Good to be here.

I should disclose that Founder Collective is an investor in MakerBot. So what is MakerBot?

So Maker Bot…

We have one right behind us actually.

Yeah, so it’s printing out right here. It’s a 3D printer. It’s a machine that can make you almost anything, which turns out is pretty handy.

And so, when you say almost anything, what are some, I mean… Here you brought some examples which are kind of fun to show some of our friends in New York or whatever.

Yeah.

So there’s fun stuff you can print. But then there’s also practical stuff?

Yeah, so I brought fun stuff. These are busts of friends, and a heart that when you twist it it goes crazy.

Awesome.

And then, but when we have a new employee, they have to print out their own coat hook and those kind of things…

They have to print their own coat hook…

Yeah (laughs) – so it’s kind of practical stuff.

But also people are using it for like jewellery moulding… I mean, are there professional uses of it currently?

Yeah. You can use lost plastic casting and make something on a MakerBot out of plastic and then transform it and get it made in metal. You can do all sorts of stuff. If you have a 3D model of it, you can make it.

Yeah. So while this thing’s printing now can you explain a little bit about what its doing and..?

Sure. The green stuff at the top is the filament. That’s the raw plastic, it’s the same thing Lego’s made of.

Uhum.

And that goes into the machine and gets pulled in by a high-torque motor and then it goes out. It goes in kind of like spaghetti, and then it comes out like super super fine angel hair spaghetti that’s molten and sticky, and it moves it around so it draws with it.

So, right now this thing is building this rocketship, right?

Yeah so we’re about…

Just building the bottom of it. Yeah, so we’re about a third of the way through the rocketship.

And so, how does it, so where does the design come from?

So you have a few options with the design. If your somebody who likes to design things. You can design whatever you want.

And that’d be using some kind of CAD software on your computer or something?

Yeah, and actually, like, that whole area is blowing up right now. There’s actually, with webGL you can, like, design things in the browser. Super cool. And then we have a site called Thingiverse and people share their digital designs and there’s, like, more than 10000 things you can just download it and print.

Without having to design any of it.

It’s like a bottle opener. I think I ran into a bottle opener or something and then downloaded and printed it out on Thingiverse right?

Yeah, nobody with a MakerBot so you’d never have to buy a bottle opener again.

OK. And then, and so then, OK, so then you print the design, so the design is just sort of a standard 3D image. How do you get it on there?

There’s an SD card. So you just put your SD card in your computer and transfer it or you hook it up by USB.

So you either build it yourself, OK, so build it yourself or download it from the internet. And you can put it on there and then you need to buy, I guess, this material. And then how does it decide, like, so it’s, like, doing all these crazy patterns and things, like, how does just deciding to that.

Yeah. When you go in and print it, there’s a little slider. You can decide if you want to be totally solid or totally empty. I think we’re like 25 percent infill. You can choose whether if you want hexagons or circles or squares in there. And then there’s an algorithm that fills it out.

OK, cool. And this will take, so this thing printing will take like twenty minutes or something like that right?

Yeah. OK. So there have been 3D printers for, like, decades, right?

Yeah. So they, I mean, they first started coming out at the end of, in the late 80’s. So, they’ve been around for a while. But those machines were like mainframe, literally mainframe-sized machines. Like, bigger than your refrigerator.

Yeah. And used for what purposes? Primarily those machines are used for prototyping. So in design houses or engineering they’re, like, OK, we want to make a new phone. Let’s make a design. Let’s print it out. OK, now we feel like this is too big for my pocket. We can’t use this.

I see. Supposedly, like people with the new iPhone, someone’s carrying around form some of the exact same form factors to see if it feels good or whatever.

Yeah. Exactly.

OK.

But the Maker Bot kind of messes with that whole system because…

That was a sort of fairly big business that was going on.

Still is. Yeah.

And still is. And what other competitors like big companies, right?

Stratesis and 3D Systems are the big ones.

Okay. How much do these devices cost?

They make beautiful machines that are 20 thousand to a million dollars. So, they go really…

And your thing is how much?

1,299 dollars.

