Start Ups Recitation
okay okay this is the final recitation Believe It or Not In The Arc of these Fab Academy recitations the last one and often the most popular one is on startups and so we have a great group ranging from pre-startup to early startup to mature startup and then we'll end with some of the supporting things coming from that so uh let's see we have about six groups so about uh uh 10 minutes or so per topic and a question throughout uh post questions to the chat if it's really urgent really urgent you can unmute and so uh first one if you take over the screen is Vanessa uh from Peru and currently in Virginia good morning everyone I will present my screen please could you confirm is Christmas working okay thank you hello my name is Vanessa Kaicho I am from Peru I Am Furniture designer an architect and I am CEO and co-founder of ifurniture uh digital carpentry and woodworking design it has startup from Peru that was born in a Fab Lab in Fab Lab uni in 2014 and that proposes an innovation solution innovating solution for the design and Furniture industry using digital fabrication um so the history of 542 started in my grandfather because I am Carpenter so many years ago and I remember when I was a child I always worked with my grandfather in his shop in Lima Peru but always working in a small traditional carpentry Workshop and a few floors of my house so I remember a lot of techniques of digital uh I'm sorry a lot of traditional techniques about Carpenter so in 2014 I found fablab uni and I remember I started working in a router CLC it was my favorite machine into the Fab Lab so I decided to merge the traditional Carpenter with digital fabrication doing some Fierce experiences in and testing in Laboratories like a fabla besant soap uh uni and fabla Peru and I was a part of the team of apla Peru and I started my researching uh proven how we can integrate the digital Manufacturing in traditional carpentry so after that I founded iPhone tour as a startup so why I founded an I started because I recognized the real estate um environment is actually growing in my country and I found a good idea to commercialize furniture and to grow and to grow this this for this idea in a laboratory to enter to the business environment that try to be sustainable and try to always improve our skills in digital Fabrication in a real space so I remember in that time I started introducing my idea and my proposal for different business months and Carpenters companies and retails uh telling about how we can use to my furniture in the industry and how we can sell it by e-commerce in an online version and then how people and users can uh always a receive this technology in their houses this is the proposal a more more of this proposal is improve the carpentry industry carpenters and designers and create an ecosystem So In This research I remember we found the problem of carpentry industry in my country rigid Furniture unique measures are repeating designs so with with those ideas some problems we I remember we always uh found opportunity in digital fabrication with this machine sad opportunities love for the technology the opportunity is for the community designers and Carpenters working together with technology Automation and proposing to improve our industry in my country after that we created a platform for two customized Furniture a platform where the users can choose a Furniture then uh propose different measures and then uh Buy in our online you know online version and then receive receive in their houses like uh you you buy uh maybe a shoes or you buy maybe other other kind of stuff in your house same for furnitures eighty percent of users always are remodeling their spaces every time and 90 of the carpet is always going to you want to use digital fabrication and we created this online customers Furniture platform in the metal in the beta version actually we are working on that and you can to choose Dimensions materials thickness you can customize your furniture by online and then you can buy it and we received information we assemble it the furniture and then you can receive in your house so we are supporting uh this project with software technology.com so it's one of the big goal for us to try to customize a lot of furniture in the same time because it's a lot of work and we are trying to uh always improve our skills in designs like uh this kind of software that very useful for us and then we we go to a Fab Lab and then we use we fabricate it we cut in the router machine and then we assembly like this video so this is the idea this is the idea to improve our our production and the social part of this this startup is to create a community of carpenters in different countries we started in in Peru in Lima with with a pilot and working with carpenters to the sending information and always making worship with them and actually our model our business model is scalable and replicable because we we can support this project with different Fab labs around our world so actually we are working in a carpentry ecosystem uh creating a community of digital Carpenters promoting this idea and this proposal with Fab labs to be sustainable like a business model and then we are working in good working programs and replicating the experience of Peru so but the best part and the future for me that I really love is to work with women women always want to operate machine this is very very motivated for me because they want to learn not just design Furnitures they want to operate a machine and work with carpenters and this integration is the social impact for our startup this is the best part for me because I are making more friends and girls like me that they love carpenters because they have histories similar like my history like a day fathers our Carpenters or maybe their grandfathers or they their cousins so they want to integrate and the technology give them the opportunity to integrate in technology and digital fabrication finally this is my team my team in Peru it's a super power boys and girls and they are working with me actually by remotes and this is is our big videos that always we promote we are