I want to congratulate
@WillyDuran65 on his new term as dean of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires.
Willy thanked Francisco Strambini and me, and he also thanked
@class_lambda for its contributions and its relationship with the university. I value that a lot.
Most people on X have a somewhat wrong image of what Lambda is. Many believe weāre a devshop that works in crypto, when we have dozens of successful products in different industries and most of our core members are mathematicians, physicists, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, civil engineers and industrial engineers and yes obviously computer scientists and computer engineers.
Lambda is and has always been deep tech.
If you want to build SaaS (something that we also do), you donāt need to understand what a Koopman operator is, finite element method or what Riemann zeta function is. But if you want to build companies at the frontier of science and engineering, you need people who understand things deeply and can work on hard problems.
Thatās why Lambdaās relationship with the University of Buenos Aires, with the Faculty of Engineering and particularly with the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences is so important and strategic.
For me, the relationship with the university has always been strange and very personal. Iām a college dropout who, more than 15 years later, came back to reform the same degree program I had dropped out of. Itās a strange circle. I left the university without a degree, but part of the university is still shaping the way I think. I spent more than 20 years in the private sector learning how to build companies, products and technology.
Now Iām using everything I learned to build a new degree program at the University of Buenos Aires. I want to create an elite of builders who want to innovate. Not an elite based on money, family or status. An elite based on knowledge, work and the ability to turn science and engineering into companies and good public policies.
For me, this is not about proving that I never needed the university. Itās the opposite, itās about giving back, closing a circle and helping create the education that I believe the next generation of builders needs.
If we want to create a better world, we need to create companies that are at the frontier of science and engineering and that work with universities and the public sector.
We also need to destroy this idea, that part of the left has, that companies go to public universities only to steal their knowledge or to destroy them. Real deep tech companies need strong universities. A deep-tech company has nothing to gain from a weak university.
But this works both ways. Universities also need a big and capable private sector with the ability to innovate, turn knowledge into products and give back to the universities that made that innovation possible.
Universities have the right environment to do research that is long term and doesnāt depend on the results of the next quarter. This is something that part of the right in Argentina doesn't understand. Companies need the public universtiy that is the one creating the most amount of professionals for our country and doing the best international research. The University needs money to be able to give freedom to researchers to work on difficult problems. Then companies have the ability to turn that research and knowledge into products, jobs and new industries. They have different roles, but they need each other. This shouldn't be an ideological debate but a practical one.
Willy and I have our differences, as all good friend have, but we also have a very strong bond. We believe in science. We believe the state should invest in it. We believe this is better for the country, for universities and for companies. Itās a win-win.
Thatās why I value my relationship with Willy so highly. Even with our differences, we agree on what we want.
Thanks Willy and I hope you keep doing an amazing job.