A bet

I *really* like bets. Not that I'm a gambler; I just like the idea that strong feelings be backed up by dollars on the table (note: this is related to my distrust of focus groups & user feedback in general). One of my favorite recent bets is Felix Salmon vs. Ben Horowitz on Bitcoin, and I'm always on the lookout for things I feel strongly enough to place a stake on.

Well last week, that chance arose. I was having coffee with Andre Wegner, and (as is our wont) we got to talking about the prospects for simulation of physical systems. I've been playing more and more with design optimization (and therefore FEA) software, and have increasingly felt that design automation is impractical, and will develop slowly (if at all). Andre is a technological optimist; he believes that an increasingly large amount of our design, testing, and optimization will be done virtually.

A concrete example arose: Andre believes that the field of computational fluid dynamics will progress quickly enough to make wind tunnels obsolete within our lifetime. I believe it won't.

So, the bet: 

If, in ten years (2025.09.18), wind tunnels are "still a thing," Andre owes me dinner. If they aren't, I owe him dinner.

I'm looking forward to this.

Feedback

There are a lot of reasons to run a Kickstarter campaign. It can provide a relatively low-risk way to get market validation; it can be a non-dilutive way to cover startup costs; it can be a good way to quickly reach a large number of customers.

But notes like this - man, they're hard to beat:

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Engineering

Over the past month I've mentioned my college major more and more in conversations about why I'm drawn to metal additive manufacturing. "Aside from trying to develop solutions for physical problems, I'm not an engineer," I'll say. "I studied Linguistics in college." I'm probably not the best judge of my intentions here, but I suspect I use this fact partly to highlight the authenticity of my enthusiasm (I've clearly selected this out as a topic of interest), and partly to set myself up as a Man From Mars. But in doing so, I end up downplaying what is an interesting thread in my career path - the desire to organize and understand data in ways that make it easier to do stuff.

I ended up in my first ling class - Syntax 1 - on a whim. I had a rather insufferable tendency to take random classes in college, most of which I'd skate through with curiosity but not a ton of drive. But Syntax was different. Where the philosophy classes I had taken were mostly concerned with arguing over opinions, and everything else seemed focused on teaching me facts, Syntax was about reasoning, pattern matching, and experiment design. Better yet, the data set at hand is literally infinite, and is accessible just by thinking up new sentences and comparing them with gibberish. I would spend hours doing this in my head: figuring out what the key variables to test a theory were, and then thinking up sentences that tested them. It was very compelling work.

Meanwhile, I had fallen in love with building things in the physical world. I was heavily involved in running a small bike shop during college, and took welding classes on the weekends. And when the opportunity arose to take time off school to run a small construction project for my parents, I jumped at it. Executing physical things - making the world more suitable for someone's needs - became a big part of my life, and when I finished my major I took on another, much larger, construction project.

Throughout my career (first in construction, then in manufacturing and product development), I've grappled with the uncertainty that the physical world brings. In linguistics (much like computer science) there's a high correlation between theory and practice. That's not to say that those fields are any easier to navigate - each presents more than its share of big challenges. But in the physical world there is a fundamental conflict between the accuracy and the resolution of what we can measure, and our ability to synthesize models for how things work is constrained by this. And even if we could overcome these fundamental uncertainties, a lot of the time you just get soot on the imaging system, and the whole experiment is rendered useless.

Somewhat separately, I've grappled with the toolchain used to coordinate physical projects. My first real experience with this was finding a decent plumber, but the same sense has followed me through manufacturing procurement, new product development, and small parts storage systems. The structures of the manufacturing and construction industries are idiosyncratic and not at all self-similar. Moreover, they turn over less quickly than those in linguistics (the study of language, not the language itself) and software development, where entire new paradigms can be developed and implemented in a matter of months. 

Today, additive manufacturing is right in the overlap in the Venn diagram of "subject to physical uncertainty" and "has a really disjointed toolchain." And the more I learn about the technology and the industry, the more it seems like the ideal place to witness - and have a meaningful impact in shaping - a new era for how human systems affect the physical world.

Of course it is key that people want the (purported) benefits that I hope metal AM will bring in this next few years. The work at hand, then, is to find applications where the value of AM is great enough to be commercially viable now - and then adjust their systems of production to fit the need. In other words: First, find what the pain points are in bringing 3D printed consumer products to market. Then, identify and organize the data flow in order to avoid & solve those pain points.

Of course, additive is just one of many sub-industries that I'd look forward to seeing the streamlined, integrated versions of. I still want a better way of finding a plumber, and I still want better ways of communicating what I want to him, and I still want more effective and efficient systems for him to organize his small parts inventory. Some of my favorite people are out there working on those problems right now, and I take every opportunity I can to help them along in some way. Because I see in them the same desire that I have: to organize data about the physical world in ways that make it easier for us to do good things there.

