WEBVTT - The Trials of MakerBot 0:00:04.120 --> 0:00:07.160 Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how 0:00:07.200 --> 0:00:13.640 stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. 0:00:13.680 --> 0:00:16.079 I'm your host, John that Strickland. I'm an executive producer 0:00:16.079 --> 0:00:18.640 with how Stuff Works and I love all things tech. 0:00:19.320 --> 0:00:22.400 And this is a part two of the maker Bought story. 0:00:22.520 --> 0:00:25.600 So if you've not heard part one, I recommend listening 0:00:25.640 --> 0:00:29.479 to the episode that published before this one, because otherwise 0:00:29.480 --> 0:00:32.760 you're coming in in medias race. So when I left 0:00:32.760 --> 0:00:34.560 off at the end of the last episode, I mentioned 0:00:34.600 --> 0:00:37.880 that maker Bot's first three D printer, the Cupcake C 0:00:38.080 --> 0:00:40.400 and C, could produce an object that was up to 0:00:40.560 --> 0:00:44.239 four inches per side well five inches tall, so you 0:00:44.280 --> 0:00:48.519 could get a pretty decent sized object if you wanted to. 0:00:48.800 --> 0:00:51.639 And the maker bot community was creating tweaks and upgrades 0:00:51.680 --> 0:00:55.200 to the printer and sharing them on the associated website 0:00:55.320 --> 0:00:58.400 called finger Verse, and the maker bot team was hard 0:00:58.400 --> 0:01:01.040 at work creating the next generation of three D printers 0:01:01.040 --> 0:01:04.919 with an eye toward moving out of the kit space eventually, 0:01:05.520 --> 0:01:08.280 because kits, by their very nature, limit the market you 0:01:08.319 --> 0:01:10.959 can sell to. Typically, you're only going to really sell 0:01:11.000 --> 0:01:14.759 to hardcore hobbyists and makers because they're the ones who 0:01:14.760 --> 0:01:17.440 are willing to put in the work necessary to put 0:01:17.480 --> 0:01:20.800 together these things. Uh, they get a lot of satisfaction 0:01:20.800 --> 0:01:22.680 on that. There is something to be said, like if 0:01:22.680 --> 0:01:26.480 you ever made anything, really but people who build their 0:01:26.520 --> 0:01:28.880 own computers, they can tell you that there's a sense 0:01:28.920 --> 0:01:31.680 of satisfaction when you connect everything and you get it 0:01:31.680 --> 0:01:34.959 to work properly. Um, and a lot of the hobbyists 0:01:35.000 --> 0:01:37.120 take a lot of joy out of that. But it 0:01:37.240 --> 0:01:39.959 does limit the number of people you're gonna sell to 0:01:40.480 --> 0:01:42.959 because there are other folks out there, such as myself, 0:01:43.280 --> 0:01:46.720 who will I have an appreciation for that skill. I 0:01:46.760 --> 0:01:49.600 don't possess it myself. And so while it might take 0:01:49.600 --> 0:01:52.160 the typical builder eighty hours to put together one of 0:01:52.200 --> 0:01:55.800 these devices, for me it would be forever because I'd 0:01:55.840 --> 0:01:58.560 spent about five hours trying to put together and then 0:01:58.600 --> 0:02:02.200 give up. So, in order to not limit themselves to 0:02:02.240 --> 0:02:06.520 that hardcore audience of makers and hobbyists, they had already 0:02:06.520 --> 0:02:12.280 started planning out building fully assembled printers in the future. 0:02:13.040 --> 0:02:15.480 On the company side of things, Maker Bots seemed to 0:02:15.520 --> 0:02:18.000 be a really interesting place to work. According to an 0:02:18.080 --> 0:02:22.520 article and Wired titled the three D Printing Revolution that wasn't. 0:02:23.040 --> 0:02:25.959 Employees worked at Maker Bought Not to get rich quick 0:02:26.120 --> 0:02:28.360 by being part of an early start up with hopes 0:02:28.440 --> 0:02:30.600 that some other company was going to do a big 0:02:30.639 --> 0:02:34.200 buy out and then you have a nice payout as 0:02:34.440 --> 0:02:37.480 your company got acquired. Instead, they were part of the 0:02:37.480 --> 0:02:40.560 company because they believed in the company's mission, which was 0:02:40.600 --> 0:02:45.600 tied closely with the rep rap philosophy of disrupting manufacturing 0:02:45.960 --> 0:02:48.360 by putting it in the hands of the common consumer. 