaringly obvious no.

Back then I was building a rocket engine in a storage unit with basically no money. Only people in the aero department knew who I was and that's primarily because I pestered them incessantly. Nah, I don't regret it one bit. I think it's an extremely useful project, one that has improved my life dramatically as well as the lives of those around me. For that I am happy and grateful. If I can help even a small number of people do their best work, I will be satisfied. 

As for my side project, I've been spending my newfangled free time figuring how to make a turnkey desktop furnace / aluminum/copper casting machine good enough to produce aerospace grade aluminum castings for cheap and I think I'll figure out the last few details here pretty soon. I'm finding myself super interested in building machine tools at the moment, and so I think I'll build a handful in the next couple of months. Ideally I'd like to find some way this summer to have my research paid for so that I can afford to not work a job and just go full time R&D on machine tools. It will be awesome to watch, we need better machine tools anyways. If you've got any ideas or suggestions as to how we can make that happen, please let me know at ismailhozain @ gmail dot com. I'm keen to hear interesting options.

Okay, I think I'm done here,

Ismail

Some pictures from the last year.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/V9uCSA199qnTKUA6A

 I will at some point write a more detailed writeup of what projects we've had a hand in. I've written enough here.