The Trials of MakerBot

you're coming in in medias race. So when I left off at the end of the last episode, I mentioned that maker Bot's first three D printer, the Cupcake C and C, could produce an object that was up to four inches per side well five inches tall, so you could get a pretty decent sized object if you wanted to.

And the maker bot community was creating tweaks and upgrades to the printer and sharing them on the associated website called finger Verse, and the maker bot team was hard at work creating the next generation of three D printers with an eye toward moving out of the kit space eventually, because kits, by their very nature, limit the market you

can sell to. Typically, you're only going to really sell to hardcore hobbyists and makers because they're the ones who are willing to put in the work necessary to put together these things. Uh, they get a lot of satisfaction on that. There is something to be said, like if you ever made anything, really but people who build their own computers, they can tell you that there's a sense of satisfaction when you connect everything and you get it to work properly. Um, and a lot of the hobbyists

take a lot of joy out of that. But it does limit the number of people you're gonna sell to because there are other folks out there, such as myself, who will I have an appreciation for that skill. I don't possess it myself. And so while it might take the typical builder eighty hours to put together one of these devices, for me it would be forever because I'd spent about five hours trying to put together and then

give up. So, in order to not limit themselves to that hardcore audience of makers and hobbyists, they had already started planning out building fully assembled printers in the future. On the company side of things, Maker Bots seemed to be a really interesting place to work. According to an article and Wired titled the three D Printing Revolution that wasn't.

Employees worked at Maker Bought Not to get rich quick by being part of an early start up with hopes that some other company was going to do a big buy out and then you have a nice payout as your company got acquired. Instead, they were part of the company because they believed in the company's mission, which was tied closely with the rep rap philosophy of disrupting manufacturing by putting it in the hands of the common consumer.

The company culture was loose and jobs were pretty vaguely defined. Apparently, you might be helping people pack kits for shipping one day, and then the next day you're tweaking product design on the latest version of your hardware. In that article, a former Maker Bought employee named Matt Griffin said there was no real formal structure to the company in those early days.

He said, no one was really fooling themselves. They all knew that ultimately that was unsustainable from a business perspective, that they were going to have a have a more formal organizational strategy moving forward. But in the early days of Maker Bought, the important thing was just do whatever needs to be done at that given time, and then worry about the next thing after you're finished with the

first thing. Within the first year of being in business, the company had made six hundred cupcakes, sea and seat kits, and according to Bree Pettis, one of the co founders of Maker Bought, the cost of all the parts for the kids added up to about six hundred fifty dollars. They were selling them for seven fifty dollars unassembled, so there was just a hundred dollars more than what it costs to get the parts together in the first place.

And that's before you start figuring in stuff like labor of putting all the pieces together, putting them in boxes, shipping them out so razor thin margins, you might say, a bit more than a year and a half after Zack Smith, Adam Mayor, and Bree Pettis had launched the company, they introduced their second model of three D printer. This one was called the thing oh Matic. Like the Cupcakes C and CEE, you could buy this printer as a

kit or you could have it fully assembled. The kit cost one thou fifty dollars and the fully assembled printer was hundred, making it the same cost as the fully assembled cupcake CE and C had been when it first debuted. The thing Amatic had some new features. For one thing, it could print multiple objects in one print job, as long as those objects didn't overlap on the print bed. This was thanks to a new technology called the automated

build Platform. Maker Bot designer Charles Packs had created that feat sure. The build platform had a heated surface and was mounted on a belt system underneath the platform. So this belt system could actually move the physical location of the platform underneath the extruder, so the printer would you know, print out the first object, then the platform could move out from under the first object. The printer could print out an additional object on that same building surface, so

you could print multiple things at once. You didn't have to manually remove each piece as soon as it was finished. As long as you could arrange the two objects to be printed on sufficiently far enough parts on the platform and not have the extruder, you know, mess up whatever it was you did just printed. That was a real danger.

