Talk: “From hobbies to professional challenges” by Lauri Väin

• Time: Tuesday, Nov 13th, 19:30 – 21:00 
• Location: MakerBay Central, at PMQ H508, 35 Aberdeen St, Central HK [map]
• Price: Free for all

#Robotics #Space #Engineering #Real Problems #Entrepreneurship

Lauri will share his experiences with the UAV Outback Challenge before UAVs were mainstream, the NASA Centennial Challenge and how hobby projects lead to professional challenges. He will also talk about forming teams, connections, and gaining insights while solving real problems.

Lauri Väin
Lauri is currently VP of engineering of an amazing startup called Starship Technologies, that makes the next generation of local delivery solutions: a global fleet of safe, practical, earthbound robots to deliver your goods within 30 minutes and doing so at less than one tenth of the current cost.

Lauri was one of Skype’s early employees that turned a small Estonian startup to a multinational later acquired by Microsoft.

Lauri is a technologist with a wide angle view on the world. He specializes in figuring out how complex systems are best built for maximal effect, even scenarios with major constraints (product, technical, legal, physical, organizational or financial). Comfortable in an environment of high uncertainty and fluid conditions as well as structured mature ones.

Lauri has a strong passion for deep diving into areas that may be entirely unfamiliar, extracting priorities and coming up with new solutions. Previous roles in product managing core technology, architecting solutions, purchase of major vendor solutions, product analytical roles, software and hardware engineering.

Projects and direct operational management ranging from highly available real-time systems with transactions-per-second rates in the hundreds of thousands, security solutions, storage of online operational data in hundreds of terabytes, bulletproof third-party APIs, high volume streaming, bulk loading, online marketing channels, financial applications with regulatory restrictions (the designed system now processes a billion EUR annually across all markets). Interest, consulting and multiple years of experience in the field physical robot rover swarms, re-engineering traditional solutions in novel ways, mechatronics, and composites, production techniques, some aerodynamics experience.