0:02:48.800 --> 0:02:53.600 The company culture was loose and jobs were pretty vaguely defined. Apparently, 0:02:53.639 --> 0:02:57.760 you might be helping people pack kits for shipping one day, 0:02:57.840 --> 0:03:00.360 and then the next day you're tweaking product design on 0:03:00.520 --> 0:03:04.760 the latest version of your hardware. In that article, a 0:03:04.800 --> 0:03:08.200 former Maker Bought employee named Matt Griffin said there was 0:03:08.240 --> 0:03:11.239 no real formal structure to the company in those early days. 0:03:11.600 --> 0:03:14.639 He said, no one was really fooling themselves. They all 0:03:14.720 --> 0:03:19.040 knew that ultimately that was unsustainable from a business perspective, 0:03:19.080 --> 0:03:20.839 that they were going to have a have a more 0:03:20.960 --> 0:03:26.119 formal organizational strategy moving forward. But in the early days 0:03:26.160 --> 0:03:29.440 of Maker Bought, the important thing was just do whatever 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:32.200 needs to be done at that given time, and then 0:03:32.280 --> 0:03:35.200 worry about the next thing after you're finished with the 0:03:35.240 --> 0:03:39.360 first thing. Within the first year of being in business, 0:03:39.400 --> 0:03:42.480 the company had made six hundred cupcakes, sea and seat kits, 0:03:42.960 --> 0:03:45.600 and according to Bree Pettis, one of the co founders 0:03:45.760 --> 0:03:48.360 of Maker Bought, the cost of all the parts for 0:03:48.480 --> 0:03:51.880 the kids added up to about six hundred fifty dollars. 0:03:52.600 --> 0:03:56.360 They were selling them for seven fifty dollars unassembled, so 0:03:56.720 --> 0:03:58.680 there was just a hundred dollars more than what it 0:03:58.760 --> 0:04:00.880 costs to get the parts together in the first place. 0:04:01.400 --> 0:04:04.240 And that's before you start figuring in stuff like labor 0:04:04.560 --> 0:04:06.720 of putting all the pieces together, putting them in boxes, 0:04:06.720 --> 0:04:11.160 shipping them out so razor thin margins, you might say, 0:04:11.320 --> 0:04:13.320 a bit more than a year and a half after 0:04:13.520 --> 0:04:17.120 Zack Smith, Adam Mayor, and Bree Pettis had launched the company, 0:04:17.200 --> 0:04:21.040 they introduced their second model of three D printer. This 0:04:21.080 --> 0:04:24.560 one was called the thing oh Matic. Like the Cupcakes 0:04:24.600 --> 0:04:26.919 C and CEE, you could buy this printer as a 0:04:27.000 --> 0:04:30.400 kit or you could have it fully assembled. The kit 0:04:30.640 --> 0:04:34.839 cost one thou fifty dollars and the fully assembled printer 0:04:35.279 --> 0:04:38.520 was hundred, making it the same cost as the fully 0:04:38.560 --> 0:04:41.839 assembled cupcake CE and C had been when it first debuted. 0:04:42.600 --> 0:04:46.040 The thing Amatic had some new features. For one thing, 0:04:46.080 --> 0:04:49.160 it could print multiple objects in one print job, as 0:04:49.200 --> 0:04:52.479 long as those objects didn't overlap on the print bed. 0:04:52.880 --> 0:04:55.400 This was thanks to a new technology called the automated 0:04:55.480 --> 0:04:59.599 build Platform. Maker Bot designer Charles Packs had created that 0:04:59.680 --> 0:05:03.000 feat sure. The build platform had a heated surface and 0:05:03.120 --> 0:05:07.279 was mounted on a belt system underneath the platform. So 0:05:07.640 --> 0:05:12.320 this belt system could actually move the physical location of 0:05:12.360 --> 0:05:17.200 the platform underneath the extruder, so the printer would you know, 0:05:17.360 --> 0:05:20.120 print out the first object, then the platform could move 0:05:20.120 --> 0:05:22.880 out from under the first object. The printer could print 0:05:22.920 --> 0:05:27.320 out an additional object on that same building surface, so 0:05:27.440 --> 0:05:30.160 you could print multiple things at once. You didn't have 0:05:30.200 --> 0:05:33.479 to manually remove each piece as soon as it was finished. 0:05:33.520 --> 0:05:36.719 As long as you could arrange the two objects to 0:05:36.800 --> 0:05:42.160 be printed on sufficiently far enough parts on the platform 0:05:42.279 --> 0:05:45.279 and not have the extruder, you know, mess up whatever 0:05:45.279 --> 0:05:47.560 it was you did just printed. That was a real danger. 