Hi, my name is David Lang and today is my 10,865th day in the world. A few people are doing the math in their head, and that's 29 years and 9 months. To give you a little bit more perspective, the average American lives for about 28,000 days, about 78 years.
Canadians actually live a little bit longer. Canadians average about 29,000 days. But by and large, that is the deck that we're all playing with. There's something about... Counting the number of days that you've been alive that feels different than counting the number of years.
And I think that's because you can feel a day in a way that you can't feel a year. You remember what you had for breakfast, you remember coming over to the theater, you remember what the weather is like. It fits inside this horizon of our minds.
It makes it seem more finite. And today, I want to talk about one of my days, and that was my 10,000th day. So if you've learned anything from me thus far, you know I have this weird obsession with counting days.
So you can imagine that my 10,000th day was important to me. And it was. It's because I made it important. Years before that, I had promised myself that no matter what was going on in my life, no matter where I was working, what I was doing, that I was going to take that entire day off and just reflect.
on the first 10,000 days and what I learned, and then the next 10,000 days and what I would like to see happen in those days. But before I get into that day and those stories, I need to tell you a little bit about a few days that happened previous to that. I'm going to start with my 9,424th day.
This was a really fateful Saturday in December in San Francisco where I met Eric Stackpole. And Eric... The picture here is Eric in an underwater cave, and as soon as I met Eric, this is all he wanted to tell me about, was this underwater cave.
He had been looking for it for a long time. There were rumors of gold in the bottom of this cave, in the foothills of the Sierras in California, that was supposedly a robbery from the gold rush. And there were stories online of treasure hunters who had gone and tried to get to the bottom of this underwater cave with no success.
But Eric, Eric had a different plan. Eric wanted to build an underwater robot, and he put this thing on the table when we first met, and it was his earliest prototype. And he explained to me it was an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle.
I didn't know what that was at the time, but it was an underwater robot that would send live video back up to the surface that you could control with a laptop. And I'm sitting here, because at the time, I had an office job, and like a lot of people, I just spent my whole days writing emails. And my jaw was on the floor.
Because this story had so much excitement and adventure and so much that was missing from my own life. And I told Eric right then, I said, I'm in, I want to be a part of this, let's do this, let's find this treasure. And Eric said, okay, great.
But there was a big problem. The robot didn't work and we didn't know what we were doing. So we did what anybody would do is we asked the internet for help.
And so we bought this domain, OpenROV.com. and told everyone, hey, we're building this open-source underwater robot, and here are the designs we have so far, and we welcome any advice or feedback. And for the first several months, that was it. Just me and Eric on the forums, me asking them questions about buoyancy and electronics, and us not getting very far. Which brings me to the next important day, and this is day 9635. And this was a...
Tuesday in July, and I'll never forget this day, I went into that office job and got called into the office of the woman that I was working for, and she explained to me that the company wasn't doing very well and I was being laid off. And for anyone who's gone through that, they know how hard that can be. And for me, it was especially hard because I was losing a job.
where my main skill was writing emails, and that was a really sad thing to lose. So not only did I not have a job, I felt that I didn't have any skills, because I loved this underwater robot project that we were working on, but I wasn't able to contribute because I was technically worthless. And so I decided right then and there, instead of trying to race, into some other job and start applying, that I was going to re-skill myself with skills to actually make something.
And so I called this process my zero-to-maker journey. And initially, it was going to only take one month. And so I started taking welding classes and woodworking classes. I started taking classes in digital fabrication, like 3D printers and laser cutters, and even got into electronics.
And all the while, Eric and I were continuing to tinker and develop our underwater robot. And it finally got to the point where it was good enough to actually go and explore that underwater cave. So we got a bunch of our friends together, and we mounted this, I guess you could call it an expedition, but for us it was just a fun weekend, and went up to the foothills of the Sierras and found that underwater cave with our robot.
And we went down, and we sent it down into the depths, and we didn't find any gold. But we had a great story, and we had a lot of fun, and we had learned so much. Which brings me to my 10,000th day. So some of you might still be doing the math, but...
By this time, I was still on my zero-to-maker journey, and I had completely run out of money. By any material measurement, my life was in shambles. I didn't have a job, I could no longer afford the rent in my apartment, so I had been living out of my car. My girlfriend didn't like that, so she split up with me.
