Tag: 3d printing
Yesterday Amy and I contributed $10,000 to the MakerBot Academy campaign which is on a mission to put a MakerBot 3D printer in every school in the United States.
We did it via a contribution on Donors Choose, one of our favorite non-profit contribution sites.
We specifically finished out the funding for five MakerBots for the following teachers in their classrooms:
- Mr. Hendry – Yorba Linda High School, Yorba Linda, CA
- Mrs. Bragdon – Brownsboro Elementary School, Brownsboro, TX
- Mr. Eiland – Woodlawn High School, Baton Rouge, LA
- Mr. Condon – Decorah High School, Decorah, IA
- Mr. Colling – Coronado High School, Scottsdale, AZ
Amy and I are planning to give a lot more to this campaign, but we decided to do something tangible right now by finishing off several of the campaigns on Donors Choose.
For those of you who have asked in the past “what can I do for you Brad?”, here’s an easy one. Just go on the MakerBot Academy Donors Choose page and make a contribution of any size to one of the campaigns. You’ll be helping the next generation.
I love being involved in magical stuff. One of our portfolio companies, Occipital, just announced their newest product, the Structure Sensor. It’s available for purchase right now on Kickstarter – they blew through their $100k goal in the first four hours of being up. But this is a “show don’t tell” classic, so take a look at the video below and prepare to have your mind blown.
So awesome. Jeff, Vikas, and team – you guys are amazing.
Structure Sensor from Occipital on Sketchfab.
Defrag and Blur are only two weeks away, and if you’re not yet registered to come, you should find a way. Why?
1. Makerbot will be there with the Replicator 2 in hand. And is there anything cooler than 3D printing right now?
2. The agenda is absolutely incredible — Kevin Kelly, Jeff Ma, Rachel Happe, Paul Kedrosky, Bre Pettis, Andrew Tschesnok.
3. The networking will be intimate and awesome, as usual.
You’ll see and interact with everything from social business software to big data stuff to robots to 3D printers to augmented reality.
If you’re a student, use the Defrag Student Scholarship and special Blur student tickets to get into both events.
If you’re not a student, use “ejnvip” to take 25% off of your Defrag registration , and if you’d like to come to Blur — use the super secret handshake code of “bifr12” to take 60% off of your blur registration (shhhh)….
Don’t miss it!
As the endless stream of emails, tweets, and news comes at me, I find myself going deeper on some things while trying to shed others. I’ve been noticing an increasing amount of what I consider to be noise in the system – lots of drama that has nothing to do with innovation, creating great companies, or doing things that matter. I expect this noise will increase for a while as it always does whenever enthusiasm for startups and entrepreneurship increases. When that happens, I’ve learned that I need to go even deeper into the things I care about.
My best way of categorizing this is to pay attention to what I’m currently obsessed about and use that to guide my thinking and exploration. This weekend, as I was finally catching up after the last two weeks, I found myself easily saying no to a wide variety of things that – while potentially interesting – didn’t appeal to me at all. I took a break, grabbed a piece of paper, and scribbled down a list of things I was obsessed about. I didn’t think – I just wrote. Here’s the list.
- Startup communities
- Hci
- Human instrumentation
- 3d printing
- User generated content
- Integration between things that make them better
- Total disruption of norms
If you are a regular reader of this blog, I expect none of these are a surprise to you. When I reflect on the investments I’m most involved in, including Oblong, Fitbit, MakerBot, Cheezburger, Orbotix, MobileDay, Occipital, BigDoor, Yesware, Gnip, and a new investment that should close today, they all fit somewhere on the list. And when I think of TechStars, it touches on the first (startup communities) and the last (total disruption of norms).
I expect I’ll go much deeper on these over the balance of 2012. There are many other companies in the Foundry Group portfolio that fit along these lines, especially when I think about the last two. Ultimately, I’m fascinated about stuff that “glues things today” while “destroying the status quo.”
What are you obsessed about? And are you spending all of your time on it?
Today we announced that we’ve led a $10m round for MakerBot Industries and I’ve joined the board. I’m super excited to be working with Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, Zach Smith, and the rest of the MakerBot gang to create consumer-grade 3D printers.
When I first met Bre, Adam, and Zach at the Botcave in Brooklyn, it was love at first sight for me. The entry way to the BotCave has a series of Thing-O-Matics (the current MakerBot 3D printer) printing out all kinds of things. A display space of 3D things sits next to a vending machine with 3D parts in it, which all open up into a warehouse space full of tiny little parts neatly arranged and being put together in kits to be shipped. At the back were a bunch of people banging away on computers.
I took a deep breath and at that moment thought “I have to invest in this company.” I spent a few hours with Bre, Adam, and Zach and came away even more excited. I knew I had a massive nerd crush on them, but I also felt like if anyone was going to create a self-replicating machine that my father would buy, these were the guys. It’s well known by now that I believe the machines have already taken over – investing in MakerBot seems like another way to help them out.
Fortunately my partners loved the MakerBot gang as much as I did. But, rather than just theorize, I bought a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic and Jason, Ross, and I put it together. It’s been busy printing out all kinds of things for the past few months. The day we signed the term sheet, I made some Foundry Group coins (with the Foundry Group logo on the front and a $ on the back) and fedexed them to Bre. I wonder what he’ll make and send back to me now that we are investors.
I believe that we’ll look back in 20 years and 3D printers will be as ubiquitous as laser printers are today. We aren’t yet at the point that is equivalent to the first HP Laserjet in 1984, but I think we’ll see a comparable product from MakerBot within a year. In the mean time, I’m going to keep downloading 3D things from the Thingiverse and keeping my Thing-O-Matic busy.