Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, John that Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works and I love all things tech.
Speaker 1: And this is a part two of the maker Bought story.
Speaker 1: So if you've not heard part one, I recommend listening
Speaker 1: to the episode that published before this one, because otherwise
Speaker 1: you're coming in in medias race. So when I left
Speaker 1: off at the end of the last episode, I mentioned
Speaker 1: that maker Bot's first three D printer, the Cupcake C
Speaker 1: and C, could produce an object that was up to
Speaker 1: four inches per side well five inches tall, so you
Speaker 1: could get a pretty decent sized object if you wanted to.
Speaker 1: And the maker bot community was creating tweaks and upgrades
Speaker 1: to the printer and sharing them on the associated website
Speaker 1: called finger Verse, and the maker bot team was hard
Speaker 1: at work creating the next generation of three D printers
Speaker 1: with an eye toward moving out of the kit space eventually,
Speaker 1: because kits, by their very nature, limit the market you
Speaker 1: can sell to. Typically, you're only going to really sell
Speaker 1: to hardcore hobbyists and makers because they're the ones who
Speaker 1: are willing to put in the work necessary to put
Speaker 1: together these things. Uh, they get a lot of satisfaction
Speaker 1: on that. There is something to be said, like if
Speaker 1: you ever made anything, really but people who build their
Speaker 1: own computers, they can tell you that there's a sense
Speaker 1: of satisfaction when you connect everything and you get it
Speaker 1: to work properly. Um, and a lot of the hobbyists
Speaker 1: take a lot of joy out of that. But it
Speaker 1: does limit the number of people you're gonna sell to
Speaker 1: because there are other folks out there, such as myself,
Speaker 1: who will I have an appreciation for that skill. I
Speaker 1: don't possess it myself. And so while it might take
Speaker 1: the typical builder eighty hours to put together one of
Speaker 1: these devices, for me it would be forever because I'd
Speaker 1: spent about five hours trying to put together and then
Speaker 1: give up. So, in order to not limit themselves to
Speaker 1: that hardcore audience of makers and hobbyists, they had already
Speaker 1: started planning out building fully assembled printers in the future.
Speaker 1: On the company side of things, Maker Bots seemed to
Speaker 1: be a really interesting place to work. According to an
Speaker 1: article and Wired titled the three D Printing Revolution that wasn't.
Speaker 1: Employees worked at Maker Bought Not to get rich quick
Speaker 1: by being part of an early start up with hopes
Speaker 1: that some other company was going to do a big
Speaker 1: buy out and then you have a nice payout as
Speaker 1: your company got acquired. Instead, they were part of the
Speaker 1: company because they believed in the company's mission, which was
Speaker 1: tied closely with the rep rap philosophy of disrupting manufacturing
Speaker 1: by putting it in the hands of the common consumer.
Speaker 1: The company culture was loose and jobs were pretty vaguely defined. Apparently,
Speaker 1: you might be helping people pack kits for shipping one day,
Speaker 1: and then the next day you're tweaking product design on
Speaker 1: the latest version of your hardware. In that article, a
Speaker 1: former Maker Bought employee named Matt Griffin said there was
Speaker 1: no real formal structure to the company in those early days.
Speaker 1: He said, no one was really fooling themselves. They all
Speaker 1: knew that ultimately that was unsustainable from a business perspective,
Speaker 1: that they were going to have a have a more
Speaker 1: formal organizational strategy moving forward. But in the early days
Speaker 1: of Maker Bought, the important thing was just do whatever
Speaker 1: needs to be done at that given time, and then
Speaker 1: worry about the next thing after you're finished with the
Speaker 1: first thing. Within the first year of being in business,
Speaker 1: the company had made six hundred cupcakes, sea and seat kits,
Speaker 1: and according to Bree Pettis, one of the co founders
Speaker 1: of Maker Bought, the cost of all the parts for
Speaker 1: the kids added up to about six hundred fifty dollars.
Speaker 1: They were selling them for seven fifty dollars unassembled, so
Speaker 1: there was just a hundred dollars more than what it
Speaker 1: costs to get the parts together in the first place.
Speaker 1: And that's before you start figuring in stuff like labor
Speaker 1: of putting all the pieces together, putting them in boxes,
Speaker 1: shipping them out so razor thin margins, you might say,
Speaker 1: a bit more than a year and a half after
Speaker 1: Zack Smith, Adam Mayor, and Bree Pettis had launched the company,
Speaker 1: they introduced their second model of three D printer. This
Speaker 1: one was called the thing oh Matic. Like the Cupcakes
Speaker 1: C and CEE, you could buy this printer as a
Speaker 1: kit or you could have it fully assembled. The kit
Speaker 1: cost one thou fifty dollars and the fully assembled printer
Speaker 1: was hundred, making it the same cost as the fully
Speaker 1: assembled cupcake CE and C had been when it first debuted.