If you didn't take that into account, then you could have a print job, if it's tall enough, get to a point where it would come into contact with the extruder as it's trying to print the second print job, and everything would mess up. So you had to pay attention to your designs. The system also included a brush to clean off the nozzle between the print jobs. This was important because otherwise the plastic could kind of gum up and cause printing errors. If you ever used a

hot glue gun, it's kind of like that. The automated build platform was one of the upgrades that was originally created for the old Cupcake C and C, but now it was coming in as an optional feature on the

thing Amatic. But this new printer also had a slightly smaller build volume than the cupcake that one as you as I mentioned earlier, could produce an object that was four inches long, four inches wide, and five inches tall, but the thing o Matic would knock that down to just be four inches in every direction, so it couldn't be quite as tall as the Cupcake CE and C could manage. Maker Bought unveiled the thing Omatic at the

twenty ten Maker Fair New York event. Like the Cupcake C and C, this printer was an open source hardware device and was registered under the canow License, which gave users the opportunity to alter the design and make adjustments or improvements. And like the Cupcake C and C, Maker but would incorporate some of those designs into future versions of the printer itself, so the design of the thing

Amatic changed with the community's input. The open source philosophy was continuing to pay off, and that it was fueling innovation at an incredibly rapid pace. The cool thing about this is that you know three D printers were meant to help with innovation, and that they would allow you to rapidly prototype stuff. You could come up with a design for a product, print out your design, test it to see if it makes sense, and if it doesn't, you could go right back to the drawing board and

lose very little time in the process. Well, not only could the printer do that, but the fact that it was open source meant that people could rapidly prototype the printer itself, changing it. So the very thing that the printer did could also contr ribute to the printer's improvement over time. I thought that was kind of a cool

recursive quality of three D printers. With maker Bought in particular, the community of maker bot owners and the thing of Verse users, that website where everyone was putting their designs. They were happy to show off their creations and they were happy to benefit from the designs made by other people.

Maker Bott was seeing a big benefit as that from that as well, both as it continued to encourage a really enthusiastic base of users and also to directly benefit from their designs by incorporating them into the future versions of the maker Bot printers. But there was a downside

to that approach as well. And the downside was that because the hardware and the software were open source and openly available to look at, other people or companies could use those designs to make their own three D printers and compete against maker Bot within that market. Now, in the early days, that wasn't really a big problem because maker Bot commanded about a quarter of the market in three D printing in those early years, but the overall

market was also really really small. The small markets provide very little incentive for competitors. Why would you jump into a tiny market it has very few customers there, and especially if one is already dominated by an established company, it could be very difficult to make any headway. But as the three D printer market would grow, that would become a bigger problem. Now throughout and eleven, maker Butt

continued selling Cupcake and Thingo matic kits. Behind the scenes teams were working on the next generation of maker butt devices, and they also secured ten million dollars in venture capital funding in August. Some people say that that was the beginning of potentially serious trouble because the capitalist of venture capitalist is making an investment, and an investment means you want to see a return. You want to see some

profit from that investment. Around that time, the company was also star to get attention from mainstream media, not just the tech and geek journals out there, but mainstream journals things like you know, Rolling Stone magazine or or the Colbart rapport. By the fall of two thousand eleven, maker Bot had around seventy employees and had added another office to accommodate the growth the company was going through. In early January, the company unveiled a new printer called the Replicator.

This would not only be the most ambitious printer to date, it would also mark the pivotal moment when maker Bot would shift away from that open source philosophy the company had embraced. So the Replicator was open source. It had not quite abandoned this yet, but it was the beginning of the end. The Replicator included dual extruders, which meant that for the first time, maker bot makers could print in two different colors of plastic for the same build.

You could have a filament of plastic of one color are going to one extruder, and a filament of plastic of a different color going to the second extruder, and then based upon your design, that would tell the printer which plastic to use for any given moment while it was building up those layers, so you could have a two tone object when you were done, whatever two colors you wanted. Really, it also increased the build size, so you can build much larger objects than you could before.