promoting our furniture startup in social media so you can find us in Instagram and Facebook so you can let's include the demo that I will uh share you the demo you can find the demo in this website iphones.la and you can click here in Tesla prototypes so our our ask is if you come to check the demo buy online like me and try to check the material and the dimensions and then please give us a feedback because we are on the starter and actually we are validating our business model online so you can leave your comment here and sell on feedbacks so the idea is to validate with you our startups on continue improving and sharing our knowledge with everybody thank you very much wonderful van that's a great great vision great progress great team I think there are a lot of people watching who are the eager to both be customers and participate and you answered the question I was going to ask which is how you're going to do the distributed fulfillment um very exciting yes that's the last the last the future I think is is a goal to be very uh uh integrated furniture designers women carpenters in the same ecosystem to improve our industry that's great okay next japie take over from from Madrid hello hello everybody um I'm gonna share my screen also the whole screen and uh yeah so yeah it's been it's been a it's been a while since I made a pub Academy and it's uh 10 years already so the the idea is to tell you know how how this has changed me and the way of work you know how's the how Fab Academy experience has uh you know as uh what has done in my in my in the way I work you know so this is me before Fab Academy so as an architect I was dealing already with digital fabrication but uh more in terms of Designing you know I was using these and detailed tools you know to to design and then this is a piece of a facade in a building that I was doing back then so I was more like a designer or not because using digital tools you know and other people using the machines were making them you know and I like very much this picture because that's me after father getting you know it's not that I you know I stopped doing digital fabrication you know I was still doing digital you know deciding with digital tools but you know I I was getting dirty you know with it you know back to the to the workshop back to the you know touching the materials touching the the wood the plaster whatever you know so it's uh you know how you know the Fab Academy and this all this education you know brings you back to the workshop you know and then you know you don't communicate your designs in terms of someone else doing them but you actually do them right so I'm going to show you a couple of uh product designs you know early early designs back again just after uh Fab Academy you know that I think are relevant in these terms you know this is small ones you know but this is a winery rack you know that I made with with with Alex you know the guy who's was with me in the picture and uh you know this is a winery rack that made the winery building you know it's by [Music] and it's a very iconic roof so we just took you know one of a part of the roof and use it as there as a one in Iraq itself you know and uh so then I was able you know to to to go through all the process of it you know as a Craftsman not only design it but making you know so I think that's uh it was a huge huge change in the in the way I was I was working you know back then and another very important project you know is this one because again it's a small one you know it's this uh faceted uh ball and you know and jar but this is when I started my contact with Ceramics you know and I really fell in love with this with this material so it was a kind of an organic evolution you know to go from this to 3D printing 3D print with Ceramics you know with it which is the the you know the the main thing I'm gonna I'm gonna talk today right so which isn't you know and then we started this project with which is called uh jet clay and uh going to the to the website I mean jet plays about 3D printing with Ceramics and another very important thing you know that that I learned uh you know this relationship is a relation with the intellectual property of the things that we create you know the knowledge that somehow we create and because back then in 2000 in 2017 we started this and we wanted to print big pieces with Ceramics so there weren't really systems already built you know 3D printers and Extrusion systems that you could buy right they were quite small so then we said what so maybe we need to to make them you know so that's what we did you know we we you know with this with all the knowledge that is back back then in places with like Fab Labs maker spaces you know meeting crucial people you know that then you learn how to how to make these things you know someone like me coming from the from the design field and you know a common question was okay so what do you do with this you know you know obviously all these designs are open you know in in Wiki Factory so a question was do you know how you know what to if we're gonna sell the machines you know we're gonna patent them and all these things and then actually what we're doing is doing workshops and then sell these somehow like Hardware as a service because what do we do you know with hired by by people you know because some you know it's not easy to build these machines you know in these entities you know that uh usually like maker spaces or education institutions you know hire us to build their machines and not only build the machines but usually making a bootcamp a week or two weeks bootcamp with designers artists you know and we teach them how to you know how to use the machines and how to develop their ideas their Concepts into you know Ceramics 3D printed products or pieces of Art and this is our you know Global globalization plan for projectally I mean we have done this already in Spain in several places Europe and Chilean Chile there is there's there's a guy making this by by his own you know and we try to help him as much as possible and and we wanna we're building this in Auckland this summer because uh in we're