June 24, 2025 • 32 mins
Samantha Snabes never set out to build a typical company. As co-founder of re:3D and a member of the Air Force National Guard, she launched an open-source 3D printing company that prioritizes access over exclusivity. But when back-to-back hurricanes hit both her team in Houston and her customers in Puerto Rico, it nearly brought the business to a halt. Then came COVID, and a vendor vanished without a trace.
In this episode, Ben Walter is joined by returning guest Ryan Pavel, CEO of the Warrior-Scholar Project, to talk with Samantha about building something bigger than profit, the messy realities of mission-driven entrepreneurship and the moment she hired an Uber driver to help her track down a missing supplier. Together, they unpack what it means to lead an open-source company through crisis, and why leadership sometimes requires breaking the rules. These are The Unshakeables.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Ruby.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
There's a lot to be said about building a business that can weather any storm. What does that reallymean though? Well, we've talked about diversifying clients and income streams. We've talked about building a strong company culture or having a mission to guide you through those dark days, butsometimes there's a literal storm and it's coming right at your business. What do you do? And it's not arhetorical question because it happened to Samantha Snabes, twice.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm Googling it. I just saw a Facebook post out there. Has anyone ever been through a cat 5 hurricane before? What should I do?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
If you guessed, one, be enlisted in the Air Force, and two, have a heap of good luck, well, you'd be right.Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Puerto Rico, and Samantha was on the island, but one of hersuperiors saw her Facebook post and called her up.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Lieutenant Snabes, at midnight tonight, you are activated again in response.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And he's like, "You're the first man in for the response for the hurricane." It got really confusing. Wedidn't have power and water. I was wearing a uniform, but still helping out parallel wrapping up my 3Dprinter and putting it into a closet to protect it because I knew the windows were going to get blownout.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
And if the windows got blown out, well, there went the company. On today's episode how Samanthaand re:3D survived.Welcome to the Unshakeables, from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia, I'm BenWalter, CEO of Chase for Business. On the Unshakeables, we are sharing the daring moments of smallbusiness owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. I'm pleasedto say today we have a first on the Unshakeables, we are welcoming a former guest back as a co-host.So, Ryan Pavel, who is the CEO of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has graciously agreed to come back.We've heard his story and now he's agreed to come back and co-host with me and talk about someoneelse's. So Ryan, welcome back.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Thank you so much for having me. This is quite
an honor.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
The whole thing's very meta. Let's see where it goes.
I think the obvious place to start and frankly, the
reason we asked you to come back on the show.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Is my 3D printing experience, right right, right, you can
say it's okay, that's what I'm known for.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
For those of you who don't know, Ryan was in
the military and currently runs a not for profit that
helps military veterans matriculate into higher education, and so he's
done a lot of thinking about what it means to
be a veteran and what it means to matriculate into
civilian life after being in the military. So Samantha's story
is sort of a little bit of both, right because
(02:39):
she founded it while she was still in the military,
But lots of people also start school when they are
so that's not unprecedented. But this is different.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Absolutely, there's something that's really invigorating about that.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This is different, is really the aim of today's episode. So, why don't we start it now? We usually just name the one city that the company is from, but this is different. On today's episode, re:3D from Chile, Puerto Rico and Austin, Texas. Samantha is the CEO of re:3D, but that's not her title.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I am co-founder and catalyst for re:3D. We're bootstrap, we don't have an investor. We manufacture these huge 3D printers out of the US. We kind of did everything the different way, and I think catalysts are really cool enzymes. My job's kind of like everyone's number two, just trying to help things move along and witness the change in the process. So, it seemed appropriate that the CEO title reflected that path.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Now, that's one title that I've never heard before, but it's very cool. Samantha has run almost every aspect of her company a little differently, and in turn has run her life a little differently. She grew up wanting to be a CEO. The idea of wearing power suits to boardroom lunches was intoxicating to her. While other kids might've read Garfield, she read Dilbert.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I'd always want to be an astronaut, then proudly passed
over very quickly a couple times, primarily because the patient experience.
Go figure. It was one of the youngest the first
time I applied.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
She didn't have enough experience, so she went out and
got experience by doing things, a lot of things. In fact,
she even created a company. As an undergrad.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I helped co-invent something for our DARPA research project. We could mechanically or chemically induce bone marrow cells to become a bone marrow, and our big claim to fame is we kept the bone marrow equivalent going for over a year where the cells were self-renewing, which was a milestone at the time in stem cell research.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
The Army ended up buying that project, by the way, and.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Then deferred graduation and picked up some majors to stay
in at that company because I couldn't afford my student loans.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
On her quest to become an astronaut, she took on
a lot of extracurriculars. She was an EMT and aolunteer
firefighter to help her chances.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So, all of us, like you would be a master scuba diver, you do all these extra things, like I did Microgravity University to fly in the vomit comet and prove if it didn't go past the teeth, it didn't count and I could hold my stuff together. And then, got a job with NASA.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Before you get too excited, I'm sorry to say that's not quite where this episode is going. Samantha unfortunately didn't become an astronaut that day, but her desire to be one came in handy. The NASA Johnson Space Center Life Science Department wanted to find someone exactly like Samantha.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Under the age of thirty that had sold a life
science company, preferably if they have a couple patents that
I had a heart for space. I was pretty shortlist,
and I was really lucky.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Her first job was as a deputy strategist and her
focus was quote standing up innovation as a concept unquote.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
So, even open coworking spaces were still a new thing, and all this paperwork and drama to convert an unused space in a place people would go and share ideas, to working with the San Diego Zoo and standing up partnerships around biomimicry, to connecting with heart surgeons or people in oil and gas to understand fluids through pipes, or I had to go to Google and General Mills and do benchmarking for NASA. Thinking about how we collaborate with NASCAR.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
As part of her work, she helped create a new
division called the Health and Human Performance Center, and she
brought innovators from these companies from around the country to
speak in corporate We sometimes call that a lunch and learn.
And during the time she was at NASA.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Let's see two thousand and eight or nine I started.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
There was a lot of talk about social entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
How living and working in space could better translate to scenarios in earth, disaster response, low resource environments. That kind of overlapped a period of time where I had been traveling to Nicaragua and Rwanda with Engineers Without Borders, and had a lot of like-minded friends at NASA who were just thinking about social impact.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Oh and did I mention that Samantha had gotten her MBA?
