October 30, 2018 • 37 mins
What happens when a company abandons its core philosophy? MakerBot went from embracing open source to incorporating proprietary technology, alienating makers and shedding co-founders as a result. Here's what happened.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, John that Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with how Stuff Works and I love all things tech.
And this is a part two of the maker Bought story.
So if you've not heard part one, I recommend listening
(00:25):
to the episode that published before this one, because otherwise
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.
(00:48):
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
(01:11):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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.
(02:13):
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
(02:34):
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,
(02:57):
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,
(03:19):
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,
(03:39):
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.
(04:01):
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
(04:24):
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,
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:10):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:54):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:39):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:10):
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,
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:47):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:50):
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,
(14:13):
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
(14:34):
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
(14:54):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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
(15:58):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:44):
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.
(17:06):
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
(17:28):
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,
(17:49):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:57):
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,
(19:20):
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
(19:43):
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
(20:05):
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
(20:27):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:08):
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,
(21:30):
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
(21:53):
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
(22:14):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:56):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:39):
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
(24:00):
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,
(24:23):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:24):
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
(25:46):
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
(26:07):
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
(26:28):
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
(26:50):
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
(27:10):
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.
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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,
(28:17):
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
(28:40):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:24):
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,
(29:48):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:30):
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
(30:52):
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
(31:14):
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
(31:34):
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
(31:56):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:42):
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,
(33:04):
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
(33:26):
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.
(33:46):
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
(34:09):
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
(34:30):
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
(34:51):
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
(35:14):
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
(35:35):
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
(35:55):
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
(36:18):
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
(36:41):
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?
You can go to tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's
our website that has the ways to contact us, let
us know what you think, maybe give us suggestions for
(37:02):
future episodes, whether it's a company, a technology, a person
in text, someone I should talk to, that kind of thing. Also,
don't forget to head over to our merchandise store that's
over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. You
can see all sorts of different things with all sorts
of different designs, and every single purchase goes to help
(37:22):
the show, So we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk
to you again really soon for moral this and bousands
of other topics because it how stuff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, John that Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with how Stuff Works and I love all things tech.
And this is a part two of the maker Bought story.
So if you've not heard part one, I recommend listening
(00:25):
to the episode that published before this one, because otherwise
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.
(00:48):
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
(01:11):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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.
(02:13):
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
(02:34):
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,
(02:57):
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,
(03:19):
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,
(03:39):
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.
(04:01):
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
(04:24):
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,
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:10):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:54):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:39):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:10):
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,
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:47):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:50):
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,
(14:13):
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
(14:34):
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
(14:54):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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
(15:58):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:44):
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.
(17:06):
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
(17:28):
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,
(17:49):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:57):
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,
(19:20):
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
(19:43):
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
(20:05):
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
(20:27):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:08):
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,
(21:30):
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
(21:53):
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
(22:14):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:56):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:39):
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
(24:00):
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,
(24:23):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:24):
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
(25:46):
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
(26:07):
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
(26:28):
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
(26:50):
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
(27:10):
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.
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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,
(28:17):
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
(28:40):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:24):
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,
(29:48):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:30):
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
(30:52):
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
(31:14):
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
(31:34):
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
(31:56):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:42):
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,
(33:04):
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
(33:26):
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.
(33:46):
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
(34:09):
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
(34:30):
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
(34:51):
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
(35:14):
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
(35:35):
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
(35:55):
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
(36:18):
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
(36:41):
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?
You can go to tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's
our website that has the ways to contact us, let
us know what you think, maybe give us suggestions for
(37:02):
future episodes, whether it's a company, a technology, a person
in text, someone I should talk to, that kind of thing. Also,
don't forget to head over to our merchandise store that's
over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. You
can see all sorts of different things with all sorts
of different designs, and every single purchase goes to help
(37:22):
the show, So we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk
to you again really soon for moral this and bousands
of other topics because it how stuff works dot com
TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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