gonna bring this machine to Burning Man and uh replicate something that we did last year which is uh 3D print oh participant is close wait one moment I cannot go where yeah sorry and then go into and we we did this in the it's like the burning man that we do here in Spain you know in in the moneros desert so we brought the the 3D printer and then we printed the the hippies of the event you know with uh with the material you know not bringing the clay you know not bringing clay but actually using the the soil the dust you know that this desert has that is very rich in in clay you know in clay in clay so the idea is to do this very same idea in in Burning Man this this summer so it it plays with the with this idea of leave no Trace which is mandatory in these events and uh actually we leave this P these pieces there right because at the end it's just a dust with water and some digital magic right an extrusion of this of this material so another uh yeah piece of art that I wanted to share with you you know that it's not in the website or no it's this work with Lola foil and uh well it's not working there the computer one moment that it has stopped uh working yeah yeah so these pieces that play with this idea of things you know is is this nature is this artificial you know it's it's like a new way of nature mixed with you know this digital Technologies so this is what this is about and something very very important we are involved right now important for us is to create our own products so in these terms we have just created this porcelain lamps it has different versions you know like desktop and hanging hanging ones um uh that you know the detail of it it's a very thin layer of porcelain it is a single material lamp so the only you know there's no plastic there's obviously there's a light bulb and then some cables and with this very fine layers you can have this you know beautiful translucency and the last project I wanted to show you that is right like right now on the on the desktop is this swamp cooler is like a evaporative cooler you know made out of Ceramics you know and it's it when it tries is to use the Ceramics you know uh you know as as our ancestors were already were already using you know as a as an evaporative cooler product or tool you know and see what the 3D printing with Ceramics could do and could help this to to to work right so it's a quite complicated uh piece but you know it's uh you know you can you put the water on top of it you know and then there is this inner very in in complex 3D printer structure you know so there is a fun you know at the bottom so then the dry uh and uh hot uh air goes from from the bottom and goes to goes down you know more humid and cold and uh you know we put this project we want to I mean not to stop using the the air conditioning but at least you know helping your micro climate to in order to reduce the energy consumption you know and use less AC right so yeah that's it so before you type uh Tom do you have a question for japie um time your hands up if if not I'm sorry about that okay um [Music] no I can't I can't hear you very well is it me or will I take at least nil yeah if you all raise your hand we know that it's real we can move okay about your business model who pays whom for what all right so oh I see I think there's a network here I'm going to stop my video okay okay a business model so we do several things right for instance right now these this project is being incubated in the circular economy Institute here in Madrid so the idea is that this one I mean this is like in development so that is this one at the end of this year next year we have like a Clear Vision or how to how to you know how to place it on the market you know and improve its Market readiness but mainly you know what uh you know you go to the we offer the service of what we mainly do is offer the service of 3D printing with ceramics but it's always a consultancy one you know because uh this is not like plastic you know has many you know many many things to know it's uh it's a soft material so usually it's a consultancy so designers or artists you know come to us with a project an idea and then we help them to develop to develop it you know that's that's mainly the you know the the income right now uh and uh you know like twice or three times a year we do this Workshop that I was talking about I need more daily basis uh we we teach you know all these relatives using 3D printed with Ceramics in universities here in Madrid in several months great okay beautiful work um really striking thank you uh so now we're going to go to Leon and in Spain and Pablo hello everyone I will share my screen so you can see the slides so my history is about personal history not just that startup or something like this I'm up a father of three we have the computer here uh I mean Leon so it's small town so we have many issues with things but I think we have a great history here for those who try to start something in your local communities so uh at the first one I was a computer teacher I teach networking Windows Linux whatever so I met software guy then I find the Fab Academy in Pablo it was an experience that changes my life not just mentally but just my way to Harmony so my mind blows up it totally changes what I did until then and then after making the Fab Academy you see this phrase from someone called Neil gar simple that say the objective of the digital fabrication is not what you can buy but you cannot buy so this gives me the idea of there are things in the world that don't even exist today so you can try to find it and then emerge it to the real world and I love this idea to transform ideas to to physical things then I read the book of Chris Anderson the long tail because okay I'm a lonely guy I know how to make things but I'm just a normal person I I hope so I cannot compete in Mass transaction or with big competitors like I I don't know Amazon or any other Ikea thing but this book told me that there are many things many things that are not selling because they are not profitable for the big companies so you can be there in the long tail to sell things that