She had an MBA.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
I ended up finishing it when I was working at NASA and became very curious about microfinance. So, I was volunteering with Opportunity International, which is microlending particularly in Nicaragua, and was very humbled when I would get in country to see all of the resources and time we invested on bringing things in. For really brilliant people that really didn't want to be dependent on aid or a big business or a cartel or a government, fill in the blank, they wanted to support their communities themselves. In parallel, I would get shown in these locations, mounds of electrical equipment that was just sitting in the sun because it was the wrong voltage, it couldn't be maintained, it wasn't culturally relevant. The list goes on and on.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Samantha would talk through all of this with her friends,
you know, informally.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
We were just grabbing beers together. I started to co
organize some friendships around this concept of the toilet sized
3D printer.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
So for our listeners, back up a little bit and
tell people what is 3D printing and what was the
idea behind re:3D in terms of being different from other
three D printers.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
3D printing has been around now for, golly, about 40 years. And typically, what was available until what we call the open source movement, there were large industrial systems. We never intended to have the business, so it was more around this idea of enabling anyone anywhere, anytime to problem-solve and support their communities in an open way, and we saw that really predicated on this opportunity to provide a low-cost, low-power, easy-to-maintain printer that people could purchase or people could build that was open source. For context, if you've been to like a school
(08:46):
or a library, you may have seen a machine that
takes like a ropelike material and it gets really hot
and melts it like a hot glue gun, and then
it draws something, and layer by layer, like a pancake,
it stacks up. Some people call it polymer printing or
desktop three D printing.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Now, most of these printers, they use plastic, and in many places around the world, well, there's an excess of plastic waste. You could purchase plastic filaments to use in the machine or you could shred plastic waste and reuse it to make something totally new. That's what Samantha wanted to do. Print from garbage. A lot of people use the printers to make phone cases or toys. In fact, a friend of mine used them to make little elephant figurines, and this shouldn't be a surprise. People come up with all kinds of things, but Samantha, she had bigger goals.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
They were talking about composting toilets and tools and birthing stools and all these things I hadn't even imagined, and said, "We were going to try and make a printer under $10,000," which is about the 10th of what the equivalent was at the time. We got a little bit of momentum on a few community platforms and then heard about the thing called Start-Up Chile that gives you $40K to start or scale your idea in Latin America.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Samantha threw her hat in the ring and they were selected, and that's how she got the startup money for re:3D.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I guess the other part of the story too, is
I took a break from contracting for NASA to go
to officer school for the Air Force.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Okay, yes, so one more thing related to becoming an astronaut.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
I had heard that being in the military could help your chances. So, with $120,000 of student loan debt, on my lunch hour at NASA, at 29, I enlisted in the military because I do everything so smartly. Stupid. It was all backwards.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Ryan. It's so great to have you back.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Having listened to Samantha, I think what I was struck
by more than anything is building a product that you
don't know how it's going to be used is a
really weird thing.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
There's something about this, comfort with the unknown, that she consistently demonstrates. There are so many things in her story where she is following the thread one step at a time, self-deprecating for some of the choices that she makes, saying the timing from which you joined the military is stupid, but clearly it's worked out for her. And she really does have this ability to be able to embrace all of these things along the way. So, there's also this risk tolerance that, really, I think defines a lot of what she's been able to accomplish.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I mean, she has been on the vomit rocket, so
you got to believe.
Yeah, multiple times, right? That's incredible.
You would not find me there. I can tell you that.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Yeah. I don't know if this stood out to you in the same way it did for me, but throughout this, her direct language, the way that she's able to embrace things, and this is something which is I think certainly influenced by the military connection there, she has no problem being direct. But I also think that that's part of who she is and how she's been able to be successful is she's not afraid to embrace the hard problems, and she's not going to run away just because something is unexpected.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah. I think she's an interesting mix of humble and
self reflecting but also risk tolerant and ambitious. Yeah, ambition
takes different forms, humility takes different forms, risk tolerance takes stiffer.
Those are all necessary ingredients, but they can look and
feel very different, and her combination is unusual, if not unique. Yeah,
(12:08):
we'll talk more about that in a bit, but for now,
let's hear the next part of her winding path with
re:3D
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Start-Up Chile, in 2013, we found out they were going to have a booth at South by Southwest.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Samantha asked if Startup Chile would get them tickets to
south By Southwest, and if they did, she'd launched the
company live at Startup Chile's booth. They had eight weeks
to make it happen.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
We did do it and we launched on Kickstarter. I built the campaign without the name of the product from Santiago. The team built the hardware, launched it in person at South by Southwest. The press comes through first and we were funded in one day, 27 hours, and then we raised a quarter of a million, which at the time was the biggest campaign anyone in that cohort had done.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
The US government saw the success of the Startup Chile
program and wanted to do something similar in Puerto Rico.
They poached one of the directors of Startup Chile to
run it and he called Samantha.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
He's like, Samantha, if you're going to print from shredded
up garbage, you should do it on an island. It's
an extreme use case of people that sometimes have to
pay to get rid of their waist, that our resource
can strained, and don't want to be importing stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So Samantha, she went to Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
At a considerable cost to us at a bootstrap company, we had brought in the first filament printer. We had it live to do classes of workshops on the island, and had just introduced ourselves to this program.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
And then she went to Korea with the Air Force.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
I've had short activations over time and training commitments where I had to use my vacation at re:3D to support that. One of them was I had to do a big exercise for a month and a half in Korea.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
At the end of the exercise, everyone has the chance
to go to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Cool well, pretty cool to some people. But while she
was there, Harvey hits. Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August
twenty seventeen, doing a lot of damage to areas of
Texas and Louisiana, including Houston, my hometown where her life
(14:06):
and work were at the time.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
That was an oh shit moment because I am literally standing on the border of North Korea as my factory that I'd been away from, five, six weeks, I was really stressed about it. We had teammates that were up on their roofs calling to do check-ons every other day because of flooding there or going to help their neighbors, or they had friends or family that lost their houses.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
But Samantha couldn't go to Houston after her exercise in Korea.
She had to go back to Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
So, I'd been in PR a month prior, but one of my co-founders comes down to relieve me so I can randomly go to Korea, which is confusing, and Harvey hits. I fly, then from Korea, all the way to Puerto Rico to relieve him. Arrived exhausted.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And that's when she heard about another hurricane Irma heading
straight for Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
I literally put a Facebook post out that said, "Has anyone ever been through a cat 4 or 5 hurricane? Is there anything I should do to prep?" And immediately the Air Force is like, "Dude, you got to find somewhere to go." And the governor comes on and he's like, "We're going to lose power for at least a month or two." So, the Air Force tells me, "Okay, at midnight tonight, we're going to put you on order. So if you're injured, at least you're covered." And the next morning, "You need to be in uniform," because I knew it was going to be bad, and I was then in uniform in parallel wrapping up my printer and putting it into a closet to protect it because I knew the windows were going to get blown out. I Saran-wrapped it. For some reason, I thought that was a great idea. In a closet, trying to find somewhere to shelter down.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Samantha was able to move the printer, thank goodness, but
the island was devastated. Despite the lack of water and power.
Samantha decided to stay.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
We say, if a Puerto Rican designs a design for a Puerto Rican need and they run it, we will let you use it for free and all the feedstock we have till it's gone. And the things that people suggested were not a single thing that we would've thought people would've needed after a hurricane. Like what?