Speaker 1: The thing Amatic had some new features. For one thing,
Speaker 1: it could print multiple objects in one print job, as
Speaker 1: long as those objects didn't overlap on the print bed.
Speaker 1: This was thanks to a new technology called the automated
Speaker 1: build Platform. Maker Bot designer Charles Packs had created that
Speaker 1: feat sure. The build platform had a heated surface and
Speaker 1: was mounted on a belt system underneath the platform. So
Speaker 1: this belt system could actually move the physical location of
Speaker 1: the platform underneath the extruder, so the printer would you know,
Speaker 1: print out the first object, then the platform could move
Speaker 1: out from under the first object. The printer could print
Speaker 1: out an additional object on that same building surface, so
Speaker 1: you could print multiple things at once. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to manually remove each piece as soon as it was finished.
Speaker 1: As long as you could arrange the two objects to
Speaker 1: be printed on sufficiently far enough parts on the platform
Speaker 1: and not have the extruder, you know, mess up whatever
Speaker 1: it was you did just printed. That was a real danger.
Speaker 1: If you didn't take that into account, then you could
Speaker 1: have a print job, if it's tall enough, get to
Speaker 1: a point where it would come into contact with the
Speaker 1: extruder as it's trying to print the second print job,
Speaker 1: and everything would mess up. So you had to pay
Speaker 1: attention to your designs. The system also included a brush
Speaker 1: to clean off the nozzle between the print jobs. This
Speaker 1: was important because otherwise the plastic could kind of gum
Speaker 1: up and cause printing errors. If you ever used a
Speaker 1: hot glue gun, it's kind of like that. The automated
Speaker 1: build platform was one of the upgrades that was originally
Speaker 1: created for the old Cupcake C and C, but now
Speaker 1: it was coming in as an optional feature on the
Speaker 1: thing Amatic. But this new printer also had a slightly
Speaker 1: smaller build volume than the cupcake that one as you
Speaker 1: as I mentioned earlier, could produce an object that was
Speaker 1: four inches long, four inches wide, and five inches tall,
Speaker 1: but the thing o Matic would knock that down to
Speaker 1: just be four inches in every direction, so it couldn't
Speaker 1: be quite as tall as the Cupcake CE and C
Speaker 1: could manage. Maker Bought unveiled the thing Omatic at the
Speaker 1: twenty ten Maker Fair New York event. Like the Cupcake
Speaker 1: C and C, this printer was an open source hardware
Speaker 1: device and was registered under the canow License, which gave
Speaker 1: users the opportunity to alter the design and make adjustments
Speaker 1: or improvements. And like the Cupcake C and C, Maker
Speaker 1: but would incorporate some of those designs into future versions
Speaker 1: of the printer itself, so the design of the thing
Speaker 1: Amatic changed with the community's input. The open source philosophy
Speaker 1: was continuing to pay off, and that it was fueling
Speaker 1: innovation at an incredibly rapid pace. The cool thing about
Speaker 1: this is that you know three D printers were meant
Speaker 1: to help with innovation, and that they would allow you
Speaker 1: to rapidly prototype stuff. You could come up with a
Speaker 1: design for a product, print out your design, test it
Speaker 1: to see if it makes sense, and if it doesn't,
Speaker 1: you could go right back to the drawing board and
Speaker 1: lose very little time in the process. Well, not only
Speaker 1: could the printer do that, but the fact that it
Speaker 1: was open source meant that people could rapidly prototype the
Speaker 1: printer itself, changing it. So the very thing that the
Speaker 1: printer did could also contr ribute to the printer's improvement
Speaker 1: over time. I thought that was kind of a cool
Speaker 1: recursive quality of three D printers. With maker Bought in particular,
Speaker 1: the community of maker bot owners and the thing of
Speaker 1: Verse users, that website where everyone was putting their designs.
Speaker 1: They were happy to show off their creations and they
Speaker 1: were happy to benefit from the designs made by other people.