You mentioned mainframes, would you consider what you have sort of the PC to their mainframes in a way? Like this is 1978 or something?

I think it’s more like 1976 with Apple I, pre-Apple II days.

You still have to build it yourselves.

Altair, you have to put…

It’s still like hobbyists, or whatever.

Yeah. And the coolest people in the world are getting into it. You talk to the people who have an Altair 8800 and they went on to start crazy companies that are famous now.

Yeah.

It’s early days The cool thing about that is that all of our customers are these super-smart, really awesome people who are getting this because they’re into the bleeding edge of technology, pushing it farther than we can.

Yeah. And so how are you able to build these things for $1000 when it costs the other companies, I mean, is it just, I mean, presumably they have a lot of other features and it does things that yours doesn’t do, right, I mean?

Well, I mean, it’s interesting. We just came at it from a totally different place. You know, they’re servicing a market of, it has to work, it has to be perfect. It has to, you know, it has to be 99.9999% accurate. And we came at it from, like, OK, what’s the absolute minimum we can do to make it work.

Yeah.

And then let’s try that, and if it works, ship it.

I see.

And it actually turns out like we’ve been able now with our second machine and our six extruder, and the 25th version of our software, we’ve been able to, like, actually make it work pretty well.

Yeah. And, so, do you use, for example, off-the-shelf parts or something, like no.

Yeah.

That makes it cheaper and so you don’t have to go do machine tooling or something?

Yeah. Instead of having to, make it out of injection-molded parts, which requires tooling and that gets real expensive, and to make changes is difficult. We just use laser cutting and off-the-shelf parts. And with laser cutting, we literally just tell our laser cutter, okay, with the next batch, we want this little hole moved over here, you know, we have some little changes to make.

Yeah.

So it’s really easy for us to be iterative and then also to keep costs down and make it flexible.

Yeah.

And get something out.

So, I’ve always been a tinkerer, and I got a, you know, I was a puppeteer, and then a school teacher, and then I made videos for MAKE magazine and worked at Etsy, and then started a hacker collective in Brooklyn called NYCResistor. And…

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. NYCResistor is awesome. It’s a, and now there’s hackers spaces. You know, when we started I think we’re one the first hackers spaces in this new wave of hacker spaces. And now pretty much every city has a hacker space. So like, and what it is is a club house, and that’s for geeks.

OK.

And we have all the tools we want and a community of folks who are smart.

So it’s particularly hardware and not software hacking, or both or?

You know, every space is different. Ours is focused on hardware hacking and making things, but there’s other spaces that are more software focused.

So like, what would people make there besides 3D printing stuff?

If somebody just made something for a classroom that is basically a like a telepresence robot, made out of like just junk we had laying around.

OK.

We have a laser cutter so there’s a lot of laser cutters basically gets used like 24/7.

OK, and so, so started that and then what happened?

You know, 3D printing is sort of a holy grail for tinkerers, because it is not just making things it is making something. It makes things so we really wanted one and we couldn’t afford one, so we started hacking things together. And we started in 2006, 2007 as a hobby for fun and then by 2009 we had one that almost worked, and so then we quit our jobs and started Microbots.

Put the pedal to the metal. I see. And right now when you order one, you have to assemble it, correct?

Yes.

I mean, is your plan to have one that is fully assembled and…

Yes, actually.

That definitely limits the audience, right ? Target market or whatever, having to assemble it?

Yes, up until now, you have to put it together actually. About a week ago we made it so that you could buy one fully assembled. It’s the same thing, just our technicians assemble it and actually they give you a call and then ask you what color LEDs you want in it, or what colour plastic, and then we make it and ship it out to you and they walk you through the process of getting it started, because it’s not hard, but it’s definitely something new and so it takes a little walking through.

And so you did mention that this is sort of like 1976 and you’re sort of Altair or something. When you think of it from a business point of view, how do you… I think Altair turned out to, I don’t know the exact story, but they weren’t big winners in the PC world.

No.

Do you see this first of all as like a movement the same way that the PC was a movement and there were forty companies that created it? And then software industries, and massive industries, or do you think it’s, that kind of scale? And, I guess, first question, and second question is if that’s the case, how do you avoid being kind of the kinda cool guys who helped kick it off, but then were surpassed by some marketing wonderboy or something?

