Cascade Labs

An independent research lab building open-source software for energy, climate, cities, and philanthropy.

About

Cascade Labs is Houston Warren (friends call me Houie). I like weather, surfing, public transport, and dogs. I think chair designers have a lot to teach us about how to build beautiful and functional things.

I have a PhD in machine learning from the University of Sydney, where I worked on ML applications in energy, climate, and robotics. I've worked on the largest solar project in the world, and most recently co-founded and CTO'd a company for quantitative siting and interconnection of utility-scale solar.

Consulting / development

LinkedIn GitHub Scholar

Principles

01

Build the hard thing.

The most important problems live in important-but-not-urgent purgatory. That's where Cascade works: pragmatic in execution, but pointed at cures, not symptoms.

02

Design for effortless adoption.

The technology to solve many of the world's hardest problems already exists. The bottleneck is adoption.

Understand why, then build — and make the right thing easier than the status quo.

03

Pay the rent, don't take it.

Solving big problems helps everyone; gating the solutions hurts everyone. Cascade pays the rent, then ships open-source, even if it means someone else profits more than we do. Yes, clients can probably exploit this to negotiate me down. Please be nice. Rent is expensive.

04

Bottom-up.

The best outcomes come from the public square and when people with skin in the game drive their own solutions. We build tools that elevate those closest to the problem, rather than handing down answers from a distance.

05

Have fun.

It's a profound privilege to spend your working life applying creativity to problems that matter.

Recognize that. Enjoy the work and the people you work with. Build things that spark joy and make you smile. Don't take yourself too seriously.