Hence, my desire to better understand physical urban infrastructure; my desire to help both Amazon and McMaster-Carr think about the way they're approaching the digitization of industrial supply; my frustration when today's procurement platforms simply digitize an opaque process without rethinking the role they play in product development; my tendency to draw parallels between "soft" robotics (think Baxter) and the supplier validation process. In all of these cases, I see - and am excited for - a significant shift in the way that information is used to understand and improve the physical world.

In my work in metal AM to date, I have tried to uncover the existing theories - rules of thumb, essentially - that most reliably produce parts today. I'm looking forward to continuing on that path, and to working with and around the engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs at the boundaries of theory and the physical world today.

Goals

I've been thinking of the things I want to focus on in metal additive manufacturing, and came up with these two goals:

1. Reduce the time & effort that independent designers spend developing & validating metal AM parts.
2. Reduce the time & effort that service providers spend getting their shops capable of reliably making their customers' parts at a profit.

The reason I *don't* mention OEMs here is because I assume that if 1. and 2. are achieved, then the OEMs will be just fine, as they'll have a healthy supply of both engineering talent and manufacturing capabilities available to them. That's not to say that I don't want to help OEMs too, but in my opinion you can have a bigger long term impact (and help save yourself from the client-driven feature creep common in industrial solutions) if you keep small shops' needs in mind.

I have some initial thoughts on how I'd begin to address these, but I'm still in the process of developing them. If anyone has ideas, I'd love to chat about them - drop me a line!

Who are you?

I'm trying to get a better handle on my blog's audience, and how on earth they ended up here. If you don't mind, would you please tell me a little bit about yourself?

Errol Morris on asking questions

I've been thinking a lot recently of a passage from Chuck Klosterman's book Eating the Dinosaur. In it he talks to the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, and the topic is about the act of being interviewed by people. This is a bit of a long passage, but I think it's a fascinating topic - and a relevant one to me, as I've learned *so* much over the past few years by simply asking people if I could ask them questions, and then going ahead and doing so.

For the past five years, I've spent more time being interviewed than conducting interviews with other people. I am not complaining about this, nor am I proud of it - it's just the way things worked out, mostly by chance. But the experience has been confusing. Though I always understand why people ask me the same collection of questions, I never know why I answer them. Frankly, I don't know why anyone answers anything. The obvious explanation is that the interviewee is hoping to promote a product or a concept (or the "concept of themselves," which is its own kind of product), but that's reductive and often untrue; once a media entity makes the decision to conduct and produce an interview with a particular somebody, the piece is going to exist regardless of how the subject responds to the queries. The interviewee can say anything, even if those sentiments contradict reality. They can deliver nothing but cliches, but the story will still run. On three occasions I've consciously (and blatantly) attempted to say boring things during an interview in the hope of killing the eventual article. It only worked once. But this type of behavior is rare. Most of the time, I pretend to be interesting. I try to frame my response in the context in which the question was asked, and I try to say things I haven't said before. But I have no clue as to why I do this (or why anyone else does, either). 

During the summer of 2008, I was interviewed by a Norwegian magazine writer named Erik Moller Solheim. He was good at his job. He knew a lot of trivia about Finland's military history. We ate fried pork knees and drank Ur-Krostitzer beer. But in the middle of our playful conversation, I was suddenly paralyzed by an unspoken riddle I could not answer: Why was I responding to this man's questions? My books are not translated into Norwegian. If the journalist sent me a copy of his finished article, I could not read a word of it. I don't even know what the publication's name (Dagens Naeringslif) is supposed to mean. I will likely never go to Norway, and even if I did, the fact that I was interviewed for this publication would have no impact on my time there. No one would care. The fjords would be underwhelmed.

As such, I considered the possible motives for my actions:

1. I felt I had something important to say. Except I did not. No element of our interaction felt important to me. If anything, I felt unqualified to talk about the things the reporter was asking me. I don't have that much of an opinion about why certain Black Metal bands burn down churches.
2. It's my job. Except that it wasn't. I wasn't promoting anything. In fact, the interaction could have been detrimental to my career, were I to have inadvertently said something insulting about the kind of Norway. Technically, there was more downside than upside.
3. I have an unconscious, unresolved craving for attention. Except this feels inaccurate. It was probably true twenty years ago, but those desires have waned. Besides, who gives a fuck about being famous in a country I'll never visit? Why would that feel good to anyone? How would I even know it was happening?
4. I had nothing better to do. This is accurate, but not satisfactory.
5. I'm a nice person. Unlikely.
6. When asked a direct question, it's human nature to respond. This, I suppose, is the most likely explanation. It's the crux of Frost/Nixon. But if this is true, why is it true? What is the psychological directive that makes an unanswered question discomfiting?

Why do people talk?

Why do people talk? Why do people answer the questions you ask them? Is there a unifying force that prompts people to respond?

Errol Morris: Probably not, except possibly that people feel this need to give an account of themselves. And not just to other people, but to themselves. Just yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Observer, and we were talking about whether or not people have privileged access to their own minds.

CK: Privileged access?