0:05:48.000 --> 0:05:50.560 If you didn't take that into account, then you could 0:05:50.720 --> 0:05:53.560 have a print job, if it's tall enough, get to 0:05:53.560 --> 0:05:55.719 a point where it would come into contact with the 0:05:55.720 --> 0:05:58.120 extruder as it's trying to print the second print job, 0:05:58.520 --> 0:06:00.240 and everything would mess up. So you had to pay 0:06:00.279 --> 0:06:04.880 attention to your designs. The system also included a brush 0:06:04.920 --> 0:06:08.400 to clean off the nozzle between the print jobs. This 0:06:08.520 --> 0:06:10.800 was important because otherwise the plastic could kind of gum 0:06:10.880 --> 0:06:13.479 up and cause printing errors. If you ever used a 0:06:13.480 --> 0:06:16.599 hot glue gun, it's kind of like that. The automated 0:06:16.640 --> 0:06:19.760 build platform was one of the upgrades that was originally 0:06:20.080 --> 0:06:23.159 created for the old Cupcake C and C, but now 0:06:23.200 --> 0:06:25.840 it was coming in as an optional feature on the 0:06:25.839 --> 0:06:29.560 thing Amatic. But this new printer also had a slightly 0:06:29.640 --> 0:06:33.800 smaller build volume than the cupcake that one as you 0:06:34.080 --> 0:06:37.000 as I mentioned earlier, could produce an object that was 0:06:37.040 --> 0:06:39.440 four inches long, four inches wide, and five inches tall, 0:06:39.880 --> 0:06:42.479 but the thing o Matic would knock that down to 0:06:42.560 --> 0:06:45.320 just be four inches in every direction, so it couldn't 0:06:45.320 --> 0:06:47.600 be quite as tall as the Cupcake CE and C 0:06:47.800 --> 0:06:51.000 could manage. Maker Bought unveiled the thing Omatic at the 0:06:51.080 --> 0:06:54.799 twenty ten Maker Fair New York event. Like the Cupcake 0:06:54.880 --> 0:06:57.159 C and C, this printer was an open source hardware 0:06:57.200 --> 0:07:00.599 device and was registered under the canow License, which gave 0:07:00.720 --> 0:07:03.800 users the opportunity to alter the design and make adjustments 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:06.520 or improvements. And like the Cupcake C and C, Maker 0:07:06.520 --> 0:07:09.520 but would incorporate some of those designs into future versions 0:07:09.560 --> 0:07:13.360 of the printer itself, so the design of the thing 0:07:13.360 --> 0:07:18.880 Amatic changed with the community's input. The open source philosophy 0:07:19.120 --> 0:07:22.160 was continuing to pay off, and that it was fueling 0:07:22.160 --> 0:07:26.840 innovation at an incredibly rapid pace. The cool thing about 0:07:26.840 --> 0:07:30.520 this is that you know three D printers were meant 0:07:30.640 --> 0:07:33.280 to help with innovation, and that they would allow you 0:07:33.320 --> 0:07:36.000 to rapidly prototype stuff. You could come up with a 0:07:36.040 --> 0:07:39.240 design for a product, print out your design, test it 0:07:39.240 --> 0:07:40.840 to see if it makes sense, and if it doesn't, 0:07:40.880 --> 0:07:42.800 you could go right back to the drawing board and 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:46.600 lose very little time in the process. Well, not only 0:07:47.160 --> 0:07:49.000 could the printer do that, but the fact that it 0:07:49.040 --> 0:07:52.800 was open source meant that people could rapidly prototype the 0:07:52.880 --> 0:07:57.840 printer itself, changing it. So the very thing that the 0:07:57.880 --> 0:08:01.720 printer did could also contr ribute to the printer's improvement 0:08:01.760 --> 0:08:03.560 over time. I thought that was kind of a cool 0:08:03.640 --> 0:08:07.120 recursive quality of three D printers. With maker Bought in particular, 0:08:07.600 --> 0:08:10.520 the community of maker bot owners and the thing of 0:08:10.640 --> 0:08:13.640 Verse users, that website where everyone was putting their designs. 0:08:13.960 --> 0:08:16.320 They were happy to show off their creations and they 0:08:16.320 --> 0:08:19.360 were happy to benefit from the designs made by other people. 