So, the first design we got was from the Feminista Colectiva in different groups, and it was to print flexible open source anatomical designs to demonstrate menstrual cups.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
So many communities around the island were cut off from running water and sanitation. So, women's health nonprofits were handing out menstrual cups to be used in place of tampons or pads.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And they're supposed to tell a 12-year-old or a 40-year-old woman how to use one. There's not an appropriate way to demonstrate this. So, we made one that could be modified depending on whatever request there was very quickly. It was a great use of flexible filament. We made things for bees because all of the leaves were off the trees and the bees needed somewhere to gather as people set out sugar water. It was just really cool.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Then two weeks after that Hurricane Maria hit.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
We stuck it out. The program paused and they said anyone could leave and we were the only company left, but that's our long story about Puerto Rico and hurricanes. We say it's where we do applied research. It's just been incredibly informative and have shaped our company in a way that we never expected.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
So, one thing I'm not quite sure I understand right now, Samantha is, who are your actual clients? Who buys the printer??
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Our customer base has always been pretty diverse, and this probably would make us less attractive too for investment if we were going to fundraise because it's what we call a broad-based technology. There hasn't been a lot of very hyper-specific and repeatable markets around 3D printing. So, you end up selling to everyone. There's a lot of interest from the defense, aerospace, and space community. So, that is a big demographic for us. That works out well because we understand it. But I would say it depends on if the printer prints from garbage or virgin materials. But loosely, it's education for us, universities and national labs, studying new materials, needing to build big things or a lot of little things to do different studies. And then, about a quarter of it is manufacturing.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
So talk to me a little bit about the fact
that the product is still open source. And I know
you're a mission driven company, but you're still, as you said,
you've been profitable since day one. Why that decision? What
does it mean? How do you manage it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, pretty poorly. For us, what it means is we haven't filed for a patent. If somebody asked us for a drawing or a supplier, we provide it and we have full transparency around everything. We have had people that it appears they loosely took the design for their own need or start their own company and their geography, and I think that's awesome, said no entrepreneur. Ever, Yeah, I think it's an honor.
(18:28):
But the reality of it is you have to be
improving the system all the time. So rather than taking
a lot of cost into patents and litigation, we just
try to put it in feature development to stay competitive,
and for us, competitiveness is more about continuing to enable
people to overcome the challenges they're experiencing so they can
solve their problems locally.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Solving problems locally is an issue Samantha and her team have also had to embrace. One of her key vendors ghosted her during COVID, disappearing with what those in the know call a Raspberry Pie.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
It was just this little part of the brains of the machine that connects us to Wi-Fi too.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
And now you're in the know, but if you still don't know, it's a tiny computer, about the size of a credit card, that can be used for almost anything. Samantha had a few sources for these. Some were overseas and some were stateside, and you probably remember all the delays getting things shipped from overseas during COVID. But the US vendor, he just disappeared.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Just completely ghosted us, went out of business, and he has supplied basically the brains of the machine to a number of printing companies as well as the thing that you touch and use to run the controls. And you can't ship without that. You can't build printers, you can't test them. And then, it was so bad. I hired an Uber driver who worked as a bouncer to go with me to his office I'd been to before. I don't know what possessed me.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
What possessed her was the fire of a thousand small
business owners before her.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
I had a lot of money hung up and was extending my lead time, which was further impacting my ability to even sell new units or do research projects. I was just like up a creek. Even to replace that, it's not a simple replacement because it changes the layout of all your electronics, wire links, hundreds of other parts, your whole manufacturing process. So, on a moment of desperation, I tried twice to hunt this guy down. I still have never heard back from him.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Samantha pilfered some spare parts from other electronics and decided to run with it anyway.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
I was like, hey, we're just going to go ahead and we're going to put this in machines in sales. We're going to try to explain to our customers what we're doing. And when they get the machine, it's going to have a big sticker on it that says, "Congratulations, beta user. Please contact support at re3D.org with any questions. Your printer comes with lifetime customer support." And then, about a year later, we would check in. Most of them had minor issues and feedback. We would ship them with the actual version once we ironed out the kinks. But that was my stupid idea. We're around today. Was that the best call?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
And there's no way to know. re:3D's journey has had
lots of ups and downs, as all companies do.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
So last year, we moved our factory. I broke two legs, had an ankle reconstruction and my elbow. And then I'm clearing the land of the shop, I get a crazy poison ivy infection leads to a staph infection. I have other requirements from the Air Force and then I'm shorting work. I've been in 14 years, so you kind of see those peaks and valleys, but I wouldn't say I do it great.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
And so what does the company do when you get
called up?
Speaker 1 (21:33):
That is unfortunate timing right now because I was just called up for six weeks. It's pretty imperfect. You just try and make it work. But I am learning about where the overlaps may be. I just finished Air Command and Staff College, which is basically another master's in leadership. And you're having to do a lot of writing and introspection and those networks have been really invaluable. I didn't go to Harvard, but I probably have access to a lot of that same type of networking reach back because of my Air Force experience..
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Ryan I want to bring you back in here. So
Samantha's story kind of has it all. I mean, she
has an interesting background, the way that she formed the business.
She's had a couple of oh moments that were pretty harrowing.
It's a unique product. I certainly haven't heard anything else
like it. Yeah, she doesn't have a standard business model.
I mean we pretty much can put this into about
four or five buckets of Oh, this is different. Absolutely,
(22:32):
I don't actually know anybody who's walked that path before.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
There's a lot of value in really being able to
learn from them, like how did they piece that sort
of thing together completely.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I sort of wanted to start, though, talk to us
a little bit about coming out of the military into
a fast paced business life. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Yeah. I think that there are a lot of ways in which people will describe the military community with really broad terms, and I think I talked about this a little bit. The first time that I met you here and when we were doing that episode is, when you think about things like every veteran's a leader. Well, some veterans, right? Some people really learn those skills. Other people may have the potential to be leaders, but they didn't have much opportunity to be able to do that when they were in. But there is something to be said for every veteran will have worked in some sort of high-paced environment. They'll have had to work with people that bring a wide variety of skills, a wide variety of backgrounds to accomplish some sort of mission. Veterans want to continue to find that sort of sense of purpose, right? They strive to be able to recreate that same sort of environment.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And be part of something bigger than themselves.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, exactly right. And giving back, and we do hear that as well. In her story, right, this idea of some sort of social enterprise. It's not just a business for the sake of the business side, but it's also about this idea of how do you have some sort of societal impact with what she's doing. Her story about trying to balance these sorts of things as well. Launching this, getting this grant while also trying to be able to launch her business and manage that. You need to dig pretty deep into that resiliency in order to make those types of things happen. And so, I do think that this is, again, why so many veterans, even if they are pursuing something else outside of military service, there still is that desire to continue to give back. I see this all the time in the folks that we work with.As you mentioned, Warrior-Scholar Project is focused on the education piece, but it's much more about how do you build perspective and how do you figure out what civic engagement, civic service looks like for you? And so, what I hear from her story as well is so much of that of saying, it's not just about building a product and doing something like that. It's how do you leverage that and how do you channel all of these things that you learned in the military and all these people that you worked with in order to do something that's bigger? And I think that that insatiable desire for impact is part of why you see so many veterans that are entrepreneurs, that have some sort of desire to be able to continue to grow. The military changes you and it sets your ambitions higher in the vast majority of cases.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I mean, the other thing that I noticed in Samantha, she's incredibly decisive. The military requires, even at a junior officer level, no one's looking over your shoulder. You have to make decisions, and obviously in extreme cases, you have to make life or death decisions.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Sure.