Now users could print stuff that was two twenty five millimeters long, one millimeters wide and one millimeters tall, or about eight point nine inches by five point seven inches by six point one inches. The Replicator was the first maker bought printer that was also sold fully assembled. There

was no kit option anymore. So this was again maker bots moved to try and and tap into a potentially larger customer base because now they could sell to people who weren't who didn't feel confident they could put such a thing together. The initial price for the Replicator was one thousand, seven fifty dollars, which is a princely sum, to be sure, but still a fraction of what most three D printers would cost. Even in the pro sumer market, you're typically looking at devices that were in the tens

of thousands of dollars. There were some competitors that were coming out with very cheap three D printers around the same time, um, but they were not at the same level of quality or name recognition as maker But. The replicator had a few quality problems of its own, including

vulnerabilities to sack electricity. There were reports that if you were to put in a card containing designs into the maker Butt replicator and you had a static charge on that card, it could cause something to pop, and then you would have an uh, non working replicator. And the

company couldn't afford to just ignore those problems. There was also increasing pressure rising from competitors, and so maker Bot was at work on the successor to the replicator, which would come out less than a year after the replicator debuted, and that would be the first three D printer maker Bot would offer that would at least be partly proprietary in nature and not entirely open source, the open source philosophy would no longer become the guiding principle for the

company's efforts, and it would mean lots of big changes. I'll explain more in a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the original Replicator was still an open source hardware project, but it would prove to be the last of those, and it was in part the reason why Zach Smith would end up leaving maker Butt, or being forced to leave maker

Butt might be the way to put it so. Earlier in two thousand eleven, before the Replicator had debut, they actually had a totally different plan to move forward, and that plan was to create a super secret, low cost, pre assembled maker Butt that would be cheap enough for the average consumer, and they wanted to aim for a price tag that would make it about as expensive as your typical new video game console, so we're talking like

five hundred or six hundred dollars. That was a really ambitious goal and it was something that they didn't think they could manage to do. Working just out of the

United States. They called this project the Mass market maker Butt Project or MMM triple M. So to achieve this goal, Zack Smith took a small team of engineers and he went to China to set up a manufacturing strategy that would meet their needs because manufacturing in China is way less expensive than in the United States, even when you factor in international shipping, you'd be saving a lot more

money per unit. So in the fall of two thousand eleven, while Smith is in China working on this, Bree Pettis back in the United States was getting impatient. He wanted to have something to show off at c e S. He had recently received quite a bit of money in venture capital for for maker Bot, and he felt like the updates to the maker Butt, the mass market maker bot device, were sporadic and not nearly giving him enough

progress each time he was getting one. So he decided to put his Brooklyn team of engineers on a new task to develop a brand new printer in time for ce S, which again happens in January, so it was a super condensed timeline now. Eventually, Bree Pettis decided to go with the New York based design over the one that Zack Smith and his team were working on in China, and it was a much more expensive approach because it was nearly dollars. It was one thousand, seven fifty bucks.

So that was a reversal on that original strategy they had leading up to c S tw twelve, where they were going to try and make a really affordable three D printer for the average person. So the device the company showed off was more of a pro sumer device, something that someone who was going to use it for professional purposes might be able to spend that kind of money, But your average consumer wasn't going to drop nearly two thousand dollars on a three D printer that they barely

knew how it worked. In April two thou twelve, Maker Butt chose formally to shut down its China operation entirely. Zack Smith was understandably frustrated. He really found himself at odds with Bree Pettis. They had uh strong disagreements on

the direction of the company. And according to Zack Smith and and in his own words, he said he was forced out of the company he had co founded because his vision of where the company should go was uh not compatible with where Bree Pettis went the company to go. And Bree was in the role of CEO at this point. By mid two thousand twelve, Zack Smith would leave maker Bot.

He ended up traveling back to China, and he was fascinated at the bustling manufacturing industry over in China, and also he was really excited because he would have access to very cheap parts there. He said, the language barrier was a bit of a challenge, but he could get all the different stuff you would need to build the kind of devices he liked building for much less money than it would cost him in the United States. So

he lived in China for a while. He would continue working with the rap Rap project, but he chose to divorce himself entirely from maker Butt, so he was the first of the three co founders to leave the company. Now, according to the interviews and articles I could find from around this particular time in maker bots history, Bree had sort of emerged at this point as the face of

the company out of the scessity. He had already achieved a following in the maker community because of his work with make magazine, so it seemed like a natural transition to make him sort of the voice and the face of maker Bot as well, and some would even compare him saying he was the Steve Jobs of maker Bot. Pettis himself said he really would prefer to be the Steve Wozniak of maker Button. If you know your Apple history, you know what the difference is there. It made two

thousand twelve. As maker Bot engineers were working on the replicator to design in secret, the company relocated to the Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, a much larger space. They now had a hundred twenty five employees, and then in August the nail in the coffin for maker Bots open source approach arrived in the form of a Kickstarter project called the Tangabot. Now the Tangentbot was proposed by a guy named Matt Strong. The Tangibot was essentially a maker

