What's new: April 2013

TechShop: an industrial revolution for $125 a month

By Brian Heater posted Apr 24th, 2013 at 2:30 PM

Someone, Mark Hatch, if I had to guess, has left a Square reader just
to the left of where we've set up our cameras. It's on a table next to
a small, but exceptionally diverse array of gadgets. There's a wooden
book that unfolds into a desk lamp and a polymer incubation blanket for
infants that's "on track to save 100,000 children's lives," according
to Hatch, TechShop's spikey-white-haired CEO. But it's the little white
plastic dongle that's the star of this show, through the power of sheer
ubiquity, popping up in coffee shops and taxicabs everywhere. Square's
modest undertaking has since ballooned to a roughly 300-person
operation. The project was born in this very space, eventually moving
to a building in San Francisco's SoMa district a block or so away, the
mobile payment company having opted not to travel too far from the
place where it was first conceived.

When it comes to proximity, Square is by no means an anomaly -- if
anything, the company's strayed a bit away from the pack. TechShop's
overseers have, quite cannily, begun to offer up a portion of the
warehouse's 17,000 square feet as office space, giving its members a
shot at some prime San Francisco real estate, a flight of stairs up from
an impressive array of machine tools -- laser cutters, waterjets and
more 3D printers than most mortals have seen in one place. "Literally
everything you need to make just about anything on the planet," says
Hatch, in typically definitive terms. And while there's arguably still
some sense of hyperbole in the notion of the "next industrial
revolution" (as 3D-printing evangelist Bre Pettis loves to put it), it's
hard to stand here in the well-lit warehouse amongst the buzz of
machinery and ideas and not appreciate the sentiment.

TechShop's mini-empire of social hackerspaces stands as a testament to
the right idea at the right moment. It's the result of a whole lot of
distinct elements congealing into a successful business model,
including a membership fee that gains you access to the tools and
classes to help you do just about anything yourself. A $125/month fee
gets you access to everything you need to get in on the ground floor of
the hardware startup revolution. Inside the warehouse, you'll find a
makeshift salon of students, young professionals, industry veterans and
curious hobbyists meeting in the downstairs machining area and upstairs
on sunlit benches for makeshift beta testing and freeform workshopping.

TechShop's mini-empire of social hackerspaces stands as a testament
to the right idea at the right moment.

Founder Jim Newton, a robotics professor and onetime MythBusters science
adviser, set up shop at the first Maker Faire in 2006, behind a sign
reading, simply, "TechShop: Build Your Dreams Here." The 250 showgoers
who signed his mailing list formed the basis of the company's first
space, a cobbled-together collection of equipment housed in an
industrial building just off the freeway in Silicon Valley-entrenched
Menlo Park. The company's since launched locations in Detroit,
Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham and Austin, and added an additional two to
its Bay Area arsenal, included this San Francisco locale, which has
become something of a de facto flagship location for the organization.
Locations in Arizona, Brooklyn and Washington, DC, are currently in the
planning stages.

Hatch cites any number of factors as contributors to his company's
success, beginning with a dramatic reduction in the price of machining
equipment, thanks in no small part to the influence of Japanese and
Chinese producers. The phenomenon has led to an astonishing 75 to 85
percent drop in the price of the tools that are so core to the TechShop
experience. The introduction of desktop computing has also had a
profound effect on that front.

"A lot of these tools are hooked up to computers, so they're
computer-numerically controlled machines," says Hatch. "And of course
that computer and that software have followed Moore's law. The CNC mill,
10 to 15 years ago, would've been a quarter-million dollars, and we're
now buying this machine for less than $20,000. What we do is we layer
this, you know, membership-based system on top of this. So for $125 a
month -- or as I like to say 'for the cost of a coffee addiction' -- you
now have access to the tools of the industrial revolution."

Then there are all of those elements that have driven the birth of the
hardware startup movement. As foreign influence has driven down the
price of manufacturing tools, the race for dominance in the commercial
mobile space has significantly dropped the pricing and size of mobile
components, all while power and availability have skyrocketed. The
explosion of commercial 3D printers and microcontrollers means that
prototyping is no longer the semi-exclusive domain of larger companies.
And, of course, the influence of crowdfunding has offered more than
enough incentive for creative tinkerers to fully invest in seeing
notebook sketches through to fruition.

"As a result, you create your own job," explains Hatch. "You create a
job for your friend, and your next friend, and pretty soon you need an
office."

The company has constructed offices on-site, allowing fully formed
companies to exist in the same space as newly realized projects,
maintaining access to the impressive array of tools and the TechShop
hive mind.