Speaker 1: Maker Bott was seeing a big benefit as that from
Speaker 1: that as well, both as it continued to encourage a
Speaker 1: really enthusiastic base of users and also to directly benefit
Speaker 1: from their designs by incorporating them into the future versions
Speaker 1: of the maker Bot printers. But there was a downside
Speaker 1: to that approach as well. And the downside was that
Speaker 1: because the hardware and the software were open source and
Speaker 1: openly available to look at, other people or companies could
Speaker 1: use those designs to make their own three D printers
Speaker 1: and compete against maker Bot within that market. Now, in
Speaker 1: the early days, that wasn't really a big problem because
Speaker 1: maker Bot commanded about a quarter of the market in
Speaker 1: three D printing in those early years, but the overall
Speaker 1: market was also really really small. The small markets provide
Speaker 1: very little incentive for competitors. Why would you jump into
Speaker 1: a tiny market it has very few customers there, and
Speaker 1: especially if one is already dominated by an established company,
Speaker 1: it could be very difficult to make any headway. But
Speaker 1: as the three D printer market would grow, that would
Speaker 1: become a bigger problem. Now throughout and eleven, maker Butt
Speaker 1: continued selling Cupcake and Thingo matic kits. Behind the scenes
Speaker 1: teams were working on the next generation of maker butt devices,
Speaker 1: and they also secured ten million dollars in venture capital
Speaker 1: funding in August. Some people say that that was the
Speaker 1: beginning of potentially serious trouble because the capitalist of venture
Speaker 1: capitalist is making an investment, and an investment means you
Speaker 1: want to see a return. You want to see some
Speaker 1: profit from that investment. Around that time, the company was
Speaker 1: also star to get attention from mainstream media, not just
Speaker 1: the tech and geek journals out there, but mainstream journals
Speaker 1: things like you know, Rolling Stone magazine or or the
Speaker 1: Colbart rapport. By the fall of two thousand eleven, maker
Speaker 1: Bot had around seventy employees and had added another office
Speaker 1: to accommodate the growth the company was going through. In
Speaker 1: early January, the company unveiled a new printer called the Replicator.
Speaker 1: This would not only be the most ambitious printer to date,
Speaker 1: it would also mark the pivotal moment when maker Bot
Speaker 1: would shift away from that open source philosophy the company
Speaker 1: had embraced. So the Replicator was open source. It had
Speaker 1: not quite abandoned this yet, but it was the beginning
Speaker 1: of the end. The Replicator included dual extruders, which meant
Speaker 1: that for the first time, maker bot makers could print
Speaker 1: in two different colors of plastic for the same build.
Speaker 1: You could have a filament of plastic of one color
Speaker 1: are going to one extruder, and a filament of plastic
Speaker 1: of a different color going to the second extruder, and
Speaker 1: then based upon your design, that would tell the printer
Speaker 1: which plastic to use for any given moment while it
Speaker 1: was building up those layers, so you could have a
Speaker 1: two tone object when you were done, whatever two colors
Speaker 1: you wanted. Really, it also increased the build size, so
Speaker 1: you can build much larger objects than you could before.
Speaker 1: Now users could print stuff that was two twenty five
Speaker 1: millimeters long, one millimeters wide and one millimeters tall, or
Speaker 1: about eight point nine inches by five point seven inches
Speaker 1: by six point one inches. The Replicator was the first
Speaker 1: maker bought printer that was also sold fully assembled. There
Speaker 1: was no kit option anymore. So this was again maker
Speaker 1: bots moved to try and and tap into a potentially
Speaker 1: larger customer base because now they could sell to people
Speaker 1: who weren't who didn't feel confident they could put such
Speaker 1: a thing together. The initial price for the Replicator was
Speaker 1: one thousand, seven fifty dollars, which is a princely sum,
Speaker 1: to be sure, but still a fraction of what most
Speaker 1: three D printers would cost. Even in the pro sumer market,
Speaker 1: you're typically looking at devices that were in the tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars. There were some competitors that were
Speaker 1: coming out with very cheap three D printers around the
Speaker 1: same time, um, but they were not at the same
Speaker 1: level of quality or name recognition as maker But. The
Speaker 1: replicator had a few quality problems of its own, including
Speaker 1: vulnerabilities to sack electricity. There were reports that if you
Speaker 1: were to put in a card containing designs into the
Speaker 1: maker Butt replicator and you had a static charge on
Speaker 1: that card, it could cause something to pop, and then
Speaker 1: you would have an uh, non working replicator. And the
Speaker 1: company couldn't afford to just ignore those problems. There was
Speaker 1: also increasing pressure rising from competitors, and so maker Bot
Speaker 1: was at work on the successor to the replicator, which
Speaker 1: would come out less than a year after the replicator debuted,
Speaker 1: and that would be the first three D printer maker
Speaker 1: Bot would offer that would at least be partly proprietary
Speaker 1: in nature and not entirely open source, the open source
Speaker 1: philosophy would no longer become the guiding principle for the
Speaker 1: company's efforts, and it would mean lots of big changes.