But even in peacetime, you are expected to make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions. And She talked a lot about her leadership training from
the military, but I think a big part of that
is likely her ability to make decisions, particularly when you
have imperfect information.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Yes, yes. Very imperfect information. And part of that I think can be something which can be a sort of a natural quality that people have pre-military, like maybe they're attracted to it because they want to be in a position that they can actually affect some sort of change that can make those sorts of decisions. But I think also culturally, perhaps to your point, that is something which is instilled even at the junior ranks. And that's true in the officer Corps and it's also true for the enlisted. So, enlisted is about 82, 83% of the military. This is the group of people that, for example, me joining at 17, if you're an officer, you're often still joining when you're maybe fresh out of college, to be then put in these positions that you are overseeing all of this equipment and these decisions. And it's not always life or death, but it is contributing towards this incredibly important mission that has really high stakes. And that can be really challenging, to put it mildly. Sure. But it's also where you grow. I think that there's a lot of people that would be put in her decision and would say, "You know what? This is actually too much for me to do both of these things at once. Maybe I can be in the guard and I could have more of a run-of-the-mill job." But for her, she clearly was yearning for something. She had this idea, right, and pursued that while also pursuing her deployments and her military obligations. That's a level of tenacity that I think many people are not necessarily, they don't have in their hopper.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Well, not just tenacity, but energy. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
Is it inherent energy or is it caffeine? Right, that's
the question. Maybe a little bit of both. But thinking
about whatever deal she's working out there where she has
twelve hours on one shift and twelve hours on another,
you do need to dig pretty deep into that.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Well. I want to pivot a little bit, Ryan and
talk about her business model because we haven't had anyone
on the show who has quite that business model. You know,
most of the people that we've had on have completely
proprietary businesses, and she's sort of done that, but sort
of not so. She has made her product infinitely configurable.
She calls it open source. She allows her customers to
(26:59):
make changes to the product that in fact encourages it.
She's teaching people how to use it in different creative
ways and then letting them get creative. We haven't quite
seen that before, and it's a pretty brave thing to
do to say, Okay, well I want this to be
so widely adopted, I'm just going to make it open
and available, right.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Right, and part of that could be, maybe the genesis of that is a business case to say that this will mean higher market share, that more people would be attracted to it. But also, it could be something which is entirely different motivation, which is just, "Yeah, I want to create this, but I don't necessarily have all the ideas about how this thing could potentially be configured by actually making it available for other people to customize it to their particular uses." I think that that same lesson, that same idea applies well outside of something like what she's created there, where if somebody creates a thing, other people can iterate on that and potentially make it even better. You see this all the time, even in the work that we do in the higher education space. If somebody can take that idea and do it better than we can, then that means that somebody else can do it better and iterate on that sort of thing. So, I think that the core of that is something which is really inspiring and clearly has worked to great success for her.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
To me, it's more that she is making the play that I want this thing to be ubiquitous, and the best way to make it ubiquitous is to open it up, not close it down. If I close it down, I invite more competition. If I open it up, there's every reason to use that. And even if my margins are a bit smaller, it's a bigger pie and that's the way to go.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
Well, you also get people that know your company for that. If this is a value and you're actually living out that value, then you can get a community. Even before coming here just looking on the website and doing some research into her company, community is this really important piece of it. How do they engage with their community? And so, they have this maker community where they have people that have this thing, this core product that they've created, but then have all their own customizations, all their own iterations of it, and that's the sort of thing that really instills loyalty. This is amazing. I didn't just buy it for this one specific use case, but actually it doesn't quite fit my need. No, I have the ability to do more.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
To be fair, I kind of want one now, right, Yeah,
I know.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Let's go. Right.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
She compares everything to toilets, and like, that's a hook
for me. If you're to look her up on LinkedIn,
she talks about her passion for toilets before she talks
about anything else, right, and I'm a sucker for something
in LinkedIn, which is just bucking the trend a little bit.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
You don't see that often.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
She had me at toilet Now, I really want one
after learning more, but I was sold early on.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Bill Gates has been big on that.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
They've been trying to recreate the toilet for years because
one of the number one drivers of global health is
sewage and sanitation.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Yeah, so you don't necessarily know where I think that
inspiration is going to come from, and I think that
this is one of the points you already made as well.
But who has this type of specific story. Nobody Right,
She's been able to carve her own path and has
clearly learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I'm expecting great things from her. Ryan while we're here,
what's the latest on Word Scholar project?
Speaker 4 (29:38):
So, Warrior-Scholar Project continues to grow. We are hungry to be able to serve more enlisted veterans. So, we work with enlisted veterans who are interested in pursuing education as a way to build perspective and to grow their civic impact after military service. And we are never going to stop. The population continues to grow every year. There's about 100,000 more enlisted veterans that are starting higher education. We want to reach more and more of them.This summer, we'll work with about 20 colleges and university partners. We're working with community colleges. We have a Graduate Pathways initiative, in between last time we talked and now, we launched a Career Pathways initiative to be able to help deepen the connections in between career ambitions and education. We want veterans to be able to answer those questions before they start school about where they want to go as opposed to trying to figure it out after they graduate. And then, our other big update is that we're actively working on an online course that's going to go live later this year. This has been an initiative that's been years and years in the making and we cannot wait to actually see that come to fruition.
Yeah, you can drive real scale with that, right?
That's exactly right. My operating assumption is the government is never going to adequately prepare people for transition, so we're going to fill some of that gap.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
You think your market is stable.
Speaker 4 (30:39):
Well, you'll like this. Dr. Laurie Santos, we actually modeled it off of her course, the Happiness course that she has at Yale. That's a phenomenal course, and so we worked with the same team, and We modeled the same sort of dynamic instruction so that we can actually have something that people are really interested in understanding what college success looks like for military veterans.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Opportunity more than obligation. That's all.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
There. You go,
Ryan, we've known each other for almost the year now.
I consider you a friend and I just want to
say thank you for coming back and sharing your time
with us again on The Unshakeables.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Thank you very much for having me here. I'm excited
to be here and I also consider you a friend.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Ben. I want to end with this question that we
ask to all of our guests on the show, which
is being an entrepreneur or business owner is really hard.
And if you had one piece of advice for current
or aspiring business owners, what would it be.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
It's okay to be ugly so often, especially in hardware,
you want to hold on to things and make it
beautiful or make it like the use case or opportunity
you saw on your head. And the reality of it
is people are going to kick it around and have
a lot of feedback and shape it so the sooner
that you can get out there, get it outside of
your family, your neighbors, your friends, the people that love you.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Get it into the wild.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Like your ugly baby fly.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Awesome, Samantha, thank you for being on the show. We
really appreciate it. You've been a great guest.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
That's a wrap on Samantha's episode, and that's a wrap
on season two of The Unshakeables. Thanks to all of
you for listening to the incredible business owners that we
get to work with every day here at Chase. There
are thousands more, and who knows, maybe one day you'll
be up here. But for now, I'm Ben Walter and
this was the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby
Studio from iHeartMedia. Thanks for listening.