Bot clone. Strong's plan was to mass produce uh these these replicator clones in China to bring down the costs and sell the tangent Bot at a significant discount in the United States. So in theory, they would be indistinguishable from the replicator printers because he could use all the open source information. They would work on the same software,

they would follow the same hardware design. They would print stuff from the finger verse just as well as a replicator could and this was all possible because all of that information was open source, so there was nothing legally stopping him from doing this. However, in the open source community, it's considered pretty taboo to clone someone else's stuff and then to sell it as your own, even if you're just attributing the other person. That's not considered super cool.

It's not in keeping with the spirit of the community, and the maker butt community largely rallied behind maker butt, even in the wake of the quality problems that the replicator had suffered earlier that year. But Pettis now had a strong argument against open source in general. Someone had outright said they were going to make the same product that his company was making, but sell it for less money.

So when maker bot announced the replicator to the company indicated that some of this technology was going to be proprietary, many in the maker community felt this was a slap in the face of the people who had supported maker bought in its early days. It was an outright betrayal.

Worse yet, there was a suspicion that maker bot was going to incorporate improvements and designs that community members had created as part of thingo Verse, that the stuff that was going to be a replicator too, would be coming straight from the people who were going to get uh rolled over by the fact that it was going to go with a proprietary approach. They weren't going to necessarily have their contributions attributed. They would see no benefit from it.

And whereas they had been happy for Maker but to succeed on in part because of their contributions earlier, that was with the understanding that they were all part of the same family and everything was transparent. Now with a proprietary approach, stuff is being hidden away from the very community that had made this company possible. So they saw it as a stab in the back. Unlike the replicator, the replicator too had only a single extruder, so you

were back to printing in just a one color. Additionally, it could only print in p L a thermoplastic. It could not do a BS. The replicator to increased the build area to two five millimeters by one three millimeters to one millimeters, or eleven point two inches by six inches by six point one inches. Essentially, layers of plastic could be as thin as one hundred micrometer. A micrometer, by the way, is a millionth of a meter and

that would improve the resolution of the print jobs. It's kind of like the dots per inch metric we would use for your standard run of the mill printers, or the pixel count we would use in the resolution of an image. The thinner the layers in a print job, the smoother the transition can be from layer to layer overall, So if you're printing an object that has a lot of curved surfaces, the result is a more smooth curved line. With thicker layers, you get more of a kind of

jagged step transition between one layer and the next. You can really feel it. It feels like a series of ridges. Some of the proprietary elements included the metal case for the replicator to It was the first time maker bot was offering up a printer that had a metal case as opposed to their traditional balsa would cases that had been the the the casing for the previous printers. And they also had some proprietary software, so it wasn't just the hardware that is no longer fully open source. The

software followed suit. The company also showed off a replicator to X, the two experimental replicator that added in some of the features that the Replicator too was missing like it had the dual extruder so you could print in two colors again, and also a heated platform to enable a B s printing, so you had essentially two different tiers of the replicator to The Replicator Too came out in September, and by that time Smith had been long gone.

He had left the company a few months earlier. Adam Mayor, the other co founder, along with Brief Pettis, would stay on with the company until October two thousand twelve. Now what led Mayor to leave, I actually don't know. I'm not certain what led to his departure from the company. It might have been a similar disagreement with Pettis over the direction of the company, the abandoning of the open source philosophy. I don't know for sure, Or may be

he just wanted to do something different. There's precious little published about his decision. But whatever the reason, by October two twelve, Maker Butt was a very different company. They had venture capitalists who were waiting to see a return on their investment. You had two out of the three original co founders gone. They were shifting from open source to something at least partially closed off. And their community, which had been so supportive, was starting to fragment, and

a lot of people were turning against the company. That fragmentation would spread to think of Verse. The site updated its terms of service, which raised questions about attribution. There was a worry that if you were to upload your designs to think of Verse, that maker butt could make use of your designs and not even a tribute you