EM: My mind resides somewhere inside of myself. That being the case, one would assume I have privileged access to it. In theory, I should be able to ask myself questions and get different answers than I would from other people, such as you. But I'm not sure we truly have privileged access to our own minds. I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are. I sometimes think of interviews as some oddball human relationship that's taking place in a laboratory setting. I often feel like a primatologist.

CK: Do you feel like you know the people that you interview? Because I never do. It seems like a totally fake relationship.

EM: I don't feel like I know myself, let alone the people I interview. I might actually know the people I interview better than I know myself. A friend of mine once said that you can never trust a person who doesn't talk much, because how else do you know what they're thinking? Just by the act of being willing to talk about oneself, the person is revealing something about who they are.

CK: But what is the talker's motive? Why did you decide to talk to the New York Observer? Why are you talking to me right now?

EM: Well, Okay. Let's use the example of Robert McNamara. Why does McNamara feel the need to talk to me - or anyone - at this point in his life? Because there's a very strong human desire to do so. It might be to get approval from someone, even if that person is just me. It might even be to get a sense of condemnation from people. Maybe it's just programmed into us as people. McNamara also had this weird "approach-avoidance" thing: He agreed to do the interview because he assumed I was part of the promotion of his [then new] book. I called him around the same time his book was coming out, and he thought it was just part of that whole deal. When he realized it was not, he became apprehensive and said he didn't think he was going to do it. But then he did, and it went on for well over a year. In fact, I continued to interview him for a long time after that movie was finished, just because I found it very interesting.

CK: But why did McNamara keep talking?

EM: He said he enjoyed talking to me. That was his explanation.

I think a lot of people don't realize the power of this. If you want answers, ask questions. People reply way more often than you'd expect.

Notes on Amazon Business and decisions in B2B ecommerce

This week, while in Seattle, I had the pleasure of visiting Amazon and talking with some folks there about Amazon Business. To prep, I spent a bit of time reflecting on the B2B ecommerce world, and how the major players in it have approached & prioritized their efforts there. I've written about both Amazon and B2B ecommerce a bit before, but what's below clarifies my thoughts on their position in the ecosystem significantly.

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To an outsider, Amazon has always struck me with two core messages:

1. We are insanely customer focused.
2. We have built a massively impressive logistical operation - the biggest of its kind, outside of China.

Also of note: Amazon has always seemed to target specific audiences in its external messaging. Most prominent to me are:

• Consumers; people who would otherwise be shopping at Walmart or local retail stores. Basically everything on the website is directed towards this group.
• Other retailers/competitors. This is a bit less immediately evident, but it’s my impression that Amazon’s willingness to talk openly about their fulfillment centers (one of which I toured last year) and the way they’re thinking about logistics & delivery (cf. drone delivery, rumors about a NYC store, etc) are intended specifically to scare off firms that might want to compete with Amazon’s retail business.
• Google/Apple/Microsoft. This is specific to AWS, which has become increasingly in focus over the past year (but was always assumed to be huge).
• Investors. The best example of this is the shareholder letter, which is always a good read. The core intent here seems (and I’ll admit that this is a half-baked theory at the moment) that investors should trust Amazon, because they’re a truly visionary company - like Apple and Google, NOT like some retailer that should be focusing on short term objectives.

What’s missing in the list above is business customers. I’ve bought plenty of business related stuff on Amazon, but it’s usually been from my personal account, and the shopping experience isn’t aware (or doesn’t care about) the context shift that I (presumably?) go through when I clock in and out. The “Recommendations for you” sections switch over, but it’s on a visit-by-visit basis. Amazon treats me as a person, and it simply recommends that I look at things that are similar to what I looked at recently. 

Now, I’m sure that plenty of businesses have Amazon accounts that are just for business purchases. I worked at one such business a few years ago, and again recently. In both of these cases, I got the impression that (and please, pardon the pseudo Christensen here) Amazon had trickled *up,* being used first at home (whether by the person in charge of purchasing, or someone who was bugging them to buy something) and then later at work. As a result, it always made sense that the Amazon product we used at work was the same as the one we were using at home. I was used to it, and it has gotten *so* easy to buy stuff for personal use there, and changing my mindset a bit to use Amazon for business stuff was really very easy.

The arrangement worked well. When I was running a prototyping shop, I made a *lot* of purchases from McMaster-Carr and MSC and Rutland. Those companies’ catalogs were tailored for the work we were doing, and they (especially McMaster) do *such* a good job of providing a consistent browsing, purchasing, and fulfillment experience, that once you get used to their system it’s hard to imagine life without it. But there were plenty of times where I used Amazon too, especially when it came to items that fell more on the “office supplies” end of the spectrum. Amazon’s search features are really good, and it’s great to have ratings sometimes as well. Amazon’s product discovery system is dramatically different from those of the industrial suppliers, and there are a lot of cases where I’ll hit the wall with one system and really just want a change of pace.