don't nobody wants to buy it massively but they can make it by one and sell it to to the right people so after that okay with the idea of founding fabric code to see this foreign manufacturing ideas for anyone okay this is my idea then I became like a entrepreneur or CEO as you said in 2015 and I'll take today I have this idea working at the left we have me in a young manner very very I don't know how to say it very illusional with everything I made and the right is like a super other people that also plays with computers and so on so what I'm doing now in the in public to see this is that my clients are Freelancers people that make things and sells one of the people but they want something that it's not in Market it's not selling they cannot find it or maybe just find in the long long markets in Asia and something like this and just need some kind of tricky or different things so I'm focusing more in in the in to be an i plus the first Master business or solar furnace people that wants to sell something different and they didn't know don't know where to made it how to start finding the place to uh become with their ideas in a physical way so for them I mean for me it's like difficult but for them that they don't know about Fab Labs or don't know about digital applications like an admir because they have to contact with the with the big companies so I start to make it big things we have here an office completely Furniture doing for me uh this is an official Madrid two small things this is a draw of the kids of friends then I transform it to a a little piece of acrylic and for me it's so valid making big things than making the small things so it's something that is valid to a people that is not me that's why I fabricate I made their their ideas not mine here are some examples you can I don't know decorate businesses in my local town you can make a corporate words for for events you can make little things for very beautiful or Worse integrated in a in a wood so you can make everything you want we know this making before Academy and belonging to a Fab Lab but for the people outside there outside are are a small area of of comfort they don't know where to made it so I started with this uh sorry yeah what I'm doing this I do this because uh empowers myself I love to make things I can learn through making things because every thing we made I made in in Practical 3DS is a challenge because everybody has a different idea for everything it's like okay we'll start from the row every time and I do this for having fun I really have fun making things for other people and yeah on the right you have if I can leave or spend some money with my with the things I made will be great so as you said in in some text conference I can locally produce interesting things for people who needs different things and the best part of this is that I can made it I can bring them physically and I can see their faces because they don't realize that this thing that they idea comes to a physical thing and they happen in your hands it's like for me it's easy but for them it's like a super woe effect and I love this this this time when I when I put the things in their hearts yeah I face problems sometimes the first one was the administration this is the biggest one probing everybody in the world I think I can see but the funny thing here is that I sit down with my employee of the tax Authority and because here you have to declarate what you're gonna do and he say okay please explain what you are major what you're doing and then I start to explain everything I can do not but what I'm doing but okay I can 3D print I can make furniture I can make and the the guy goes crazy it's like what so because you have like a little epigraphy like like a places where you can check what you're doing and each check goes to uh you have to pay for so so finally the the guy is very very happy to to us because finally we find that I will be a Furniture maker whatever it means and then I can go from from here to the to whatever yeah the other thing is that I know many things but my imposter syndrome is like uh okay I know some things but I'm sure that everybody knows more than me I right now I'm seeing Vanessa I'm seeing happy they are like super top people but the reality is that you know what you know and you can apply it to the things you do and this is the most problem for me personally like in starting the like this this company or this startup and the other is that uh you need to be in the middle of what how you see yourself and how old I see you so you have your personal brand you have to know what you can do what you not and then show it to the people so finally I found myself being like an accustomed playing everything doing everything in my own making marketing research relationships trying to make emails learning things so it's for me it's very difficult but it's really really challenging so I like this so much being everything I learned many many of everything so which are the advantage of being yeah Pablo one one minute left okay I can be fast I can make one day publication with local delivery I can be ecological I can use material inside my town and from local supplies they are super happy to buy from them I can collaborate collaborate with anyone I want people that make crafting or local windows so I can collaborate with them and they can be low cost because not about the price but the units I can start with one unit and then go so for me it's like a super earthy and I have this symbiosis with my Fab Lab I have this beautiful Fab Lab in our town that has matching machines it has the knowledge it has the orders people that begging them to make things and I'm in symbiosity with them Outsourcing these things that the people makes I have income that goes to Fab Lab by renting the machines and I gave them visibility so more people know what the public is and could be on the edge so you want to contact me feel free thank you very much great uh thank you Pablo uh so so far we've seen early stage startups now we're going to see two more mature ones so uh Elan takeover from Chapel Hill hey can you hear me coming through great all