Gadgetory

I'm Alexis Ohanian I started startups invested in them and met amazing people using the internet to change the world our generation has an opportunity unlike any other we can create small empires without anyone's permission the Internet is a global platform a company that started in the Netherlands is now headquartered here on Park Avenue now this is not a street where you'd expect to find a start-up revolutionising manufacturing and that's exactly what shapeways is doing hello I'm Alexis welcome Shapeways is a 3d printing community and marketplace so anyone can go to our website you can look at the crazy designs the beautiful designs that our community has created over six hundred thousand of them you can customize lots of them by just clicking putting in your initials you know changing the shape a little bit really easy and then if you are into 3d software or you want to learn 3d software and there's plenty of that even for free these days you can design your own thing and then upload it to our site and you can see what I would cost you can have it made by us in all kinds of different materials from plastics to metal to silver gold-plated brass now you know all kinds of materials and then you get it at home you get your special product made just for you and like a few weeks later now so just to be clear I could have a sad Keanu in gold-plated brass yes you could Wow I couldn't get out of my head the sad Keanu mean I was going around and and I don't know if you've seen this backing right there I had to bring this what's this that's you that's your sad Keanu me oh my god this this is a like happy period for all of us we were I know on cloud nine but anyway finally I have him in the palm of my hand we originally started in the Netherlands in Eindhoven to give it some perspective and tone actually was a very small town that grew really quickly because Philip still big factories there and then they built a city with with workers and then everything moves out to to Asia and Eastern Europe when we spun out of Philips which actually was our starting ground we went into an office that had some place to do some manufacturing and at the same time we opened our our main office here in Manhattan so here we build a great team of like marketers product people and engineers and back in - we had a supply chain team and we had a customer support team and the world we're really eager to learn more about 3d printing because at that time we were we outsource everything so we bought our first 3d printer there this was in late 2010 and so we started to learn about it and pretty pretty soon if we figured out that we could do this really well all right so this is the entrance yes am I allowed to just go in absolutely you lead the way now we're pretty pretty open here and so I noticed you can't go too far without seeing some what are presumably shapeways yes pretty much everything it's safe to assume we made so this is I believe st. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow yes in full color sandstone roughly how long does entire manufacturing process takes you have any sense yeah so we print actually in a large print tray so we don't print one thing at a time we put many things in a large tray at a given time and so we say for those trays to be printed and then for the breakout and for all the powder to be slept away it's typically about nine hours yeah perfect Wow that's amazing it feels like sandstone I don't know it's it's definitely heavy this is substantial I kind of want to flip it over and look underneath can we see what that looks like on the inside oh it's a little game of Tetris so moving in here see our fabulous management team as you can tell they sit in the middle of it with all of us which is the medium and you have the brass knuckles so you clearly the enforcer now I actually have the breast pizza cutter that's genius the Mario mobius and a bacon Mobius that's amazing how bacon that how do people come up with this stuff like that's imagine cut a little better a better customers that's a magic of our mind let me throw this at you now 3d printing can be done with a lot of materials why not Mobius bacon made out of bacon we are there with 3d food printing technology or not no we're not there yet yeah people are learning burger yes emerita me yes yeah little makers not me why are they going to burritos when you could just have bacon you got a baby stepper you can't that's our Minimum Viable Product bacon is minimum viable product you guys were inside this massive Dutch company and your startup life it wasn't you quitting your job it wasn't you you know graduated from college this was you like taking this thing out of a massive company and starting something how did that come about I've always been part of startups the first one actually was a company that published the first free 3d software called blender so that was one of the reasons why I got really excited about 3d printing but when I got the idea I mean where do you get money in eindhoven there is not a big angel investor scene there are no VCS other banks but hey banks don't take risks they give you money when you don't need it typically yeah um so yeah how do you get money and the friend who introduced me to 3d printing he was actually working on in Phillips as a manager on the lifestyle incubator board and he said why don't you pitch to us so actually what I did is I quit a startup I was CTO it pitched for them and joined Phillips to start a company which is kind of talking within a company yes because Phillips at the time had three incubators focused on their core domains one of them was the lifestyle incubator and within the lifestyle incubator they felt this make total sense and since the amounts I was asking for for them were reasonable maybe even small they said well let's give sky shop so this is product and design maintaining the front end of everything and here are the geniuses behind the back