Ruby.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
There's a lot to be said about building a business that can weather any storm. What does that reallymean though? Well, we've talked about diversifying clients and income streams. We've talked about building a strong company culture or having a mission to guide you through those dark days, butsometimes there's a literal storm and it's coming right at your business. What do you do? And it's not arhetorical question because it happened to Samantha Snabes, twice.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm Googling it. I just saw a Facebook post out there. Has anyone ever been through a cat 5 hurricane before? What should I do?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
If you guessed, one, be enlisted in the Air Force, and two, have a heap of good luck, well, you'd be right.Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Puerto Rico, and Samantha was on the island, but one of hersuperiors saw her Facebook post and called her up.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Lieutenant Snabes, at midnight tonight, you are activated again in response.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And he's like, "You're the first man in for the response for the hurricane." It got really confusing. Wedidn't have power and water. I was wearing a uniform, but still helping out parallel wrapping up my 3Dprinter and putting it into a closet to protect it because I knew the windows were going to get blownout.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
And if the windows got blown out, well, there went the company. On today's episode how Samanthaand re:3D survived.Welcome to the Unshakeables, from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia, I'm BenWalter, CEO of Chase for Business. On the Unshakeables, we are sharing the daring moments of smallbusiness owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. I'm pleasedto say today we have a first on the Unshakeables, we are welcoming a former guest back as a co-host.So, Ryan Pavel, who is the CEO of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has graciously agreed to come back.We've heard his story and now he's agreed to come back and co-host with me and talk about someoneelse's. So Ryan, welcome back.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Thank you so much for having me. This is quite
an honor.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
The whole thing's very meta. Let's see where it goes.
I think the obvious place to start and frankly, the
reason we asked you to come back on the show.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Is my 3D printing experience, right right, right, you can
say it's okay, that's what I'm known for.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
For those of you who don't know, Ryan was in
the military and currently runs a not for profit that
helps military veterans matriculate into higher education, and so he's
done a lot of thinking about what it means to
be a veteran and what it means to matriculate into
civilian life after being in the military. So Samantha's story
is sort of a little bit of both, right because
(02:39):
she founded it while she was still in the military,
But lots of people also start school when they are
so that's not unprecedented. But this is different.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Absolutely, there's something that's really invigorating about that.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This is different, is really the aim of today's episode. So, why don't we start it now? We usually just name the one city that the company is from, but this is different. On today's episode, re:3D from Chile, Puerto Rico and Austin, Texas. Samantha is the CEO of re:3D, but that's not her title.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I am co-founder and catalyst for re:3D. We're bootstrap, we don't have an investor. We manufacture these huge 3D printers out of the US. We kind of did everything the different way, and I think catalysts are really cool enzymes. My job's kind of like everyone's number two, just trying to help things move along and witness the change in the process. So, it seemed appropriate that the CEO title reflected that path.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Now, that's one title that I've never heard before, but it's very cool. Samantha has run almost every aspect of her company a little differently, and in turn has run her life a little differently. She grew up wanting to be a CEO. The idea of wearing power suits to boardroom lunches was intoxicating to her. While other kids might've read Garfield, she read Dilbert.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I'd always want to be an astronaut, then proudly passed
over very quickly a couple times, primarily because the patient experience.
Go figure. It was one of the youngest the first
time I applied.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
She didn't have enough experience, so she went out and
got experience by doing things, a lot of things. In fact,
she even created a company. As an undergrad.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I helped co-invent something for our DARPA research project. We could mechanically or chemically induce bone marrow cells to become a bone marrow, and our big claim to fame is we kept the bone marrow equivalent going for over a year where the cells were self-renewing, which was a milestone at the time in stem cell research.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
The Army ended up buying that project, by the way, and.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Then deferred graduation and picked up some majors to stay
in at that company because I couldn't afford my student loans.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
On her quest to become an astronaut, she took on
a lot of extracurriculars. She was an EMT and aolunteer
firefighter to help her chances.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So, all of us, like you would be a master scuba diver, you do all these extra things, like I did Microgravity University to fly in the vomit comet and prove if it didn't go past the teeth, it didn't count and I could hold my stuff together. And then, got a job with NASA.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Before you get too excited, I'm sorry to say that's not quite where this episode is going. Samantha unfortunately didn't become an astronaut that day, but her desire to be one came in handy. The NASA Johnson Space Center Life Science Department wanted to find someone exactly like Samantha.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Under the age of thirty that had sold a life
science company, preferably if they have a couple patents that
I had a heart for space. I was pretty shortlist,
and I was really lucky.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Her first job was as a deputy strategist and her
focus was quote standing up innovation as a concept unquote.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
So, even open coworking spaces were still a new thing, and all this paperwork and drama to convert an unused space in a place people would go and share ideas, to working with the San Diego Zoo and standing up partnerships around biomimicry, to connecting with heart surgeons or people in oil and gas to understand fluids through pipes, or I had to go to Google and General Mills and do benchmarking for NASA. Thinking about how we collaborate with NASCAR.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
As part of her work, she helped create a new
division called the Health and Human Performance Center, and she
brought innovators from these companies from around the country to
speak in corporate We sometimes call that a lunch and learn.
And during the time she was at NASA.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Let's see two thousand and eight or nine I started.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
There was a lot of talk about social entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
How living and working in space could better translate to scenarios in earth, disaster response, low resource environments. That kind of overlapped a period of time where I had been traveling to Nicaragua and Rwanda with Engineers Without Borders, and had a lot of like-minded friends at NASA who were just thinking about social impact.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Oh and did I mention that Samantha had gotten her MBA?
