And until the dying days of 2008, Makani was humming along, honing its technology and increasing both the size of the kites and the duration of their flights. A prototype the size of a piano tested on Maui was generating enough energy to power five American homes. Then the recession hit. The investment tap ran dry; Griffith says, "We had to scale back pretty dramatically to survive. We cut down to the smallest possible technical team."
This would gut many people, and surely it was painful for Griffith, but he also saw it as an opening, and so among the things slashed from the budget was himself. "I'm an expensive employee," he says. "I could still be useful, but there are others who could be more useful." As founder, he remains involved in the company's big-picture decisions, but he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations. Instead, Griffith took survey of his life -- fragmented market, baby on the way -- and decided to abandon the deep dive and return to the surface. He would paddle around and pursue many ideas.
It was not an especially complicated or well-thought-out process. He collected a few core people and thought, We've got some interesting ideas. We can survive. We'll boot up Other Lab.
To get things started, he had some consulting gigs ("major energy companies, I think you can say") as well as a DARPA grant, his 3-D modeling software, and "a whole bunch of other ideas in the energy space." Plus Howtoons, which sells books and hopes to soon complete a deal to produce educational materials for a federal agency. For start-up capital, he dipped into the $500,000 award that came with his MacArthur grant.
"We have some work that's good and paying," he says. "We have a whole bunch of intellectual property we're trying to get out in the world -- cool stuff that we've developed but never had time to push out. We do this superhigh abstract math and physics stuff, but then you're always thinking about its association with other things. We realized, Wow, we could use this to make amazing cardboard gorillas or jigsaw puzzles."
So that started as something else entirely?
"That started," Griffith says, "when DARPA said, 'We would like you to build us Terminator 2, quite literally.' [Terminator 2, if you're not familiar with the movie of the same name, was a sort of animate silver goo that looked like mercury and could fashion itself into any form it encountered, animal or otherwise.] Their example: Wouldn't it be great if our soldiers had a screwdriver that became a wrench that became an airplane?"
I laugh. He doesn't. "There's a deep relationship between information and structure," he says. "You need a certain amount of information to describe a 3-D structure."
This is not easy to grasp, but the gist is that Griffith and Bachrach haven't yet made T2, but in the early stages of fumbling in that general direction, they have made some cool 3-D gorillas that can easily be manufactured in pieces, and given a few more months, they might also change the way cars are assembled.
"We specifically have been working on this idea that we can build a mechanical synthetic analog to DNA," says Griffith. "Turns out, I can build a string that can fold any 3-D shape from a string of tetrahedra. By choosing a left- or right-hand fold at any hinge, it can make any shape. And we developed some pretty elegant math and theory that describes how you do that."
That has since become another puzzle -- a strand of plastic DNA that can be made, via a series of rights and lefts, into just about anything. It's out at toy fairs now and should be in stores sometime in 2010.
"This is a pretty cool frontier," he says. "So we developed a bunch of tools that describe geometry -- that's how we ended up doing these surface models, which relates to making better jigsaw puzzles, which relates to inflatable elephants, which relates to how you sew more optimized T-shirts. It's a very fruitful, fun area to think about."
As much as Griffith loves to come across as a fun-loving eccentric, he wants to make it very clear that he's also up to serious science. Sure, he's having fun with puzzles and bikes, but his real passion is and always will be energy.
As he bounces along from idea to idea, all the while salting his sentences with ominous facts about the energy problem, I can't help wondering if he isn't going to give himself a crisis of conscience. I ask if he ever feels as if he's not making the best use of his abilities. Does he not feel pressure to be the Dean Kamen of climate change?
"Every day, I wonder if I'm working on the right things," Griffith says. "But I want to enjoy what I do. Everyone does."
He would be thrilled to churn out one product after another that finds a market, however small, because he feels as though the little guys are now at the helm of innovation's ship. But he certainly hopes that a big hit isn't far off. And he wants more than anything for one -- or several -- of those hits to make a real impact on climate change.
He has, he says, "every entrepreneur's problem. You're always trying to find the union of things you want to work on and things that are marketable and investable. And to find the overlap in that Venn diagram."
As the two of us eat lunch, Griffith wanders back around to the underlying question of all these conversations.
"Here's the business story," he says. "We're going to hit 450 parts per million" -- the scientific assessment of the maximum amount of carbon our atmosphere can handle -- "because we have no choice, and whoever invents technologies that allow people to increase their quality of life while hitting that number wins -- and wins big." He pauses.
"The business landscape looks like infinite possibility."
Josh Dean is a regular contributor to Inc. For the March 2009 issue, he wrote about the Wexley School for Girls advertising agency.