0:08:19.880 --> 0:08:22.000 Maker Bott was seeing a big benefit as that from 0:08:22.000 --> 0:08:24.640 that as well, both as it continued to encourage a 0:08:24.680 --> 0:08:28.240 really enthusiastic base of users and also to directly benefit 0:08:28.320 --> 0:08:31.400 from their designs by incorporating them into the future versions 0:08:31.440 --> 0:08:34.559 of the maker Bot printers. But there was a downside 0:08:34.559 --> 0:08:38.120 to that approach as well. And the downside was that 0:08:38.200 --> 0:08:41.720 because the hardware and the software were open source and 0:08:41.880 --> 0:08:46.640 openly available to look at, other people or companies could 0:08:46.679 --> 0:08:49.160 use those designs to make their own three D printers 0:08:49.360 --> 0:08:53.160 and compete against maker Bot within that market. Now, in 0:08:53.160 --> 0:08:56.760 the early days, that wasn't really a big problem because 0:08:56.800 --> 0:08:59.680 maker Bot commanded about a quarter of the market in 0:08:59.720 --> 0:09:02.840 three D printing in those early years, but the overall 0:09:02.880 --> 0:09:06.880 market was also really really small. The small markets provide 0:09:07.160 --> 0:09:11.000 very little incentive for competitors. Why would you jump into 0:09:11.120 --> 0:09:14.960 a tiny market it has very few customers there, and 0:09:15.160 --> 0:09:18.600 especially if one is already dominated by an established company, 0:09:18.960 --> 0:09:21.080 it could be very difficult to make any headway. But 0:09:21.160 --> 0:09:23.680 as the three D printer market would grow, that would 0:09:23.720 --> 0:09:28.600 become a bigger problem. Now throughout and eleven, maker Butt 0:09:28.640 --> 0:09:32.800 continued selling Cupcake and Thingo matic kits. Behind the scenes 0:09:33.040 --> 0:09:36.240 teams were working on the next generation of maker butt devices, 0:09:36.320 --> 0:09:40.240 and they also secured ten million dollars in venture capital 0:09:40.320 --> 0:09:45.040 funding in August. Some people say that that was the 0:09:45.080 --> 0:09:50.040 beginning of potentially serious trouble because the capitalist of venture 0:09:50.080 --> 0:09:53.760 capitalist is making an investment, and an investment means you 0:09:53.760 --> 0:09:55.440 want to see a return. You want to see some 0:09:55.800 --> 0:09:59.520 profit from that investment. Around that time, the company was 0:09:59.559 --> 0:10:03.480 also star to get attention from mainstream media, not just 0:10:04.000 --> 0:10:08.160 the tech and geek journals out there, but mainstream journals 0:10:08.200 --> 0:10:10.800 things like you know, Rolling Stone magazine or or the 0:10:10.840 --> 0:10:15.760 Colbart rapport. By the fall of two thousand eleven, maker 0:10:15.800 --> 0:10:19.960 Bot had around seventy employees and had added another office 0:10:20.000 --> 0:10:23.400 to accommodate the growth the company was going through. In 0:10:23.440 --> 0:10:29.600 early January, the company unveiled a new printer called the Replicator. 0:10:30.120 --> 0:10:33.280 This would not only be the most ambitious printer to date, 0:10:33.880 --> 0:10:36.440 it would also mark the pivotal moment when maker Bot 0:10:36.440 --> 0:10:40.040 would shift away from that open source philosophy the company 0:10:40.080 --> 0:10:44.719 had embraced. So the Replicator was open source. It had 0:10:44.800 --> 0:10:47.280 not quite abandoned this yet, but it was the beginning 0:10:47.280 --> 0:10:51.760 of the end. The Replicator included dual extruders, which meant 0:10:51.800 --> 0:10:54.280 that for the first time, maker bot makers could print 0:10:54.320 --> 0:10:57.080 in two different colors of plastic for the same build. 0:10:57.600 --> 0:11:00.000 You could have a filament of plastic of one color 0:11:00.000 --> 0:11:02.640 are going to one extruder, and a filament of plastic 0:11:02.640 --> 0:11:05.320 of a different color going to the second extruder, and 0:11:05.320 --> 0:11:07.800 then based upon your design, that would tell the printer 0:11:08.040 --> 0:11:11.760 which plastic to use for any given moment while it 0:11:11.800 --> 0:11:15.440 was building up those layers, so you could have a 0:11:15.520 --> 0:11:19.720 two tone object when you were done, whatever two colors 0:11:19.760 --> 0:11:23.840 you wanted. Really, it also increased the build size, so 0:11:24.080 --> 0:11:26.720 you can build much larger objects than you could before. 