She had an MBA.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
I ended up finishing it when I was working at NASA and became very curious about microfinance. So, I was volunteering with Opportunity International, which is microlending particularly in Nicaragua, and was very humbled when I would get in country to see all of the resources and time we invested on bringing things in. For really brilliant people that really didn't want to be dependent on aid or a big business or a cartel or a government, fill in the blank, they wanted to support their communities themselves. In parallel, I would get shown in these locations, mounds of electrical equipment that was just sitting in the sun because it was the wrong voltage, it couldn't be maintained, it wasn't culturally relevant. The list goes on and on.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Samantha would talk through all of this with her friends,
you know, informally.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
We were just grabbing beers together. I started to co
organize some friendships around this concept of the toilet sized
3D printer.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
So for our listeners, back up a little bit and
tell people what is 3D printing and what was the
idea behind re:3D in terms of being different from other
three D printers.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
3D printing has been around now for, golly, about 40 years. And typically, what was available until what we call the open source movement, there were large industrial systems. We never intended to have the business, so it was more around this idea of enabling anyone anywhere, anytime to problem-solve and support their communities in an open way, and we saw that really predicated on this opportunity to provide a low-cost, low-power, easy-to-maintain printer that people could purchase or people could build that was open source. For context, if you've been to like a school
(08:46):
or a library, you may have seen a machine that
takes like a ropelike material and it gets really hot
and melts it like a hot glue gun, and then
it draws something, and layer by layer, like a pancake,
it stacks up. Some people call it polymer printing or
desktop three D printing.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Now, most of these printers, they use plastic, and in many places around the world, well, there's an excess of plastic waste. You could purchase plastic filaments to use in the machine or you could shred plastic waste and reuse it to make something totally new. That's what Samantha wanted to do. Print from garbage. A lot of people use the printers to make phone cases or toys. In fact, a friend of mine used them to make little elephant figurines, and this shouldn't be a surprise. People come up with all kinds of things, but Samantha, she had bigger goals.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
They were talking about composting toilets and tools and birthing stools and all these things I hadn't even imagined, and said, "We were going to try and make a printer under $10,000," which is about the 10th of what the equivalent was at the time. We got a little bit of momentum on a few community platforms and then heard about the thing called Start-Up Chile that gives you $40K to start or scale your idea in Latin America.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Samantha threw her hat in the ring and they were selected, and that's how she got the startup money for re:3D.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I guess the other part of the story too, is
I took a break from contracting for NASA to go
to officer school for the Air Force.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Okay, yes, so one more thing related to becoming an astronaut.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
I had heard that being in the military could help your chances. So, with $120,000 of student loan debt, on my lunch hour at NASA, at 29, I enlisted in the military because I do everything so smartly. Stupid. It was all backwards.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Ryan. It's so great to have you back.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Having listened to Samantha, I think what I was struck
by more than anything is building a product that you
don't know how it's going to be used is a
really weird thing.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
There's something about this, comfort with the unknown, that she consistently demonstrates. There are so many things in her story where she is following the thread one step at a time, self-deprecating for some of the choices that she makes, saying the timing from which you joined the military is stupid, but clearly it's worked out for her. And she really does have this ability to be able to embrace all of these things along the way. So, there's also this risk tolerance that, really, I think defines a lot of what she's been able to accomplish.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I mean, she has been on the vomit rocket, so
you got to believe.
Yeah, multiple times, right? That's incredible.
You would not find me there. I can tell you that.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Yeah. I don't know if this stood out to you in the same way it did for me, but throughout this, her direct language, the way that she's able to embrace things, and this is something which is I think certainly influenced by the military connection there, she has no problem being direct. But I also think that that's part of who she is and how she's been able to be successful is she's not afraid to embrace the hard problems, and she's not going to run away just because something is unexpected.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah. I think she's an interesting mix of humble and
self reflecting but also risk tolerant and ambitious. Yeah, ambition
takes different forms, humility takes different forms, risk tolerance takes stiffer.
Those are all necessary ingredients, but they can look and
feel very different, and her combination is unusual, if not unique. Yeah,
(12:08):
we'll talk more about that in a bit, but for now,
let's hear the next part of her winding path with
re:3D
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Start-Up Chile, in 2013, we found out they were going to have a booth at South by Southwest.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Samantha asked if Startup Chile would get them tickets to
south By Southwest, and if they did, she'd launched the
company live at Startup Chile's booth. They had eight weeks
to make it happen.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
We did do it and we launched on Kickstarter. I built the campaign without the name of the product from Santiago. The team built the hardware, launched it in person at South by Southwest. The press comes through first and we were funded in one day, 27 hours, and then we raised a quarter of a million, which at the time was the biggest campaign anyone in that cohort had done.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
The US government saw the success of the Startup Chile
program and wanted to do something similar in Puerto Rico.
They poached one of the directors of Startup Chile to
run it and he called Samantha.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
He's like, Samantha, if you're going to print from shredded
up garbage, you should do it on an island. It's
an extreme use case of people that sometimes have to
pay to get rid of their waist, that our resource
can strained, and don't want to be importing stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So Samantha, she went to Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
At a considerable cost to us at a bootstrap company, we had brought in the first filament printer. We had it live to do classes of workshops on the island, and had just introduced ourselves to this program.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
And then she went to Korea with the Air Force.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
I've had short activations over time and training commitments where I had to use my vacation at re:3D to support that. One of them was I had to do a big exercise for a month and a half in Korea.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
At the end of the exercise, everyone has the chance
to go to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Cool well, pretty cool to some people. But while she
was there, Harvey hits. Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August
twenty seventeen, doing a lot of damage to areas of
Texas and Louisiana, including Houston, my hometown where her life
(14:06):
and work were at the time.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
That was an oh shit moment because I am literally standing on the border of North Korea as my factory that I'd been away from, five, six weeks, I was really stressed about it. We had teammates that were up on their roofs calling to do check-ons every other day because of flooding there or going to help their neighbors, or they had friends or family that lost their houses.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
But Samantha couldn't go to Houston after her exercise in Korea.
She had to go back to Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
So, I'd been in PR a month prior, but one of my co-founders comes down to relieve me so I can randomly go to Korea, which is confusing, and Harvey hits. I fly, then from Korea, all the way to Puerto Rico to relieve him. Arrived exhausted.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And that's when she heard about another hurricane Irma heading
straight for Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
I literally put a Facebook post out that said, "Has anyone ever been through a cat 4 or 5 hurricane? Is there anything I should do to prep?" And immediately the Air Force is like, "Dude, you got to find somewhere to go." And the governor comes on and he's like, "We're going to lose power for at least a month or two." So, the Air Force tells me, "Okay, at midnight tonight, we're going to put you on order. So if you're injured, at least you're covered." And the next morning, "You need to be in uniform," because I knew it was going to be bad, and I was then in uniform in parallel wrapping up my printer and putting it into a closet to protect it because I knew the windows were going to get blown out. I Saran-wrapped it. For some reason, I thought that was a great idea. In a closet, trying to find somewhere to shelter down.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Samantha was able to move the printer, thank goodness, but
the island was devastated. Despite the lack of water and power.
Samantha decided to stay.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
We say, if a Puerto Rican designs a design for a Puerto Rican need and they run it, we will let you use it for free and all the feedstock we have till it's gone. And the things that people suggested were not a single thing that we would've thought people would've needed after a hurricane. Like what?
So, the first design we got was from the Feminista Colectiva in different groups, and it was to print flexible open source anatomical designs to demonstrate menstrual cups.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
So many communities around the island were cut off from running water and sanitation. So, women's health nonprofits were handing out menstrual cups to be used in place of tampons or pads.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And they're supposed to tell a 12-year-old or a 40-year-old woman how to use one. There's not an appropriate way to demonstrate this. So, we made one that could be modified depending on whatever request there was very quickly. It was a great use of flexible filament. We made things for bees because all of the leaves were off the trees and the bees needed somewhere to gather as people set out sugar water. It was just really cool.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Then two weeks after that Hurricane Maria hit.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
We stuck it out. The program paused and they said anyone could leave and we were the only company left, but that's our long story about Puerto Rico and hurricanes. We say it's where we do applied research. It's just been incredibly informative and have shaped our company in a way that we never expected.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
So, one thing I'm not quite sure I understand right now, Samantha is, who are your actual clients? Who buys the printer??
