Diego Fonstad, Educational Toys and Ed Tech Tinkerer 

 

92-145. Diego Fonstad

SPEAKERS

Diego Fonstad, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachmann, and I’m delighted to be here today with Diego Fonstad, Diego, welcome to the show. So, Diego. Tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard,

 

Diego Fonstad  00:24

Well, I’ve had quite an unusual one, I would guess I would say, but I’m sure I’m not the first one to say that I left after I left Harvard, I had the good fortune of spending a year abroad, living in Barcelona, where I was working at a business school, and that exposed me, you know, I was an I was a government undergrad, and so thought I was going to go back to grad school, but that exposed me to the world of business. And shortly, when I got back, I decided to apply for a consulting job, and worked in consulting for a number of years, primarily in the healthcare world, bunch of a small boutique firm that worked with a lot of biotech and healthcare companies and got to see a lot of really eye opening things in that process. And then the Internet came around, the first internet wave, and I jumped ship to that, and had the good fortune of at this stage, seeing at least two bubbles of the internet, and kind of in the middle of the first bubble, I focused mostly at that point on being a product manager and product running product groups. I decided that it was a good time to take cover at school again and went back to business school. Was one of the older guys there. I graduated in 2003 and then went from there to start a biotech company, and did biotech for four or five years, until we got a round of funding where my role there wasn’t as critical, and have since explored both green building, but most recently, have for the last 10 years, been in I guess you’d call it ed tech. But I also sometimes just say I’m a toy maker. I make educational toys, and I have a small company in San Francisco that focuses on creating hands on toys for kids to learn electronics engineering and coding, and that’s kind of my career arc in the process. I had four kids and four step kids, and they are all out of the house at this point. So I am now a very hands full empty nester, and very excited with the the various, you know, following the various lives of of these eight amazing kids. And, yeah, that’s been the on that side. The last after the 25th reunion, I also kind of reconnected with a bunch of the guys that I used to row with, and we have been staying in touch ever since. And get due to at least two events a year, sometimes up to three, the head of the Charles the San Diego crew classic, and we keep trying to find that third one to do, but it’s been a lot of fun. And so, all right, that’s a quick version. I think you got a lot of questions from there. I’m sure

 

Will Bachman  03:47

I do. I have many, many questions, and I may jump around a little bit. How did the job come about? Of the job at Barcelona, at the B school, at the business school in Barcelona. What prompted you do that? If you were thinking about grad school, what prompted that and and also, how did you get that job?

 

Diego Fonstad  04:09

You know, it was pure opportunity. I had known a a professor years ago through my my family, who was taking a sabbatical in the US, and wanted somebody to to run this same project he was going to be doing in the US at his school. And so he gave me that opportunity. And going to Barcelona during 92 during the 92 Olympics, was too hard to turn down. And I just, I went for it.

 

Will Bachman  04:42

Tell, us, what did you learn that year? How did you emerge different from that year than than when you started? What? What did you know different about the world, about Europe, about Barcelona, about Spain?

 

Diego Fonstad  04:57

Oh, that’s a great question. Restaurant. I mean, I think I, you know, being immersed in in Spain during that time, I don’t think I had really realized the how Catalonia was so different from the rest of it. You know, living in Catalonia and I had, they were, I was, I’m bilingual, and so I was able to speak Spanish. But being an American, they gave me some slack and not knowing Catalan. And the importance of knowing Catalan for them and the importance of their own culture, was something that was completely eye opening for me. I am. I was also exposed to just how business schools worked and, and the whole case study method, and, and, and that that form of teaching, which I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that, that kind of exploring of a problem through a story, and I found that a very valuable way of learning things. And I’ve always been someone who likes stories. Tend to read more, you know, nonfiction than fiction, but I think that then taking that and, you know, having a path for teaching off of that story, I found very valuable, and that’s something I I enjoyed a lot from, from that experience.

