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Manufacturing guy-at-large.
Undercurrent
I became aware of Undercurrent a little over a year ago. I found them via Radiolab, where they were an underwriter; their ad caught me off-guard (in particular because it mentioned both additive manufacturing and human-refrigerator interaction), and I've spent a lot of time since then tracking the organization. Undercurrent's philosophy, talent, and focus were highly attractive to me, and I enjoyed reading about their work.
And so it's with great pleasure that I can announce that I'm joining Undercurrent in a full-time strategy role.
Mike Arauz describes Undercurrent's philosophy well here:
This is why we’ve built a team that doesn’t look like traditional consulting firms. We value someone’s ability to see how organizations need to be in the future more than someone’s knowledge of how organizations operated in the past. Our core competency is not our ability to apply rigor and proven methodologies to make safer bets and mitigate risk, it’s our insight about how the future is going to be different than the present, gained through intuition, intelligence, and creativity.
I will be continuing my work on the variety of other projects I've got going - with increased vigor, in some cases. Undercurrent has the highest density of curiosity, creativity, and excitement that I've ever seen in a workplace. I'm looking forward to being a part of it.
Porlex/Hario hack!
My coffee grinder hack works really well! I made a few cups this morning with it - and you can get your own on Shapeways!
Found
What is possible in the future
Ben Bajarin, on twitter yesterday:
I always, *always* want to be looking down the road in fields upstream of mine. If you want to be ahead of the curve, it's critical to be tracking the curves of all the fields that inform yours.
Enough Authority/Enough Responsibility
David Cole, writing about the role of designers in a very good presentation from last year.
If the project you were working on failed — it hit the market and nobody wanted it, nobody used it — would you blame yourself? If the answer is no, then I think you don't have enough authority. If you're blaming others for the outcomes in your work, it's time to demand more.
I would generalize this statement to all professions, all roles. I would also add that responsibility is key to this equation as well, and that responsibility isn't given - it's taken.
Generic
"In today's high speed environment, stop motion footage of a city at night with cars turning quickly makes you think about doing things efficiently."
Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson, in a post titled "Newspapers are Dead; Long Live Journalism."
“But [Insert Newspaper Name Here] has great journalists! They’ve won Pulitzer Prizes! And our democracy needs newspapers!” Unfortunately, advertisers don’t, and newspapers are paying the price for having long ago divorced the cost of their content from the value readers place upon it. To put it another way, it’s not that “the Internet has unbundled advertising from content creation,” it’s that advertisers (rightly) don’t give a damn about journalistic ideals. It is incredibly tiring to hear newspaper defenders talk as if advertising dollars are their god-given right, and that Google and Facebook are somehow stealing from them, when in reality Google and Facebook are winning in the fairest way possible: providing better value for the advertiser’s dollar.
Porlex
I think this is very pretty.
With any luck, I'll have an update on my coffee grinder driver in the next few days. The bottom line is that it's live and working, and you should holler at me if you're interested in testing one!
I just want to point out: *this* is how we send things around the world. Paper. Pens. Carbon copies.
I'm pretty sure that this is totally insane.
Equity
Marc Andreessen, writing about the future of the news business. Emphasis is mine.
The best approach is to think like a 100% owner of your company with long-term time horizon. Then you work backward to the present and see what makes sense and what remains. Versus, here is what we have now, how do we carry it forward?...
There are some artifacts and ideas in the journalism business that arguably are counterproductive to the growth of both quality journalism and quality businesses. It’s why some organizations are finding it so hard to move forward.
An obvious one is the bloated cost structure left over from the news industry’s monopoly/oligopoly days. Nobody promised every news outfit a shiny headquarters tower, big expense accounts, and lots of secretaries!
Unions and pensions are another holdover. Both were useful once, but now impose a structural rigidity in a rapidly changing environment. They make it hard to respond to a changing financial environment and to nimbler competition. The better model for incentivizing employees is sharing equity in the company.
I tend to agree that unions and pensions are outdated, but it's often difficult to relay the complexity of the situation without sounding overwhelmingly conservative. Andreessen's suggestion is more interesting: replace unions and pensions with equity. I find this quite agreeable.
Nothing to add
Gabe Newell, in the second part of his interview with WaPo, on how he approached his entry into the gaming industry.
It seemed like the big mistake would be to get into a business where you couldn't tell if you were any good at it because you could throw a lot of money away and find out that you really had nothing to add.
This sounds so simple, but I find it totally profound.
Digital *and* unique
Ben Thompson, in a post titled "The Cost of Bitcoin." Emphasis mine.
The implication for apps is clear: any undifferentiated software product, such as your garden variety app, will inevitably be free. This is why the market for paid apps has largely evaporated. Over time substitutes have entered the market at ever lower prices, ultimately landing at their marginal cost of production – $0.
The same story applies for music, movies, content, etc., and this has fundamentally changed what it means to do business on the Internet. It’s why, for example, WhatsApp was so valuable to Facebook: attention is the true finite resource, and how it’s commanded is, in some ways, besides the point.
Bitcoin and the breakthrough it represents, broadly speaking, changes all that. For the first time something can be both digital and unique, without any real world representation. The particulars of Bitcoin and its hotly-debated value as a currency I think cloud this fact for many observers; the breakthrough I’m talking about in fact has nothing to do with currency, and could in theory be applied to all kinds of objects that can’t be duplicated, from stock certificates to property deeds to wills and more.