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Our customer base has always been pretty diverse, and this probably would make us less attractive too for investment if we were going to fundraise because it's what we call a broad-based technology. There hasn't been a lot of very hyper-specific and repeatable markets around 3D printing. So, you end up selling to everyone. There's a lot of interest from the defense, aerospace, and space community. So, that is a big demographic for us. That works out well because we understand it. But I would say it depends on if the printer prints from garbage or virgin materials. But loosely, it's education for us, universities and national labs, studying new materials, needing to build big things or a lot of little things to do different studies. And then, about a quarter of it is manufacturing.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
So talk to me a little bit about the fact
that the product is still open source. And I know
you're a mission driven company, but you're still, as you said,
you've been profitable since day one. Why that decision? What
does it mean? How do you manage it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, pretty poorly. For us, what it means is we haven't filed for a patent. If somebody asked us for a drawing or a supplier, we provide it and we have full transparency around everything. We have had people that it appears they loosely took the design for their own need or start their own company and their geography, and I think that's awesome, said no entrepreneur. Ever, Yeah, I think it's an honor.
(18:28):
But the reality of it is you have to be
improving the system all the time. So rather than taking
a lot of cost into patents and litigation, we just
try to put it in feature development to stay competitive,
and for us, competitiveness is more about continuing to enable
people to overcome the challenges they're experiencing so they can
solve their problems locally.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Solving problems locally is an issue Samantha and her team have also had to embrace. One of her key vendors ghosted her during COVID, disappearing with what those in the know call a Raspberry Pie.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
It was just this little part of the brains of the machine that connects us to Wi-Fi too.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
And now you're in the know, but if you still don't know, it's a tiny computer, about the size of a credit card, that can be used for almost anything. Samantha had a few sources for these. Some were overseas and some were stateside, and you probably remember all the delays getting things shipped from overseas during COVID. But the US vendor, he just disappeared.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Just completely ghosted us, went out of business, and he has supplied basically the brains of the machine to a number of printing companies as well as the thing that you touch and use to run the controls. And you can't ship without that. You can't build printers, you can't test them. And then, it was so bad. I hired an Uber driver who worked as a bouncer to go with me to his office I'd been to before. I don't know what possessed me.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
What possessed her was the fire of a thousand small
business owners before her.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
I had a lot of money hung up and was extending my lead time, which was further impacting my ability to even sell new units or do research projects. I was just like up a creek. Even to replace that, it's not a simple replacement because it changes the layout of all your electronics, wire links, hundreds of other parts, your whole manufacturing process. So, on a moment of desperation, I tried twice to hunt this guy down. I still have never heard back from him.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Samantha pilfered some spare parts from other electronics and decided to run with it anyway.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
I was like, hey, we're just going to go ahead and we're going to put this in machines in sales. We're going to try to explain to our customers what we're doing. And when they get the machine, it's going to have a big sticker on it that says, "Congratulations, beta user. Please contact support at re3D.org with any questions. Your printer comes with lifetime customer support." And then, about a year later, we would check in. Most of them had minor issues and feedback. We would ship them with the actual version once we ironed out the kinks. But that was my stupid idea. We're around today. Was that the best call?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
And there's no way to know. re:3D's journey has had
lots of ups and downs, as all companies do.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
So last year, we moved our factory. I broke two legs, had an ankle reconstruction and my elbow. And then I'm clearing the land of the shop, I get a crazy poison ivy infection leads to a staph infection. I have other requirements from the Air Force and then I'm shorting work. I've been in 14 years, so you kind of see those peaks and valleys, but I wouldn't say I do it great.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
And so what does the company do when you get
called up?
Speaker 1 (21:33):
That is unfortunate timing right now because I was just called up for six weeks. It's pretty imperfect. You just try and make it work. But I am learning about where the overlaps may be. I just finished Air Command and Staff College, which is basically another master's in leadership. And you're having to do a lot of writing and introspection and those networks have been really invaluable. I didn't go to Harvard, but I probably have access to a lot of that same type of networking reach back because of my Air Force experience..
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Ryan I want to bring you back in here. So
Samantha's story kind of has it all. I mean, she
has an interesting background, the way that she formed the business.
She's had a couple of oh moments that were pretty harrowing.
It's a unique product. I certainly haven't heard anything else
like it. Yeah, she doesn't have a standard business model.
I mean we pretty much can put this into about
four or five buckets of Oh, this is different. Absolutely,
(22:32):
I don't actually know anybody who's walked that path before.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
There's a lot of value in really being able to
learn from them, like how did they piece that sort
of thing together completely.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I sort of wanted to start, though, talk to us
a little bit about coming out of the military into
a fast paced business life. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Yeah. I think that there are a lot of ways in which people will describe the military community with really broad terms, and I think I talked about this a little bit. The first time that I met you here and when we were doing that episode is, when you think about things like every veteran's a leader. Well, some veterans, right? Some people really learn those skills. Other people may have the potential to be leaders, but they didn't have much opportunity to be able to do that when they were in. But there is something to be said for every veteran will have worked in some sort of high-paced environment. They'll have had to work with people that bring a wide variety of skills, a wide variety of backgrounds to accomplish some sort of mission. Veterans want to continue to find that sort of sense of purpose, right? They strive to be able to recreate that same sort of environment.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And be part of something bigger than themselves.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, exactly right. And giving back, and we do hear that as well. In her story, right, this idea of some sort of social enterprise. It's not just a business for the sake of the business side, but it's also about this idea of how do you have some sort of societal impact with what she's doing. Her story about trying to balance these sorts of things as well. Launching this, getting this grant while also trying to be able to launch her business and manage that. You need to dig pretty deep into that resiliency in order to make those types of things happen. And so, I do think that this is, again, why so many veterans, even if they are pursuing something else outside of military service, there still is that desire to continue to give back. I see this all the time in the folks that we work with.As you mentioned, Warrior-Scholar Project is focused on the education piece, but it's much more about how do you build perspective and how do you figure out what civic engagement, civic service looks like for you? And so, what I hear from her story as well is so much of that of saying, it's not just about building a product and doing something like that. It's how do you leverage that and how do you channel all of these things that you learned in the military and all these people that you worked with in order to do something that's bigger? And I think that that insatiable desire for impact is part of why you see so many veterans that are entrepreneurs, that have some sort of desire to be able to continue to grow. The military changes you and it sets your ambitions higher in the vast majority of cases.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I mean, the other thing that I noticed in Samantha, she's incredibly decisive. The military requires, even at a junior officer level, no one's looking over your shoulder. You have to make decisions, and obviously in extreme cases, you have to make life or death decisions.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Sure.