 

Will Bachman  06:15

All right, let’s jump now to to what you currently have going on, and we’ll maybe loop back and fill in some of the gaps. But tell us about some of these educational toys that your your company produces, these physical products that help understand, you know, as you talked about coding and technology and so forth,

 

Diego Fonstad  06:33

yeah, so at this point, like now, Gosh, 15 years ago, I was kind of had left that biotech company and was trying to figure out what to do next. And the Head of School of my daughter’s all girls school. She’s now 27 but she was in middle school back then, called me into the office, and I had been talking to her about tinkering and the importance of hands on learning, and she said, Why don’t you? We’ve got this opportunity to build out a maker space here. Can you help get that set up? And I helped set it up. They asked if I would want to stay on and direct it, but I didn’t want to be working in the academic environment as an administrator, and so I managed to finagle the title of resident tinkerer for about eight years as kind of I got to brainstorm with teachers and design curriculum with them, and in that process, I became increasingly frustrated with What the existing products were that were teaching electronics engineering and coding, and it was I just didn’t like how they fit with how I thought these things should be taught. And I kept looking for somebody designing a better product, and finally decided to build my own. And so I started a company called imagination supply CO, and our first product line is called electrify. And the the name imagination supply CO is this very ambitious concept of I remembered in the reading in the early days that when Ted Turner set up CNN, he had all the flags of like in the UN in front of in front of the building, even though they were just a tiny Podunk thing, because he had big goals for it. And so I thought, Well, my big goals are that I’ll sell more than just these products. I’m making everything for imagination, but the first product line is electrifying, and to this day, that is still our only product line. But, you know, I still have goals to sell other imagination supply, kind of like Acme, but for imagination. And yeah, so we do things. What I described, there’s three different levels. There’s simple circuits, simple logic and coding. And so we provide tools and products that make it easy for kids to explore electronics, coding and logic and then more advanced coding. And so that’s our our product line. And what you see behind me is a lot of both prototypes and just things I’ve collected that kind of go into this over the years. But yeah, our board, we have a little in a board like this is something that’s a a little vibrating motor project that you use for for exploring

 

Diego Fonstad  09:32

the engineering process. These look so fun. This is a describe

 

Will Bachman  09:40

it, because we’re going to publish this as an audio episode. So let me, let me see what I’m seeing here. I’ll just give a little description of it. Can you up again?

 

Diego Fonstad  09:49

So, yeah, so this, this, this is a little board that has a vibrating motor on it,

 

Will Bachman  09:55

and it’s kind of a shape of a says little engineer on it. So it’s the shape of a, kind of a. Robot kind of thing with some some feet that, I guess, wiggle, and then it moves forward. It, it,

 

Diego Fonstad  10:06

yeah, when you turn on the vibrating motor, it’ll just rattle around on you, okay? And then the idea is that the students will then, you know, in there’s, there’s a very common project called a brush bot, where they do that, and it’s fun and it’s engaging. But the next there’s kind of a now, what in the teaching? And in this case, because you can change how the position, you can change the way it’s set up, you can try to make it move in a predictable way. So it’s the idea for this product is to have them explore the engineering process by, you know, make a change, observe how that change changes the system, and then, and then, then apply your, you know, hypothesis, what you can do to change it further, and then observe again. So it’s that, it’s that cycle of iterate, observe change. Iterate, observe change, and and that’s, you know, that’s how people work in the engineering process, and it’s kind of, and there’s a very popular project that is used with this, where they make a little cardboard car that races down a cardboard ramp. And it’s really just a riff of like the the pinewood derby that is done by the Boy Scouts. But one of the things that I don’t like about the pinewood derby as a project is that it really isn’t the engineering process. You’re given one piece of wood, and it’s precious, and you can only you’ve got to get it right with that one block and and in the real world, you you try something, if it doesn’t work, you throw it out and start over. And you know, it’s not this one simple thing. It’s this. It’s this constant testing and iterating, which is harder to do when you have one precious resource like that, just a different lesson that you get out of. But it’s not the engineering process.