right great to be here hi Milan I'm a co-founder of shaper tools and very briefly I'm going to tell you what we do just so you have some background we make a handheld CNC router called origin it lets you cut freehand but following a digital file very accurately and the way it works it has a camera it looks down at the material it sees where it is and then you can follow a digital file that you've placed on the workspace As you move this constantly adjusting to keep you exactly on the path even if you're a little bit off so that's the general idea and you can do a lot of things with it this is one of my favorites it's a huge musical staff that's been inlaid into a hardwood floor this is around 20 feet across you can take the tool to the job also example is this guy on a snowmobile taking it up to a ski lodge to modify a sign that was hanging in the lodge but there's a lot of more pedestrian things a lot of joinery all sorts of projects and if you're interested you could check out these two tags shape or origin or shaper made on Instagram that's probably the best place to see thousands of different projects uh so I wanted to mainly talk about uh you know how I got into this beginnings of the company and a little bit about the lessons I've learned along the way so my kind of introduction to digital Fabrication in general was in 2007 2008 I was a student uh Bachelor student in Niels lab and I did my bachelor's thesis on rapid prototyping of rapid prototyping machines and this is work that's continuing it's kind of a continuing theme as you well know uh at CBA and but like a lot of people after I graduated I went got a job I worked for a design firm but they were really cool and let me take Neil's class how to make something that makes almost anything it's kind of the follow-on class to how to make almost anything and uh that's where I really kind of got the bug for building digital fabrication machines uh you can see Neil in this photo just his hair back there and a few other people Marcelo Max who couldn't be here but were joined by David and then I wanted to point out one guy Skyla Tibbetts who's a professor of architecture at MIT now who was in the class and he's going to play a small role in this story a little bit later on so I went and I did start a company but it wasn't shaper at first I quit my job and I wanted to commercialize some tools that we'd been developing myself Max other people uh within CBA uh and I shipped one machine total uh over the span of two years it was this multi-fab machine which was based off of this design we had done earlier uh and then kind of wasn't making any money started doing consulting work helping people design tools that they were going to sell like this milling machine which also never made it to Market and so I was getting really exhausted of this and I decided I'm going back to grad school and maybe a month after I get back to grad school I get an email from Skyler saying hey I know this guy he's at MIT also he has this idea for a handheld CNC router and he's looking for a mechanical engineer to join up forces and this is him uh who became my co-founder Alec and the one axis prototype of origin that he brought in a tupperware bin to our first meeting it didn't look nearly as glamorous as it does in this Photograph it was covered in sawdust and but anyways it was really cool and I was also kind of in the habit of just saying yes to things at the time and so I said sure I'll work on it and that led us to kind of a bunch of work together starting with the goal of how do we make this into a two axis machine allow it to correct in two directions at once and so I made a mock-up we designed a prototype turn that into a prototype which became a part of the paper that we published and this whole time we hadn't really said we're starting a company but he did give me a sheet of paper that said if we do start a company I'm going to give you X small percentage of the company for the work that you've done to date uh but as it turned out we just we talked more and we're like yeah this would be really fun to go in together on as co-founders so we started working on it as it was called tool sense at the time and we use that same prototype we started uh with some incubators like the mass challenge a local incubator in Massachusetts and uh things were going okay but we decided we really need to raise the money uh that was one of the goals of the incubator and so this is when things got a little bit Silicon Valley This Is Us in Mountain View California in a Woodshed demoing to a one of our investors actually the first investor who invested in us and I was pretty daunted about the whole idea of investment and and um sorry about that I think one thing that I think one thing that uh was pretty cool about our product is that it didn't have a very obvious business case up front and the reason that was cool was because it meant that the people who invested in us really believed in the product and the team but also really got what we were trying to do and when you're picking investors it's really nice it's really good to have people that really believe in what you're doing or really excited about what you're trying to do because you go to them for a lot of advice besides money and so with that money we went and we did a few things the first thing well second thing we did I guess in parallel two parallel things uh one was building a team and I want to call out one person in particular although we have many really awesome people that we work with uh this guy Joe Heaven straight Alec and I realized pretty early that neither of us were really cut out for CEO material we're both pretty technical we didn't have a lot of experience and Joe was a very early kind of angel investor and uh he was working for Google working on the Google Glass team at the time and we decided to hire him as our CEO and then other people on Google Glass uh heard what he was doing and they left and joined us also and before long we actually had a significant fraction of the Google Glass team working on shaper origin in parallel we had been working on this prototype uh with a designer and