Chat Room Season 2 goes analog
Not so long ago, the unusual building at the corner of 20th and Alabama Street was one of the largest job creators in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Not as Felix E. Schoenstein & Sons, the pipe organ builder that occupied the space for more than 80 years, and whose logo is still on the building’s facade. Instead, it was under the building’s next and current occupant, Otherlab, a green tech research and design incubator, that its three floors hummed with engineering ingenuity. Otherlab bought the landmark building in 2011, and at its height employed more than 100 inventors, engineers, and scientists building technologies, most of them devoted to decarbonizing our overheated planet.
In the last decade, Otherlab has spun off companies that created, among other inventions, an induction stove with a built-in battery; floating offshore wind turbines; and a robotic knee brace that has both medical and military applications.
Today, Otherlab’s industry has ground nearly to a halt thanks to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Signed in July, it slashed environmental protections, including provisions of the Inflation Reduction and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Acts, created by the Biden administration. This month, Trump canceled $7.6 billion in grants for clean energy projects in blue states, further diminishing the domestic green tech sector. The cuts keep coming: last week, Trump killed a huge solar project in the Nevada desert.
Otherlab’s wind, solar, and electrical projects, including those that have gone on to be successful standalone companies like Gradient, which makes cost-and energy-efficient electrical heating and cooling units, have depended on precisely the type of funding from programs at the Department of Energy and Department of Defense that the Trump administration is now slashing.
If these rollbacks are a threat to anyone clinging to hope for a habitable planet, they are gut-wrenching to Otherlab’s founders, who dedicated their lives and work to converting such hopes into reality.
On a recent morning, I met Saul Griffith and James McBride at the laboratory where the original interior wood paneling from the Schoenstein & Sons era glowed in abundant natural light. Otherlab’s cavernous workrooms were largely empty. Gone are the soft robots (including an inflatable elephant), the four-person bicycle that hung on a wall, and the workstations that housed tools, pumps, plastic tubing, and cables. Even the projection screens and white boards have been taken down. A three-dimensional wooden cutout in the shape of an octopus and a card catalogue whose drawers list parts for tools remain, vestiges of Otherlab’s creative industry.
Griffith, an Australian with a red pirate’s beard and, under the circumstances, surly attitude to match, sat in an office where customers once negotiated the price of pipe organs.
“Unfortunately, you’re seeing it without its recent full-of-life-ness, because we work on things that the new regime doesn’t like,” Griffith told me. “It doesn’t have the vibe that it did 12 months ago.”
Griffith, who earned a Ph.D. from MIT and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, sees himself as a participant in an American system of mostly federally-funded science and research to serve the public. He rattled off a long list of agency acronyms Otherlab has worked with, from DARPA to NASA, SOCOM to NIH. While other San Francisco founders were building new social networks or enterprise software solutions, he and his colleagues were building physical things designed to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels.
Besides lamenting the gutting of environmental program budgets, Griffith highlighted what he called the Trump administration’s extraordinary effort to undermine the endangerment rule, which registered carbon dioxide as a pollutant so that it could be regulated and its emission moderated. He described the administration’s July analysis of climate science as a “greatest hits of climate denial.”
Trump’s decision to charge a $100,000 fee for H1-B visas is yet another move hobbling Otherlab’s practice of hiring large numbers of highly educated and specialized immigrants. Griffith doubts if, under today’s administration, he could get the “extraordinary ability” visa that brought him to the US as a younger man.
He grew wistful as he recalled Otherlab’s “incredible run,” and the memories of his children, and dozens of other kids of inventors who built their careers there, running through the building where cranes, pulleys, and a removable floor lent a Pee-wee’s Playhouse or Batcave vibe to the bustling lab. Architectural features once used in the assembly of organs proved useful in the creation of Otherlab’s inventions like inflatable robots and solar powered scooters.
“I know what the future looks like, and America is taking a very regressive turn away from science, away from a cheaper, cleaner future, away from better health outcomes,” he said. “It’s wild. Wild to watch. It’s not the America I came to in 1998.”
Griffith no longer lives in San Francisco, having moved with his family back to Australia, which, he noted, is barreling ahead with solar energy along with China. That has left McBride, Otherlab’s chief technology officer, to oversee a skeleton crew of engineers in the Mission.
McBride, who has a background in physics, met Griffith when they were graduate students at MIT. He first worked for a startup writing software, then moved into finance, a field he called financially rewarding but emotionally unfulfilling. He moved to San Francisco to work on Griffith’s idea to develop kites that flew in loops to generate electricity. The startup, called Makani, was acquired by Google X in 2013. It was grounded in 2020.
Sitting in front of giant windows with a wide view of the Mission, McBride described Otherlab’s mandate as finding people doing good research and wrapping a company around them to commercialize it. Over the years, that approach produced some relationships with private funding sources, yet, McBride said, those have been slow to replace the disappearing federal money.
Otherlab is also facing competition from a local threat: artificial intelligence. Besides sucking up ever larger amounts of electricity and water, AI is sponging human talent and investor dollars. As venture capital floods companies such as Open AI and Anthropic, and even smaller San Francisco startups, salaries are ballooning, making it more difficult for enterprises like Otherlab to attract or retain engineers.
The diminished funding has left McBride overseeing the clearing out of Otherlab’s top two floors, which they plan to rent out. The company continues to maintain the ground floor for its projects.
In the near term, Otherlab is hibernating in a mode McBride likened to graduate school.
“We’re just going to hide for a couple of years, and incubate some really kind of hard things to work on so that when the money comes back, we will be ready with stuff that looks good to get funded then,” McBride said.
After discussing the obstacles threatening Otherlab’s survival with Griffith and McBride, I was surprised by their expressions of optimism. There weren’t many, but what they did offer sounded genuine. Griffith said he’s working with both Republicans and Democrats as he pursues a new endeavor, Rewiring America, a nonprofit aimed at electrification in homes and small businesses.
“Hopefully, America will get back in the game, doing science and addressing climate change in a few years,” Griffith said. “And we’ll come back and help.”
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