 

Will Bachman  11:59

Yeah, tell us about how

 

Diego Fonstad  12:02

this one here is, is for teaching computer science and coding. And this is an example of something called, I call the very useful monster, where you have these boards that use called the micro bit. And on them, they can do a lot of things. They have a lot of built in features to them. They have LEDs. They have they can power motors. They can they have sensors built into them. And often, when you learn to code with them, all the pieces of them, you learn how to do each one of those independent of each other, and it’s interesting, and you learn that. You learn the components. But when you do the very useful monster, what you’re doing is the as your coding increases, the the monster becomes more useful. So as you learn more, the monster grows. So as you grow in your coding journey, so does your monster. And that is the the idea of both creating the product, but also the kind of the curriculum around it that is engaging and tries to be also tries to be open ended, you know, it’s a very useful monster. And so it’s purposely vague. What does useful mean? Well, it’s what’s useful for you and, and that’s kind of the process. It’s, you know, it’s trying to, trying to do this kind of constructivist learning, but, but also still learning the basics, you know,

 

Will Bachman  13:23

what sort of impact have you seen on the the kids who have, you know, been, then, been using your products. What, what sort of transformation Have you seen?

 

Diego Fonstad  13:35

You know, it’s, it’s interesting. I would say, you know, when kids interact and really get to you can that level of engagement is, you know, it’s what keeps you going. Because I’ll tell you that a education is not a high money making business. You know, this is, this is more out of a out of out of trying to, kind of get, to get that lightning in the bottle of seeing the kids engage with and show it to their parents, or show to the teachers and learn things. And yeah, I mean, so you there’s countless examples of of those, those kids who may not be engaged in class, but when they are given an opportunity to build something, or given their opportunity to code their own thing, suddenly become active and engaged and are are just different students and and those are, you know, you always love seeing those stories. I’ll say one of the things that has been more of a surprise, and that I kind of, I I knew about the students, and I knew that I, if I did it right, I would engage the students. One of the surprises is that by building a more craft focused and engaging structure for teaching and learning things. I’ve made it much more accessible to the teachers. So a lot of teachers are intimidated by having to teach some of these things, and by creating a framework that they get suddenly they become more comfortable with it, and that’s been the. Bigger surprise. I mean, I think honestly, early on, the surprise was how intimidated teachers were by this space. I call it like the fear pyramid that a lot of teachers find stem intimidating, because in most, most schools, especially non independent schools, the science teacher is is a roving specialist that’s, you know, going to be coming through. And most of them are also probably their science background is in life sciences. So when you give them an engineering project or an electronics project, they’re just going to be like, Whoa. I can’t even engage with that. And so getting them to, like, and then at the tip of the fear pyramid is electronic. I mean, it’s coding. And that’s like, everybody’s like, why? Don’t know what to do with that. And so these days, even though a lot of people have like, you know, coding requirements in schools, they use things like code.org as a as I describe it as the equivalent of of when your substitute teacher would roll in the VCR and be like, here, you guys sit and watch this. They use things like code.org to just, Okay, kids, just follow the instructions here and do that. So finding that you know when you create something that’s engaging and accessible to the teachers, that becomes so much easier to permeate, you know. And I initially thought I was just focused on the students, but it’s really getting the teachers comfortable with this technology has been critical as well. The early adopters, I mean, were were comfortable, you know, like people who ran makerspaces, those, those were some of the early adopters. But as you start to kind of expand beyond that into the broader population, it’s the teachers and and I guess you know, if it done right, that’ll have an even bigger impact than just one or two students who really connect with it.

 

Will Bachman  16:52

Tell us a bit about your own history as a tinkerer. Did you grow up building stuff and playing around with electronics or carpentry, or tell us how you, how you came to this.

 

Diego Fonstad  17:03

Yeah, it’s, it’s funny, I think I always did like building stuff, even like at Harvard, I my senior year, I took a class. I actually kind of made my own engineering class, even though I was a government major, I structured a class to to build something and, and I had taken some classes. I was, I reason I picked government was because half the core applied to the major so I could take whatever other classes I wanted, constantly. And, and I took a lot of engineering, and I did the machine shop there, I don’t know, in the data machine shop. And the project you walked out with was a little cannon that proves that you knew how to use lathe, the CNC, the mill that all these components and and that was you built this little aluminum cannon.

 

Will Bachman  17:54

Did you get the fire?

 

Diego Fonstad  17:57

No, you were. You were specifically not allowed to bore it out because it was aluminum. If you actually tried to put something in there that I think could explode into shrapnel, it wasn’t strong enough to like to hold, it’s so so they didn’t want you to. They only let you bore it a little bit. It didn’t, you didn’t get to bore it all the way out to try to make it a functional cannon.

 

Will Bachman  18:22

I had, I have never heard of this course that sounds so cool.

