I flew to Atlanta last week to give a talk at Mailchimp. Know them? If you don’t send emails to big groups of people, you probably wouldn’t, but if you do, you definitely do. Mailchimp is a mass-email service, but it’s wrapped in a cutesy, web 2.0 B2C-style design. They have millions of clients — we use them at modbot to send newsletters. If you’ve subscribed to get email updates for blog posts, look at the bottom of this email! Sent by Mailchimp.

I try pretty hard to ignore invitations that don’t appear to have a direct benefit for Modular Robotics. After all, there’s always a lot to do at the new shop. But the people at Mailchimp are totally awesome, and they offered to take me to dinner at Empire State South. So, 18 hours in Atlanta. Turns out it was completely worth it. For a SaaS company, the chimps there do a lot of playing in hardware. I got a great demo of the Freddie Mercury Project hardware in which they sent email from the stratosphere with a stuffed monkey. Etcetera.

Anyway, I talked about tiny robots and manufacturing and complexity. And also a little about evolution and faith, because why not? The slides from my talk definitely don’t stand alone as a presentation (if you weren’t there, you won’t get it) but for the archives, here they are (55MB PDF).