Mark Hatch
CEO, TechShop

We are starting our afternoon session. This is an important session. The best things are kept for last. So, we have good speakers. We have Ray Kurzweil of course, as the keynote speaker of the afternoon, closing our conference. I know everyone is looking forward to him. I also know that you want to pay close attention to the others that are coming. Especially happy to have Mark here. Mark Hatch is the CEO of the TechShop. TechShop is part of the Maker Revolution. I believe that as we are going towards making an impact with our technologies at an accelerated rate, and closer and closer to our lives, it's going to be important that we pay attention to what the maker movement is about. Welcome Mark Hatch.

Thank you, thank you very much. Shut out to Singularity U, Alex, David. Thanks for getting me here and giving this conference. So, um, I'm mark Hatch, I'm the CEO of TechShop. TechShop is the largest membership-based open access machine shop, fabrication studio and maker space. Let me give you a quick video tour of what it looks like.

(video here)

That's a quick video clip. TechShop is 15,000 sq ft of every machine, tool, wood working tool, fabrics lab, plastics lab, 3D prototyping, laser cutters, plasma cutters, welding machines, open auto bay, and about 4,000 sq ft of workshop with compressed air, electrical and water, and most importantly, over 600 people who gather together to create their dreams.

What if innovation were free? The largest untapped resource on the planet is not natural gas, and it is not energy, it's not wind energy, it's not solar energy. It is the free time creativity and disposable income of the creative class. The creative class in the USA represents 40M people that control 474B dollars in disposable income. They are spending it on mansions, urban assault vehicles and crapachinos. What if we were able to get them out of their seats and into a shop like this for beginning to build their dreams? More importantly, helping them to start dreams about the world's biggest problems.

Let's talk about what's starting to drive this. A couple of things that are driving TechShop. For 240 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the common man and woman have lost access to the tools of innovation. At the beginning of the industrial innovation, the tools of innovation and creativity moved beyond the reach of all but the most driven and crazy inventors and entrepreneurs and creators. That's about to change.

With Chinese capital tools coming down the cost, by 80 to 90% in the last 15 years, and Moore's law applied to CNC machines, driving those costs down by 95% in many cases, we're on the cusp of the largest period of physical innovation. This is the cheapest access to tools ever. 15 years ago, just to use a CNC machine, you had to code gcode, it's a little harder than Visual Basic, easier than gcode. Now inside of 3 weeks I can teach you to drive a CNC shop, and sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of these products out.

I want to get out to the people that are actually working inside of TechShop. Let me introduce you to some extreme makers, like Andy Filo. That's an extreme maker. Andy felt that science promised him a jet pack back in the 60s and 70s. He's working on it. That is not photoshopped. That's a pilot over 200 feet. He broke one leg and two ribs on the landing, a small price to pay. Ken is a co-inventor (Ken Hawthorn) he machined the frame and carbon fiber for the current record holder for electric motorcycles (166 mph). He got 70% throttle.

Danny Fakuba is a 19 year old kid who built a segway. He innovated, he decided the problem with the segway was that you couldn't sit on it. It's the world's first two wheel self-balancing electric bar stool. It does 18 mph. That's the best thing about it.

Not everyone is always trying to solve transportation issues- like Chris Chalmers- who is just trying to inspire us. He did an installation, he thought he would lose 2 or 3 thousand dollars, found TechShop, did the manufacturing, and made money on his first installations.

Karen Synders launched a bamboo needle gauge company. In the first 6mo, her brother in law quit their job, then her job, and she amde more money in 6mo selling on ebay to crafters than she ever made before. Desktop manufacturing device.

Roy Sandberg - telepresence robot company. Two years, two brothers, patents, trials, Europe, nursing home market.

This is James McKelvey, he's Jack Dorsey's partner, Jack is one of the co-founders of twitter. He used the mills and lathes to build a prototype for the p2p iphone payment processing thing, and then raised 10M in their series A funding round.

I'm going to talk about four that are fundamental. This is what happens when you provide the community with tools. Phil Hughes and his partner Bob built a liquid-cooled server rack. Datacenters use 3% of all of the energy in the US, and if you liquid cool it, it will save 15% to 30%, they used $20k and 2 years, they solved 1/2 to 1.5% of all of the US energy's needs all by themselves. With a DARPA grant for 2.8M, they are going a long way.

Trevor Boswell built something called DripTech, there's 200 villages in china and 40 villages in India.

Nick Koshnick have built a fertilizer detection device. It helps subsistence farmers reduce about 50% of the mass of fertilizer that they have to use on their fields.

Naganad Murty - world health organization identified some of the top 10 problems in the globe. 40% of that problem is India. Another problem is keeping the children warm. Incubators cost $12k to $20k. That's the absolute cheapest. That's way beyond what a villager could afford. These guys went to TechShop, tapped into the community, uplinked the IP, and have launched a blanket company with a polymer phase-changing device in it that keeps the child warm. They charge $25, a little bit better than $12k.

What happens when you give people access to tools and information? Boom. You get a creative revolution. I believe we're going through a creative revolution to get to the singularity.