David Lang is the cofounder and CEO of OpenROV, designing and manufacturing underwater drones.

Why you should listen

David Lang is a maker whose craving for adventure turned him into an amateur ocean explorer. He is the cofounder of Open Explorer, a digital field journal for researchers, citizen scientists and explorers.

in 2010, Lang and NASA engineer Eric Stackpole went looking for lost gold (literally) in an underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierra Navada. But they weren't quite sure how to go about it. Without much expertise (or money), the two put initial designs for an underwater robot explorer online. Soon OpenROV was born: a community of citizen ocean explorers who build and constantly improve upon these small remote operated underwater robots.

Lang is also the author of Zero to Maker and a 2013 TED Fellow. He lives on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay.

David Lang’s TED talks