But even in peacetime, you are expected to make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions. And She talked a lot about her leadership training from
the military, but I think a big part of that
is likely her ability to make decisions, particularly when you
have imperfect information.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Yes, yes. Very imperfect information. And part of that I think can be something which can be a sort of a natural quality that people have pre-military, like maybe they're attracted to it because they want to be in a position that they can actually affect some sort of change that can make those sorts of decisions. But I think also culturally, perhaps to your point, that is something which is instilled even at the junior ranks. And that's true in the officer Corps and it's also true for the enlisted. So, enlisted is about 82, 83% of the military. This is the group of people that, for example, me joining at 17, if you're an officer, you're often still joining when you're maybe fresh out of college, to be then put in these positions that you are overseeing all of this equipment and these decisions. And it's not always life or death, but it is contributing towards this incredibly important mission that has really high stakes. And that can be really challenging, to put it mildly. Sure. But it's also where you grow. I think that there's a lot of people that would be put in her decision and would say, "You know what? This is actually too much for me to do both of these things at once. Maybe I can be in the guard and I could have more of a run-of-the-mill job." But for her, she clearly was yearning for something. She had this idea, right, and pursued that while also pursuing her deployments and her military obligations. That's a level of tenacity that I think many people are not necessarily, they don't have in their hopper.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Well, not just tenacity, but energy. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
Is it inherent energy or is it caffeine? Right, that's
the question. Maybe a little bit of both. But thinking
about whatever deal she's working out there where she has
twelve hours on one shift and twelve hours on another,
you do need to dig pretty deep into that.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Well. I want to pivot a little bit, Ryan and
talk about her business model because we haven't had anyone
on the show who has quite that business model. You know,
most of the people that we've had on have completely
proprietary businesses, and she's sort of done that, but sort
of not so. She has made her product infinitely configurable.
She calls it open source. She allows her customers to
(26:59):
make changes to the product that in fact encourages it.
She's teaching people how to use it in different creative
ways and then letting them get creative. We haven't quite
seen that before, and it's a pretty brave thing to
do to say, Okay, well I want this to be
so widely adopted, I'm just going to make it open
and available, right.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Right, and part of that could be, maybe the genesis of that is a business case to say that this will mean higher market share, that more people would be attracted to it. But also, it could be something which is entirely different motivation, which is just, "Yeah, I want to create this, but I don't necessarily have all the ideas about how this thing could potentially be configured by actually making it available for other people to customize it to their particular uses." I think that that same lesson, that same idea applies well outside of something like what she's created there, where if somebody creates a thing, other people can iterate on that and potentially make it even better. You see this all the time, even in the work that we do in the higher education space. If somebody can take that idea and do it better than we can, then that means that somebody else can do it better and iterate on that sort of thing. So, I think that the core of that is something which is really inspiring and clearly has worked to great success for her.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
To me, it's more that she is making the play that I want this thing to be ubiquitous, and the best way to make it ubiquitous is to open it up, not close it down. If I close it down, I invite more competition. If I open it up, there's every reason to use that. And even if my margins are a bit smaller, it's a bigger pie and that's the way to go.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
Well, you also get people that know your company for that. If this is a value and you're actually living out that value, then you can get a community. Even before coming here just looking on the website and doing some research into her company, community is this really important piece of it. How do they engage with their community? And so, they have this maker community where they have people that have this thing, this core product that they've created, but then have all their own customizations, all their own iterations of it, and that's the sort of thing that really instills loyalty. This is amazing. I didn't just buy it for this one specific use case, but actually it doesn't quite fit my need. No, I have the ability to do more.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
To be fair, I kind of want one now, right, Yeah,
I know.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Let's go. Right.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
She compares everything to toilets, and like, that's a hook
for me. If you're to look her up on LinkedIn,
she talks about her passion for toilets before she talks
about anything else, right, and I'm a sucker for something
in LinkedIn, which is just bucking the trend a little bit.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
You don't see that often.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
She had me at toilet Now, I really want one
after learning more, but I was sold early on.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Bill Gates has been big on that.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
They've been trying to recreate the toilet for years because
one of the number one drivers of global health is
sewage and sanitation.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Yeah, so you don't necessarily know where I think that
inspiration is going to come from, and I think that
this is one of the points you already made as well.
But who has this type of specific story. Nobody Right,
She's been able to carve her own path and has
clearly learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I'm expecting great things from her. Ryan while we're here,
what's the latest on Word Scholar project?
Speaker 4 (29:38):
So, Warrior-Scholar Project continues to grow. We are hungry to be able to serve more enlisted veterans. So, we work with enlisted veterans who are interested in pursuing education as a way to build perspective and to grow their civic impact after military service. And we are never going to stop. The population continues to grow every year. There's about 100,000 more enlisted veterans that are starting higher education. We want to reach more and more of them.This summer, we'll work with about 20 colleges and university partners. We're working with community colleges. We have a Graduate Pathways initiative, in between last time we talked and now, we launched a Career Pathways initiative to be able to help deepen the connections in between career ambitions and education. We want veterans to be able to answer those questions before they start school about where they want to go as opposed to trying to figure it out after they graduate. And then, our other big update is that we're actively working on an online course that's going to go live later this year. This has been an initiative that's been years and years in the making and we cannot wait to actually see that come to fruition.
Yeah, you can drive real scale with that, right?
That's exactly right. My operating assumption is the government is never going to adequately prepare people for transition, so we're going to fill some of that gap.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
You think your market is stable.
Speaker 4 (30:39):
Well, you'll like this. Dr. Laurie Santos, we actually modeled it off of her course, the Happiness course that she has at Yale. That's a phenomenal course, and so we worked with the same team, and We modeled the same sort of dynamic instruction so that we can actually have something that people are really interested in understanding what college success looks like for military veterans.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Opportunity more than obligation. That's all.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
There. You go,
Ryan, we've known each other for almost the year now.
I consider you a friend and I just want to
say thank you for coming back and sharing your time
with us again on The Unshakeables.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Thank you very much for having me here. I'm excited
to be here and I also consider you a friend.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Ben. I want to end with this question that we
ask to all of our guests on the show, which
is being an entrepreneur or business owner is really hard.
And if you had one piece of advice for current
or aspiring business owners, what would it be.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
It's okay to be ugly so often, especially in hardware,
you want to hold on to things and make it
beautiful or make it like the use case or opportunity
you saw on your head. And the reality of it
is people are going to kick it around and have
a lot of feedback and shape it so the sooner
that you can get out there, get it outside of
your family, your neighbors, your friends, the people that love you.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Get it into the wild.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Like your ugly baby fly.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Awesome, Samantha, thank you for being on the show. We
really appreciate it. You've been a great guest.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
That's a wrap on Samantha's episode, and that's a wrap
on season two of The Unshakeables. Thanks to all of
you for listening to the incredible business owners that we
get to work with every day here at Chase. There
are thousands more, and who knows, maybe one day you'll
be up here. But for now, I'm Ben Walter and
this was the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby
Studio from iHeartMedia. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Ben Walter
Kathleen Griffith
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