I'll bite but consider all I write poorly informed wild speculation. The person he mentions has been behind a lot of advancements in both getting cheap FPGA ba

I'll bite but consider all I write poorly informed wild speculation. The person he mentions has been behind a lot of advancements in both getting cheap FPGA based boards to the hands of users and creating libre silicon-proven IP. He recently left his company that was making Zedboards and Parallella among other things to join DARPA. The last big project he seemed to have worked on was a 1000-core processor of which a lot was open source but a lot of the important bits were protected due to likely an NDA with the factory or the provided of the tools they used. It hope what he is going to work on (EDA) will finally enable DARPA and others to fund truly open source designs and tools and work with fabrics that would allows access to really cheap ASICs or FPGA based systems, building on all the momentum around platforms like RISCV and his experience creating the Epiphany cores.