 

Diego Fonstad  18:25

So that was that that was actually just a that was a, not a like a credit course, it was something, if you wanted to have access to the machine shop, you had to go in and take this course over time with and show up with the machine guy. This is like in the physics building, they had this machine shop that you could go in and and then, and once you got certified, you could go in on your own and do stuff you had to demonstrate knowledge of how to do

 

Will Bachman  18:53

that. I have a new number one regret about something I didn’t do at Harvard that sounds so cool, learning to use machine shop, and, you know, safe, safely. Use all these like lathe and different devices. And, yeah, and,

 

Diego Fonstad  19:06

you know, I think I had somewhere around here. Shoot, I wish I had it handy. The I found the other day a piece of something I built during my time there. But my pant back, and you could see my desk, you would understand why it’s so hard to find. I don’t know where it is. Yeah, so, so at the time, I convinced a professor in an engineering to to sponsor me for a project which is basically almost like a a thesis level, kind of independent class there that I designed a The goal was to measure the power output of a cyclist pedal stroke. So I had my junior and senior year. I had decided to join the cycling team, and everybody would talk about how an efficient pedal. Metal had stroke, had equal power all the way around. So you’re pulling and pushing. It’s not just the push down. It’s trying to smooth out that. And so I wanted to figure out a way of measuring that. And so I convinced this. I had no business doing this, but because I didn’t really understand the physics or the engineering or any of that, but I convinced a professor to sponsor me, and basically let me try to design this thing. And I got, I got close to the point of starting to measure it, and then some short circuit happened, and the whole thing just started smoking and and that’s when I just had to call it a day. And that that was just happened too late in the process.

 

Will Bachman  20:41

So, yeah, wow. Okay, what a crazy place Harvard is that gov major is building this, like cyclometer meter thing, very

 

Diego Fonstad  20:52

cool. Yeah, it was, it was, it was basically, initially I thought it was going to be the clipless pedal part that it was going to snap in and put a pressure sensor on there. But then when I realized how pressure sensors worked, I had to rebuild a full pedal that could work with the strain gages and and then I so I made one of those, and I put strain gages on it, and I was going to measure it and do all these things with it.

 

Will Bachman  21:17

Sounds pretty complicated, so you were doing that. So it sounds like you were kind of had this interest. It wasn’t something you maybe grew up as a kid, but at Harvard, you were started getting into building physical things. And then did you kind of continue that interest after you graduated? And were, you know, going to business school and being a consultant and so forth, and through all those years?

 

Diego Fonstad  21:39

You know, in a weird way I would say no, because I think in our time when we graduated, it was almost drilled into us that it was like a service economy, that that the future was not like with what you could do with your brain, not what you could do with your hands. And so it was always something that was dormant for me, that you that I liked doing it, but I was focused on, you know, things I could do with my brain as opposed to what I could do with my hands. And so the closest I would do is, almost every year when my kids were born, I would build something for them. So I built a desk for my kids out of scrap lumber. That was like, you know, we had a building project, and they were throwing away all this beautiful lumber. So I made a desk out of it, and and I did, I did a few projects like that, like woodworking projects, but they were always a very side thing that it was, you know, that’s not what I that was thought need, but it was just something I would do off to the side,

 

Will Bachman  22:38

yeah, tell us a bit about Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of articles about maker spaces, and it seems like it had a rise. I’m not sure exactly when, but sometime in the 2008 2010 or two, sometime in there, you started hearing about it, and there’d be some, maybe in schools like you did, or community ones, like, I know there’s one in Brooklyn, and I’m not sure now if they’re kind of getting eclipsed a little bit by all the energy around AI. But tell us about, you know, what you’ve seen in this kind of world of maker spaces?