This is worth highlighting: 

• McMaster-Carr’s search is very good, but their browse features are just *awesome.* This works because they’re basically a walled garden: McMaster curates their catalog well, and they do a really fantastic job collecting & displaying (consistent!) data about every product that they sell. 
• Amazon is basically on the other side of the spectrum. Their catalog is enormous, but it’s full of stuff that comes from third parties, and is often really poorly documented. Plus there’s a lot of stuff that you can buy on Amazon that’s basically a joke (that 55 gallon drum of lube comes to mind). This is partly made up for by their review system, which is really helpful when you’re evaluating multiple products whose data doesn’t line up directly. But it also feels like a crapshoot sometimes, especially with decidedly consumer products (that three wolf shirt comes to mind). In the end, the Amazon shopping experience is definitely less consistent than McMaster’s - but then again, McMaster won’t sell you a 55 gallon drum of lube. (I’m being facetious, but the point is real. Amazon’s huge catalog is definitely a feature.)
• The other industrial players are a mixed bag. None of them are as good about data keeping (or, consequently, browsing/filtering) as McMaster. None of their searches are as good as McMaster or Amazon, and none of their catalogs are as large, either. They make up for these shortcomings with depth: Uline does shipping, MSC and Rutland do tooling, etc. They have niches, and their capabilities within those niches make them incredibly valuable.

It’s also worth noting that these companies each take a different approach to knowing/caring who (or what type of entity) their customers are:

• It’s implicit from McMaster’s site, but I’ve been told in person that they take it very seriously that they do *not* treat different customers differently whether they’re a business or an individual. The prices I see as some schmo on the street are the same prices I see if I’m an engineer at Lockheed Martin, and they don’t give quantity discounts either. They’ll even turn away large orders, and are in general happy to send customers to their suppliers if it’d make more sense to cut McMaster out of the transaction. 
• A lot of the same could be said of Amazon, with the caveat that there’s a public perception that Amazon is constantly optimizing their pricing - definitely for time of year (supply and demand), but possibly also on a person-by-person basis. I have no way of knowing how much of this is true, and personally I wouldn’t find it offensive if it was. But it does strike me that Amazon takes the stance that “everyone sees the same site, but that ‘same site’ is one that’s constantly shifting depending on who you are and when you’re looking at it and what you looked at recently, and when we talk about the ‘same site’ we’re talking about something that might vary in layout, graphic design, product recommendations, pricing, and any other number of variables.”
• Most of the industrial players, on the other hand, do kind of want to be selling to actual businesses. Some of them will go so far as requiring EINs or sales tax IDs (this is more common with suppliers that sell products at wholesale), but almost all of them will at least have the “business name” field be required.

If it’s not clear, I *like* these differences. I enjoy living in a world where companies put philosophical approaches to commerce up for debate, and let consumers decide which they prefer. The variety is good, and I find myself enjoying trying to use each to its most powerful effect. But the differences are worth noting, and it’s fun (and possibly useful) to project outward where each of these perspectives might lead in the future.

A few thoughts sent from China

After a week traveling in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Dongguan for The Public Radio, I wanted to post a few quick thoughts on China and other related stuff. There will be more to come (photos + detailed descriptions of the places we visited), but here are the things that struck me most prominently during the trip.

Reasons to pay attention to China

I feel like if you need reasons to pay attention then you're already lost. Nonetheless:

1. I like China a *lot.* The places we visited ranged from visually striking (mostly in their scale & the obvious rate of change that they're going through) to absolutely beautiful; the people we visited and talked to expressed more raw enthusiasm and interest than almost anyone I know; and the culture is just fucking *cool.* I really enjoy being here, and can't wait to explore the vast expanse of geography and culture that I've so far had only fleeting exposure to.
2. Even if you don't *enjoy* it as I do, I don't understand how anyone can be *disinterested* in China. It's an absolutely fascinating place, and is historically unique in that it has highly mature cultural systems (which are significantly older and more well documented than anything in Europe, for instance), *and* is at the same time navigating a totally unprecedented period of both cultural and technological development and turnover. Add to that the pure drama of the past century or two of Chinese history (I'm shocked that so many Westerners lack even a baseline understanding of, for instance, the Cultural Revolution), and you have what I believe to be the most compelling and spectacular narrative of our time. Even if you don't *like* it, I'd be shocked if every single person who reads this can't find a wealth of fascinating storylines to dive into here.
3. IT'S BLOWING UP. This country is doing totally mind blowing things right now, and there's little doubt in my mind that the 21st century will see its total dominance of so many of the things (global economic systems; technological prowess; cultural influence) that the West has controlled so well over the past few hundred years. To not make a good faith effort to gain at least a basic understanding of Chinese history, culture, and growth would be to do a complete disservice to one's own future. It offends and saddens me to see my contemporaries doing just that.

