Talk at Institute for the Future

Solve
Hard(ware)
Problems
Nick Pinkston
@nickpinkston
Thursday, April 25, 2013

Nick’s Projects

• Get space creatively
• Behind every hackerspace is a cool landlord
• Get members ﬁrst, get them to pay up
• Be open to the community, open shop

• Started as distributed fabbing marketplace
• Don’t do this...
• Then automated 3D printing
• Then injection mold quoting software

16 Meetups
4694 Members

DFM Plug-ins Full-auto Factory

Why Hardware Startups?
• Real Problems: Food, water, shelter,
medicine... We can’t solve these by
just adding software - new machines
and devices need to be made.
• Big Companies aren’t moving fast
enough - we need startups to solve these
hardware problems faster and more widely.

First Startup Dec 2011 March 2012 July 2012 -
Location
San
Francisco
Shenzhen
China
San
Francisco
Boston
Startups 9 9 1(?) 0
Services
- Mentors
- Workspace
- Mfg. Resources
- Mentors
- Space
- Near Shenzhen
supply base
- Seeed Studio
- Mentors
- Full Proto Shop
- PCH Mfg.
Resources
- Mentors
- Full Proto Shop
- Dragon Inno.
Mfg. Resources
Funding Funds: $25-100K
- Equity: 3-10%
Funds: $25K
- Equity: 6-10%
Funds: ?
- Equity: ?
- Licensing Model?
Funds: ?
- Equity: ?
- Licensing Model
Hardware Accelerators

Hardware Startup Services
*No one knows why the “Street” trope happened...

Mfg: Now and Then
•Mass Production:
• Unit Cost, Scalability
• Mass Customization is overhyped
•Small-Run, Flexible Production:
• Setup Cost, Speed
Manufacturers are stuck in a mass production mindset

Digital Manufacturing is
the Real Movement
• 3DP is currently overhyped, but it is great
for prototyping and as a Gateway Drug
• Prototyping is close to solved
• Production is the real problem

Nothing is ever Democratized
“Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two”
- Engineering Maxim
Computers?
Are datacenters just a
bunch of MacBooks?
Printers?
Why does Print-on-
Demand exist?

Manufacturing Physics
• Feature formation efﬁciency (x = speed)
• Molding is x^3, SLS = x^2, FDM = x
• Material Compatibility (melting points, etc.)
• Don’t Fight Entropy: melting vs. forming

Manufacturers don’t want
your help
• Still focused on big players and mass production
• Don’t make their own software / electronics.All
of them are mech. engineers / machinists
• “What’s MAKE Magazine?”
-Youth coordinator for manufacturing magazine

Engineering Conservatism
Software
Engineering
(minutes)
Electrical
Engineering
(days)
Mechanical
Engineering
(weeks)
Civil
Engineering
(months)
Conservatism is driven by iteration time and risk
Screwing up
(debugging) is how
you have to work.
Screwing up is very
expensive.
Don’t do it!
One iteration, if it
breaks:
“You’re Fired!”
It’s going to take a
few boards to get it
right.

Vertical is Back
• Who: SpaceX,Tesla,Apple, Makerbot,
3D Robotics, OpenROV, etc.
• HybridVertical & Core Competencies
• Hyundai built their own steel mill

Distributed Production
is a Canard
Distributed / Democratized Prototyping is Real

Machine cost doesn’t matter
• Machine vs. Unit vs. Setup Cost
• Facebook is capital intensive:
• $1.8B Datacenter + $53M/YR electricity
• $1.5B 2012 Revenue

The Robot Wars
Baxter RobotMaster

Economies of Scale
in the Future
Infrastructure
Community

MechE Tools

EE Tools

What should CAD really give you?
• Simulation
• DFM - Design for Manufacturability
• Data Interchange and Part Libraries
• MechE + EE
• Collaboration
• Problem:We need more bandwidth!
Engineering Superpowers

Open Source?
• Open Hardware: Going through a
Stallman moment...
• Makerbot, Chris Anderson, OpenROV...
•Software:
• Open is hard when Users ≠ Developers:
• FreeCAD, GIMP, Calibre, etc... suck

Maker Cities
• Cities are gaining power relative to Feds
• Our current capitalism has issues with
long-term outlooks and +/- externalities
• Education is the ultimate competitive adv.

A Brief History of Maker Cities
• Robert Owen (Textiles) -> New Harmony, IN
• F.C. Lowell (Textiles) -> Lowell, MA
• Henry Ford (Cars) -> Fordlandia, Brazil
Trope: Industrialist -> Factory Utopia
Honorable Mention: J.A. Etzler & “New Eden” (1833)
“The paradise within the reach of all men, without labour, by powers of nature and machinery”

Current Maker Cities
• Open Source Ecology’s Factor-eFarm
• Shenzhen
• “Pro” Hackerspaces
• Artisans Asylum (Somerville, MA)
• New Lab (coming soon to Brooklyn)
• Berkeley Makerspace (coming soon)

A Deﬁcit of Meaning
• Contemporary Western Society: sans un
raison d’etre.
• Current Post-Modernism & “Hipsters” are
symptoms of the disease.
• MakerFaire is the new “Big Tent Revival”
and is the only fully-rounded, future-facing
movement.

Education is the Ultimate
Competitive Advantage
• Net Productivity must be greater than
surroundings in the long-term.
• If you really believe in liberal values, you
already agree with the above statement.
• San Francisco has no yuppie families with
school-aged kids because of bad schools.

A New Capitalism
• Market Failure: Value Creation without
Value Capture
• Financial Models: Kickstarter?
• Capitalism Outside; Socialism Inside
• Cell Wall Model of Economy
• Government OS

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