The Starforge Thesis.

The ideas behind the space.

Howdy.

When me and the boys set out to start Starforge we just wanted somewhere where we could build things and meet cool people. Not a complicated ask really. Well it worked. Way better than we expected.

Now, I want to move the goalposts. Here’s what I’m thinking about.

I really like College Station, as a town, as a place to live long term because it’s secluded enough to be quiet, safe, with good family environment and through the university has a growing talent pool. The biggest problem is that a huge proportion of people move away after college. People come to College Station so they can go to school and get a high paying job and then go get one in a big city like SF or Austin. A recent survey I read said that 50.8% of people think a college town is a great place to live long term. Now the numbers are probably bogus, and you shouldn’t really place much weight on them, but from what I’ve seen, that checks out. From my experience, my friends would graduate and try to stay in town, but without very many engineering jobs, there’s really nowhere for them to make the kind of money they need for college to have been worth it for them, so they leave.

So basically, what I’m saying is that College Station needs some engineering industry. We need high paying jobs. So my idea is let’s turn College Station into a massive engineering/manufacturing/business hub where you can come, bootstrap a company for the cheap at Starforge, connect with some of the investors we know, raise however much funds you need, get some cheap real estate and then you hire directly out of our talent pool.

I realized that it might be a really good idea for us to reach out to local companies and offer recruiting services. For example. Say a local company needs an electrical engineer. They come to me and they ask me to find them someone. Since our talent pool is pretty concentrated and self-selects for motivated people who will pay for and use a makerspace, we have some seriously talented people. When people come to A&M and want to build things, they come to us. So then I’ll look at the job application, see who I think would fit it, and I’d send it to one of my members and get them the job. If it’s not a good fit, there’s other fish in our little sea, but I generally think this service would help the students, the businesses, Starforge and the local economy. It’s just an all around circle of winning.

People always ask me, Ismail, how do I get good at engineering? And I tell them to build things. It’s pretty simple really. Just build things, show you can execute on a plan and you’ll be far more competent than most everyone in your field. It’s really simple. It’s the reason I’ve done well, it’s the reason many of my friends found me and have all done well together and individually. Also, you never know where things may take you, just start messing around and quit trying to be predictable. Build something fun, and then when you finish it show it off to the world, and use it to meet people you’d otherwise have nothing in common with. Dig around, be curious, let your inner child guide some of your bigger decisions. Why did I build rockets? I still have no idea. It worked though! Not anywhere near what I expected, but life isn’t linear in the slightest.

Now. How do I know we even have a talent pool that is worth hiring from? In reality. I don’t. I know we have a small amount of just wildly talented engineers in our circles, but do we have enough to be considered a talent pool? Not really. Not yet. However, I’m patient and we can curate this over the course of the coming months/years. Our plan for recruitment is to focus a huge amount of attention on freshmen. When people come to A&M, the first things they look for are things to do and people to do them with. We have both of those things, we just have to make it well known that we are the best choice for as many students as we can support. And generally people self-select. Someone who doesn’t really care about building things will show up once or twice, but someone who, as we like to say “has that dawg“ will be there late night every night cooking up something wild. Bring a couple of those people together and you have a scenius ( I know it’s more complicated than that). That’s what we’re cooking.

A question I kept asking myself was how do we curate intrinsic motivation. Now, I’m not really a good example for this, because quite frankly I have no idea why I’m the way I am. It’s a lot of things. BUT.

I called one of my closest friends, a guy who I mentored in high school and we talked about this extensively. His name’s Michael, ( not cofounder Michael). Michael used to come to engineering club occasionally because his sister was involved in it and he’d come along with her. This was his freshman year, where he tried to get involved and succeeded a little bit, but nothing major. Then COVID hit and things were dormant for Michael until his junior year. He’s a year younger than me, so early in my senior year, I decided I was going to kickstart a robotics team to get people excited about engineering. And my recruitment method was really simple.

I would walk up to people and be like, hey do you want to build a cow?

They’d look at me confused and then start laughing and be like sure why not. Or they’d laugh and say they have something else going on. But by and large it worked. I got about half of our engineering club people, so like ~30 people excited about it enough to at least contribute a little bit. Now something to note with projects like this is that they are subject to Price’s law. Meaning a square root of the number of people on the team do half the work. Basically meaning, as big of a team as you accrue, what you’re looking for is really just a couple of heavy-hitters. Michael slowly turned into a heavy-hitter. And he’d start coming in every day after school, help me build things, or come in and a couple of us would have lunch in Mr. Gupton’s classroom or in the lab and just hang out. It became an obsession ( obsessions are so much more fun with friends). And slowly he began to take on more responsibility, over the course of the following months. Now, the robot competition crashed and burned, but it served the purpose I needed it to, and it got engineering club going for another year and got people like Michael started and on track to do great things.