Speaker 1: I'll explain more in a moment, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the original
Speaker 1: Replicator was still an open source hardware project, but it
Speaker 1: would prove to be the last of those, and it
Speaker 1: was in part the reason why Zach Smith would end
Speaker 1: up leaving maker Butt, or being forced to leave maker
Speaker 1: Butt might be the way to put it so. Earlier
Speaker 1: in two thousand eleven, before the Replicator had debut, they
Speaker 1: actually had a totally different plan to move forward, and
Speaker 1: that plan was to create a super secret, low cost,
Speaker 1: pre assembled maker Butt that would be cheap enough for
Speaker 1: the average consumer, and they wanted to aim for a
Speaker 1: price tag that would make it about as expensive as
Speaker 1: your typical new video game console, so we're talking like
Speaker 1: five hundred or six hundred dollars. That was a really
Speaker 1: ambitious goal and it was something that they didn't think
Speaker 1: they could manage to do. Working just out of the
Speaker 1: United States. They called this project the Mass market maker
Speaker 1: Butt Project or MMM triple M. So to achieve this goal,
Speaker 1: Zack Smith took a small team of engineers and he
Speaker 1: went to China to set up a manufacturing strategy that
Speaker 1: would meet their needs because manufacturing in China is way
Speaker 1: less expensive than in the United States, even when you
Speaker 1: factor in international shipping, you'd be saving a lot more
Speaker 1: money per unit. So in the fall of two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: while Smith is in China working on this, Bree Pettis
Speaker 1: back in the United States was getting impatient. He wanted
Speaker 1: to have something to show off at c e S.
Speaker 1: He had recently received quite a bit of money in
Speaker 1: venture capital for for maker Bot, and he felt like
Speaker 1: the updates to the maker Butt, the mass market maker
Speaker 1: bot device, were sporadic and not nearly giving him enough
Speaker 1: progress each time he was getting one. So he decided
Speaker 1: to put his Brooklyn team of engineers on a new
Speaker 1: task to develop a brand new printer in time for
Speaker 1: ce S, which again happens in January, so it was
Speaker 1: a super condensed timeline now. Eventually, Bree Pettis decided to
Speaker 1: go with the New York based design over the one
Speaker 1: that Zack Smith and his team were working on in China,
Speaker 1: and it was a much more expensive approach because it
Speaker 1: was nearly dollars. It was one thousand, seven fifty bucks.
Speaker 1: So that was a reversal on that original strategy they
Speaker 1: had leading up to c S tw twelve, where they
Speaker 1: were going to try and make a really affordable three
Speaker 1: D printer for the average person. So the device the
Speaker 1: company showed off was more of a pro sumer device,
Speaker 1: something that someone who was going to use it for
Speaker 1: professional purposes might be able to spend that kind of money,
Speaker 1: But your average consumer wasn't going to drop nearly two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars on a three D printer that they barely
Speaker 1: knew how it worked. In April two thou twelve, Maker
Speaker 1: Butt chose formally to shut down its China operation entirely.
Speaker 1: Zack Smith was understandably frustrated. He really found himself at
Speaker 1: odds with Bree Pettis. They had uh strong disagreements on
Speaker 1: the direction of the company. And according to Zack Smith
Speaker 1: and and in his own words, he said he was
Speaker 1: forced out of the company he had co founded because
Speaker 1: his vision of where the company should go was uh
Speaker 1: not compatible with where Bree Pettis went the company to go.
Speaker 1: And Bree was in the role of CEO at this point.
Speaker 1: By mid two thousand twelve, Zack Smith would leave maker Bot.
Speaker 1: He ended up traveling back to China, and he was
Speaker 1: fascinated at the bustling manufacturing industry over in China, and
Speaker 1: also he was really excited because he would have access
Speaker 1: to very cheap parts there. He said, the language barrier
Speaker 1: was a bit of a challenge, but he could get
Speaker 1: all the different stuff you would need to build the
Speaker 1: kind of devices he liked building for much less money
Speaker 1: than it would cost him in the United States. So
Speaker 1: he lived in China for a while. He would continue
Speaker 1: working with the rap Rap project, but he chose to
Speaker 1: divorce himself entirely from maker Butt, so he was the
Speaker 1: first of the three co founders to leave the company. Now,
Speaker 1: according to the interviews and articles I could find from
Speaker 1: around this particular time in maker bots history, Bree had
Speaker 1: sort of emerged at this point as the face of
Speaker 1: the company out of the scessity. He had already achieved
Speaker 1: a following in the maker community because of his work
Speaker 1: with make magazine, so it seemed like a natural transition
Speaker 1: to make him sort of the voice and the face
Speaker 1: of maker Bot as well, and some would even compare
Speaker 1: him saying he was the Steve Jobs of maker Bot.
