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This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2018 14:23:59 -0500
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: March 4, 2018 at 10:35:09 AM EST To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing Bre Pettis left MakerBot a wealthy man with a trail of enemies. Danielle Applestone was a PhD desperate for someone to save her company. Then the two found each other. By Kimberly Weisul March/April Issue <https://stage.inc.com/magazine/201804/kimberly-weisul/bre-pettis-danielle-applestone-makerbot-othermill-3d-printer.html> Of all the things that almost thwarted Danielle Applestone's life's work, she never imagined that one of them would be venture capital. Applestone grew up in the Arkansas woods, in a house built on tree stumps. Her mom grew vegetables and chopped all the wood. Her dad, a disabled Navy veteranwho has used a wheelchair since he broke his back, was into making bullets. The family was always modifying things around the house so he could use or reach them. "For me, it was like, holy crap, tools are power," says Applestone. But home life was rough. "There are ways to control your family with fear that don't involve punching them," she says. At age 8, she tried to run away. In sixth grade, a teacher referred Applestone--by then, a constant tinkerer--to a free STEM camp. At 14, she gained admission to a free STEM boarding school, and realized that science would be her ticket out. By the time Applestone debuted the Othermill in 2013, she was a single mom who had managed to graduate from MIT and to earn a PhD in materials science. She turned down a job at Tesla, where she would have been the third employee in its battery division. Instead, she built a machine that she believed would teach Americans the skills necessary to take the two million manufacturing jobs projected to go unfilled over the next decade. More sophisticated than both a laser cutter and a 3-D printer, the Othermill is a computer-controlled milling machine that can cut into aluminum, brass, wood, and plastic with incredible precision. Industrial mills can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are the size of at least one refrigerator. Her team at Other Machine--now called Bantam Tools--had made a plug-and-play desktop version the size of a tall toaster that cost only $2,199. If a 3-D printer could let people make plastic objects at their whimsy, her milling machine could give people the power to produce the stuff that makes the stuff--anything from a circuit board to a gear. "With a milling machine, the world is your Lego," says Applestone. Those at the forefront of the maker revolution believe "desktop milling has the potential to be even more significant than consumer 3-D printing," says Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, an open-source hardware company. Saul Griffith, founder of Otherlab, the San Francisco-based incubator where Applestone first hatched the Othermill, says any country that wants to stay ahead must empower the next generation with skills and accessible tools. "We have to give our children robots that make things," says Griffith. "Danielle is on the frontlines of giving robots to children so they can built the future.” Developing the mill had been challenging. But getting the money to do it was even more difficult. In 2012, an $8 million Darpa grant was supposed to fund Applestone's company, but only a fraction of it came through. To keep the project alive, Applestone and her staff took consulting jobs while mounting a Kickstarter campaign. Crowdfunding success attracted angel investors and venture capitalists, from whom she eventually raised $6.5 million. By the time fundraising was over, Applestone, now 37, felt indestructible. As a woman and as a hardware entrepreneur, she says it was "a nightmare. You come out on the other side of it, and you're friggin' strong. It's like, I can do anything now." By 2017, she'd been shipping product for three years and had reached breakeven, no small feat for a hardware startup. But at a board meeting that February, her investors told her it wasn't enough. They wanted to see the kind of growth trajectory that would bring dramatic returns, and they didn't think Applestone was on that path. She needed to do something radically different, they told her, or it would be time to sell. Suddenly, the funding bargain she'd made became very clear to her: "We couldn't keep doing what we were doing because we'd taken venture capital." Applestone pursued would-be acquirers, but none of them were interested in running a hardware company. Some saw it as a potential acquihire; others just wanted her. Then there were those who wanted to turn Other Machine into a software company. Applestone couldn't stand it. The mill was about turning people into makers, not coders. Applestone was desperate. "How can we say to our customers"--engineers, educators, hobbyists, many of whom Applestone had come to know personally--"you've been with us for four years, and sorry, guys, but someone bought us and they're shutting us down?" she thought. Sitting at her computer one evening in her Berkeley, California, office, she sent off another round of emails. Then, at 6:49 p.m., she saw a green light pop up in her Gchat window. It was Bre Pettis. She'd known Pettis in passing for years--the maker community, at times, can seem alarmingly small. And Pettis, with his trademark sideburns and shock of salt-and-pepper hair, is one of its best-known members. One of the founders of 3-D-printing company MakerBot, Pettis had sold that company to Stratasys for $403 million in 2013. He'd also made the controversial decision to move MakerBot away from open source, enraging open-source evangelists. When, in 2016, he left the company a rich man, a large helping of ill will tagged along with him. Applestone wasn't going to tell Pettis everything. But maybe he had connections to a potential buyer, she thought. Pettis asked her what she was specifically looking to sell. "The whole company?" he messaged her. "Yes, the whole thing," she typed back. A few days later, Pettis was on a plane to Berkeley. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
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- This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing Dave Farber (Mar 04)