A few observations about Chinese culture

• I've remarked on this before (in particular after visiting Taiwan), but the way that today's Chinese cities (to be specific, as I've visited only a few: Shanghai, Suzhuo, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Hong Kong) integrate the many modes of life is both impressive and heartwarming to me. In the US, we vilified Robert Moses while never really heeding Jane Jacobs' ideas: our cities still separate commercial from residential spaces, and real manufacturing & logistics is rarely to be seen. But in my experience in China, these three aspects of human activity often exist in close proximity. Moreover, they're often done *as a family;* in the small manufacturing shops we saw in Shenzhen and Dongguan, it was evident that child care is no more complicated than... having your kids hang out while you work. It's possible that I'm a rare case, but this is very appealing to me.
• I'll write a longer thing about this sometime, but "distributed manufacturing" totally exists here - and it has *nothing* to do with 3D printing. Anyone who talks about how 3D printing is making it so that "regular" people can make stuff (a popular line in both the American press and VC communities) is full of shit, and the reality is that they probably don't understand even the most basic realities of what "manufacturing" looks like.
• It continues to surprise me how shocked Chinese people are when I have anything more than a passing interest in their culture, language, and customs. Admittedly, it's fair to say that in these things I'm an outlier among my contemporaries; still, the totality of my efforts amount to little more than being comfortable using chopsticks, being open to weird and/or spicy food, and being able to say "I cannot speak the Chinese language" in Mandarin. Meanwhile, most of the Chinese people I meet are often totally fluent in English, eat McDonalds and KFC, have at least some awareness of American culture, and own clothes and accessories made by (or at least copied from) trendy Western brands. I talked to my friend Dan Hui about this, and he pointed out that many Chinese people assume that learning about Chinese culture is as difficult in the US as learning about American culture is in China. Moreover, many of the people who I've come into contact with here are business contacts, and the stereotype of an American businessman isn't exactly someone who goes out of their way to eat random street food. Nonetheless, I continue to encounter people here who are cultured, outgoing, and genuinely interested - and their default assumption is that I am none of those.
• Everywhere I go in China, I'm struck with a willingness to accept short term discomfort with the promise of long term, lasting growth. This is something that the US (and Europe, for that matter) is really, really shitty about. A jackhammer in the morning; a closed sidewalk; ongoing construction on the BQE - all of these things are treated as unjust intrusions into civilized life. Never mind the NIMBYism that prevents the kind of municipal and regional scale infrastructure improvements going on in China today - in the US, those sorts of things went on a path parallel to Robert Moses' reputation. I'll admit, of course, that the tradeoffs between growth and stability are difficult to navigate. But it's truly inspiring to see a collective effort across Chinese society to *get the next hundred years right,* and I can't help but feel that Western conservatism isn't helping us compete.

General purpose travel notes

• I bring a handkerchief or bandana everywhere I go. Napkins aren't really a thing, and it's nice to have something to wipe off with.
• I don't know about you, but drinking outdoors, in public - especially in a subtropical climate - is one of my favorite things. Neither mainland China nor Taiwan have open container laws, and I take great pleasure at stopping in at a 7-Eleven or street stall and cracking open a Tsingtao as I explore a neighborhood on foot. The shocking thing is that nobody else - local or tourist - seems to be doing the same thing. Their loss.
• WeChat is a really, really great app. I think it'd be great if more people in the US used it.
• Most of the upscale (ish) hotels we stayed at had "gratuities" sections on their bills, but in general tipping is not a thing here. Which is fucking great, and I can't understand why the US won't follow suit.

Thanks *so* much to Dragon Innovation, who helped us plan & manage our trip - and to my friend Dan Hui, who was an excellent tour guide in Hong Kong & point of reference for our whole trip.

Undercurrent is gone

Update: This post has received a bit of traffic over the past few days, and I've gotten some nice notes on Twitter as well. I would ask, however, that anyone who's truly interested in the people from Undercurrent (who are now all freshly out of a job) consider reaching out. While my own interest is in advancing industrial additive manufacturing, there are a lot of bright minds (I believe them to be the best in the industry) who are excited to explore and improve the effectiveness and resilience of ambitious organizations. If that's something that excites you, send me a note and I'll connect you with the very best people for the job.

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Two and a half years ago, an ad on Radiolab caught my attention. I was listening to a lot of podcasts at the time and paid as much attention to the sponsors as most people do. But this one said something about "3D printing, and the future of human-refrigerator interaction," which was weird. I liked it.

My courtship with Undercurrent was long and slow. I was at a transitional point in my career, and in a lot of ways the skills I had weren't well suited for what UC did. But I stayed in touch, and made friends, and was working on interesting, challenging stuff myself - and being really public about the whole thing. And after a full year on the periphery, I joined Undercurrent full time in April of 2014.

In most respects, the work wasn't what I had expected. I didn't really know what corporate consulting was like to begin with, and Undercurrent's particular take on consulting was an additional degree of separation away from anything I understood.

But it fit, and it fit in a way that I had never experienced before. I made friends. We worked long days at client sites, and wrote long wrap-up documents on the plane back home. We had heated debates on random evenings about the future of 1099 employment law, or whether or not a hot dog could be a sandwich. We hustled; we worked hard. I did some of the most savvy, thoughtful, and critical reasoning of my life. I learned a lot.