0:11:27.600 --> 0:11:30.240 Now users could print stuff that was two twenty five 0:11:30.240 --> 0:11:35.160 millimeters long, one millimeters wide and one millimeters tall, or 0:11:35.200 --> 0:11:38.080 about eight point nine inches by five point seven inches 0:11:38.120 --> 0:11:41.559 by six point one inches. The Replicator was the first 0:11:41.720 --> 0:11:45.880 maker bought printer that was also sold fully assembled. There 0:11:45.920 --> 0:11:49.040 was no kit option anymore. So this was again maker 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:53.280 bots moved to try and and tap into a potentially 0:11:53.640 --> 0:11:57.120 larger customer base because now they could sell to people 0:11:57.160 --> 0:12:00.760 who weren't who didn't feel confident they could put such 0:12:00.800 --> 0:12:04.200 a thing together. The initial price for the Replicator was 0:12:04.280 --> 0:12:08.480 one thousand, seven fifty dollars, which is a princely sum, 0:12:08.520 --> 0:12:11.280 to be sure, but still a fraction of what most 0:12:11.400 --> 0:12:14.880 three D printers would cost. Even in the pro sumer market, 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:17.400 you're typically looking at devices that were in the tens 0:12:17.400 --> 0:12:21.640 of thousands of dollars. There were some competitors that were 0:12:21.640 --> 0:12:25.080 coming out with very cheap three D printers around the 0:12:25.160 --> 0:12:29.840 same time, um, but they were not at the same 0:12:29.960 --> 0:12:33.120 level of quality or name recognition as maker But. The 0:12:33.200 --> 0:12:37.079 replicator had a few quality problems of its own, including 0:12:37.200 --> 0:12:40.880 vulnerabilities to sack electricity. There were reports that if you 0:12:41.360 --> 0:12:46.959 were to put in a card containing designs into the 0:12:47.000 --> 0:12:51.200 maker Butt replicator and you had a static charge on 0:12:51.240 --> 0:12:54.840 that card, it could cause something to pop, and then 0:12:54.920 --> 0:13:00.360 you would have an uh, non working replicator. And the 0:13:00.400 --> 0:13:03.599 company couldn't afford to just ignore those problems. There was 0:13:03.679 --> 0:13:07.559 also increasing pressure rising from competitors, and so maker Bot 0:13:07.760 --> 0:13:10.880 was at work on the successor to the replicator, which 0:13:10.880 --> 0:13:14.440 would come out less than a year after the replicator debuted, 0:13:14.920 --> 0:13:17.240 and that would be the first three D printer maker 0:13:17.280 --> 0:13:20.720 Bot would offer that would at least be partly proprietary 0:13:20.840 --> 0:13:24.880 in nature and not entirely open source, the open source 0:13:24.880 --> 0:13:27.960 philosophy would no longer become the guiding principle for the 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:31.240 company's efforts, and it would mean lots of big changes. 0:13:31.360 --> 0:13:33.760 I'll explain more in a moment, but first let's take 0:13:33.800 --> 0:13:44.280 a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the original 0:13:44.320 --> 0:13:47.679 Replicator was still an open source hardware project, but it 0:13:47.679 --> 0:13:50.440 would prove to be the last of those, and it 0:13:50.520 --> 0:13:53.840 was in part the reason why Zach Smith would end 0:13:53.920 --> 0:13:58.520 up leaving maker Butt, or being forced to leave maker 0:13:58.559 --> 0:14:01.720 Butt might be the way to put it so. Earlier 0:14:01.760 --> 0:14:06.440 in two thousand eleven, before the Replicator had debut, they 0:14:06.480 --> 0:14:09.720 actually had a totally different plan to move forward, and 0:14:09.760 --> 0:14:13.160 that plan was to create a super secret, low cost, 0:14:13.440 --> 0:14:16.000 pre assembled maker Butt that would be cheap enough for 0:14:16.040 --> 0:14:19.360 the average consumer, and they wanted to aim for a 0:14:19.400 --> 0:14:22.080 price tag that would make it about as expensive as 0:14:22.120 --> 0:14:25.280 your typical new video game console, so we're talking like 0:14:25.680 --> 0:14:28.400 five hundred or six hundred