Will they fly? (Butterfly from Austin Bike Zoo on Facebook)
Table of Contents
Starting One-Person Companies
Eric Pan and his team from Seeed Studios visited with us after the NVIDIA GTC conference. In our conversation, Eric asked if we had heard the term — OPC. No, I admitted. He explained that it stood for one-person companies and the Chinese government was looking for ways to encourage the development of one-person companies powered by AI. He said that the government was organizing co-working spaces and campuses to host people wanting to start one-person companies. I found the following article to support what Eric was talking about.
Here’s an excerpt from that article:
While venture capital funds are driving Silicon Valley’s AI boom, China is leaning on government policy and funding to mobilize participation from both industries and individuals, Zhang said. The government has set up venture funds, provided data infrastructure, and acted as an early adopter for domestic AI products.
Eager to facilitate AI adoption, several district governments are also subsidizing entrepreneurs to integrate OpenClaw, a viral open-source AI agent that can handle tasks such as managing emails or building websites, into industrial applications, despite the agent’s security risks.
The OPC subsidies are going to entrepreneurs through special incubators that are now popping up across the country. The definition of an OPC varies: Some incubators say they also include companies with two or three people.
Eric sees OPCs as expanding the kind of businesses that makers have been able to create. Think IOT combined with AI agents. He sees the need for local businesses to install, customize and manage networks of smart devices; the hardware might be open and widely available but it needs a person to integrate it into a particular use case for a business. He was excited about the possibility that IoT devices might now have AI agents in industrial buildings, in agriculture and even in the home.
Eric and I talked about the example of a personal weather station. An IOT weather station has sensors to measure temperature, humidity, windspeed, etc. If connected, the weather station is able to send the data it captures to the Internet and it can be read on a website. What if these weather stations each had a agent? Eric said that they might be able to talk to other weather stations directly, but the most important thing is that they could take action, such as interacting with an irrigation system to turn it on when it was hot. If the irrigation system was managed by an agent, then it could work with the weather station to identify optimal patterns for irrigating fields.
This week, I met with Andrew who retired from working for a big tech company but has a number of side jobs. One of them is designing Web sites for small businesses. The need is still there for business to have Web sites and while there are tools out there to make it easier to do it yourself, some businesses prefer to have someone do it for them. Andrew said that now it is much easier for him to create a full website on his own without needing additional tech and design help. It’s a one-person job that delegates roles to AI.
In fact, you might think of OPCs in the way that web design (and web designers) became a job in the late 1990’s. A group of people developed web design skills and worked individually or in small groups to create websites for businesses. These web design firms didn’t grow to become large VC-backed firms with national reach; most remained small and local. That’s the profile of OPCs.
If you think of it, it’s a lot like the profile of the business of makers and crafters who make something and sell it, often using online services to run their business. What if AI can make running that business easier or at least less costly to run?
Wouldn’t this be an interesting opportunity for makerspaces to become incubators for one-person companies? Makerspace creates the environment for useful experimentation and collaboration in local communities. In the US, we may not be able to get the same kind of support of the government as in China but the US has the same challenge that China recognizes — what will people do? Nobody seems to really know.
Let me know if you’re interested in exploring makerspaces as a network of incubators for one-person companies.
Kevin Kelly’s advice
Wired Senior Editor and friend of Make:, Kevin Kelly gave this answer to a question about the kind of jobs young people might find in the future.
One of the bits of advice I have for young people, which my apply here, is try to work in an area where there's no language and no names. What is it that you're doing? Try to be out in front of language, because that means you are in a real frontier. Try to work on something where it takes you 20 minutes to explain to your parents what you're actually doing. That's a good sign. Now, it doesn't guarantee success. But it does guarantee that you are breaking the rules. It does guarantee that you are out there on the frontier, because that's the definition of a frontier is that we don't have the words or the language for it.
His advice reminds me of when I was talking about the Web in 1992, having to explain browsers and servers and that the information could be anywhere in the world, not on your local machine — and that almost anyone could publish on the Web. Doubters with an MBA said there was no business model behind the Web. Doubters with a CS degree said the Web would never scale. Ordinary people? They thought it was pretty cool once you explained to them what was going on. They could see the opportunities.
The New One Dollar Board
The new “One Dollar Board” was on our radar this week, although it’s based on a ten-year old open-source hardware project. The GitHub repo was created this year, and it looks to be by one of the original founders. The One Dollar Board is based on the CH32V003, an ultra-cheap RISC-V MCU with 2KB SRAM, 16KB flash, and up to 18 GPIOs that sells for under $0.10.
The Computer of Things is the philosophy behind the One Dollar Board. Instead of just connecting objects to the internet, we want to give intelligence to every object — making the physical world programmable, accessible, and creative.
If anyone has had any experience with the One Dollar Board, please let us know. I so want there to be a “Dollar Store” for computing, something like the old Radio Shack.
Austin Bike Zoo
The Austin Bike Zoo was one of the first makers we found for Maker Faire Austin back in 2007. Their creative collection of bike-based curiosities are really beautiful. The Austin Bike Zoo, according to their post on Facebook, will be part of the Silk Road event in San Antonio Texas today. “Come take a ride on our beautiful bikes and experience the cultural exchange with makers and performers from around the world today,” the post reads. It’s great to see them out and about for spring.
Austin Bike Zoo (from their Facebook)
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