A year after I joined, Undercurrent was acquired by Quirky, a startup developing products with the help of an online community. Quirky was one of the bigger New York startup stories for a while, and I had bought a few of their products - and had not enjoyed them. I had thought a lot about product development over the previous few years (and was in the midst of fulfilling my own Kickstarter campaign at the time), and had real doubts about Quirky's take on the subject.

And, so did a lot of other people. Quirky had already had some layoffs before we joined, and there was another round our first week or two that we were in their office. It was a pretty weird place to walk into, though to be honest it really didn't change my work much. We still had our Undercurrent client relationships, and I was too busy shipping radios out on the weekends to think much about how Quirky was doing. But it wasn't going well, and everyone knew it.

In the meantime, my desire to focus on manufacturing was growing. Undercurrent supported this, even giving me a cash budget to spend on titanium 3D printed parts. I was figuring out how to move the industry past the problems I had seen with additive manufacturing. Undercurrent was behind it.

At this point in the story, the details are mostly public. Over the past few weeks, both Quirky and Undercurrent began going through the motions of shutting down, permanently.

I'll miss it. UC valued my work and critical perspective more than anywhere I've ever worked. It offered more in the way of curiosity, and warmth, and just always felt like home.

I'm looking forward to the future. Undercurrent - and the clients we worked with - offered me fantastic opportunities over the past year and a half. But there are other opportunities out there, and I'm excited to find my place working on them. 

To my colleagues: Thanks for your support. I wish you the best, and look forward to working with you (it's a small world, after all) in the future.

To my clients: Thanks for your sincerity. I can't think of better people to have worked for, or better problems to have worked together on.

Over the next weeks, I'll be digging deeper into the topics in industrial additive manufacturing that I've spent so much time thinking about recently. If you want to work together, please drop a line :)

My secret Manufacturing master plan

Background: My day job is directing Undercurrent's strategy work with General Electric, but on the side I spend my time researching the state of the art in manufacturing - specifically, industrial 3D printing. I've written before about my approach to some of this work, but want to lay out here the way I see it fitting into my career.

As you'll know from my blog (cf. one, two), a primary focus of mine is developing a line of high end metal 3D printed bicycle parts. However, it might not be clear that that's just one step in finding specific applications where 3D printed production parts make commercial sense. In the end, the purpose of my work is to help expedite the transition toward a more fluid, transparent, and efficient mode of product design, manufacturing, and distribution - one which properly accounts for its own externalities, and allows for rapid integration of feedback across and throughout a part's life cycle.

I should be made clear that my long term focus isn't specific to additive. Every manufacturing method has a purpose, and any claim that 3D printing is going to unseat other methods should be examined critically. I want product designers have perfect transparency into how a given process will affect cost and function, and to be able to tune their design such that it's well matched for the resources at their disposal - and the end user's needs. 

I do believe, however, that additive manufacturing offers a unique and historical opportunity. Partly because of the fact that 3D printed parts always begin as 3D models - and partly, to be frank, because of its sex appeal - additive has encouraged a new wave of people to people to work in an industry (manufacturing) that was due for a radical change. And while the effect of their naïveté is often to simply create churn, in the end I believe that manufacturing will benefit greatly from the influx of new ideas and working styles.

In order to harness this opportunity, I'm focused on developing the most compelling possible use case for the technologies at play today. For metal 3D printing to reach industrial maturity, designers need to understand its limitations - and how to best exploit its strengths. So I have begun my research with metal powder bed fusion, which is currently the 3D printing process best suited for industrial use. I'm developing parts which make good use of 3D printing's strengths (lightweight, low production volume, smaller than a breadbox), and an industry which prizes the traits that additive manufacturing is best suited for (has short sales cycles, rewards innovative design, benefits from customization).

Today, developing metal 3D printed parts is an expensive process, and it's difficult to estimate how difficult a project will be. So to begin, an easy place for me to provide value has been to explain (in sometimes painstaking detail) the experience I've had over the past year and a half. Because there's so little public information about the realities of  metal powder bed fusion, writing on that subject has allowed me to boost my profile quickly. 

But more importantly, it has encouraged other people who are working on similar problems to offer collaborations. This has helped me twofold: First, it has in many cases resulted in decreased costs on my end, as the people and companies that I'm collaborating with have given me prototype parts in exchange for me writing long, in-depth descriptions of what they do. But even more significantly, these collaborations have given me unique opportunities to see past the marketing and sales messages and talk directly to the engineers who know the state of metal powder bed fusion best. This has allowed me to advance my own level of knowledge much more quickly than I otherwise could have, and has given me access to people who I can now turn to when I'm stuck.

To be sure, I have a *ton* to learn - and ultimately I'll never know as much as the seasoned professionals who I'm working with now. But between the hands on experience that I'm getting by building bike parts, and the access I now have to the most advanced research organizations in the world, I find myself in an ideal position to identify what aspects of today's manufacturing ecosystem most desperately need fixing - and who the most well positioned players are today. And that, plus the (I hope) sincerity, honesty, and intelligence that I've employed in writing about my own development process, puts me in a position to be a key part of whatever team ends up fixing them. 

