Saul Griffith's House of Cool Ideas

Other Lab founder Saul Griffith has made a fortune applying way-out mathematics to inventions large and small, including robotic kites, insulation inspired by origami, and the carbon-emissions calculator WattzOn.

Cody Pickens

Ninja Style Saul Griffith, inventrepreneur. One of his specialties is applying way-out mathematics to real problems, small and large.

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Like any thoughtful person, Saul Griffith has ideas as he walks around: Hey, wouldn't it be cool if… You know, we sure could use… Why doesn't someone make a better… But it's hard to imagine anyone who does this as often, and in such a variety of areas, and -- this is the important part -- with such acute ability to execute them. Whereas most people muse, Griffith makes.

"My life is a living laboratory," Griffith likes to say, and he certainly does live it that way, walking around until he bumps into a problem and then retreating to his San Francisco lair to figure out how best to create his way around it. The bearded, 35-year-old Australian is a rare specimen in the commercial universe: a hybrid of inventor and entrepreneur with the aptitude to identify things that the world needs and then make and sell them. He is, for lack of a better and more established term, an inventrepreneur, and to follow Griffith around is to be constantly stooping to pick up ideas for products and companies that trail behind him like coins that have fallen through a hole in his pocket.

"Saul is an omnivorous inventor," says Neil Gershenfeld, the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and one of Griffith's former postdoctoral advisers at that university. "He invents the way most people breathe, as a fundamental aspect of how he functions."

When the MacArthur Foundation handed Griffith one of its famous "genius grants" in 2007, it called him a "prodigy of invention in service of the world community." It cited his work at MIT, where as a graduate student he demonstrated how machines can self-assemble, and where he designed a membrane-based molding system that could be used to mass-produce cheap corrective lenses for the developing world (and that eventually became a company now known as OptiOpia); as well as his work educating children about science through the quirky, instructive cartoons known as Howtoons; and, lastly, for the many other clever and practical devices born at Squid Labs, the now-defunct Bay Area research laboratory that once served as his home base.

When I visited him in San Francisco last fall, Griffith was in the middle of a career swerve. He had recently removed himself from his last start-up, an ambitious alternative-energy company known as Makani Power, and he had only just turned on the lights at his newest company, Other Lab.

Other Lab is not an easy business to define. You might call it an incubator, though Griffith avoids the term because of the stink it obtained during the dot-com boom and bust (that is, as a place where investment capital is wasted on foosball tables and projects that go nowhere). You might call it the lair of a mad scientist. Essentially, it is a workshop in which inventions are launched and tested in the hopes that they become products that either will be sold off or will grow into companies.

Griffith is especially worked up these days about climate change. It's the issue that most drives him, and his colorful talks on the subject make him a hot commodity at egghead jamborees such as TED and PopTech. Of late, he has embarked on a personal "energy diet," attempting to curtail what he realized was a hypocritical lifestyle for a climate-change evangelist. How did he come to realize this? Because he was curious, and when he's curious, interesting things almost inevitably happen.

In this case, Griffith and his Other Lab mates built arguably the world's best and most user-friendly carbon calculator. WattzOn (wattzon.com) will possibly one day become a thriving business -- you can easily imagine companies licensing the technology to analyze their business footprint -- but in the meantime, it's a free online tool that spits out detailed analyses that, in Griffith's case, not only caused him to give up driving but also to forgo imported wine, cancel his beloved New York Times subscription (to the continued chagrin of his wife), and ditch his dryer for a clothesline that ticked off his landlord.

Origami insulation
Explorations in the design of lightweight, high-efficiency energy-saving materials

"I'm working on phasing carbon out of my life," he tells me as he plucks his infant son, Huxley, from a plastic tub mounted to the front of a clunky-looking three-wheeled bicycle Griffith had brought back from Denmark; he is, naturally, intending to build a better, cooler version of it. "As a friend put it -- very well -- I'm trying to figure out how to live the life I would like others to lead." He sighs. "But, man, it's hard."

If the economic climate were different and investment capital for out-there-seeming businesses hadn't suddenly vanished in late 2008, Griffith would probably still be pedaling from his San Francisco home for a ferry ride to Alameda Island and the retired air-traffic-control tower that housed Makani Power. There, he and his pals were well on their way to delivering scalable wind energy using airplane-size robotic kites inspired, in part, by the wings Griffith has been designing to power his kite-surfing hobby since college.

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