dollars. That was a really 0:14:28.440 --> 0:14:30.920 ambitious goal and it was something that they didn't think 0:14:30.920 --> 0:14:34.360 they could manage to do. Working just out of the 0:14:34.440 --> 0:14:38.800 United States. They called this project the Mass market maker 0:14:38.880 --> 0:14:44.360 Butt Project or MMM triple M. So to achieve this goal, 0:14:44.880 --> 0:14:47.640 Zack Smith took a small team of engineers and he 0:14:47.680 --> 0:14:51.040 went to China to set up a manufacturing strategy that 0:14:51.040 --> 0:14:54.800 would meet their needs because manufacturing in China is way 0:14:54.920 --> 0:14:57.520 less expensive than in the United States, even when you 0:14:57.560 --> 0:15:00.520 factor in international shipping, you'd be saving a lot more 0:15:00.560 --> 0:15:04.000 money per unit. So in the fall of two thousand eleven, 0:15:04.040 --> 0:15:07.760 while Smith is in China working on this, Bree Pettis 0:15:07.760 --> 0:15:10.640 back in the United States was getting impatient. He wanted 0:15:10.680 --> 0:15:13.200 to have something to show off at c e S. 0:15:13.240 --> 0:15:16.880 He had recently received quite a bit of money in 0:15:16.960 --> 0:15:21.040 venture capital for for maker Bot, and he felt like 0:15:21.120 --> 0:15:24.680 the updates to the maker Butt, the mass market maker 0:15:24.720 --> 0:15:29.800 bot device, were sporadic and not nearly giving him enough 0:15:29.840 --> 0:15:33.720 progress each time he was getting one. So he decided 0:15:33.760 --> 0:15:37.320 to put his Brooklyn team of engineers on a new 0:15:37.360 --> 0:15:40.040 task to develop a brand new printer in time for 0:15:40.160 --> 0:15:42.840 ce S, which again happens in January, so it was 0:15:42.880 --> 0:15:48.480 a super condensed timeline now. Eventually, Bree Pettis decided to 0:15:48.520 --> 0:15:52.600 go with the New York based design over the one 0:15:52.680 --> 0:15:55.840 that Zack Smith and his team were working on in China, 0:15:56.040 --> 0:15:58.600 and it was a much more expensive approach because it 0:15:58.640 --> 0:16:03.280 was nearly dollars. It was one thousand, seven fifty bucks. 0:16:03.320 --> 0:16:07.120 So that was a reversal on that original strategy they 0:16:07.160 --> 0:16:09.440 had leading up to c S tw twelve, where they 0:16:09.440 --> 0:16:12.400 were going to try and make a really affordable three 0:16:12.480 --> 0:16:14.920 D printer for the average person. So the device the 0:16:14.920 --> 0:16:18.000 company showed off was more of a pro sumer device, 0:16:18.120 --> 0:16:20.800 something that someone who was going to use it for 0:16:20.840 --> 0:16:23.800 professional purposes might be able to spend that kind of money, 0:16:23.800 --> 0:16:26.400 But your average consumer wasn't going to drop nearly two 0:16:26.440 --> 0:16:30.920 thousand dollars on a three D printer that they barely 0:16:30.960 --> 0:16:34.960 knew how it worked. In April two thou twelve, Maker 0:16:35.040 --> 0:16:39.360 Butt chose formally to shut down its China operation entirely. 0:16:40.160 --> 0:16:44.600 Zack Smith was understandably frustrated. He really found himself at 0:16:44.600 --> 0:16:49.240 odds with Bree Pettis. They had uh strong disagreements on 0:16:49.280 --> 0:16:53.240 the direction of the company. And according to Zack Smith 0:16:53.280 --> 0:16:54.920 and and in his own words, he said he was 0:16:54.960 --> 0:16:58.680 forced out of the company he had co founded because 0:16:59.320 --> 0:17:02.360 his vision of where the company should go was uh 0:17:02.480 --> 0:17:06.040 not compatible with where Bree Pettis went the company to go. 0:17:06.080 --> 0:17:08.960 And Bree was in the role of CEO at this point. 