Stephen Baldwin

Hello, I'm SB, Stephen. I'm a physicist and I'm working in a little town, a cute little town called St Ives just outside of Cambridge, in Cambridgeshire, England.

Most of my time now is interacting with other people to guide them to solutions. So they bring me problems and I then think through how to guide that person to a solution to that problem.

I'll be brought into meetings where other problems have been found and there'll be data explaining this weird behaviour of something that's going on and then I will think through and go, I think we need to explore this direction of attack to expand that data set or we need to look in this in more detail so that they can then go off and do that study and do that research to then come to a conclusion.

I'll then review that result and then hopefully we slowly iterate towards finding the answer to the problem.

There isn't hugely a typical day but the main thing that does happen is we have a thing called stand up, where every day we get together and the team communicates and collaborates for a very short period of time so that everyone is in line with everyone else.

There'll nearly always be one meeting a day which will be interacting with stakeholders of some kind. So this may be external businesses, this may be internal stakeholders, this may be customers and clients, this may be one-to-one meetings and understanding a particular associate's struggles or challenges.

So yeah, so that'll be that those two sort of fixed things. And then around that will be some time going down to the lab, seeing the results, checking the equipment's working, going down to the factory, checking with them, is this process still working? Is that still working? Coming back upstairs, loading up some AI, getting the results from the artificial intelligence, comparing that with real data.

The team normally is about five to ten people, that sort of size. So we'll have the project manager and then me as the technical lead guiding the technical aspects of the work. Sometimes physically doing my own work too, not just guiding others. But that would be sort of where I would sit in the hierarchy.

The general discussions though are pretty flat in terms of the hierarchical structure. There isn't really a boss and it's more that I just know more about certain things than they do and therefore I can guide them through that because I know more.

There isn't a social hierarchy. I'm not above them and they're below me. We are the same. We are both humans. We're both equal. I just happen to have more experience and more knowledge and are therefore able to guide them more than they're able to guide me.

The best thing about my job is the fact it's very varied. So the team I work in, we're building a mechanical system that has physical hardware to it, such as pumps, valves, gears, doors, latches.

So there's this physical aspect to it. So you've got all that core classic physics of forces moving around.

And then inside there are pipes full of fluid. So you've also got fluid physics to worry about.

That's all controlled by electronics. So you've then got electronics to worry about.

That electronics is controlled by software. So you then have all the software stuff to worry about.

That software is powering algorithms. So you have to have algorithms to control all that stuff.

And that stuff is then driven by AI. And then you've got consumer electronics and internet of things and operating systems and all of these things.

So for me it just really hits the sweet spot of like this is the type of problem I love solving because I can do all of it and I'm not swamped and I'm not overwhelmed but I'm also always challenged. It's always a big problem but it's never an impossible, intractable problem.

So I had my own company before joining Lynx. I was making sound better on mobile phones, televisions, cars. So I had a technology that improved the quality of loudness on devices, so making them never too quiet, never too loud. So helping protect your hearing, all these cool things.

We raised lots of money. It was going extremely well. But I burnt out. I burnt out. The key learning was that you have to put yourself first in order to give more. And I hadn't got that balance right.

And I'm still learning the balance of sacrifice and delivery. And that if you sacrifice too much of yourself, you don't have anything to give. You don't have anything to give.

But I then decided to quit and I wanted a nine to five. I then had absolutely no intention of working at this company. I came here purely for a job interview as job interview practice.

It's like, yeah, the recruiters got me a job interview. They're willing to take me for an interview. I'm just going to go for practice. I don't want to work here. Why would you want to work here? Like, it's just this boring thing that no one cares about. Why would you want to work here?

And then I get here and they're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it prints 100 Coke cans per second. Wait, wait, what? A hundred Coke cans a second. And yeah, and the physics that makes it work is just mad. It's basically wizardry.

Wait, what? Yeah, amazing. Where do I sign? Where do I sign? This is too cool. Where do I sign?

And yeah, and I've been that excited about the product ever since. Billions of products every day are printed with this technology. It's saving lives by making sure people aren't eating things that are out of date.

Ultimately I had no intention of working here. Like this is purely just the luck of life has brought me to this business and because it was so interesting, because of all the things I've described, here I am 11 years later still enthusing about how interesting this technology is and the potential this technology has for further improvement.