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MARK R. HATCH

THE

MAKERREVOLUTION

BUILDING A FUTURE ONCREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

IN AN EXPONENTIAL WORLD

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Copyright © 2018 by Mark R. Hatch. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Contents

Introduction: The Maker Revolution v

S E C T I O N 1 T r e n d s T h a t A r eD r i v i n g t h e M a k e r R e v o l u t i o n

1 Exponential Technologies 3

2 Tools and Knowledge 21

3 Capital, Manufacturing, and Markets 33

4 Recapping the Drivers of the Revolution 49

S E C T I O N 2 T h e M a k e r R e v o l u t i o nI s D r i v i n g M a j o r C h a n g e s

5 Economic Development 57

6 Innovation 75

7 Creativity 95

8 Education 109

S E C T I O N 3 W h a t S h o u l d W eD o a b o u t I t ?

9 Institutional Response 131

10 A Call to Arms—How Engaged Are You? 147

Conclusion 155Index 157

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Introduction: The MakerRevolution

BOOM! The greatest explosion of innovation and creativity inall human history is upon us. Radical advances in 3D printing,biosciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer science,pharmacology, physics, material science, network and commu-nications, education, tool use and access to knowledge, markets,financing, and communities are driving the fastest and largestleap forward we have ever experienced. And best of all, thisrevolution is open to almost everyone. That’s right, this revolu-tion is one that the average person will be able to participate inand reap the rewards of participating. This is a unique time inhuman history that offers a fundamentally positive transforma-tive potential. I hope by the end of the book you will not onlyagree with me, but join the revolution. BOOM!

Author note: I use “BOOM!” in my presentations tokeep the audience engaged and because some of thesuccess stories are so amazing that they deserve a“BOOM!” It has become something of signature. Yes,you will see it here. And yes, you should read that wordout loud. Shall we practice?

Everything around us is changing. Everything. The past is nolonger a reliable guide to the future. Yes, there are some terrify-ing trends and scary new technologies, and some technologiescan be misused. But after being immersed in the technologyand trends of the future for more than thirty years, I’ve becomemore optimistic about the future, not less. And while it is humannature to see and anticipate negative outcomes, or to focus on

v

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worst-case scenarios, we can (re)train ourselves to see opportu-nities and look for potentially positive outcomes.

These trends are so broad and deep that they will touchevery aspect of our lives. I see direct impacts on work, play,home, sleep, sports, language, personal identity, spirituality—oneverything . . . and that is just with progress we have seen withartificial intelligence in the last couple of years. There is nocorner of human existence that will not change over the nexttwenty years. Not one.

For much of the last decade, I have been a leader in one ofthe most remarkable revolutions, the Maker Movement. I’vehad an opportunity to be at or near the forefront of many of therevolutions in the recent past. During the personal computerrevolution, in the early 1980s, I ran an interactive multimediasoftware/hardware company before multimedia was a thing.I launched one of the first fifty Fortune 500 corporate websitesin the mid-1990s, democratized access to printing technologyas a product management director at Kinko’s just prior tothe first dot-com boom and bust, and drove both an onlinehealth benefits website and a software-as-services back-officeplatform in the 2000s during and after Web 1.0. After 2007I became a leader in the Maker Movement, and from thatperch and through personal interest I’ve become embeddedin a far-ranging group of activities, people, organizations,companies, and “crazies” (in the best sense of the word) whoare creating the future. I’m not trying to brag (I don’t think),just trying to build context for where I’m coming from. I’m farfrom the success I seek, but I’m grateful for the opportunity tolive and work in what I am convinced is the most remarkabletime to be alive in human history.

A major theme of this book will be rooted in the MakerMovement and what it means for you and society. But theMaker Movement is operating within the context of exponentialtechnological innovation, and it is riding the wave of changebeing driven by these exponential technologies. As such, I will

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also cover the exponential technology that is the impetus formuch of the change within the movement. It is impossibleto grasp the coming impact of the Maker Movement withoutthis background. I will leverage my experience as an adjunctfaculty member at Singularity University for this section, withshout-outs to Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamantes, Salem Ismael,Peter Van Geest, Rob Nail, Jonathan Knowells, David Kraft,Vivek Wadhwa, and others involved there.