end of everything so this is our whole glorious team whom we love deeply yeah you guys always development I presume this is the most popular thing on shape boys right now you would've think so but evidently it's not I don't want these people well they're gonna after they see this they're gonna know whoever created this grumpy cat bust is going to be doing very well after the show airs it's fantastic what why are you working here at J boys we're gonna show you what we doing before this before this I've had a ton of different jobs I worked in them for finance our contract day my and I worked in other startups and I came to shape days just over a year ago and I was interviewing much different places and it was just like it seemed to be the most fun it seemed to be the most motivated group of engineers working on the coolest technology that I'd seen and a completely emerging sector so like all of those things just came together so yeah this is kind of a no-brainer all right so let's say and I've got a couple of friends who have been and are in this situation right now and they're they're they're good at the work that they do they just feel like government contract work isn't exactly the most stimulating what do you tell them we're watching this right now and basically see where you work right now see the folks you work with and work for and and go like I want your job and yeah I don't know it's just we have more fun we have more fun we do you get to work on a product that you really believe and in a lot of folks who are doing like the bigger businesses do work on products they believe it but it's you're so close to the end result like if you work in a government contract least in my experience you know you're working on a huge aircraft carrier or a big fighter planes like well that's big but I don't I uh nav Airy small piece of it here you're in the whole process from start to finish from complete ideation of ideas and products to actually implementation building them and then you get to hold something like this in your hand the end of a so it's like you have real tangible results that come out of all the work that you put into it so I think that for me anyway that's breathe we have our our marketing team is over here these are the materials geniuses as we refer to them hello oh you're the guys have to talk to you about the bacon mobius strips made out of bacon okay do we have the technology for that yet 3d printing land not quite I mean people are printing on like human organs for replacements like if you were to lose it here they can do like sell deposition row and print your near so hypothetically you could it seems like if they could make it for your belly fat cells you could make bacon yeah you should be able to you're really expensive but but worth it maybe if I opened a shape waist or and made bacon mobius strips out of bacon would you buy one yeah what what if it were a thousand dollars why not yes so business shapeways peg the factory of the future so all of this stuff came out of a printer yeah so much of what you guys do is sort of a typical for startups today when it came to fund raising back in the day you all were probably met with a lot of skepticism because it's one thing to build a marketplace it's another thing that to sort of use 3d printing modeling technologies develop to let people create and share all that stuff out all that stuff jives with what investors expect as soon as you also mention hey we're going to manufacture and ship this stuff to it stops looking like a traditional ones and zeros kind of startup because you're dealing with stuff now you clearly have great investors on board now andreessen horowitz Union Square Ventures how how did that how do you sell that how did you convince them to get on board well you're right what stuff especially in the beginning and it was even tougher still because if it was the word manufacturing maybe I didn't scare them that much in the beginning but I wasn't seeing manufacturing I was seeing 3d printing and people went like what is that most investors were underwear most people I mean when I got in touch with in 2006 with the technology I went like what is this and I'm pretty tech savvy there was really really unknown so we were indeed billing this company and we were saying well we manufacture the physical stuff using 3d printers and you know people just didn't get it and they saw more risks than rewards probably so there was a lot of skepticism until I met Albert at Union Square Ventures and he said yo this is great he has a in his early days I think some some background in manufacturing so he said this is great we should do this and one led to the other and here we are hello yes hi pleasure thank you very much rabbit so this is where all the actual magic happens you guys take random ideas from people on the internet and make them into real is it critical yes yes we really make people's ideas complex so I got this great idea I want to create a mobius strip of bacon all right so I 5 I've uploaded the model I'm really proud of it it's gonna be great now we go to the first stage of the planning yes we go to the planning of the machines there we have a team of engineers they gather all the models that come on every single day they double-check them for prints ability what they do is they basically have a 3d version of the inside of the printer and they try to put as many products as they can try to fit it in one to in one print build and this is a human digitally packing all these 3d objects it's a film an extra combination of a couple of smarter algorithms and quite a few smart people and this is like the ultimate Tetris game we have a big community in Europe also because we started there I mean the Dutch community is strong but we start you know we already had lots of customers in United States one of the reasons we had our main office here and we wondered it doesn't make sense to make stuff in Europe and then