this is our first we had many prototypes this is like the first one that really looked like a product and felt like a product and the first thing Joe said when he joined was we need to make 10 of these and I just finished making three and I was exhausted uh but I was like okay uh and so we built 10 we got them out to beta testers we did a lot of testing and we realized this is not the product we should ship it's got too many issues we were ready to pull the trigger on a Kickstarter campaign and we decided no we've got to hold off we've got to redesign this one more time and that was kind of against the advice of a lot of investors who were saying you know this whole like uh Break Stuff early philosophy uh that we should just launch with it that if you think you're ready it's too late I think when you're building power tools and trying to build trust with customers that's the wrong approach and so we spent a lot of time sweating details on redesigning it even down to like the Fasteners and making specifying where the Loctite went on the Fastener and things like this all the testing we did it was salt fog to see what's going to corrode first uh it was a huge effort uh one other thing that happened was we found a partner for the spindle spindle is a really important part of the machine but it's something that's pretty commodity and wasn't really making sense for us to design from the ground up so we ended up partnering with Festool which is one of kind of the Premier power tool manufacturers German company and they built the spindle for us and finally uh two minutes along two minute warning okay thank you so finally we ended up shipping in 2017. this is the first unit off the factory we had the uh auspicious honor of being on wood magazine on the cover of wood it's not Time Magazine but uh we'll take it and we ended up uh kind of in total when you look back on it took six and a half years we had seven major prototypes around 20 people and a lot of parts go into this uh particularly 50 tooled Parts which means that we had injection molding tools a lot of investment up front a lot of risk but it was really worth it because uh in the end we end up with a product that has very few returns and has stood the test of time and then at the end of 2018 uh Festool is actually owned by a parent company called TTS tool Technic systems and we had a relationship with them and they decided that they wanted to acquire shaper so we went under their umbrella in December 2018.
and that's not the end of the story I'm still at shaper we're still doing a lot of stuff uh we've done 10 software releases and I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned from this is well two things one of the customer is always right especially when it comes to user experience rather than telling them oh you need to figure out how to do it the way we think it should be done we're constantly learning from them and the other thing is that software is hard you always hear Hardware is hard but I think from a customer perspective it's the software that's hard because software can change under their feet and it's really difficult to keep it from slipping backwards like that takes a surprising amount of effort and then to push it forwards is even harder so that's kind of one big lesson that I've learned from all this uh we've kind of had the opportunity to finally in the last few years to start spreading out into a lot of other tracks uh like we have a lot of accessories like workstation plate some software that is paid for now uh we've done things like premium projects where you can attempt to wrap up okay buy projects and uh hardware and basically I mean that's it I just wanted to share a few things where things have gone in studio which is a design tool so that's it thank you great thank you very inspiring Arc um next we'll go to David in Berlin great thank you very much for having me all right all right can you see my screen great okay so um hey my name is David I'm the shooting processor here at Farm labs I don't want to run out of time because that sounded stressful we learned but great presentation all right uh so very quickly about me uh I'm Hungarian um spend most of my early life there went to the media lab started a company and then being at four miles for about almost 10 years uh but important for the story um actually started a Fab Lab as well I couldn't find an image but Neil was gracious enough to present at our opening party and I'm really happy to report the uh the place is still operational they'll be just got kicked out of our lease so um we're moving uh took how to make almost anything uh at uh at MIT which was probably with the class that impacted my trajectory the most made this uh graffiti um pendulum robot which is a lot of fun um and then I was skipped a couple years ahead but um uh started with four mods right after our Kickstarter Campaign which was the largest Kickstarter campaign in technology up until someone recently raised three million dollars there and then spent the next 10 years working on um different type of stereotography and also selective laser sensory machines so we're in the residence and powders business and Neil told me that many of you know about us so I'm gonna skip a deeper interaction here but I think the team that I really wanted to share is that making a few of something is really really hard and I think that the best way to demonstrate that is how hard it was to build uh our first uh prototype so uh making quantity one on the left that's the first prototype of the form one uh then making couple for the kind of like work stock prototype this is where we figured out how to make it a little bit more compact first industrial design uh kind of looks and feels like prototype and I'm building tens of them as Elon also said extremely difficult uh and then building thousands and there's our first factory in the US uh was a real real Challenge and I'm figuring out where to make it later on and then this uh this graph that is very ill-defined and changes all the time is is really hard to dial in where to build for the right quantity but I'm glad to say that 10 years later