So, in short, the master plan is:

1. Build compelling 3D printed products.
2. Use the exposure I get from that process to learn as much as possible about the industry.
3. Use that knowledge to identify the biggest problems today, and find out who's best positioned to fix them.
4. Form like Voltron with those people, and together make sustaining and powerful changes to the way that the product development life cycle works.

Don't tell anyone.

---

ps - Hat tip to Elon Musk, whose strategy (and how he communicates it) rocks.
pps - I also explicitly want to bring more advanced manufacturing development to New York City, which I believe is the best place in the world to do serious work.

Things that are on my plate right now

Mostly for my own benefit & the sake of catharsis, here are the things that are consuming my attention over the past & for the next few months:

• Planning my own wedding in October.
• Having fun this summer.
• Getting more exercise.
• Writing a long blog post on the seatmast topper that I had printed (DMLS) by Layerwise, and then tested by EFBe. 
• Writing a long blog post on the seatpost that I had printed (EBM) by Addaero.
• Digging more into McMaster-Carr's iOS app, and comparing it to Amazon's recently rebranded Business offering.
• Planning a sourcing trip to Shenzhen, where Zach and I will investigate a significant redesign of The Public Radio's speaker & mechanical assembly.
• Getting more hands-on experience with metal powder bed fusion machines. Because there are none in the New York metropolitan area, this inevitably means traveling for a few days to somewhere where I have a friend in the industry.
• Doing a deeper dive into the variety of design tools that are cropping up for additive manufacturing. This includes getting better at T-splines (Autodesk Inventor), working with topology optimization software (SolidThinking Inspire; Frustum Cloudmesh), and doing some experimenting with lattice structure generation (with nTopology).
• Doing a deeper dive into build preparation software, namely Materialise Magics.
• Building myself a real desk, preferably with a proper toolchest integrated into it. I also want 2x24" displays, a proper Windows computer for 3D design, a new Mac for daily use, and a place for both a Wilton "bullet" vise and my 12"x18" granite surface plate.
• Writing a presentation on metal 3D printing that covers both my experiences over the past two years (a case study), and my broader observations on the industry. 
• Getting said presentation accepted to an industry conference (likely either AMUG, RAPID, or Inside 3D Printing).

There are a few more longer-term things, but this is a pretty good list for now. 

Without a trunk

Tim Urban, writing about learning about Tesla (emphasis mine):

I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about. And what I usually find is that so many of the topics I’ve pegged as “boring” in my head are actually just foggy to me—like watching episode 17 of a great show, which would be boring if you didn’t have the tree trunk of the back story and characters in place.

Speed to product != Speed to learning

When I joined Undercurrent, I found one phrase to be in particularly heavy use: "Speed is the new IP." I liked it, and I'm sure I used it in arguments from time to time. But over the past year I've developed some skepticism - especially given the wide variety of contexts in which we encourage our clients to go faster.

You see, I'm focused on learning as fast as I can. At times, that will mean releasing products really quickly. But immature products rarely teach you anything useful. In order to learn - in order to get the IP, the competitive advantage that you really want - you sometimes need to hold back. 

Sometimes that may seem slow; hell, sometimes it may actually be slow. But fast product cycles in and of themselves aren't worth shit. The goal is to know how to fulfill your customers' needs better than anyone else, and to be prepared to fill those needs. And if you can do that without a strenuous series of rapid product releases, all the better.

My failure was probably

As a kid, I read Calvin and Hobbes fanatically. Last week I got Bill Watterson's new book, which is actually an exhibition catalog from a retrospective of his work. It contains a long interview with Watterson, in which he talks about being let go from his first job drawing political comics:

Though my early career was much different than his, I relate to a lot of this. 

Principles

Came across this today:

View fullsize

It reads:

I want to be a key part of developing & distributing products that people like myself value, enjoy & share.

I want to utilize my desire to be well-informed to help those around me make wise [robust, anti-fragile] decisions in the face of uncertainty.

I want to be an effective problem solver, and I want to solve interesting & challenging problems.

I want a healthy relationship with risk.

I would have written this almost two years ago - summer of 2013. It still rings very true to me today.

The Public Radio is "not a wearable."

In advance of DFM Forum (which is this Thursday in DUMBO - come!), I sat down to talk about my background and the process of launching a hardware startup. Here's the video:

You notice how all my answers begin with the same exact cadence? Well, I do too :/

"Do you think you're a workaholic?"

Ada asked the question late last night, just as we were going to bed. It's been a long week, and I've worked until about midnight every single night. That's been the case for most of the past six months: In general, if I'm not working on The Public Radio it's because I've spent all evening clearing my inbox out, or writing my newsletter, or (as was the case much of this week) working late on Undercurrent stuff. And if I'm honest, the same could be said for most of my adult life. 

Regardless, though I suppose by way of a technicality, I've never considered myself a workaholic. I think of a workaholic as someone who is addicted to work - to whom the goal is working itself. 