Michael then went on to lead 3-4 different projects, some of which were more successful then others, win a couple state competitions and then got a jobo at a local display manufacturing company where he currently works. In his own words, he said that it was because he spent time with me ( and people like me) that got the ball rolling for him. To sum it up, he became a whole lot more intrinsically motivated to do something other than play video games, and be a generic consumer and it really helped him get his life started in multiple different ways.

This has happened with several other people I know, so I’ve seen it firsthand, people can become orders of magnitude more intrinsically motivated. It takes a guiding hand, and a lot of time, and a creative and free environment. It’s truly what the job of a teacher is, yet most get caught up in the details of their subject, which is by and large irrelevant.

Let’s loop back to Starforge. So one of the theses is this:

People, in the right environment, can become far more agentic/intrinsically motivated and agency is infectious, in both directions.

This is really really really exciting for me. Because at the end of the day, to do great things, the number one thing you need is agency and intrinsic motivation. And that’s the most rare trait of all. So few people have enough agency to make decisions for themselves and pick alternative paths. But the fact that it can be taught is a huge massive win in my book. I mean yeah maybe people knew this, but now it’s apparent to me and I’m making it an explicit point.

AGENCY CAN BE TAUGHT!!!!

And so that’s why I want to catch the freshmen early. So I can teach more of them agency. So we can work on their soft skills and give them the time and space to fail a couple times so they can eventually succeed. It’s not a linear process at all, it’s compound, nearing on exponential for some. They’ll have a slow first couple of weeks/months, then depending on the person, they’ll eventually get the hang of it and take off like a rocketship. This problem is really interesting to me. I don’t really know why it’s interesting, it just is. I’ve never really thought of myself as a teacher, because why would I? But as this continues on, I think of myself more as the guide from Terraria, mostly useless, but he’s your link with the game and suggests things that you could do to help yourself grow. I think teaching is really the wrong way of looking at learning. Teaching + studying is a failed workflow.

You think about your life, think about the people in your childhood. The people who had more impact on you were not necessarily the teachers who taught you how to add numbers, or read, but your parents, and the ‘guide‘ figures around you who taught you to step out of your comfort zone and supported you and believed in you. Belief capital is huge. It means the world to someone when you believe in them and tell them that you trust them to do something successfully. Do that enough times, and they’ll gain an otherwordly level of confidence, enough for them to tackle on the biggest projects and be A Somebody. Not another number. I think learning is more about exploring + guiding. If I were to educate someone, a kid for example, I’d tutor them offhand. In a sense that I’d suggest things they could do, and then sit back, let them do it, and answer the occasional question. Let them have freedom in what they choose to do and how they choose it and their outcomes will be orders of magnitude better adapted to a dynamic world. Maybe when things were more stagnant we could get away with teaching + studying since things didn’t change all that much, but with what seems to be coming, teaching agency and dynamism is an infinitely better long term strategy.

Anyways back to talent. We just established that agency can be taught. Technical skills we know can be taught, and they both take time. So by catching the freshmen early, we’ll get to find the gems in the rough. This is a highly personalized process, so these people won’t get churned out like out of a school. It’ll be much more informal, much less structured, more freeform. I’m 100% confident that our talent pool is infintely better than A&M at large and beats every single student org on campus. So instead of companies supporting things like FSAE with sponsorships + internships + hires, It’d be much more worth their time to support Starforge, where the talent quality and density is much higher.

So we’ve got a talent pool of agentic people who want high paying jobs, preferrably in the area. Now we need to figure out how to get a small percentage of those people to start highly technical companies, raise funds, and hire out of our talent pool. Entrepeneurship I think is similar to agency. I’m not sure it can be taught, but people who are high in agency beforehand will be more disposed to entrepeneurship naturally. Now in thinking about companies, I’m not quite sure how to help here. I’m still in the process of gettign plugged into the local business community, so I’m not sure what everyone needs, but it’s something that’s very interesting to me to get to know and get to be familiar with local businesses and their owners.

All in all, the best way to know if a deal is good, is if everyone benefits in multiple different ways and everything synergizes. And this feels like that.