ship at the United States right if we can build and manufacture and actually have a factory in an oven what everybody thinks is crazy because everything left there you are not build a factory here in New York to have a factory close to the main office of course makes sense because then you know everybody can work together and learn faster so we started to look around and you know we saw a lot of old factories that were empty and not used for a long time and then we found this this great place in Long Island City that was perfect for us not too large not too small reasonable rent and you know we said let's do it oh boy so this is where the actual magic happens the real shapeways magic we got a whole set of printers here lined up on a hook yes you can have a look it's okay I know that my parents used to tell me not to stare directly into the microwave which I think was just hogwash but they were paranoid and scared of microwave all right so this is in the middle of a build right now yes and presumably like if I sat here long enough I would see my hypothetical bacon strip mobius being created right before my eyes yes yes this is this is baby leave is a very hot oven and then he's plastic just below the melting temperature and at the moment that the laser shines faucet tray across a platform it centers the pieces of the plastic together so it basically does it layer by layer by layers and about 24 hours later you have a completely ready prints this is a 24/7 operation it's easy for me to think about you know having a 24/7 business when it's just a website you know the website goes down you know it's a pain you have to solve it but it's not like a giant machine with stuff how do you think about running a business that is as digital as it is physical I really like it personally I mean this is why I'm part of Shapeways it's just really great to be able to make something that people like physically will hold in their hands and especially what if it's their own creation what they've made and you know from a business perspective it brings a whole lot of interesting challenges and exciting things that you can do I mean we were building a factory here I mean what more fun can you have I feel like everyone in 3d printing in that industry is living like five years in the future you almost kind of have to because you have to believe in a vision that hasn't yet arrived but seems imminent I mean to some extent every founder does but I feel like especially 3d printing you know when you started this business only a few years ago what was the most impressive if you understand where I'm coming from like impressive thing that could be printed and what is it today and then what do you expect it to be two or three more years from now it's less what the machines can do because what the machines can do today is not wildly different from what they could do five years ago yeah but it's what people can come up with the first things that we saw were really basic shapes and we need to get our heads around what is possible with 3d printing more than that the technology is holding us back sure there are lots of limitations I mean I'm not going to say it's it's perfect yet but if you're a designer especially you're a product designer what you get taught in schools is what people tell me is that you need to design for manufacturing regular manufacturing mass manufacturing has a lot of limitations you need to think about a lot of things and quite a few of those limitations do not apply for 3d printing but since if you're trained to think about those limitations all the time you don't like to break those rules and that's actually what's happening now people start to realize oh wait a minute all the things that I couldn't do I can and I think that is where you know complexity of the things the daring of our designers of our community is growing and growing and growing and sometimes that drives us mad because they come up with things that are so on the edge of what the machines can do but it's I think still a lot of stuff that you can do conceptually with 3d printing is not done yet when you were a kid and you were in elementary school and you were asked to write a letter to like yourself as an adult talking about what you wanted to be when you grew up was it designing cufflinks as one of the most successful businesses powered by Shapeways absolutely not because if it was that would be awesome I would be so precious so cool though we are so how definitely unintentional so how did this happen started as friends going out for drinks but then quickly realized we all had this shared frustration of just like so much crap in the world so much stuff that was not good quality it's so many things that were so disposable we're like we don't want that we we thought back to you know the times were like you had an item you had a product to go had a piece that then you would give to your son they would pass along in these like elements of family heirlooms and we kind of just had this strong urge that like those pieces were like disappearing somehow that's where like Shapeways was snug right there we're like oh wait we can just do this and upload something and have something on our hands and for weeks sure let's do it so honestly we had three products put it up on a Shopify site luckily got picked up by Swiss Miss wired and gadget Gizmodo and then a slew of orders came in and then we were a company instantly I love this notion of all these artists and designers who are doing things without permission just creating not long after I think the release of the original iPad you all had designers manufacturing cases within days yeah is that right yeah presumably you know they didn't go to Apple for permission for this they were just making useful cases for these devices on Shapeways I think what's on a Friday in April somewhere and on Monday we saw an iPad case pop up on shapeways this guy bought the thing measured it four days