I want freedom, though. I want to be recognized for my intuition, and my intelligence, and for the effort I put into the things I do. I want people to say "He doesn't fuck around. And he notices real stuff, and he turns his observations into really valuable output - whatever the form." And then I want to be given the benefit of the doubt - the freedom, both creative and financial - to do just that. 

It's possible - likely, even - that my efforts are misguided. At least within traditional working environments, and even at companies that espouse two pizza rules and generally empower their employees (I'll pause here to note that Paul Graham's How to Make Wealth, and especially the section titled "Working Harder," is an absolutely excellent discussion of this topic), the value of individual contributions is extremely difficult to measure, and it's correspondingly rare to have one's individual efforts result in the kind of graduation that I seem to want. And moreover, one might argue that the freedom I'm looking for is a Macguffin: Once I get this recognition, what will I do with it? Work? 

And yet, I continue. Even as I lay in bed, I was thinking of what I wanted to do over the weekend, with the explicit intention of carving out more breathing room for myself. And I awoke this morning feeling no different: There are things I want very much to work on today, and in my mind I can see how they add up to something more than the sum of their parts - to myself, my users, and to, I hope, the future of my creative path.

The Devil's Advocate Office

The Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence, AMAN, has specific roles dedicated to advocating for contrary points of view. From a 2007 paper by Yosef Kuperwasser, of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy (emphasis mine):

...But the key reason that AMAN has not become an arm of the military is that it has in place a number of tools to ensure the promotion of diverse views. First, in order to make sure that different and opposing opinions are heard within the Israeli intelligence community, AMAN has a culture of openness, where individuals are expected to voice dissenting opinions. The organizational slogan that reflects this openness is, “Freedom of opinion, discipline in action.” AMAN has two other tools that promote diversity: the “devil’s advocate” office and the option of writing “different opinion” memos. 

The devil’s advocate office ensures that AMAN’s intelligence assessments are creative and do not fall prey to group think. The office regularly criticizes products coming from the analysis and production divisions, and writes opinion papers that counter these departments’ assessments. The staff in the devil’s advocate office is made up of extremely experienced and talented officers who are known to have a creative, “outside the box” way of thinking. Perhaps as important, they are highly regarded by the analysts. As such, strong consideration is given to their conclusions and their memos go directly to the office of the Director of Military Intelligence, as well as to all major decision makers. The devil’s advocate office also proactively combats group think and conventional wisdom by writing papers that examine the possibility of a radical and negative change occurring within the security environment. This is done even when the defense establishment does not think that such a development is likely, precisely to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios.

While the devil’s advocate office is an institutional level safeguard against group think, there is also an individual-level safeguard. The analysts themselves are given venues for expressing alternate opinions. Any analyst can author a “different opinion” memo in which he or she can critique the conclusions of his or her department. Senior officers do not criticize analysts who choose to write such memos.

This is smart.

Sufficiently expert

From a Paul Graham essay titled "How to be an Expert in a Changing World:"

If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring.*

* In practice "sufficiently expert" doesn't require one to be recognized as an expert—which is a trailing indicator in any case. In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot would be enough.

Yes.

What I'm doing

The following is an account of the professional (ish) things that I'm currently working on. 

Undercurrent

I work full time at Undercurrent, where I advise big companies on (usually) high level strategy, and spend a lot of time thinking about what working at a 300,000 person company is (and should be) like.

The Public Radio

I'm cofounder of Centerline Engineering, whose purpose is to design, manufacture and distribute The Public Radio. For the next few months (while Zach is busy at SFPC) I'll be leading most of the day-to-day activities, including retail (i.e. Kickstarter) and wholesale (radio stations) customer relations, project management, and procurement. Zach will take over a bunch of that in January, but the bottom line is that The Public Radio will amount to a part time job for the foreseeable future.

DMLS research

I'm collaborating on a project with Dustin Lindley, a researcher at the Additive lab of the University of Cincinnati Research Institute. I started this project to determine the cost structure of a DMLS bicycle seatmast topper. Now, we're working to understand the limits of the engineering and commercial viability of 3D printed consumer products. I've spent limited time on this over the past few months, but hope to make some progress by early 2015; expect a few hours a week (plus a day or two in Cincinnati).

Brilliant

I'm a design advisor to Brilliant Bicycles, a direct-to-consumer bike brand that's launching in the next few months. I'm doing all of the bike geometry design, and in the end act as a co-product manager. My hourly commitments vary, but average less than five hours a week. 

NYIO

I'm founder of the New York Infrastructure Observatory, which itself is a spinoff of the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory. Our first trip is this week, and I expect to spend a day or two every six weeks organizing and running NYIO events, which will usually take the form of manufacturing and logistics location tours.

The Prepared

I run a links-style mailing list, The Prepared, that ships weekly to about 150 people. Its purpose is to understand the process of value creation, and to help provide context on the mindsets and cultures in which products are developed, built, and distributed. Keeping a mailing list has become personally rewarding to me, and serves as both an impetus to read and remember interesting things, and as a way to communicate with intelligent, interesting people both in and out of my social circles.