 

Diego Fonstad  23:16

Yeah, no, so, I mean, you’re absolutely right. It’s, I mean, a lot of things in education follow this pendulum swing. You know that suddenly this becomes the important thing, and then this becomes the important thing. And in that timeframe that you described, definitely it was there was this sudden interest and energy behind makerspaces, and so much so that there was even this program started by DARPA called mentor makerspaces, where they were supposed to fund, you know, hundreds of 1000s of maker spaces around the US. And there’s like, no small irony that, like, you know, after the Biden chips act, it’s all like, Hey, we got to learn. We got to teach people trades again and teach them how to make stuff again, you know. And it’s just like, yeah, we’ve been there, done that, you know. I mean, it’s like, it wasn’t specifically around the trades and that, but it’s, it’s a variant of that, you know, I would say the there definitely was a big push for it. I think in the in the makerspace world, I would have a lot of it as as a parent who was helping out in that time, I was always very nervous because people wanted them, but couldn’t articulate why. And that always makes you nervous when something is so hot, everybody has to have it, but doesn’t know why they have to have it. And so I think that was one of the challenges with it back then. I think that a lot of people had different and it was almost like a rorschachist. It was what you wanted it to be. Some people saw it as a way of teaching hands on making others taught. Saw it as a way of teaching stem. Others saw it as a way of teaching problem solving. And so, for example, here in the Bay Area, there was a very, there’s still very successful school called nueva, and they had set up a very. Uh, visited and popular Makerspace that other schools would come and like make pilgrimages to, and a lot of their background came out of the design school of Stanford. So for them, the makerspace was about teaching the process of design thinking and problem solving through design whereas there’s another school in our area called lick Wilmerding that has had a makerspace since the beginning, but theirs is much more about the craft of making. And so their focus, they would have these very advanced woodworking classes where you would learn how to make a proper project in woodworking and and they had a very different goal for that. You know, they wanted kids to be able to know how to do something, know, understand the craft well. And that reminded me of when I was in in middle school, the I went to a woodshop, and, you know, I wasn’t allowed to, you know, it was all very prescriptive. It’s like, you know, you’ve got to sand it down to this level with this grit, and then get to this grit and then to that grit and, you know, and the woodshop guy would like mark it with a pencil, and I gotta keep sanding over here, and you go back and and the finished product looked like a good finished product because you were following the very prescribed path. But that’s how a good product is made. Is is like that, whereas in the Design Thinking world, it’s almost the other extreme in design thinking. When you build a product for a prototype, you intentionally want it to be kind of rough looking, so that people don’t are open in their feedback to you about what they give. They don’t if somebody looks at something that’s too well made, they’re like, ah, if I, if I tell them, it sucks that they’re gonna they’re gonna feel bad, because they clearly put a lot of effort into it. So if I give you something, that’s a little janky, you’re more likely to be like, Yeah, I don’t like this feature, that feature. And so it’s like, almost different extremes, but it was still called the MakerSpace. And so, like, you know, there was a lot of issues there. And I do think, though, that, you know, for me, what resonated in terms of the logic of it, was that when you when you combine that feedback of interacting with something physically, and it does encourage you in a number of ways. It encourages you to keep working on the problem, because it’s it’s a problem that you’re holding and and manipulating and working on, but it also it, it’s a discipline in breaking down a problem. When you have a physical problem, that you can break it down in certain ways. That’s a discipline in how you solve that problem. And so that’s a very transferable skill into other parts of life that you can gain from from doing this. So even though the space definitely goes things like a pendulum, I wanted to build a company that would address elements of it that I liked, because I thought the I thought they were valuable.

 

Will Bachman  27:48

You are a few years ahead of me in terms of being an empty nester. I still have two high school kids in the house. Tell us a bit about what your life is like now that all the kids are out, you know, out and launched. Are you traveling, or other kind of activities have emerged to fill some of those hours that you might have spent parenting. Or tell us a bit about life, life today.

 

Diego Fonstad  28:16

Well, so you know, earlier I described the after our 25th I got reconnected with some of the rower guys that I used to and I’ll say one thing that has filled up a lot is I’ve been you’re more active, and you get to do more, you know, you get to do more exercise and focus on it. And rowing is a classic example of something that was very hard to do when the kids were in the house, even, like in masters wearing I tried it 15 years ago. And the, you know, even getting on the water at 5am and getting off by 645 and getting home by seven, I wasn’t able to help get the kids out the door. And so it was just not doable. You know, even waking up at absurd hours of the morning to work out didn’t work with that sport and and, and unfortunately, now that I’m in the 50 age group, I’ve discovered that that’s a common problem. So back in the 40s, Masters rowing is a much sparser place. So you can excel because there are fewer competitors the 50s and 60s are. It’s crowded. So, so one thing I’m doing is a lot more, you know, lot more activity and, and, and just getting more fit and staying active like that. What’s your