for it. And originally it seemed pretty clear that if you authored a work on thing of Verse, you would get credit, and you might share a design with everybody else and they might all be free to use it, but it was with the understanding that you would at

least get credit for that design. The updated terms of service through that into question, and there was a long time before maker bot had any answers to people who are raising questions about that, and so some people began to move to put new designs on a different site rather than risk having their work appropriated by MakerBot. Then, whether that was a real possibility or not, the perception was that maker bot was going to push into this closed ecosystem and you wouldn't be able to tell. So

people began to abandon finger Verse. Not everybody but some of the more passionate community members were Pettis, for his part, would defend this decision to move to this sort of closed approach. He argued that the open source approach was unsustainable in the long run, that if a company were to keep doing that, it would eventually go out of

business as a result. And so he said, if my goal is to create three D printers for everyone, you know, something that everyone can afford and everyone can use, I have to change the way we do business. Otherwise we will be run out of business and I'll never achieve that goal. Anyway, that was not the end of the problems with Maker Butt. We'll talk about some more challenges the company faced in the following years in just a moment. But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.

In June two thousand, a company called Stratusis came knocking with an eye towards acquiring Maker Butt. Stratusis had been around since nine and it was also in the additive manufacturing and three D printing business. The company had carved out a profitable space in the rapid prototyping industry. The deal. The acquisition deal was for more than four million dollars with an additional two hundred million dollars or so in

performance based earnouts. Some of the folks in the maker community viewed this as yet another sign that maker Butt had, in their minds sold out. Not at first, MakerBot was on the expansion again. They started hiring more people, and they started designing the next phase of three D printers, and these would include some new features, some of which might have seemed a little excessive or maybe unimportant. Had

stuff like WiFi capability, that kind of thing. But meanwhile, there was still this growing perception that MakerBot needed to produce some printers at the lower end of the market, stuff that was more affordable for your average consumer, like what the mass market maker Bot was supposed to be.

It was stuff that MakerBot just hadn't managed to do yet. Now, according to that article and Wired that I mentioned earlier in this episode, at ce S two thousand and fourteen, maker Butt was showing off three printers and they weren't all fully operational, and yet they were still winning industry awards. Meanwhile, competitors were popping up with lower priced printers, and that was starting to eat into the segment of the market

that maker Butt had originally wanted to target. When it pursued that asked market maker bought printer in Now when customers had problems with their printers, however, things were more complicated than they used to be. They used to be able to solve those problems themselves. They could proNT out a replacement part uh, they could consult the thing overs, find out what was wrong, you know, the community forums,

and print out a replacement and fix it themselves. They never had to bother anybody else, or they might be able to rely upon someone in the community to help them out. But the proprietary nature of the hardware and the software men the crucial details were being purposefully withheld from customers and competitors, and it was in order to protect the business. So it made sense from a business perspective. But now customers who were having problems with their printers

were finding it more challenging to fix those problems. They couldn't always fix it themselves, and the company was struggling to find a way to have consumer relations to answer these problems. Repair issues things like that um in a timely manner, and in some cases there just weren't any fixes to be had. There was even a class action

lawsuit leveled against Stratusis and maker bought. The focal point for the lawsuit was in the smart Extruder component that was a component in many of maker bots more recent printers. The lawsuit alleged that the company had knowingly included this particular component in its printers, knowing that it wasn't working properly, so, in other words, that the design was not really a good one, and they put it in their their products anyway.

The lawsuit eventually was dismissed there was a lack of evidence showing that the company had knowingly included a malfunctioning part, but it didn't help the reputation of the company. In September, Bree Pettis would step down as the CEO of maker Butt, but he transitioned to become the head of stratusis Is Innovation Workshop. Jenny Lawton, who was the president of maker Bot at that time, would step up to become the

interim CEO. Lawton had previously invested in maker Bot and had served as its chief strategy officer before she had become president. And things got pretty rough at MakerBot. It was not a good year for maker Bot or for

its parent company. Stratusis was not performing as well financially as it had projected, and during the first quarter earnings call in Strateusis executives cited a slowing market as the real cause of the problem, that the three D printer market was slowing down, that maybe they had already hit maximum penetration in the hobbyist market and they had not really been able to leverage that into the broader consumer market.