we're still alive and we're doing pretty good uh we have about 900 people should well over 100 000 of our printers and many hundreds of millions of Parts produced um so we're very glad and this this all started in a lot of ways in um in uh in Neil's lab with Max Natan and David trainer uh you know kickstarting the company in 2011. uh they're a product company I'm very very proud of it so that means that we make a lot of different things we make printers uh all of our materials and software we actually acquired a chemical company in Ohio so um we do that too which is really cool and unique um and we exist in this larger world so a lot of times people ask us okay tree printing great it's actually not that big of a market there is a much larger market of Desktop Digital fabrication tools um I did have here a shaper uh origin before so I don't know where it went but that belongs there I don't know exactly it's very hard to Define how big it is Elan if you have good numbers please let me know and then beyond that there's digital fabrication tools and injection molding and of course the 12 trillion dollar Global manufacturing Market um we exist because we want to give more access to um to any one of these very powerful tools I think that this is the single most important thing that we learned in class that um there are very few companies in the world that had access to these amazing tools before um before we came around for example or other companies that that try to democratize fabrication so this is a very worthwhile effort and you pick up a lot of really interesting use cases and customers I think that this is kind of where we want to go and uh sorry for the uh comical uh uh drawing here but uh we want to really build this kind of ultimate room where um where we we will be able to have a lot of different tools that uh that help you make stuff so if you think about four Maps uh you think about anything that helps you make stuff so I try to not just make this into a presentation of formats but really help you think about some lessons that I've learned so I grouped it into three things at different scales so at a ten percent level um if you do a Kickstarter uh remember you need funding for the company because Kickstarter is for cogs really important lesson most people forget about this and it can cause real problems um work only on things that you personally believe in and you have a strong intuition about if you are not a a good mirror for your customers then uh that it's most likely going to fail and everything always takes longer than you think I think that we learned this in class as well but I wanted to show you an interesting uh thing that I learned this is at four labs they lovingly call this the defactor which is uh my D factor which means how far we were off in estimation versus how long actually things took it's a shocking thing that over a course of a three-year product development cycle I have been shockingly accurately wrong consistently which means that it I'm always 1.83 roughly off by how long it took versus how long it actually took so um David there's a quick question what is uh cogs explain that uh cost of goods sold so that means um uh if if you're producing a machine that uh on Kickstarter and it's three thousand dollars uh uh you're selling it for three thousand dollars it's most likely between a thousand and two thousand dollars to make it the kickstarter money is for that not to actually build the company to hire the people to do dividendy so if you're trying to build a company successfully raise funding or have a plan for making the actual uh company succeed and then take the money in so you have Capital to invest and actually buy the raw material to build the machines um that's uh that's a lesson that we've learned um at 100 uh I think one thing that is really important to remember is that the most scaling variant problem that you will face at any every given level is hiring the best people and you can hire with the Money Ball principle if you haven't watched the movie or read the book please do it's a really good one which means that you can find the weirdos the people that are uniquely applying to your particular company and make them successful even if everybody else does that they're not the right people and we've hired very successful great people that became extremely successful and they wouldn't have maybe at other companies once you have pmf which is product Market fits go faster than carpet bump this is the right time to boldly invest in the direction that you're going and if you're successful expect that people are going to come after you competition people copying you disruptive innovation litigation we've seen all of it and um it's it's not a question if it happens it's just when um finally thousand person we can really work hard at morale at a thousand person company or start thinking about things like how are people doing I mean you start thinking about it earlier but it becomes an extremely important part of like how are people doing how will how they're building teams um and there are a lot of things that you can do but nothing beats good business if you don't have a good business you can still have bad morale but if you don't have a good business almost certainly you're gonna have bad morale so uh stay focused on building good business for companies that have a hardware component a lot of times your business is going to be driven by your product cycles and you need to have good sales and marketing but that's to maintain and grow you slowly the big jumps in business is always going to bear and products uh buying Revenue doesn't work long term you can do it for a little bit but um in Hungarian we have a beautiful saying that the garbage truck always catches up with the dogs um so I will let you think about that and um and so yeah combining two and three is the most efficient way to go quickly um and wrapping up hopefully on time you're hiring uh and we have lots and lots of different positions we have offices in Boston Berlin uh Budapest and Hungary um Tokyo and couple other places in APAC and lots and lots of different places and I wanted