While there's much to be said for the communal nature and exchange of
ideas that comes with setting up camp in the kitchen of one's
hackerspace, the time eventually comes for most companies to do business
behind closed doors. For TechShop, the answer is quite simple: be the
one to build those doors. The company has constructed offices on-site,
allowing fully formed companies to exist in the same space as newly
realized projects, maintaining access to the impressive array of tools
and the TechShop hive mind.

"Part of our design is to have startups actually officing on-site, and
they often graduate," says Hatch. "Then they'll move, you know, a couple
blocks away like Square. It's literally a half a block away and they now
have something like 300 employees." Now the place is home to a diverse
and fascinating array of companies and organizations like San Francisco
Made, a non-profit that, quite fittingly, is focused on promoting local
manufacturing.

There's also Type A Machines, a company borne out of the RepRap 3D
open-source 3D-printing home revolution.

"All of us are members here," says CEO Kevin Roney. "We actually base
our operations here in an office on the third floor. Type A Machines
does its complete production here in San Francisco at TechShop. We use
the Tormach [CNC mill] for milling out the hot ends, the waterjet for
cutting the fanblade mounts [and] the lasers for cutting the casing."

It's a small, but powerful reminder of how the hardware revolution
may some day turn the tides on the steady loss of manufacturing jobs
in this country.

It's quite a thing to behold, really: the company's full production line
laid out in its small, backroom offices, its Series 1 printers all
assembled on-site. They're a small, but powerful reminder of how the
hardware revolution may some day help turn the tides on the steady loss
of manufacturing jobs in this country. This all still seems a bit of a
pipedream for major manufacturing, but as demand for products becomes
more fragmented and niche, it's possible to see an increasingly
important role for localized manufacturing.
Located just next door, ProtoTank is more an idea factory than a
miniature in-house hardware manufacturer. "We're three guys and one
girl who just decided it was way too much fun to build hardware
together," explains co-founder Sam Brown. The company started life with
the creation of a Mario Bros.-inspired desktop lamp, a cube sporting
the familiar question mark that illuminates with impact. The location
of its first office space was a natural fit, given the communal nature
that gave rise to the company.

"These are some of the brightest minds I've come across," explains
fellow co-founder Adam Ellsworth. "While it's a four-person team, we
certainly wouldn't be in the place we are without the community. We can
create prototypes and small manufacturing runs with tools it wouldn't be
possible to fund ourselves. We couldn't afford a waterjet, and a laser
cutter would be a pretty large investment, but being in this building
allows us all that."

In amongst all this movement, the US government itself is beginning to
take notice of TechShop's goings-on.

The solution to improved communication between the two parties is a
sort of red Batphone that connects directly to the USPTO hotline,
located just to the side of a bank of computer workstations on the
second floor.

"One of our biggest fans is David Kappos, [former] head of the US Patent
and Trademark Office," says Hatch. "He came to Menlo Park a few years
ago and did a presentation to a bunch of inventors, and at the end of
it, grabbed our founder, Jim Newton, and said, 'Hey, we've got to work
with you guys because this is exactly what we need. We need more
inventors in the US, and we need to communicate better on what the
provisional patent means and how to go through the patent process and my
examiners are really there to help.'"

The solution to improved communication between the two parties is a sort
of red Batphone that connects directly to the USPTO hotline, located
just to the side of a bank of computer workstations on the second floor.

"We told the commerce department [about the phone]," says Hatch. "They,
of course, then told us that we need[ed] to have a green phone that
hooks directly to Commerce Connect."
It's easy to see why the government would take notice of TechShop. The
space is a utopian prototype for the push to foster a more
startup-friendly environment in the US. As with the media landscape
before it, one can foresee a future when a fair amount of hardware will
shift to a hyper-specialized model, with many consumers trading in
mass-produced products for limited-run devices targeted toward their
individual needs and desires. The smartphone revolution has done wonders
for the speed, size and price of components and explosions of
programmer-friendly hardware like Arduino boards and desktop 3D printers
have made it that much easier to transfer ideas from the drawing board
to the real world. If the US government has its way, of course, that
manufacturing will be happening right in our backyard. And with the help
of crowdfunding sites and desktop prototyping, it just may be TechShop
that leads that charge.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service

Quoting: 'Numerous studies and much accepted wisdom suggest that time
spent doing nothing, being bored, is beneficial for sparking and
sustaining creativity. With our iPhone in hand — or any smartphone,
really — our minds, always engaged, always fixed on that tiny screen,
may simply never get bored. And our creativity suffers. ... For example,
psychology professor Gary Marcus distinguishes between the two primary
types of pursuits we use to defeat boredom. "Boredom is the brain's way
to tell you you should be doing something else. But the brain doesn't
always know the most appropriate thing to do. If you're bored and use
that energy to play guitar and cook, it will make you happy. But if you
watch TV, it may make you happy in the short term, but not in the long
term."

http://readwrite.com/2013/03/29/the-iphone-killed-my-creativity

/A

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