0:17:09.520 --> 0:17:13.520 By mid two thousand twelve, Zack Smith would leave maker Bot. 0:17:13.560 --> 0:17:16.320 He ended up traveling back to China, and he was 0:17:16.359 --> 0:17:20.399 fascinated at the bustling manufacturing industry over in China, and 0:17:20.440 --> 0:17:23.840 also he was really excited because he would have access 0:17:23.880 --> 0:17:28.080 to very cheap parts there. He said, the language barrier 0:17:28.240 --> 0:17:30.639 was a bit of a challenge, but he could get 0:17:30.680 --> 0:17:32.800 all the different stuff you would need to build the 0:17:32.840 --> 0:17:35.880 kind of devices he liked building for much less money 0:17:35.880 --> 0:17:37.600 than it would cost him in the United States. So 0:17:37.640 --> 0:17:40.400 he lived in China for a while. He would continue 0:17:40.440 --> 0:17:43.119 working with the rap Rap project, but he chose to 0:17:43.160 --> 0:17:46.320 divorce himself entirely from maker Butt, so he was the 0:17:46.400 --> 0:17:49.920 first of the three co founders to leave the company. Now, 0:17:49.960 --> 0:17:53.040 according to the interviews and articles I could find from 0:17:53.080 --> 0:17:57.000 around this particular time in maker bots history, Bree had 0:17:57.040 --> 0:17:59.040 sort of emerged at this point as the face of 0:17:59.080 --> 0:18:02.600 the company out of the scessity. He had already achieved 0:18:02.640 --> 0:18:05.200 a following in the maker community because of his work 0:18:05.240 --> 0:18:09.240 with make magazine, so it seemed like a natural transition 0:18:09.280 --> 0:18:11.639 to make him sort of the voice and the face 0:18:12.240 --> 0:18:15.719 of maker Bot as well, and some would even compare 0:18:15.800 --> 0:18:18.600 him saying he was the Steve Jobs of maker Bot. 0:18:19.040 --> 0:18:21.280 Pettis himself said he really would prefer to be the 0:18:21.320 --> 0:18:24.720 Steve Wozniak of maker Button. If you know your Apple history, 0:18:24.760 --> 0:18:27.520 you know what the difference is there. It made two 0:18:27.520 --> 0:18:30.600 thousand twelve. As maker Bot engineers were working on the 0:18:30.640 --> 0:18:35.399 replicator to design in secret, the company relocated to the 0:18:35.480 --> 0:18:39.760 Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, a much larger space. They 0:18:39.760 --> 0:18:42.399 now had a hundred twenty five employees, and then in 0:18:42.440 --> 0:18:45.800 August the nail in the coffin for maker Bots open 0:18:45.880 --> 0:18:48.960 source approach arrived in the form of a Kickstarter project 0:18:49.359 --> 0:18:53.280 called the Tangabot. Now the Tangentbot was proposed by a 0:18:53.280 --> 0:18:57.320 guy named Matt Strong. The Tangibot was essentially a maker 0:18:57.400 --> 0:19:02.000 Bot clone. Strong's plan was to mass produce uh these 0:19:02.080 --> 0:19:06.320 these replicator clones in China to bring down the costs 0:19:06.480 --> 0:19:09.680 and sell the tangent Bot at a significant discount in 0:19:09.720 --> 0:19:13.359 the United States. So in theory, they would be indistinguishable 0:19:13.480 --> 0:19:16.879 from the replicator printers because he could use all the 0:19:16.880 --> 0:19:19.639 open source information. They would work on the same software, 0:19:20.040 --> 0:19:23.160 they would follow the same hardware design. They would print 0:19:23.200 --> 0:19:25.879 stuff from the finger verse just as well as a 0:19:25.920 --> 0:19:30.320 replicator could and this was all possible because all of 0:19:30.359 --> 0:19:34.840 that information was open source, so there was nothing legally 0:19:35.080 --> 0:19:39.440 stopping him from doing this. However, in the open source community, 0:19:39.560 --> 0:19:43.800 it's considered pretty taboo to clone someone else's stuff and 0:19:43.840 --> 0:19:45.960 then to sell it as your own, even if you're 0:19:45.960 --> 0:19:49.439 just attributing the other person. That's not considered super cool. 0:19:49.800 --> 0:19:53.560 It's not in keeping with the spirit of the community, 0:19:53.640 --> 0:19:57.320 and the maker butt community largely rallied behind maker butt, 0:19:57.680 --> 0:20:00.280 even in the wake of the quality problems that the 0:20:00.320 --> 0:20:05.560 replicator had suffered earlier that year. But Pettis now had 0:20:05.560 --> 0:20:10.200 a strong argument against open source in general. Someone had 0:20:10.440 --> 0:20:12.960 outright said they were going to make the same product 0:20:13.040 --> 0:20:16.720 that his company was making, but sell it for less money. 