Speaker: Craig Rupp, CEO and Farmer at Sabanto
Title: Unsettling Career Advice
Abstract: If graduation is on the horizon and the plan is either entering the industry or perhaps starting a company, this is your chance to hear some free career advice. You will find out the dirty little secret why you did not get considered or hired for a job. You will learn strategies you can use to accelerate your career. You will learn simple techniques that will create defining moments.
Bio: Craig has over 30 years of professional engineering and entrepreneurial experience. Craig started his career in 1988 as a hardware engineer at Motorola, designing and developing the first GSM mobile station. He subsequently transferred his talents to Motorola’s Iridium project and became a lead engineer, architecting the subscriber unit, maintaining the link margin, and addressing other satellite communication issues. In 2000, Craig moved on to John Deere, designing and developing Deere’s Starfire GPS receiver and Greenstar display. In 2002, Craig founded Alliance Technologies Group (ATG) and focused on providing optimized RF measurement and generation algorithms for high-volume manufacturing. National Instruments (NI) acquired his company in 2005 where he became a Chief Measurement Architect. He was the sole person that architected, designed, developed, and first deployed AM, FM, RDS, Bluetooth, GSM, EDGE, CDMA2k, EVDO, WCDMA, TDSCDMA, and LTE solutions for National Instruments. His solutions have been deployed worldwide, working in conjunction with RIM/Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, and Apple. In 2012, Craig founded 640 Labs, headquartered in Chicago, and brought the agriculture industry the 640 Drive, a small, low-cost Bluetooth device interfacing to the CAN bus on farm equipment, transferring the captured data to an iPad. Monsanto acquired his company in 2014 and made Craig a Senior Director/Senior Fellow. His FieldView Drive became one of the fastest, widely adopted devices in agriculture. In 2018, Craig founded Sabanto, a Farming-as-a-Service company using autonomous equipment. Headquartered in Chicago, his company was the first to autonomously plant a farmer’s field in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana. His company recently closed a seed round and is scaling his business. Craig is passionate about technology and is a risk taker. Raised on a farm in Iowa, he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Iowa State University in 1988, his master’s degree in 1990, and continues to chip away at his PhD at Iowa State. He currently has 13 patents.
ECpE Seminar Host: Aditya Ramamoorthy