Speaker 1: Pettis himself said he really would prefer to be the
Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak of maker Button. If you know your Apple history,
Speaker 1: you know what the difference is there. It made two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. As maker Bot engineers were working on the
Speaker 1: replicator to design in secret, the company relocated to the
Speaker 1: Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, a much larger space. They
Speaker 1: now had a hundred twenty five employees, and then in
Speaker 1: August the nail in the coffin for maker Bots open
Speaker 1: source approach arrived in the form of a Kickstarter project
Speaker 1: called the Tangabot. Now the Tangentbot was proposed by a
Speaker 1: guy named Matt Strong. The Tangibot was essentially a maker
Speaker 1: Bot clone. Strong's plan was to mass produce uh these
Speaker 1: these replicator clones in China to bring down the costs
Speaker 1: and sell the tangent Bot at a significant discount in
Speaker 1: the United States. So in theory, they would be indistinguishable
Speaker 1: from the replicator printers because he could use all the
Speaker 1: open source information. They would work on the same software,
Speaker 1: they would follow the same hardware design. They would print
Speaker 1: stuff from the finger verse just as well as a
Speaker 1: replicator could and this was all possible because all of
Speaker 1: that information was open source, so there was nothing legally
Speaker 1: stopping him from doing this. However, in the open source community,
Speaker 1: it's considered pretty taboo to clone someone else's stuff and
Speaker 1: then to sell it as your own, even if you're
Speaker 1: just attributing the other person. That's not considered super cool.
Speaker 1: It's not in keeping with the spirit of the community,
Speaker 1: and the maker butt community largely rallied behind maker butt,
Speaker 1: even in the wake of the quality problems that the
Speaker 1: replicator had suffered earlier that year. But Pettis now had
Speaker 1: a strong argument against open source in general. Someone had
Speaker 1: outright said they were going to make the same product
Speaker 1: that his company was making, but sell it for less money.
Speaker 1: So when maker bot announced the replicator to the company
Speaker 1: indicated that some of this technology was going to be proprietary,
Speaker 1: many in the maker community felt this was a slap
Speaker 1: in the face of the people who had supported maker
Speaker 1: bought in its early days. It was an outright betrayal.
Speaker 1: Worse yet, there was a suspicion that maker bot was
Speaker 1: going to incorporate improvements and designs that community members had
Speaker 1: created as part of thingo Verse, that the stuff that
Speaker 1: was going to be a replicator too, would be coming
Speaker 1: straight from the people who were going to get uh
Speaker 1: rolled over by the fact that it was going to
Speaker 1: go with a proprietary approach. They weren't going to necessarily
Speaker 1: have their contributions attributed. They would see no benefit from it.
Speaker 1: And whereas they had been happy for Maker but to
Speaker 1: succeed on in part because of their contributions earlier, that
Speaker 1: was with the understanding that they were all part of
Speaker 1: the same family and everything was transparent. Now with a
Speaker 1: proprietary approach, stuff is being hidden away from the very
Speaker 1: community that had made this company possible. So they saw
Speaker 1: it as a stab in the back. Unlike the replicator,
Speaker 1: the replicator too had only a single extruder, so you
Speaker 1: were back to printing in just a one color. Additionally,
Speaker 1: it could only print in p L a thermoplastic. It
Speaker 1: could not do a BS. The replicator to increased the
Speaker 1: build area to two five millimeters by one three millimeters
Speaker 1: to one millimeters, or eleven point two inches by six
Speaker 1: inches by six point one inches. Essentially, layers of plastic
Speaker 1: could be as thin as one hundred micrometer. A micrometer,
Speaker 1: by the way, is a millionth of a meter and
Speaker 1: that would improve the resolution of the print jobs. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like the dots per inch metric we would
Speaker 1: use for your standard run of the mill printers, or
Speaker 1: the pixel count we would use in the resolution of
Speaker 1: an image. The thinner the layers in a print job,
Speaker 1: the smoother the transition can be from layer to layer overall,
Speaker 1: So if you're printing an object that has a lot
Speaker 1: of curved surfaces, the result is a more smooth curved line.
Speaker 1: With thicker layers, you get more of a kind of
Speaker 1: jagged step transition between one layer and the next. You
Speaker 1: can really feel it. It feels like a series of ridges.
Speaker 1: Some of the proprietary elements included the metal case for
Speaker 1: the replicator to It was the first time maker bot
Speaker 1: was offering up a printer that had a metal case
Speaker 1: as opposed to their traditional balsa would cases that had
Speaker 1: been the the the casing for the previous printers. And
Speaker 1: they also had some proprietary software, so it wasn't just
Speaker 1: the hardware that is no longer fully open source. The
Speaker 1: software followed suit. The company also showed off a replicator
Speaker 1: to X, the two experimental replicator that added in some
Speaker 1: of the features that the Replicator too was missing like
Speaker 1: it had the dual extruder so you could print in
Speaker 1: two colors again, and also a heated platform to enable
Speaker 1: a B s printing, so you had essentially two different
Speaker 1: tiers of the replicator to The Replicator Too came out
Speaker 1: in September, and by that time Smith had been long gone.