It was bad. It was a really kind of... Material-wise, it was a bad moment. But I did what I promised.
I took the whole day off. And I just walked around San Francisco, and I thought really hard about all the choices I had made leading up to being a 27-year-old homeless person who's just building robots with his friends in his garage. And I was thinking, what am I going to do now? But I was surprisingly calm about it, and I thought, OK, you got to this point, and you learned a lot.
And so those first 10,000 days were going to be about exploring. But the next 10,000, I'm going to focus on building things with people that I care about. And I kept thinking of that Native American saying, if you want to go fast, go alone.
But if you want to go far, go together. And that kept going through my mind. And I got back to work.
And it was about a week after that that we launched our project, OpenROV, on Kickstarter. And we had no idea what to expect. We put it up there, and we raised our goal of $20,000 in about two hours, and we ended up raising $100,000. on Kickstarter, which two years ago was a lot of money on Kickstarter, and now people raise a lot more. But for us, this was amazing.
All of a sudden, we had all the money to do what we'd wanted to build. The only problem is we actually had to build them. So we actually had to start a manufacturing company to actually build those underwater robots, and that was a huge challenge.
But we did it. And so we started manufacturing these robots, and we shipped them out to all our Kickstarter backers, and we shipped them all over the world to all these people. And now we've grown. In the last 18 months, we've shipped over 1,300. underwater robots and have become one of the largest underwater robot manufacturers by volume in the entire world.
Which is pretty amazing. And I got a book deal out of the whole thing. I got to write about my whole zero to maker journey about how to reskill yourself. And I even got to give a TED talk about the whole thing.
So that's what I've been up to for the last 865 days. It's been a wild ride. But I still keep thinking about that 10,000th day and it's not The round number aspect doesn't matter. What I keep thinking about was that moment where I decided, okay, what happened up until now happened. And going forward, I'm going to do things differently.
I'm going to create a new path. And I have three lessons that I want to talk about from that 10,000th day. The first one is that success is nothing personal.
I've been incredibly lucky. I've gotten to do a lot. all of my biggest goals. I started a company, I wrote a book, and I got to give a TED talk.
I'm pretty much done. But the interesting thing about that is those accomplishments actually don't feel that special, because now I'm aware of how much other people had to do with that. Not only the people that I work with, but the people who came before me and created these opportunities for me.
And those achievements pale in comparison to seeing other people. Build on top of what you've done. This is a high school in Oakland that's exploring lakes and oceans. This is Leslie in Atlanta, and Dominic in Sydney, and Jessica in Rhode Island. And there's classrooms, and there's families.
And later on, you should go to the site OpenExplorer and see just what these people are doing with these underwater robots. And it... I don't even have words for it.
It just fills me up. And I realized that success is not about something that I do personally. It's about all of these other people who get to build on top of what we've done and the work that we've done. That's what's important.
Number two is... about exploration and about going further. So growing up, and then even finding myself in this office job, you think that exploration is something that doesn't happen anymore, that humans have discovered every inch of this planet and that we know everything, and that there's a few people on TV who get to go to these places and learn these things, and then they come back and tell us about them in these shows and in these magazines. And that is not the case.
Since building these underwater robots, we've brought them to underwater reef bases. off the coast of Florida, in cenotes in Mexico. We've seen sharks. They've been in Antarctica. They've been in reefs.
And they've even seen shipwrecks. And I've realized that there is so much left to learn. explore and it's very very important that we do it because that's what humans do we find the horizons and we go past them and now is a better time than any time in history to do that And the last thing is about sharing, is about doing it together.
So when Eric and I first met, we had this long conversation about values and adventure and exploration and this idea that wouldn't it be cool if there were thousands of underwater robots all over the world and you could go online and you could control them and explore anywhere? Wouldn't that be cool? That was a dream we had that we wanted to see exist.
And we invited other people to believe in that with us. and it's made the journey so meaningful. And I saw this quote the other day, and this is actually what I want to end on, that pretty much summed up the way I feel.
It's a dream you dream alone is only a dream, but a dream you dream together becomes reality. So I hope you all enjoy and appreciate the rest of your day. Thank you.