to highlight the startup founder role which is a mysterious uh yet a great place for us to interact with people that we just cannot put in any other category so please talk to me if you're interested I left my email address there that's it okay great wonderful thank you David and I'm gonna end let me go to here with two things so first is uh as you just heard um from David there's a lot of demand for this sort of talent that comes through Fab Academy and so uh We've made a few attempts at this and this is the current version we're bringing to life this is the jobs platform to fill in people with skills looking to be hired and people looking to hire and there's a even with tech cutbacks there's an almost insatiable demand for people in The Sweet Spot of skills like David was describing and so uh more is going to be coming on this jobs platform um uh Tom's asking about interns and that's a good lead actually um transitionally between jobs and incubator um and it's a good note I see Luciana we're not distinguishing between jobs and interns and we could have a separate category for intern placements which is a nice idea um last thing I want to do is this has been an amazing group of people and you're all kind of like icebreakers plowing through challenges it's a pretty high threshold and we've had a bad record historically of trying to pair inventors and entrepreneurs where the Fab Lab inventors feel like the entrepreneurs aren't telling them anything useful the entrepreneurs feel like the Fab Labs aren't paying attention and I've recently realized that we were using a more traditional model to think about incubation and in the same way that the Fab Academy helped Pioneer this model of distributed education where peers and mentors with machines in work groups locally are connected globally we're now developing a distributed incubator and so the idea is rather than you going to the incubator we want the incubator to come to you and this is very much a work in progress but the idea is to take people who come through the network we identify and help train and pair them in the Fab Academy and Academy model with leading Global mentors in a network um and so uh um just to quickly introduce I think some of them might be on the call this is a group helping advise and helping to start Mentor Eileen uh she's known among many other things for she invented the term uh unicorn as a VC um Blair many of you know um started with working with underserved communities has a background in Tech um uh Calvin and Habib work closely um uh with an incubator out of MIT um uh David and Eric are among the most thoughtful investors I know Eric was on the Midas list from Forbes of the most successful uh VCS and that's the Elaine euron can you quickly introduce yourself uh yeah sure hi everyone um super impressive just to to listen to everyone's Journey it's somewhere at the beginning and some have already achieved great success but but I really loved someone talking about was um talking about the fact that it's okay to actually not exactly know what your product or company is exactly going to do but having that passion and that conviction because I see that very consistently across a lot of tech focused Founders but at the same time you do need to have some intuition about where it's going to go and who might bite in any case what I do is I actually invest in sustainability based companies primarily around hydrogen I do that kind of globally um you know sort of the have I guess uh offices in Hong Kong I'm currently sitting in Stockholm and we also have offices in Hong Kong um and so a little bit different from what you guys are doing but uh very inspired great and then Paul can you explain the incubation work you do in Africa so um unfortunately I need to drop off for a four o'clock meeting but uh great to hear from all of you thank you okay see you Paul hi nice to meet everyone uh great presentations yeah so um I've been working I was an executive director for an incubator in Canada and then I wanted to take my kind of talents to the developing world and so I've been working in Africa and we've actually um have been working with a lot on the product development side of things so um and we think that distributed incubation has a really good use case there as does distributed Manufacturing um so you can bring kind of low-cost labs to uh the people in that in those communities and they have really great ideas um it's just giving them presenting them with the ability to realize those ideas and so we've really been working on how to incorporate Fab labs in the Prototype and product design um and then how do we scale from there and so um we've been in Togo but we're also expanding to Ghana and our plan is to uh build more Labs across West Africa as kind of these places where people can come to develop their products and prototypes great thanks Paul and then uh last on the list race data is the founder of Analog Devices one of our favorite chip companies at MIT if you've seen the gear uh dramatic gear rebuilding it's this data building um and he's very engaged in this vision of a distributed incubator and so lots of work to come on it but you know if you go back to uh was it uh Pablo trying to explain to the tax person what he does and the challenge of administration part of this is to and David's lessons part of this is to take that accumulated experience and reduce the threshold for more people I feel like uh we've done a great job in the Fab Lab Network up to a point where you fall off a cliff and this is to begin to support uh the next stages in that so more to come on that if you're interested um let me know I'll be helping coordinate and we'll be building out this Mentor team um to Mentor as a group but then starting to pair one-on-one on individual products and projects and so with that that's the startup uh recitation um it's a great tour through early mid and mature stage um with a really impressive group of people um so let's thank all of them and we keep this to an hour so I'm gonna stop um recording but if anybody wants to stay on for a few minutes so I'm going to stop the recording
2023-06-25 19:35