0:20:16.760 --> 0:20:20.000 So when maker bot announced the replicator to the company 0:20:20.000 --> 0:20:24.199 indicated that some of this technology was going to be proprietary, 0:20:24.320 --> 0:20:27.480 many in the maker community felt this was a slap 0:20:27.520 --> 0:20:30.399 in the face of the people who had supported maker 0:20:30.440 --> 0:20:33.400 bought in its early days. It was an outright betrayal. 0:20:34.280 --> 0:20:38.520 Worse yet, there was a suspicion that maker bot was 0:20:38.560 --> 0:20:43.600 going to incorporate improvements and designs that community members had 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:47.520 created as part of thingo Verse, that the stuff that 0:20:47.600 --> 0:20:49.840 was going to be a replicator too, would be coming 0:20:49.920 --> 0:20:54.000 straight from the people who were going to get uh 0:20:54.359 --> 0:20:57.040 rolled over by the fact that it was going to 0:20:57.160 --> 0:21:00.639 go with a proprietary approach. They weren't going to necessarily 0:21:01.080 --> 0:21:05.199 have their contributions attributed. They would see no benefit from it. 0:21:05.320 --> 0:21:08.119 And whereas they had been happy for Maker but to 0:21:08.200 --> 0:21:14.320 succeed on in part because of their contributions earlier, that 0:21:14.400 --> 0:21:16.280 was with the understanding that they were all part of 0:21:16.280 --> 0:21:19.919 the same family and everything was transparent. Now with a 0:21:19.960 --> 0:21:23.600 proprietary approach, stuff is being hidden away from the very 0:21:23.600 --> 0:21:26.359 community that had made this company possible. So they saw 0:21:26.359 --> 0:21:29.680 it as a stab in the back. Unlike the replicator, 0:21:30.040 --> 0:21:34.040 the replicator too had only a single extruder, so you 0:21:34.080 --> 0:21:37.919 were back to printing in just a one color. Additionally, 0:21:37.960 --> 0:21:40.560 it could only print in p L a thermoplastic. It 0:21:40.600 --> 0:21:44.480 could not do a BS. The replicator to increased the 0:21:44.520 --> 0:21:48.760 build area to two five millimeters by one three millimeters 0:21:48.800 --> 0:21:53.680 to one millimeters, or eleven point two inches by six 0:21:53.720 --> 0:21:57.400 inches by six point one inches. Essentially, layers of plastic 0:21:57.440 --> 0:22:01.080 could be as thin as one hundred micrometer. A micrometer, 0:22:01.160 --> 0:22:03.560 by the way, is a millionth of a meter and 0:22:04.040 --> 0:22:06.919 that would improve the resolution of the print jobs. It's 0:22:06.960 --> 0:22:09.440 kind of like the dots per inch metric we would 0:22:09.520 --> 0:22:12.040 use for your standard run of the mill printers, or 0:22:12.160 --> 0:22:14.440 the pixel count we would use in the resolution of 0:22:14.480 --> 0:22:17.320 an image. The thinner the layers in a print job, 0:22:17.760 --> 0:22:21.600 the smoother the transition can be from layer to layer overall, 0:22:21.720 --> 0:22:23.560 So if you're printing an object that has a lot 0:22:23.600 --> 0:22:28.040 of curved surfaces, the result is a more smooth curved line. 0:22:28.520 --> 0:22:31.240 With thicker layers, you get more of a kind of 0:22:31.320 --> 0:22:35.280 jagged step transition between one layer and the next. You 0:22:35.280 --> 0:22:37.719 can really feel it. It feels like a series of ridges. 0:22:38.680 --> 0:22:42.199 Some of the proprietary elements included the metal case for 0:22:42.240 --> 0:22:44.760 the replicator to It was the first time maker bot 0:22:44.840 --> 0:22:47.520 was offering up a printer that had a metal case 0:22:47.600 --> 0:22:51.320 as opposed to their traditional balsa would cases that had 0:22:51.320 --> 0:22:55.840 been the the the casing for the previous printers. And 0:22:56.080 --> 0:22:59.199 they also had some proprietary software, so it wasn't just 0:22:59.280 --> 0:23:03.159 the hardware that is no longer fully open source. The 0:23:03.160 --> 0:23:07.680 software followed suit. The company also showed off a replicator 0:23:07.680 --> 0:23:12.679 to X, the two experimental replicator that added in some 0:23:12.720 --> 0:23:15.399 of the features that the Replicator too was missing like 0:23:15.520 --> 0:23:18.359 it had the dual extruder so you could print in 0:23:18.359 --> 0:23:21.480 two colors again, and also a heated platform to enable 0:23:21.520 --> 0:23:24.760