This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 4, 2018 at 10:35:09 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> This Team Built an 'Absurd Machine' That Blows Away 3-D Printing
> Bre Pettis left MakerBot a wealthy man with a trail of enemies. Danielle Applestone was a PhD desperate for someone 
> to save her company. Then the two found each other.
> By Kimberly Weisul
> March/April Issue
> <https://stage.inc.com/magazine/201804/kimberly-weisul/bre-pettis-danielle-applestone-makerbot-othermill-3d-printer.html>
>
> Of all the things that almost thwarted Danielle Applestone's life's work, she never imagined that one of them would 
> be venture capital.
>
> Applestone grew up in the Arkansas woods, in a house built on tree stumps. Her mom grew vegetables and chopped all 
> the wood. Her dad, a disabled Navy veteranwho has used a wheelchair since he broke his back, was into making bullets. 
> The family was always modifying things around the house so he could use or reach them. "For me, it was like, holy 
> crap, tools are power," says Applestone.
>
> But home life was rough. "There are ways to control your family with fear that don't involve punching them," she 
> says. At age 8, she tried to run away. In sixth grade, a teacher referred Applestone--by then, a constant 
> tinkerer--to a free STEM camp. At 14, she gained admission to a free STEM boarding school, and realized that science 
> would be her ticket out.
>
> By the time Applestone debuted the Othermill in 2013, she was a single mom who had managed to graduate from MIT and 
> to earn a PhD in materials science. She turned down a job at Tesla, where she would have been the third employee in 
> its battery division. Instead, she built a machine that she believed would teach Americans the skills necessary to 
> take the two million manufacturing jobs projected to go unfilled over the next decade.
>
> More sophisticated than both a laser cutter and a 3-D printer, the Othermill is a computer-controlled milling machine 
> that can cut into aluminum, brass, wood, and plastic with incredible precision. Industrial mills can cost hundreds of 
> thousands of dollars and are the size of at least one refrigerator. Her team at Other Machine--now called Bantam 
> Tools--had made a plug-and-play desktop version the size of a tall toaster that cost only $2,199. If a 3-D printer 
> could let people make plastic objects at their whimsy, her milling machine could give people the power to produce the 
> stuff that makes the stuff--anything from a circuit board to a gear.
>
> "With a milling machine, the world is your Lego," says Applestone. Those at the forefront of the maker revolution 
> believe "desktop milling has the potential to be even more significant than consumer 3-D printing," says Limor Fried, 
> founder of Adafruit Industries, an open-source hardware company. Saul Griffith, founder of Otherlab, the San 
> Francisco-based incubator where Applestone first hatched the Othermill, says any country that wants to stay ahead 
> must empower the next generation with skills and accessible tools. "We have to give our children robots that make 
> things," says Griffith. "Danielle is on the frontlines of giving robots to children so they can built the future.”
>
> Developing the mill had been challenging. But getting the money to do it was even more difficult. In 2012, an $8 
> million Darpa grant was supposed to fund Applestone's company, but only a fraction of it came through. To keep the 
> project alive, Applestone and her staff took consulting jobs while mounting a Kickstarter campaign. Crowdfunding 
> success attracted angel investors and venture capitalists, from whom she eventually raised $6.5 million. By the time 
> fundraising was over, Applestone, now 37, felt indestructible. As a woman and as a hardware entrepreneur, she says it 
> was "a nightmare. You come out on the other side of it, and you're friggin' strong. It's like, I can do anything now."
>
> By 2017, she'd been shipping product for three years and had reached breakeven, no small feat for a hardware startup. 
> But at a board meeting that February, her investors told her it wasn't enough. They wanted to see the kind of growth 
> trajectory that would bring dramatic returns, and they didn't think Applestone was on that path. She needed to do 
> something radically different, they told her, or it would be time to sell. Suddenly, the funding bargain she'd made 
> became very clear to her: "We couldn't keep doing what we were doing because we'd taken venture capital."
>
> Applestone pursued would-be acquirers, but none of them were interested in running a hardware company. Some saw it as 
> a potential acquihire; others just wanted her. Then there were those who wanted to turn Other Machine into a software 
> company. Applestone couldn't stand it. The mill was about turning people into makers, not coders.
>
> Applestone was desperate. "How can we say to our customers"--engineers, educators, hobbyists, many of whom Applestone 
> had come to know personally--"you've been with us for four years, and sorry, guys, but someone bought us and they're 
> shutting us down?" she thought. Sitting at her computer one evening in her Berkeley, California, office, she sent off 
> another round of emails.
>
> Then, at 6:49 p.m., she saw a green light pop up in her Gchat window. It was Bre Pettis. She'd known Pettis in 
> passing for years--the maker community, at times, can seem alarmingly small. And Pettis, with his trademark sideburns 
> and shock of salt-and-pepper hair, is one of its best-known members. One of the founders of 3-D-printing company 
> MakerBot, Pettis had sold that company to Stratasys for $403 million in 2013. He'd also made the controversial 
> decision to move MakerBot away from open source, enraging open-source evangelists. When, in 2016, he left the company 
> a rich man, a large helping of ill will tagged along with him.
>
> Applestone wasn't going to tell Pettis everything. But maybe he had connections to a potential buyer, she thought. 
> Pettis asked her what she was specifically looking to sell. "The whole company?" he messaged her. "Yes, the whole 
> thing," she typed back.
>
> A few days later, Pettis was on a plane to Berkeley.
>
> [snip]
>
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