Yeah, we want our next machine to be the Apple 2, not the Commodore 64.

Okay. I think that was a good machine too.

It was, but then it didn’t go anywhere. And when we started, there was just basically the RepRap Research Foundation, which was basically a bunch of folks making 3D printers with the focus of being able to make other 3D printers with their 3D printers. And we decided we wanted the machine that would just make anything, that would just be useful.

There’s a name – the RepRap machine is the machine that can build itself, right?

That’s it’s name.

And does the MakerBot qualify as a RepRap Machine?

It does now. So like a year and a half in, one of our users made a MakerBot, with this MakerBot.

So it’s not like you can print the whole thing, but you can print every piece of it?

All the parts except what we call the vitamins, which are like the nuts and bolts and metal parts, you can print on MakerBot.

I see. OK. Sorry, you were saying about the industry. So, yes, the industry is just going to get more and more interesting. It’s actually going faster than I expected when we started. I thought it would take like four years, five years to get to where we are now, and, you know, we’re just trying to keep up.

It’s going fast.

So, well, in five, ten years, you think people, everyone will have a 3D printer in their home?

You know, it’s hard to imagine now, but like when microwaves came out, it was super, super exciting and thrilling to have a microwave, and you went over and watched, it and you worried about sitting in front of it and stuff, and now its just like boring, like everybody has a microwave.

Well Bill Gates had this you know, it was considered radical when he said his goal was have a pc on every desk.

Right.

It was like wow that’s nuts. And now of course we have like four of them or something, I mean not just PC but some computer or whatever.

I won’t mind. One of my goals is to get one in front of every kid. ‘One MakerBot Per Child’ style, you know? Because if I was 10, and I had access to a MakerBot and I could take the things that I imagined, and just make them rather than having to like, take things apart and, feel it straining stuff.

But is it, is it all sort of round like kind of the fun, sort of toy like stuff or I mean, I guess, you know, I mean, you know, the PC I think started off, like I don’t know, I start off playing games on it. I think a lot of people who, you know, of our era or whatever who had Apple 2’s, and things did.

But, then eventually you had the spreadsheet and you had all sorts of other things and that’s when you really had a booming industry is when you kind of crossed over beyond just the tinkerers, right? I mean, do you see that as something that, like, I mean, like, what would that be. So, what would be like in the household of 2020 you know, would you just be printing all of your silverware and not buying anymore or how I mean, what do you use it for.

Or, do you like send somebody, like, you send, I mean, presumably, like you can have different materials and eventually you can have any material, I guess, or?

Yeah, I mean, the future looks interesting. We’ve got, like, like you say, like, right now most people are using it, just for their, like 95% of MakerBot use is just for satisfaction and enjoyment, puzzles and toys and stuff like that. But, then there’s stuff, like, when you have a MakerBot, and, you know, we had a user whose glasses broke, so he just printed new glasses frames.

Right.

We had a user who moved into his apartment and they were out of shower curtain rings and so he printed shower curtain rings. I mean, we hear stories like this of people just printing things that they need. So, when you have a MakerBot, you have like MakerBot goggles. And you just start seeing the world through the eyes of, like, well, you know, I need one of these, rather than just instantly think go shopping for it.

Yeah, I think glasses are interesting, I guess, because you can, you could completely tailor them to your face in a way that you could never before, right?

Yeah, I’m actually.

I have a super weird nose and I always have trouble finding glasses for example or?

Yeah, we could scan those, scan your glasses in and, like, move them part of them.

Yeah, so that’s actually how you got these people here, right? This is like Chris Poole from Canvas. It was…

Yeah.

Because I saw him that day and he was covered in powder. I said “What happened to you?” He said, “I was over at MakerBot getting scanned.” So you have this scanner over there where you scan any object and then…

Yeah, it’s a laser-scan, it’s a polhemus scanner, and we basically, you sit down and we cover you in corn starch. Well, just mostly your hair because the laser doesn’t see dark things, so we have to kind of lighten it up with some powder.

Yeah.