Speaker 1: He had left the company a few months earlier. Adam Mayor,
Speaker 1: the other co founder, along with Brief Pettis, would stay
Speaker 1: on with the company until October two thousand twelve. Now
Speaker 1: what led Mayor to leave, I actually don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: not certain what led to his departure from the company.
Speaker 1: It might have been a similar disagreement with Pettis over
Speaker 1: the direction of the company, the abandoning of the open
Speaker 1: source philosophy. I don't know for sure, Or may be
Speaker 1: he just wanted to do something different. There's precious little
Speaker 1: published about his decision. But whatever the reason, by October
Speaker 1: two twelve, Maker Butt was a very different company. They
Speaker 1: had venture capitalists who were waiting to see a return
Speaker 1: on their investment. You had two out of the three
Speaker 1: original co founders gone. They were shifting from open source
Speaker 1: to something at least partially closed off. And their community,
Speaker 1: which had been so supportive, was starting to fragment, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people were turning against the company. That
Speaker 1: fragmentation would spread to think of Verse. The site updated
Speaker 1: its terms of service, which raised questions about attribution. There
Speaker 1: was a worry that if you were to upload your
Speaker 1: designs to think of Verse, that maker butt could make
Speaker 1: use of your designs and not even a tribute you
Speaker 1: for it. And originally it seemed pretty clear that if
Speaker 1: you authored a work on thing of Verse, you would
Speaker 1: get credit, and you might share a design with everybody
Speaker 1: else and they might all be free to use it,
Speaker 1: but it was with the understanding that you would at
Speaker 1: least get credit for that design. The updated terms of
Speaker 1: service through that into question, and there was a long
Speaker 1: time before maker bot had any answers to people who
Speaker 1: are raising questions about that, and so some people began
Speaker 1: to move to put new designs on a different site
Speaker 1: rather than risk having their work appropriated by MakerBot. Then,
Speaker 1: whether that was a real possibility or not, the perception
Speaker 1: was that maker bot was going to push into this
Speaker 1: closed ecosystem and you wouldn't be able to tell. So
Speaker 1: people began to abandon finger Verse. Not everybody but some
Speaker 1: of the more passionate community members were Pettis, for his part,
Speaker 1: would defend this decision to move to this sort of
Speaker 1: closed approach. He argued that the open source approach was
Speaker 1: unsustainable in the long run, that if a company were
Speaker 1: to keep doing that, it would eventually go out of
Speaker 1: business as a result. And so he said, if my
Speaker 1: goal is to create three D printers for everyone, you know,
Speaker 1: something that everyone can afford and everyone can use, I
Speaker 1: have to change the way we do business. Otherwise we
Speaker 1: will be run out of business and I'll never achieve
Speaker 1: that goal. Anyway, that was not the end of the
Speaker 1: problems with Maker Butt. We'll talk about some more challenges
Speaker 1: the company faced in the following years in just a moment.
Speaker 1: But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: In June two thousand, a company called Stratusis came knocking
Speaker 1: with an eye towards acquiring Maker Butt. Stratusis had been
Speaker 1: around since nine and it was also in the additive
Speaker 1: manufacturing and three D printing business. The company had carved
Speaker 1: out a profitable space in the rapid prototyping industry. The deal.
Speaker 1: The acquisition deal was for more than four million dollars
Speaker 1: with an additional two hundred million dollars or so in
Speaker 1: performance based earnouts. Some of the folks in the maker
Speaker 1: community viewed this as yet another sign that maker Butt had,
Speaker 1: in their minds sold out. Not at first, MakerBot was
Speaker 1: on the expansion again. They started hiring more people, and
Speaker 1: they started designing the next phase of three D printers,
Speaker 1: and these would include some new features, some of which
Speaker 1: might have seemed a little excessive or maybe unimportant. Had
Speaker 1: stuff like WiFi capability, that kind of thing. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there was still this growing perception that MakerBot needed to
Speaker 1: produce some printers at the lower end of the market,
Speaker 1: stuff that was more affordable for your average consumer, like
Speaker 1: what the mass market maker Bot was supposed to be.
