"Latency To Cool Should Be Zero" Meet The Makers | Noise Engineering's Kris Kaiser & Stephen McCaul

video upload by Bilijie

"Noise Engineering’s Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul on building their eurorack modular synth company after leaving jobs in sound engineering and biology academia. What makes this process unique? How do they manage a squad of dedicated people? What is the best thing about being your own boss?

This video is NOT sponsored by Noise Engineering or anyone else

00:00 - Intro
00:39 - Why modular synthesizers?
02:43 - How is a modular synthesizer different from a more traditional synth?
04:18 - What does your job look like in 5 years?
05:51 - Does that uncertainty create a lot of stress? How do you deal with it?
07:13 - How did you decide to change careers to start Noise Engineering? What factors went into that?
09:08 - How did you know it was time to grow your company? What were you looking for?
11:00 - What are the pros and cons, in your opinion, for starting your own business?
12:46 - What are some major hurdles you and other eurorack companies are dealing with right now?
14:51 - How have these factors affected pricing? What goes into pricing your modules?
16:28 - What are some of your most important lessons from being in business all these years?
17:23 - What's one thing you did, or decision you made, that greatly helped you, your company, or your career?
18:25 - In your opinion, what are the keys to building and maintaining great relationships?
19:20 - When you have disagreements, or when things go wrong, how do you deal with that?
24:29 - What are your core values that you don't want to compromise?
27:52 - Walk us through your process from Idea to Creation?
33:41 - What's it like to finally release something (Xer Mixa) that you've been working on for years?
35:23 - So what happened to the Iteritas line (BIA etc) Why did it retire?
40:20 - Is the Versio line now the most popular product?
41:42 - What can be done about the lack of diversity in the Eurorack and modular synth community?
43:45 - What advice would you give a young person or someone seriously considering starting their own creative business?

Meet The Makers is a series of interviews and discussions about the creative forces behind small maker industries. These questions were created to help young artists and people new to the modular synth community discover more about the people who make the tools, their challenges, successes and lessons. Coming up 12/2/2023 we'll be live streaming a discussion with Steady State Fate founder Andrew Morelli.

Thanks Kris and Stephen for generously giving time to this project. And to Patrick O'Brien for providing amazing samples of Noise Engineering modules in action."