 

Will Bachman  29:35

exercise look like? What’s, what’s your typical it’s,

 

Diego Fonstad  29:40

it’s it’s trying to get on. I’ve been, I’ve been taking, I’ve taken a single sculling. Okay, I’m here in San Francisco, so I get to row in a lake. I used to think it was kind of a pain that I had to keep turning the boat around. But it’s, it’s nice to be on a lake because you don’t have to worry as much about the other rowers. You can just sometimes focus. On your rowing. And like, I’m like a river where you’re constantly following the turns and looking over your shoulder and constantly looking for others I could kind of sight down the lake, see if there’s anyone in my way, and then just row for, you know, eight minutes without even thinking which is a it’s a great, great feeling. And so, so there’s that I actually, I, you know, take advantage of living out here mountain biking. I was evaluating, and I’m not sure if I’m going to fully follow through on it, but I went through the process of joining ski patrol to because I wanted to, you know, spend more time in the mountains. And it was a way of forcing me to do that. And that was a great experience. And, and, and just, yeah, fill, filling your time with, with, with, and getting out, and then to travel. I mean, with eight kids all around the United States, there’s, there’s always somebody to visit. So I have done less travel on my own, as I have done just visiting the kids where they are, and that’s been a blast. Because one of the things I find most exciting about empty nesting and watching the kids grow up is that they’re different people to interact with, and they are people you are no longer. You’re always responsible for them at some level, but you’re never you are you just, it’s, it’s a different dynamic that you have with them, and it’s a fun one. It’s fun to be hanging out with somebody who’s pretty interesting and cool on their own merit. And so that’s been a blast. Well, tell

 

Will Bachman  31:45

us a little bit about the biotech company that you helped start. And then, you know, you end up, I guess, getting rolled out of it after a few years, or, you know, leaving it after you got it to the certain stage. Tell us a little bit about that experience, yeah.

 

Diego Fonstad  31:59

So when I, um, you know that was kind of like, if you, if you remember my, my, even my arc when I had first started in consulting and healthcare and, and then the Internet came around, and I decided to to jump into that. But I’d always had an interest in in healthcare and pharma and and, you know that that side of the world. So when I went to business school, I took that as an opportunity to shift focus, you know? So here I’d been software, internet product manager, and you can kind of school is a great place to reinvent yourself and and at Stanford, they had this. They had just started this really interesting program called Bio, I think it’s called Bio X, gosh, it’s been so long ago now that had that would combine med school, engineering school and B school students in a class and work on on projects, and the person running it this amazing professor called Paul Yock, and his experience was primarily in interventional cardiology, and so he that was the focus of a lot of stuff we were doing there, but it gave me an opportunity to literally, like, roam the halls of the school and and see what other professors were up to and and ask, you know, and see, see what kind of cool projects might come out of there. And through another classmate who had found this one professor, I found this opportunity to start this company at the time. It was called a fundamental applied biology fab. And it was a cell free protein synthesis company that was based on this professor who had previously worked at Genentech in the early days, and then come back and gotten his PhD, and and became professor, and maybe already had his PhD, he came back to teach and and it was supposed to be kind of a better, faster, cheaper way of making proteins. It kind of evolved into a company that would make proteins that were hard to manufacture using traditional means. It’s called Sutro biopharma now, and it actually, gosh, it IPO like 15 years after founding. It’s now a penny stock. But hey, it’s, it’s still out there, so we’ll see. It’s a good story. It’s a, it’s a tough business. I mean, I think biotech is a, is a challenging one. And I think one of the, one of the challenges I ran into was it was one of the few businesses, I think, out there still where the it’s very hierarchical, and that if you don’t have a degree in that space, it’s very hard, you know, after four years of getting it set up and getting it to this point of getting a very large round of funding, they looked at me said, you’re not a scientist. What are you doing here? And I’m like, All right, well, I’m fully vast. It doesn’t look like you guys are going to give me any more stock. So maybe now’s a good time to get out of here. And that’s, that’s kind of what happened, to be honest. Because they just, you know, it’s even something as basic as, you can’t call somebody a scientist if they don’t have a PhD, you know. So we had these, we’d have these meetings in the lab where, oh, so and so’s great. They’re the they’re one of the best ones, but we can’t promote them to scientists because they don’t have a PhD, is like, well, they they do all the work we would want them to do, but no, but they got to have a you know? Anyways, I could, I could ramble for a while about some of the challenges biotech, but one of them was I didn’t have that. And the one class I did not take at Harvard, I was, I was one class shy of being pre med, because I took a lot of science classes, and the one class I didn’t take was organic chemistry, and that would have been very helpful in that biotech company. I spent a lot of time looking things up in my little books and stuff to figure out what people were talking about, and I think organic chemistry would have saved me some of that hookup time.