later he had us design ready for a back cover of an iPad in four days you go from an idea to a product that you can sell as an individual that is almost impossible without a platform like Champlain's we like to say it's our playground for ideas it's our little sandbox where we kind of sketch around to do the things we like of making new things and testing them out and we still all have our day jobs realize this is just great the costs have just completely collapsed and and then also it's really freeing because of that like as a designer and as a creator you're like you're not sitting here and having that check of like oh I made this thing but I don't think it's gonna sell it's like it doesn't really matter so if anyone's out there just truly just go and learn to write just go ahead and go for it and the tools are out there the education is out there is so many tutorials different things like that so many like so much information out there that's really just about like your time and energy and learning the tools and then just committing to it what do you say to skeptics what do you say to people who look at that and just say this is an important user trinkets these are just little things like their toys what do you say to them you know if you think about the fact that we see more and more people printing their engagement rings or their their wedding rings in shape ways and making them and designing them themselves I don't think those things are trinkets to those people they're really important things they're really important in their lives and the first time I heard it I was like blown away you're doing this on Shapeways you got to be kidding you're not going to a jeweler and then I realized what hang on this is such a personal event in someone's life buying something that someone else can also buy isn't good enough for them they want to make something they want to design something and then give it away that is truly personal to them and they can unleash their own creativity so then I understood but so that's not trinkets by a long shot what happens here is when you have a tray we take them out of the printer this is how it comes out of the printer and we've all done it this morning already so unfortunately I cannot show you the actual I the actual thing getting it out of the sand but basically the tray is cooled down in order by order and we put a big tray we put it on here then the platform Rises and then basically the outside box disappears and the white cake comes out on top of it so it looks like Han Solo frozen in the Carbonite yeah yeah and then basically we just really gently we know where each mole is we start digging it away after the breakout station and all the moles are clean they actually come here we put them on these racks and in the early afternoon like one tray offs another comes in here and then basically we sort it here it's clearly a very important human process to a lot of this to make sure quality control is so high and make sure everyone gets what they are expecting again yeah hello oh yeah I like this like some great nice to meet you good so welcome seeing the KL end of the process so you get a bin this is the UPS label packing slip swag which you're familiar with and the product itself Oh a dwarven battle-ax yeah I don't know the damage per second on it but we can find out later though I'm gonna be sort of hands off with this one um the first thing you do should take the UPS label put it you put it aligned with there you go things go flip you flip the box hello okay take a right and then and then you're basically going to assemble half a box watch it you shout it is all right sorry upside down right here yeah perfect right there Shazam Shazam so personally what the customers see is this yes can I can I write lose you in right yeah what's the GPS watch small empires they're right because I want to write soon Wow so for somebody's watching the show and it's thinking I want this job I want to do this what you know and let's say they are god let's either in the massive company that doesn't have any kind of incubation program or maybe it doesn't does matter but let's say they are doing the nine-to-five thing maybe they're college dude what do you tell them what do you tell her to end up like you well I think one of the most important traits is that you don't listen to the word no when I started shapeways we had some pretty big technology challenges if you upload a file to us how do I know I can print it right how do I even know it's a file that a printer would recognize how big is it what would it cost so I went around the corner and I asked quite a few very very smart technology people can you build me something that helped me understand whether it is printable and can help me fix it if it isn't and what it would cost etc and they said wow there's that it's really hard it's actually almost impossible and if we were to build this I mean this was a big company and they'd say well this might cost you 10 to 20 million and maybe three years ago nothing cause 10 to 20 million and nothing takes three years so I didn't hear that so I kept looking and I found these great guys in in Seattle and Alan Hudson was the shield at a company and he's not working for us he said I can do this in three months well yeah that sounds everything can be done in three months so you know don't listen to know if you hear no go somewhere else open-source software rips down the Bears to entry for anyone who wants to build a business using code Shapeways has leveled the playing field for anyone who wants to design and make things and it's all happening right here in this building in New York City so it can't be done can't make a bacon mobius strip can the bacon Lucas true don't take no for an answer that's just what Pete said so I'm gonna take no for an answer all right just put this here it's still beta yeah but delicious I just need my thousand dollars now my work here is done you