THE MAKER MOVEMENT—A QUICK SURVEY

The Maker Movement started in 2004 with the initial publica-tion of Make: magazine by O’Reilly Publishing. Dale Daughertyis recognized as the founder of the movement, with the supportof Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and thechronicler, instigator, and founder of not a few movementshimself. Maker Media has spun out of O’Reilly and remainsthe go-to resource for all things maker-ish. In 2006, Dale andDan Woods (now CEO of TechShop in my old role) launchedthe first Maker Faire at the San Mateo, California, fairgroundsand started the practice of bringing participants of the nascentindustry together at an annual festival of maker celebration,networking, and conversation. It has exploded.

These annual celebrations are kind of like a state fair, butthey trade out the animals for robots, geeks, steampunk out-fits, and propane-driven fire spectacles. At the first Faire, about25,000 people showed up. Since then it’s grown like crazy. Morethan 150,000 people attended the Bay Area Maker Faire in 2016,and there are now also major Maker Faires in New York City andChicago as well as over thirty featured Faires and hundreds ofMini Maker Faires held around the globe each year.

These events are wonderful exhibitions of human creativity,ingenuity, and possibility.

Have you ever seen a rock band supported by 500,000-ampTesla coils? The performers must wear metal mesh suits to

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protect themselves from the bolts of lightning striking theirbodies and instruments. They “play” the coils. High notes arehit by raising a hand up high and low notes played by holdingthe hands low. Dual notes from the pair of coils can be played atthe same time. A few years ago we were able to get Mike Rowe,of Dirty Jobs fame, to step into the phone booth–sized box onstage between the coils and get (safely) zapped by massive boltsof deadly lightning. My favorite “art” piece a couple of yearsago was a Burning Man performance art mobile, a flamingsteampunk octopus. Imagine a fifteen-foot metal octopusoutfitted with a massive sound system and huge propane tanks,shooting fifteen-foot streaming bursts of flaming propane out ofeach arm and its head. This is not your father’s state fair. This ismixed up with kids ages eight to eighty bouncing around boothsstuffed with crafts, robots, advanced manufacturing gear, fire,and homemade everything.

There are so many R2-D2 robots at Maker Faires, an entirecorral is set aside for them. Yes, an R2-D2 corral. Kids can learnhow to solder, make a “blinky light,” and pick locks . . . all beforelunch. Maker Faire is a celebration of all things “STEAM”(science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics). At aMaker Faire, you can listen to panels on how to open your ownmakerspace, become a citizen scientist, use your 3D printerfor printing prosthetics, and see practical uses for drones. Youcan attend “power tool races” (not for the faint of heart) wherethey do a “fifty-yard dash” with over-powered belt sanders andcircular saws. The racer places an amped-up, highly modified,circular saw on the ground between two rails, with a fifty-yardelectric cord that spools out as the saw careens from one side ofthe track to the other. The blades cut into the ground and thenlaunch down the track at terrifying speeds, bouncing off thewalls . . . which usually but not always hold these spinning toolsof instant death. I’m waiting for the chainsaw races. And notthe kind where you cut down a tree.

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Then there is the model military boat competition wherelarge replicas of combat destroyers sink one another with can-nons blasting away in a big pool while spectators cheer the may-hem. You can also watch a life-sized game of Mouse Trap® thatends with a multiton safe dropping onto an increasingly unrecog-nizable automobile. My only surprise here is that some automo-bile company hasn’t sponsored the destruction of one or moreof their competitors’ cars. Can you imagine?

At Maker Faire, you will meet representatives from some ofthe largest brands showing off their new tech, fun tech, and justplain weird tech. Companies like GE, Pepsi, Intel, Microsoft,Google, and others routinely come out to play. Certainly, theiremployees are present in droves.

It’s not all destruction and play. The primary function ofthe Maker Movement to date has been infecting a generationof young people with a desire to learn how to make things.This translates into creating more and more kids who want tobe artists and engineers. I kind of like seeing Maker Faire asground zero for the creation of a new renaissance. If you haven’tbeen to one of the big ones, you need to book it. It’s a lookingglass into the future.