 

Will Bachman  36:00

Yeah, on the topic of classes, are there any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way?

 

Diego Fonstad  36:13

You know, it’s, it’s funny, I would say that the the class that changed kind of my trajectory of how I approach school and and it’s still something that I appreciate, and what I do was the still goes gas stations, because I I came to Harvard as a from a public school, And I think I showed up and I was just, I was I was drowning for the first two years, just trying to keep up with everything and and it was one of the things I didn’t, didn’t realize until later, was that I was doing it all wrong. I was just writing everything down in classes. I was just taking notes furiously. I wasn’t listening. And I think that class was one of the first classes where I could just sit down and listen and process what was being told and actually realize, oh, wait, I can get a lot more out of this if I just sit here and listen and and, and I just changed how I approached all my classes after that. You know, it’s like, I’m gonna just, I mean, gosh, if I these days, I’d have a little AI recorder taking all my notes and just sit there and listen, and I’d be so happy. But I would say a lot of my classes was a lot of just furiously note, writing down everything they were saying without actually listening. And that class helped me do that. It was also because it was all about observing. It was, you know, I think the real title was study of the built urban American environment, or something like that, and it was just all about observing the world and understanding why the world was the way it is. And I think that that was for me, that’s it slowed me down and really made a difference.

 

Will Bachman  37:59

What’s beyond sort of study habits. What was something from that course that changed how you perceive the world? And yeah, I was John sto is also one of my favorite professors, vs 107, I think it was the built environment of North America.

 

Diego Fonstad  38:16

That’s it. Yeah, gas stations was the nickname for that one.

 

Will Bachman  38:22

Yeah, Hmm, what’s one? It’s one way that you think differently, or just observe differently

 

Diego Fonstad  38:28

based on, well, you know, in a way, it’s it kind of validated something that I had before, which was that I always like to question and explore things, you know. Why are things the way they are? And it was a class that basically was all about that, you know, and so not feeling like that was like, Oh, don’t go there, you know. Just Just Just listen, you know, just do this, as opposed to just observe things and try to understand why they are the way they are. Is, is something that is, I had an element of it, but I think it just didn’t, it wasn’t as validated a lot of the other classes. It felt a lot of classes were like, you’re here to learn, and I’m going to shove this down your throat. And this one was like, Hey, sit back and look and ask and and that just that whole approach was just so different for me and than any others. And I think that that, and it validates something that just resonated with me, of that, you know, like, Don’t you know it, you know, ask, unpack why things are the way they are, as opposed to just like, listen to and be told how they are. I think was, was an important dimension of that,

 

Will Bachman  39:40

yeah, yeah. And for for listeners that didn’t have a chance to take still goes course. Some of his books are a bit more, bit more academic leaning or but his book outside lies magic is, I think, a really good sort of introduction to his approach. So. I would, I would recommend that if you didn’t have a chance to take the course, yeah.

 

Diego Fonstad  40:04

And, you know, the closest example out there, like, I think it’s why, like, the podcast, 99% invisible, is basically, like, it’s, it’s almost basically following his whole approach to life, you know, so

 

Will Bachman  40:16

pretty much, yeah. And any act, were there any activities you were involved in at Harvard that continued to resonate? Sounds like rowing was an important

 