Speaker 1: It was stuff that MakerBot just hadn't managed to do yet. Now,
Speaker 1: according to that article and Wired that I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: in this episode, at ce S two thousand and fourteen,
Speaker 1: maker Butt was showing off three printers and they weren't
Speaker 1: all fully operational, and yet they were still winning industry awards. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: competitors were popping up with lower priced printers, and that
Speaker 1: was starting to eat into the segment of the market
Speaker 1: that maker Butt had originally wanted to target. When it
Speaker 1: pursued that asked market maker bought printer in Now when
Speaker 1: customers had problems with their printers, however, things were more
Speaker 1: complicated than they used to be. They used to be
Speaker 1: able to solve those problems themselves. They could proNT out
Speaker 1: a replacement part uh, they could consult the thing overs,
Speaker 1: find out what was wrong, you know, the community forums,
Speaker 1: and print out a replacement and fix it themselves. They
Speaker 1: never had to bother anybody else, or they might be
Speaker 1: able to rely upon someone in the community to help
Speaker 1: them out. But the proprietary nature of the hardware and
Speaker 1: the software men the crucial details were being purposefully withheld
Speaker 1: from customers and competitors, and it was in order to
Speaker 1: protect the business. So it made sense from a business perspective.
Speaker 1: But now customers who were having problems with their printers
Speaker 1: were finding it more challenging to fix those problems. They
Speaker 1: couldn't always fix it themselves, and the company was struggling
Speaker 1: to find a way to have consumer relations to answer
Speaker 1: these problems. Repair issues things like that um in a
Speaker 1: timely manner, and in some cases there just weren't any
Speaker 1: fixes to be had. There was even a class action
Speaker 1: lawsuit leveled against Stratusis and maker bought. The focal point
Speaker 1: for the lawsuit was in the smart Extruder component that
Speaker 1: was a component in many of maker bots more recent printers.
Speaker 1: The lawsuit alleged that the company had knowingly included this
Speaker 1: particular component in its printers, knowing that it wasn't working properly, so,
Speaker 1: in other words, that the design was not really a
Speaker 1: good one, and they put it in their their products anyway.
Speaker 1: The lawsuit eventually was dismissed there was a lack of
Speaker 1: evidence showing that the company had knowingly included a malfunctioning part,
Speaker 1: but it didn't help the reputation of the company. In September,
Speaker 1: Bree Pettis would step down as the CEO of maker Butt,
Speaker 1: but he transitioned to become the head of stratusis Is
Speaker 1: Innovation Workshop. Jenny Lawton, who was the president of maker
Speaker 1: Bot at that time, would step up to become the
Speaker 1: interim CEO. Lawton had previously invested in maker Bot and
Speaker 1: had served as its chief strategy officer before she had
Speaker 1: become president. And things got pretty rough at MakerBot. It
Speaker 1: was not a good year for maker Bot or for
Speaker 1: its parent company. Stratusis was not performing as well financially
Speaker 1: as it had projected, and during the first quarter earnings
Speaker 1: call in Strateusis executives cited a slowing market as the
Speaker 1: real cause of the problem, that the three D printer
Speaker 1: market was slowing down, that maybe they had already hit
Speaker 1: maximum penetration in the hobbyist market and they had not
Speaker 1: really been able to leverage that into the broader consumer market.
Speaker 1: MakerBot sales were not performing as expected, and Jenny Lawton,
Speaker 1: who had only been the CEO since September, was moved
Speaker 1: to become the vice president of Special Projects over at Stratusis,
Speaker 1: and Jonathan Jacklin, who had been the general manager of
Speaker 1: Strateusis Asia Pacific Japan, became the new maker Bot CEO.
Speaker 1: Jenny Lawton would end up leaving Stratesis just a few
Speaker 1: months later, and so would Bree Pettis, the only remaining
Speaker 1: co founder. He would also leave the company uh in
Speaker 1: June two fifteen. Now initially he would lead a new
Speaker 1: company called Bold Machines. This was actually the former Innovation
Speaker 1: Workshop division of Stratusis. Stratesis decided to spin out the
Speaker 1: Innovation Workshop as its own company, and Bree Pettis would
Speaker 1: become the head of that company. Later still, he would
Speaker 1: purchase another company that would change its name to Bantam Tools.
Speaker 1: This is a company that produces a computer controlled milling machine.
Speaker 1: Milling machines cut material away to make models. So you
Speaker 1: could say he's gone back to sort of the opposite
Speaker 1: of three D printing, but it does bring milling, which
Speaker 1: has incredible precision, into the realm of the pro sumer,
Speaker 1: and milling machines, like three D printers, were once so
Speaker 1: prohibitively expensive that only big manufacturing companies could actually afford them,
Speaker 1: So it's sort of doing the same thing but using
Speaker 1: a different methodology than what he was doing with three
Speaker 1: D printers. Back to Maker Bot in April, Jonathan Jacklin
Speaker 1: led the company through a series of layoffs. He cut
Speaker 1: twenty percent of all the jobs at Maker Bought in April,
Speaker 1: and in October he did it again, knocking another off.