TECHSHOP, AN OPEN-ACCESS DIY WORKSHOPAND FABRICATION STUDIO

My introduction to TechShop came at geek party that DEMOcofounder Chris Shipley held in the Silicon Valley in late fall2007. I overheard TechShop founder Jim Newton say, “It’s likeKinko’s for geeks.” Kinko’s was the chain of copy shops thatPaul Orfalea and friends had started (and eventually sold toleveraged buyout company Clayton, Dubilier & Rice . . . whoeventually sold it to FedEx). I had had a short but memorablestint at Kinko’s. My team was involved in pulling high-speedInternet to every location, launching the e-commerce portion of

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Kinkos.com and developing the first suite of “print-to-Kinko’s”applications.

I eventually cornered Jim and asked him to describeTechShop. He said it was just like Kinko’s except that instead ofgiving people access to office equipment, he was giving peopleaccess to manufacturing tools. Or, as I like to describe them,the tools of the Industrial Revolution. I didn’t really believeit at first.

“Really?” I asked. “TechShop lets random people they’venever met use welding machines, metal lathes, table saws, drillpresses, and the like?”

“Yes,” said Jim. “After safety training.”I had to see this place. It sounded like the future.I’m one of those guys who tend to live in the future. Living

in an unrealized future has a lot of downsides. During my shortstint in the military (Fifth Special Forces Group, Green Berets),one of my favorite lessons was “never mistake a clear view fora short distance.” In the desert that mistake will kill you. In themountains, it might not kill you, but it will make your life mis-erable. The key to living in an unrealized future is to minimizeyour burn, have lots of great partners, and have access to cashwhile you wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

I went to visit Jim at the first TechShop location, in MenloPark, California. It had been open for about a year, had about150 members, and was the pioneer of what eventually becameknown as “makerspaces.” Eventually I became a cofounder ofthe company and a leader in the Maker Movement. At the timethough, I knew nothing about the space.

For those of you who have not been to a TechShop, imag-ine twenty thousand square feet staffed and stuffed with all theequipment, training space, and members needed to make almostanything on the planet. Even with only the start of a membershippool (we would eventually target eight hundred to a thousandmembers per location), it was clear to me that Jim and cofounderRidge McGhee (no longer in the picture) were on to something.

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After spending a day on-site and meeting variousentrepreneurs who collectively told me that they had saved 97percent of their startup costs by using the TechShop platform,I knew that makerspaces would one day be in every city on theplanet. William Gibson’s quote came to mind, “The future isalready here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Though we still have a long way to go, we are clearly on atrajectory to place makerspaces not just in every city, but also inevery school. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself again.

I joined Jim and eventually became a cofounder ofTechShop, and with a very talented group of fellow makers wegrew it to forty times its size, attracted tens of millions dollars ininvestment, and brought the company to thirteen locations onfour continents with partners including GE, Ford, Autodesk,Samsung, DARPA, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs(VA), Lowe’s, Leroy Merlin, and many others. I had the privilegeof meeting President Barack Obama, visiting the White Houseand the Roosevelt Room within the White House, and—mostimportantly—getting to know some of the most amazing andexciting makers, heroes, unsung heroes, and other amazing peo-ple from around the world who make up the Maker Movement.

These were the early days, though. Most of the amazingthings that have happened were not clear or on the horizon yet.

At the time, TechShop charged $100 for a monthly mem-bership, with discounts for annual memberships and unlimitedaccess to tools you’d been cleared on. It was and is an amazingdeal. (At Kinko’s we charged $36 an hour just for access to adesign computer.) We derived immense satisfaction from build-ing a community of makers in every location we opened.

It was like building a beehive: We needed the physical infras-tructure to house the hive, but it was the members that addedthe value. And once we reached three hundred members orso, magic happened. TechShop went from being a place wheresomeone needed to be in order to get their work done to beingthe only place people wanted to be to work.