Diego Fonstad  40:27

Yeah. So I rode, interestingly, I only rode freshman and sophomore year, and overlapped a little bit my junior year, then I transferred to the cycling team and I wrote on the psychic team junior and senior year, and those both experience, you know, I actually thought I’d walked away from rowing, and it kind of came back after, after the reunion row, and kind of reconnected with it as a sport. I just wasn’t as connected with it for a long time. But cycling was, was an amazing opportunity there that they had a coach there, John Alice, who was one of the early pioneers in cycling, and just having the opportunity to in American cycling, he was one of the one of the early Americans to go to Europe and race there. And I think he, I think he was a Princeton grad, but he and then he set up the bike, shot the Belmont wheel works, and Somerville works, where he was co owner of those two and he would just take the team out for for a ride. And just being able to learn at the foot of someone with that level of experience was was amazing, and and it was a great group of people to learn from since then, like I said, you know, kind of reconnecting with the guys I used to row with has been huge. And we’ve got a this roaming group of mostly class of 90 tours in there that are that participate in these events as possible. And the club’s called the Crimson death barge. It’s based on our, based on the fourth, fourth freshman lightweight boat that just was like, you know, they give you the worst boat as fourth freshman and and we had trouble that that seat that freshman year, the coach had trouble, like nailing down the boats. So everybody basically got thrown in the dungeon, the death barge, for a little bit, and it was just kind of a formative experience for all of us to to have to, you know, claw way out. You know, it’s like when you get thrown in the pit, you got to claw out. And it’s that’s always a learning experience.

 

Will Bachman  42:36

And what do you do now? Do you get together and actually row in some of these events? Or, yeah, so we

 

Diego Fonstad  42:41

will be, there’ll be, we have a number of boats registered, but at least two boats, maybe three, will be rowing in the head of the Charles we always row in the San Diego crew classic and and we look for others to row. And as as a crimson death barges, actually, I think it’s crimson death bargedotcom if you want to look up that URL is, has a little bit of some pictures. I don’t think they’re up to date, because I am, unfortunately, the webmaster, and I’m not always updating it.

 

Will Bachman  43:12

How does that work? Do you get together for like, a couple days to practice before the race? Or how do you end up, you know, what’s the logistics of doing this together?

 

Diego Fonstad  43:24

You know, it’s not recommended we, we, we rarely, most of us rarely row in an eight. So sweet sores are always kind of a novelty to us. A bunch of us are, have been taking up sculling lately. So a lot of us are sculling. And so we, we sometimes do a quad and and, and. So a bunch of us still are in the bay, in the in the Boston area. So some, some row out of there. A lot of sculling. It’s one of the Third Kind of regular thing is we all there’s a sculling camp up in Vermont called craftsbury that we all coordinate. And this year, there was nine of us who are related to us, kind of met up at craftbury Vermont for a weekend and took this camp and but that’s, that’s single sculling and, and then, yeah, for the events, we just show up and hopefully get one practice in, and Then just row. We are really a lot of boats at our age are sometimes what they call Rolodex crews, where they are trying to stack the boat to win. We are just there to have fun and be happy. We’re still alive. I think we kid, but not really kid that our goal is just to be the last man standing. You know, right now it’s a tough spot, because 50s and 60s are crowded, but if we can make it to the 80s and 90s, all right, might start winning,

 

Diego Fonstad  44:47

just because we’re the only ones still there. And so that’s our goal.

 

Will Bachman  44:55

Well, that also must be really nice companionship to have some activity. To bring together with a right group on some kind of regular basis.

 

Diego Fonstad  45:04

Oh, absolutely. And even, even during, like covid, because we started in 2017 after the after the reunion. And so we were already kind of connected during covid. We sometimes do these remote workouts together. We found some software that you could kind of do this. I kind of like, I don’t know if you know cycling Zwift, but like, a Zwift for for ERGs, and you could, and we would do that, and I think it helped a lot of us not go stir crazy, to to have another group of people that we would you could chat with regularly and get you to exercise during that, that crazy time.

 

Will Bachman  45:41

Alright, amazing. Well, Diego, thank you so much for joining today. If people want to find out more about what you’re doing, at you at with electrify and your company, or follow up with you. Where’s the best pace for people to find you online? Yeah.

 

Diego Fonstad  45:59

So I would just say in electrify.it, so I got cute. I use the Italian domains because so you could say electrify it. So it’s electrify.itdotcom, and that’s the easy way to find me. I also have a unusual enough name that if you were to Google my name, you would find me. It’s, it’s

 

Will Bachman  46:23

great, Diego, thank you so much for joining today. Great. Thank you.