Jason Keats - Founder & Chief Hooligan, OSOM Ep #70

Anatoly welcomes Jason Keats (Founder & Chief Hooligan, OSOM) to the podcast to talk about his epic career building hardware, the Solana Saga phone and all things mobile and web3. Pre-order the Saga now at solanamobile.com

 

00:09 - Intro

00:25 - Background

03:27 - Working at Apple

08:07 - The Gem Phone

10:15 - Privacy at Essential

12:24 - Building for Mobile

15:52 - Hardware he wants to build

17:07 - Crypto x Cars

19:02 - Do Apple or Google care about hardware and crypto?

21:08 - Innovation in hardware

21:56 - The saga phone

22:56 - The manufacturing process

26:29 - How to start building

27:56 - Working with start ups

29:15 - The innovation cycle in hardware

30:36 - Privacy features

32:42 - Working with non-crypto people

36:08 - Outro

 

DISCLAIMER

The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. Those who appear in the content may have a financial interest in any projects referenced, and any content herein is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.  This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor.

 

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today, I have Jason Keats with me who's the CEO and co-founder of OSOM. Welcome.

Jason (00:18):

Hey, how's it going? Glad to be here. Glad to chat everything we've been working on finally.

Anatoly (00:22):

Yeah. Me too. It's been kind of a crazy journey. You have an awesome background. Do you mind just sharing it?

Jason (00:32):

Yeah. I've had a very, weird hardware background throughout my career. When I left Berkeley, I decided I wanted to go build something. I didn't want to sit in front of a computer all day. Well, my degree is in astrophysics from Berkeley. And then I went on to work on solar panels. And that was-

Anatoly (00:54):

Like...

Jason (00:54):

What was that?

Anatoly (00:55):

Yeah. How did you get from astrophysics to hardware?

Jason (00:59):

So my senior year, my professor asked me to... He knew I had access to a machine shop because I was working with the Formula SAE, which is a student racing program. So they knew I had access to a machine shop and they wanted to make parts for telescopes. So I offered and said, "Hey, I can do that." So instead of being a traditional GSI or something like that, I was the monkey who machined random parts. And that was a lot more fun. At the end of the day, instead of having a program, I was like, "I have a thing. It's built." And that was it. I wanted to build things.

Anatoly (01:39):

That's awesome. How did you get into astrophysics then? What was the reason for getting into astrophysics?

Jason (01:48):

I just wanted to be able to say, I was... It was a rocket scientist was the logic I had, 18-year-old me had. Little did I know that wasn't exactly how that worked, but it sure sounded cool. And nowadays it just sounds really cool to say, "Oh, I have a degree in astrophysics from Berkeley."

Anatoly (02:05):

That does sound really cool. So what happened after? You build telescopes, right?

Jason (02:10):

Yeah. I built little bits and bobs for telescopes. I didn't want to get a real job, so I started a motorcycle company that was a complete disaster. Not a complete disaster, but it was pretty ro