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A catalytic action happens at around three to five hundredmembers. When you are in a major city and you have thirty tofifty people on-site at any given time, a person is two degrees ofseparation from success. If a TechShop dream consultant (DC)doesn’t have the answer to your question, there is someone elseon-site, at that moment, who does.

I’ve seen this play out so many times that it feels normalto me.

“Hi, I’m having some trouble with sourcing,” said aTechShop member to a DC that I was having a conversationwith. “I recently learned that some woods are treated witharsenic as a preservative, and I don’t want arsenic in my finalproduct. I’m not sure what to do.”

The DC didn’t have the background to answer the question.“I’m not really an expert in sourcing,” he said, “But let’s see whois here tonight.” He eyed the room. Sure enough . . .

“Ha, you see that member over there?” Pointing to some-one across the room. “Let me introduce you to him; he does allthe sustainable sourcing for Restoration Hardware—you know,the large furniture retailer and manufacturer. I’ll bet he can helpyou sort it out. And if he can’t, Autodesk has a sustainable manu-facturing expert on staff, and as a partner of theirs, we can hookyou up with them.” BOOM!

Problem solved.Another time, similar situation . . .“I’m having trouble with my manufacturing design,”

announced a member. “Specifically, the size of the screws I’musing for my water-resistant watch. My Chinese manufacturerkeeps messing up.”

The DC on duty responded, “Well, let’s see who’s heretonight . . . Um, there’s someone from Frog (a global hardwaredesign and strategy firm), and someone from Ideo (another topdesign firm) is over there. Oh, and there’s one of my friendsfrom Apple—let’s go talk to him. But if that doesn’t work, wejust announced a partnership with Flex, the second-largest

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contract manufacturing company in the world, and they havea service offering called ‘sketch to scale.’ They have thousandsof engineers who specialize in exactly the kind of this you aretrying to do.” BOOM!

Now, when I started at TechShop, none of these things werein place . . . but they are now. Chris Anderson, former editor ofWired and current founder and CEO of 3D Drones, likes to say,“If you can imagine it, you can build it.” Indeed, one can. Youand I currently operate in a world where just about anythingcan be crowdsourced—knowledge, money, manufacturing,markets . . . you name it. But we were in the early days.

As we were slowly growing TechShop, a steady stream ofinteresting people kept coming through the doors. Venturecapitalists, most of whom don’t, won’t, and refuse to invest inhardware companies. Writers like Ashlee Vance, then with theNew York Times, now with Bloomberg and the author of theNew York Times bestseller on tech billionaire/entrepreneur/inventor Elon Musk, came through and immediately sawthe power of a makerspace. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs andDeadliest Catch attended an early Maker Faire and eventuallyfeatured TechShop in an episode of CNN’s Somebody’s GottaDo It. Many, many others visited the shop. Importantly, sodid many early makerspace innovators that I will highlight inlater chapters.

Here is the most important idea, though:The tools of this new industrial revolution are cheaper, more

powerful, and easier to use than any other tools in human history,by at least one or maybe even two orders of magnitude. Andwhen someone drops the cost of producing a product by 97 to 99percent, they have fundamentally changed the world.

In her original work on the Internet, Mary Meeker likenedthe World Wide Web to the construction of nineteenth- andearly-twentieth-century canals (think of the Erie Canal and theIllinois and Michigan Canal) that reduced the cost of commodi-ties transportation from Chicago to the East Coast by 97 percent.

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We are living through a similar discontinuity now as the cost tocreate a sophisticated prototype of an idea has dropped in manycases by over 97 percent. Better, the speed with which one canget to that prototype has also accelerated exponentially. If youhave access to the tools, you can produce it today. BOOM!

This new reality, where tools are cheap and easy to use,attracted a group of early adopters, writers, producers, futurists,evangelists, and dreamers.