MakerBot sales were not performing as expected, and Jenny Lawton, who had only been the CEO since September, was moved to become the vice president of Special Projects over at Stratusis, and Jonathan Jacklin, who had been the general manager of Strateusis Asia Pacific Japan, became the new maker Bot CEO. Jenny Lawton would end up leaving Stratesis just a few months later, and so would Bree Pettis, the only remaining co founder. He would also leave the company uh in

June two fifteen. Now initially he would lead a new company called Bold Machines. This was actually the former Innovation Workshop division of Stratusis. Stratesis decided to spin out the Innovation Workshop as its own company, and Bree Pettis would become the head of that company. Later still, he would purchase another company that would change its name to Bantam Tools. This is a company that produces a computer controlled milling machine.

Milling machines cut material away to make models. So you could say he's gone back to sort of the opposite of three D printing, but it does bring milling, which has incredible precision, into the realm of the pro sumer, and milling machines, like three D printers, were once so prohibitively expensive that only big manufacturing companies could actually afford them, So it's sort of doing the same thing but using a different methodology than what he was doing with three

D printers. Back to Maker Bot in April, Jonathan Jacklin led the company through a series of layoffs. He cut twenty percent of all the jobs at Maker Bought in April, and in October he did it again, knocking another off. A big problem was that the company had sold fewer than half of the number of printers in twenty as it had in tween. You don't want to see that number going down year over year. In general, businesses really like to see those numbers go up, and this was

the wrong direction. So things were looking a little grim. In sixteen, the company made another big change Maker Bought, which shut down its manufacturing facility in New York outsourced all of its manufacturing to China. So up to this point, all the maker Printers were largely being made and assembled in the United States. You know, there's some parts that probably came from other places, but most of the parts

were being produced here in America. But in order to bring the costs of manufacturing down, they made the decision to shut down those US based operations and outsource everything to Chinese manufacturers. They do still have offices in New York and there's still people who work for Maker Bought in the US. Involves some developers and engineers, uh, some corporate personnel. Uh. The repairs department is located out of America, but all of manufacturing has been moved over to China.

Jonathan Jacqueline led the company to shift its focus a bit away from consumer three D printers, which really was becoming hyper competitive. Lots of budget models were coming out every year and eating into maker bots sales. So instead he decided to focus on the educational and professional uses for maker butt printers. This would keep the printers in

a more uh higher end market than consumer markets. He could sell them for higher prices, didn't have to worry about cutting costs to the point where it could make a more competitive product in the consumer space, and things kept changing. While the company would produce new printer designs that were made in China, again trying to compete against an increasingly crowded marketplace and an increasingly disillusioned pool of consumers. The shoveling at the top of maker Bot had not

quite finished. In January, Jonathan Jackline resigned as CEO and maker Bots president at that time was Nadav Goshen, who would be promoted to the role of CEO. The company is still in business today, though it is obviously a very different entity than the one that was founded back in two thousand nine. All three co founder are gone.

The founding principle of an open source hardware and software approach is gone, a lot of the passionate community members are gone, a lot of the goodwill for a thing averse has gone as well, and the manufacturing facilities in the United States are gone. More than a hundred jobs are gone. So things have changed dramatically obviously for maker but the company was probably chiefly responsible, I would say, for raising the profile of three D printing, perhaps to

the detriment of the industry overall. It may be that three D printing became a mainstream phenomena a little too early before it was really ready to uh to to settle in. If you think about that hype cycle that Gartner always is talking about, the inflated expectations part was probably particularly high for three D printers. Maybe now we're finally on the pathway to having a more realistic and

sustainable implementation of three D printers. Whether or not Maker Bought will play a large part in that future remains to be seen. But the company has had to weather some pretty serious storms over the past few years, and that wraps up our look at the Maker Bought story so far. I hope that in a few years I'll be able to revisit this topic and maybe have some

really cool stuff to talk about. But it's kind of an unfortunate story as it stands when you look at how the people who truly love the company felt they were treated, even people who were some of the founders of that company. But sometimes the reality of business means that those idealistic views have to have to have to step aside. What do you guys think I'm curious to hear?

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