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Section II

SPECULATION

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Look. The basic goal is to build cool things with cool people. But I want to turn it up to 11 on both of those things. The future is going to be building the coolest things with the coolest people. Now how do we achieve that? Naturally, you need a world-class facility, lots of freedom, some capital, and a whole lot of wizardry. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know how to build a world-class organization. I have barely any idea what I’m doing. Just enough to get from one day to the next. But at the very least, we should aim for something that’s high up there and study the sucess cases. What wizardry is required? It’s the little things. Solving motivation, removing obstacles as fast as they can be removed so downtime is minimized, giving people space and pressure when necessary, having personal guides and goals and somehow managing to scale a hugely creative and individual organization. How do the individual parts of this puzzle fit into the organizational side of things? How do we avoid the mistakes of our predecessors on the university side of thing? How do we perfect this, who do we target, what can we handle, what’s the right approach here?

I have no idea. Truth be told, answering these questions will raise a thousand more. But it’s quite alright. The future is emergent. There will be glimpses and epiphanies that guide us in the future as they have in the prior months. These thoughts you read were slowly brewed over the course of months, but perfected ( or at least hewn to an acceptable standard) in epiphanies, glimpes, and conversations. The vision I’d like to sell is a vision of almost a tech-hogwarts. But I want to arrive there organically. The organic factor is extremely important. When scaling things like this, if you lose the organic factor, you’re committing the mistake of throwing the baby out with the bath water? Keeping this place organic as we scale is difficult. But we need to make an effort. I have very little idea what I’m talking about, but scaling Tech Shop was maybe the most detrimental thing to it in the long run.

By the way, by the way. I want to be very clear about something.

I have absolutely zero desire in franchising this. I want there to be one Starforge. Not two, not one in every city. Nope. Just one that delivers on the highest level possible in the universe. I’m a huge believer in centralization. I would rather have one campus that I know intimately well, evolve and make perfect, than have more suboptimal franchises that waste time and divide attention. I want nothing to do with personally bringing this to other college campuses, quite frankly I dislike remote work and have never had a good time with it, and the magic sauce is never there in remote work or second campuses. Sorry, this isn’t a 3 dimensional object that can be 3d printed like a piece of plastic. No, an organization like this is living, it is a snapeshot of a time and place and it cannot be replicated. Imitated yes, but imitation is not a problem here. There’s a certain magic to having everyone be in one room. Zoom left such a scar on our generation, I want nothing to do with it ever again. In person, centralized perfection ftw.

The problem then becomes transportation. Which is okay! That’s part of the bigger plan anyways.

(sidenote, I will gladly help anyone start their own similar organization)

I can tell you that our goal posts have now shifted. We’re very close to reaching self-sufficiency and we’ll celebrate that soon enough. Beyond that, I want to establish some sort of safety net for our staff/members so we can take some risks and not fall on our faces. I’d love for us to shift towards something like the Foundry concept I outlined in a previous blog. Not quite sure what the stepping stones are, but we’ll figure that out soon enough.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the scenius concept. Something we need to figure out better is how to cross-pollinate knowledge between our members. Heck. It may be just as simple as every single member having a wiki entry with specialties and knowledge that you can search so you know who to speak to regarding questions. I have a mental database of who knows what, so I guess I serve as a librarian. Some of our more active members also know, but it’s important that that knowledge be more accessible so we can really become a scenius. Our classes are an excellent way of doing that, but not yet vast enough or extensive enough at all.

There’s a lot going on. We have learned huge amounts in the last ….. 8 months? and have much more to learn in the coming months. Feels unreal, but I can’t imagine living any other way. We’re getting better. So much better. I want Starforge to be the single best place to build on the planet. I want people to quit school to come build with us. I have only the slightest idea of how to do that, but the nice thing is I (probably) have enough time to figure it out.

Places like MIT, CalTech, and Stanford’s Makerspace are all really fascinating to me. To me, building things is the highest form of human expression. There’s nothing quite like it for me. And many have come to similar conclusions. But I want to tie them all together. I want to have a hivemind of technical knowledge and a group of people willing to pick up projects on a whim. It begs the question. How do you get interesting people to pick a place to move and build in?

Making moving easier, giving them a great place to live, offering them opportunity, jobs, giving them something interesting to work on, or some space to work on their own work, funding, environment ( the right vibes). It’s a nuanced question that I don’t quite have all the answers to. Still grasping at how to even ask the question really. But the answers are going to fun. Pretty soon, we’ll connect to the wider internet and share in much greater quantity and much higher detail what things are like over here. As it stands, none of us yet have the patience or capacity to deal with it. I’ll delegate it when the right person comes along.

Anyways.

I think that’s all I have to say. Feel free to reach out. Not too busy to talk. Give me feedback, and ideas.

Thanks and gig em.

Ismail