Looking sideways
Nobel Laureate and longtime bell Labs researcher Arno Penzias, in an excerpt from his book "Harmony." The focus here is organizational change at Bell Labs, presumably in the 1990s. Emphasis is mine.
The change didn't take place overnight, but over time our behavior has changed radically. Today about half our researchers work full-time in partnership with colleagues from other parts of AT&T. Similar changes have taken place in management as well. While most research managers have kept their titles and the trappings of office, their jobs have undergone 90-degree turns. Instead of looking up and down, so to speak, they now spend most of their time looking sideways.
For example, each research director now works with one of AT&T's business units, making sure that its needs get attention. The directors also make sure that Bell's researchers have access to potential customers for their work. These directors work not just for the sake of the people in their own organizations but rather for the research operation as a whole. With organizational roles now more clearly defined on the basis of function rather than scientific discipline, management's primary attention has shifted to external interactions.
Recasting first-level management roles has proved the most challenging undertaking. Experienced researchers themselves, managers had worked hard to ensure the best possible research in their departments. But "best" as they defined it. In one particular case, this meant producing the world's most powerful laser diode--a record-breaking experiment. It won the "best paper" award at a major professional conference. While certainly not unworthy, this internally generated pursuit of excellence paid insufficient attention to the priorities of potential customers. While colleagues in our Lightwave Business Unit sought more powerful lasers, they might have preferred to trade some of that device's performance for compatibility with their existing fabrication methods.
Parts in.
I received the shipment of my rack ends yesterday.
Receiving parts is always really fun. I bagged them up into individual shipments last night, and will get them in the mail on Monday.
They're pretty, right?
Hardware Updates
Yesterday I received new PCBs for The Public Radio, and quickly built up a few units.
These will go out to beta testers early next week.
Building them up has been really fun - they work well, and all of the parts are organized in a way that makes assembly pretty straightforward. Getting everything all knolled nicely actually helps a significant amount in PCB assembly - now, if I can just get my parts organizer up and running...
Feltron
Nick Felton, in an interview with The Great Discontent:
Certainly, the Annual Report personal project has elevated my career enormously, but it was only one of many personal projects that I tried along the way—no one gave a hoot about most of them. Not letting that discourage me, I kept trying other things. It wasn’t about finding “the idea,” but putting things out that I thought were worth doing and seeing if anyone cared. If not, I moved along.
What It Would Be
I've spent much of the past few weeks thinking about how to proceed on my DMLS seatmast topper project. Since I posted my findings on DMLS pricing in mid January, it has became the most viewed thing I've written here. It's also become (aside from my home and "feed" pages) the most popular landing page on my site, due to both high search term ranking and the fact that it's been shared around the 3D printing community extensively.
There are a few distinct goals moving forward, which represent partially overlapping ideas of what I'm working on.
- Develop a body of knowledge and understanding which encompasses the advanced manufacturing industry and the supply chain logistics required to sustain businesses selling engineered 3D printed consumer products.
- Develop deep experience operating the toolchain required to design said parts for manufacturing. Includes parametric solid/NURBS modeling, organic T-spline modeling, topology optimization modeling, and DFM/CAM software.
- Design said parts, and have them manufactured & tested. Use the resulting data to develop an understanding of the mechanical properties and DFM guidelines for parts made via DMLS and other advanced processes.
- Develop & launch distribution & sales operations (likely e-tail), and sell physical product there.
- Do some/all of the above with bicycle parts as a specific focus.
Many of the points here are not mutually exclusive; point 5 certainly entails many/all of the previous items. But my path forward depends crucially on whether I approach this as primarily a research project - or as a business.
On one hand, I'd like to move forward in a rapid, directed manner. Doing so will require resources, however, and may inevitably constitute a full-time job. In order to fund such an effort, I'd need to show a near-term market fit - which will require me to approach this specifically as a business.
On the other hand, I'm aware that there are benefits to approaching this primarily as research. I ultimately want to learn; building a business is just one of many ways of doing so. Moreover, there are any number of businesses which address parts like mine, and selling bicycle products doesn't apply to all of them. It's possible that advanced supply chain logistics is a better fit for my knowledge and skillset. Focusing on the bike market might not be the best way to approach such a goal.
Regardless, it's likely that I refine and then purchase a seatmast topper in the coming weeks. This will require a small investment on my part (a few thousand dollars), plus about a week's work. I'll learn a few things about the process, and going through a build will give me an opportunity to cement relationships with suppliers and processing & testing partners.
Assuming the test part is functional, the next step would probably be to feel around the market a bit. This topper will be on the expensive side, and though I'm confident it'll sell, branding it will be delicate. Finding an audience, and defining the product in a way that they can relate to, will be an interesting exercise.
With a bit of luck, I'll have a working assembly + a landing page with preorders by Memorial Day. Stay tuned.
Technology
Douglas Adams, in a 1999 post titled "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet."
Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
Grinder mods update
Got this updated part a few weeks ago, and it's looking promising.
Shown here mounted on the pentagonal shaft head on a Porlex mini grinder. The shaft of the part fits in a standard hand drill/driver.
What I really want here is to put a little DC gearmotor on one of these hand grinders, and then link it up with my GCal so that it grinds coffee for me every morning when my alarm goes off. We'll get there.