Saul Griffith on winning a MacArthur, entrepreneurship, and dumpster diving

His TED talk is pretty interesting:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/48

Amazing.. there are so many paths to realizing a startup. These people bootstrapped, consulted, etc. and finally found their startup path, not unlike Cognos which was recently acquired by IBM for $5B.

What are you going to do with the $500,000?

...I'd love to see a CAD program that allows you to enter folding patterns for origami and paper airplanes.

The "genius" grants have always been a sad joke.

I wouldn't necessarily say that. I think the process for awarding them is bogus.

But I do hope the the origami idea is just part of his plans.

If you take his idea for the CAD program and combine it with his ideas from the TED speech of using materials as code you might end up with something that you can digitally generate very complex 3D structures from very simple building blocks using only a sequencer for the blocks and that might be a very cool product - think of it as the next generation of 3D printers.

And then if you opensource the diagrams people can finally apply opensource ideas to production.