Inc. magazine did the first piece on TechShop, but it wasthe US-based nonprofit think tank The Institute for the Future(IFTF), and Bob Johansen specifically, that really began tounderstand the makerspace’s transformational impact on mak-ing, fabrication, mass manufacturing, and culture. Bob pulleda steady stream of Fortune 100 companies and internationalconglomerates into the Menlo Park facility to expose them tothis new way of doing things. Eventually, Ashlee Vance’s piecein the New York Times led to a collaboration between TechShopand Ford Motor Company that would expand TechShop’s reachoutside the Bay Area and propel Ford on a five-year odyssey tobecome the largest patent creator of its peers. In 2008, IFTFpublished a forecast on The Future of Making that includedTechShop in it. We became the daily instantiation of the MakerMovement for their clients to experience.

When you drop the cost to build a prototype by 97 per-cent, what was once a $100,000 cost becomes a $3,000 one.A $100,000 invention is only available to the most dedicated,wealthy, risk embracers or to the insane. But at $3,000? Almostanyone can pursue their dream for $3,000. In roughly ten years,we have moved from a place where only the wealthiest and mostwell-connected people and corporations could afford to inventto an era in which almost anyone can. I will expand on thisreality over the coming chapters, but this is truly miraculous.

War, insurrections, revolutions, and massive displacementsof people took place as a result of the Industrial Revolutionmoving the center of production and innovation out of homes

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and small businesses into large, well-funded enterprises. (EvenCommunists moved production to centralized facilities.) Now,in a very short period of time during the early stages of thetwenty-first century, we have begun reversing important unas-sailable truths (not all, or even most, but enough to tangiblychange an innovator’s calculus) and realities of the previouscenturies’ assumptions about innovation.

More on this later.

MY INTRODUCTION TO EXPONENTIAL TECHNOLOGY

Early on at TechShop, we had visitors from Singularity Uni-versity (SU). Founded in 2008 by Peter Diamandis and RayKurzweil at the NASA Research Park in California, SU isfounded on Ray’s book, The Singularity Is Near, which I read assoon as it came out in 2006. At SU they study and proselytize theview that we are experiencing rapid, exponential, technologicalacceleration across a number of domains. They (and I as anadjunct faculty member) espouse that it is difficult to fathomexponential change. There is little in our day-to-day experiencethat prepares us for this pace of change. The people at SUbegan taking tours of TechShop and eventually settled on acombination of a presentation and a robot-building groupexperience for their students.

Sometime earlier, a TechShop staff member had approachedme to tell me that our “Lasers and Beer” and “Welding andWine” experience events were getting boring. Initially, I wasn’tconvinced—how could power tools and alcohol be boring?I mean, what is NASCAR other than powerful machines,alcohol, and potential promise of a mishap? But I had to handit to the staff—they not only wanted to create a robot-buildinggroup experience, but they wanted combat robots that wouldfight it out to the death in an MMA-style double-eliminationcompetition. This quickly became one of TechShop’s signaturegroup events. And it fit the SU crowd perfectly. What better

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way to demonstrate the new exponential reality than to takea room full of tech newbies and wannabes with limited to notechnical capabilities at all and then have them build their owncombat robots in one evening? BOOM!

Singularity University (not an accredited institution simplybecause accreditation by nature takes longer to achieve thanthe amount of time that the technology they are studying takesto become obsolete) focuses on rapidly changing technologythat is transforming the human experience, and even dabbleswith technology that is changing what it means to be human.This exponential reality is the backdrop for this book. Much ofthe technology that is working on an exponential curve is beingdriven by the Internet and computing, both of which are drivenby Moore’s law.1 The exponential change that we have beenexperiencing in computers is now also demonstrated in otherfields, such as biotech, nanotech, materials science, robots, arti-ficial intelligence, 3D printing, and advanced manufacturing,among other technologies.

These trends, the technology driving the singularity, afriction-free new reality that we are operating in, and the MakerMovement itself, require a new way of thinking and operating.It demands new policies for cities, counties, states, and nations.It changes the way we teach and sometimes what we teach. Thisengine is already changing the world in profound ways. We areseeing an explosion in innovation and creativity. BOOM!

Mark R. HatchSan Francisco, California

1Moore’s law (/m cerz. l c/) is the observation that the number of transistors ina dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The obser-vation is named after Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Fairchild Semicon-ductor and Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in thenumber of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate ofgrowth would continue for at least another decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.