Speaker 1: A big problem was that the company had sold fewer
Speaker 1: than half of the number of printers in twenty as
Speaker 1: it had in tween. You don't want to see that
Speaker 1: number going down year over year. In general, businesses really
Speaker 1: like to see those numbers go up, and this was
Speaker 1: the wrong direction. So things were looking a little grim.
Speaker 1: In sixteen, the company made another big change Maker Bought,
Speaker 1: which shut down its manufacturing facility in New York outsourced
Speaker 1: all of its manufacturing to China. So up to this point,
Speaker 1: all the maker Printers were largely being made and assembled
Speaker 1: in the United States. You know, there's some parts that
Speaker 1: probably came from other places, but most of the parts
Speaker 1: were being produced here in America. But in order to
Speaker 1: bring the costs of manufacturing down, they made the decision
Speaker 1: to shut down those US based operations and outsource everything
Speaker 1: to Chinese manufacturers. They do still have offices in New
Speaker 1: York and there's still people who work for Maker Bought
Speaker 1: in the US. Involves some developers and engineers, uh, some
Speaker 1: corporate personnel. Uh. The repairs department is located out of America,
Speaker 1: but all of manufacturing has been moved over to China.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Jacqueline led the company to shift its focus a
Speaker 1: bit away from consumer three D printers, which really was
Speaker 1: becoming hyper competitive. Lots of budget models were coming out
Speaker 1: every year and eating into maker bots sales. So instead
Speaker 1: he decided to focus on the educational and professional uses
Speaker 1: for maker butt printers. This would keep the printers in
Speaker 1: a more uh higher end market than consumer markets. He
Speaker 1: could sell them for higher prices, didn't have to worry
Speaker 1: about cutting costs to the point where it could make
Speaker 1: a more competitive product in the consumer space, and things
Speaker 1: kept changing. While the company would produce new printer designs
Speaker 1: that were made in China, again trying to compete against
Speaker 1: an increasingly crowded marketplace and an increasingly disillusioned pool of consumers.
Speaker 1: The shoveling at the top of maker Bot had not
Speaker 1: quite finished. In January, Jonathan Jackline resigned as CEO and
Speaker 1: maker Bots president at that time was Nadav Goshen, who
Speaker 1: would be promoted to the role of CEO. The company
Speaker 1: is still in business today, though it is obviously a
Speaker 1: very different entity than the one that was founded back
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine. All three co founder are gone.
Speaker 1: The founding principle of an open source hardware and software
Speaker 1: approach is gone, a lot of the passionate community members
Speaker 1: are gone, a lot of the goodwill for a thing
Speaker 1: averse has gone as well, and the manufacturing facilities in
Speaker 1: the United States are gone. More than a hundred jobs
Speaker 1: are gone. So things have changed dramatically obviously for maker
Speaker 1: but the company was probably chiefly responsible, I would say,
Speaker 1: for raising the profile of three D printing, perhaps to
Speaker 1: the detriment of the industry overall. It may be that
Speaker 1: three D printing became a mainstream phenomena a little too
Speaker 1: early before it was really ready to uh to to
Speaker 1: settle in. If you think about that hype cycle that
Speaker 1: Gartner always is talking about, the inflated expectations part was
Speaker 1: probably particularly high for three D printers. Maybe now we're
Speaker 1: finally on the pathway to having a more realistic and
Speaker 1: sustainable implementation of three D printers. Whether or not Maker
Speaker 1: Bought will play a large part in that future remains
Speaker 1: to be seen. But the company has had to weather
Speaker 1: some pretty serious storms over the past few years, and
Speaker 1: that wraps up our look at the Maker Bought story
Speaker 1: so far. I hope that in a few years I'll
Speaker 1: be able to revisit this topic and maybe have some
Speaker 1: really cool stuff to talk about. But it's kind of
Speaker 1: an unfortunate story as it stands when you look at
Speaker 1: how the people who truly love the company felt they
Speaker 1: were treated, even people who were some of the founders
Speaker 1: of that company. But sometimes the reality of business means
Speaker 1: that those idealistic views have to have to have to
Speaker 1: step aside. What do you guys think I'm curious to hear?
Speaker 1: You can go to tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's
Speaker 1: our website that has the ways to contact us, let
Speaker 1: us know what you think, maybe give us suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes, whether it's a company, a technology, a person
Speaker 1: in text, someone I should talk to, that kind of thing. Also,
Speaker 1: don't forget to head over to our merchandise store that's
Speaker 1: over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. You
Speaker 1: can see all sorts of different things with all sorts
Speaker 1: of different designs, and every single purchase goes to help
Speaker 1: the show, So we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon for moral this and bousands
Speaker 1: of other topics because it how stuff works dot com