Why a Makerspace?

What exactly is the vision here?

Since we spent the last couple days smashing up floors, we had quite a bit of time to just think on what exactly we want to achieve here. Initially, the low resolution idea was that we set out to do this so we could have tools, a space to build things, a space to meet new people, but the more we delve into this topic the more we realize it’s so much more powerful of a tool than we initially thought.

I have a thesis about talent in big state schools, or just large places in general. Let’s just run the numbers real quick here.

A&M has about 73,000 students. Roughly 23,000 are studying some form of engineering, but there are several other majors adjacent to building things and starting businesses and so I expect the interest to be multifaceted and distributed across several majors.

Now, how in tarnation does one do a talent search on a group of 73k students? Well first question is to ask what are we filtering for?

I’m filtering for a combination of agency, determination, creativity, and a history of NOT BEING AN NPC. I mostly want people who are driven to do things. Sounds simple, really those people are increasingly rare.

People who’s life is not just school → party → sleep →repeat or some variation of wanting resume padding or those who want the identity of an engineer without actually building much of anything during college. The people I’m looking for are the people who will do things, or are capable of being shifted towards that direction. Michael ( my cofounder) was always high in agency, and yet in college he thought he was going to just study a lot, get a masters and go to MIT. Once he saw my rocket project, and we realized what we could build together, that notion got dropped and his goals changed almost overnight.

It’s filtering for people who can be persuaded to venture and explore, people who are children at heart and not jaded.

It’s a bit convoluted, but you know it when you see it. And I’ve seen it. Michael, Daniel, David, many of the people I’ve met and brought together have plenty of agency, plenty of will to do things. Others need a little bit of a push, but it’s important for them to be in an environment where that push can be capitalized. I can’t just walk up to someone and tell them to build a motorized couch ( something we are going to have built at some point) without giving them a place to work or tools to work with.

Now. I found, that the best option for searching through such a large group of people is to be an absolute cultural phenomenon. Be a lure that they can’t resist. The people I’m looking for would absolutely jump at the notion of a makerspace. These people have no other place for their projects, not at this university except for a select few who’s interests align with the university ( again I repeat, very few, and even they are increasingly growing unsettled).

Seriously, A&M built a multi million dollar facility called the FEDC, and for the most part almost nobody can access it. I walk past there on the daily and it’s almost always deserted. Mostly because it is restricted to A&M recognized engineering student orgs ( many of whom have been kicked out recently btw) academic research labs ( who get charged for use), and classes that require it, which mostly default to capstone and a handful of scattered engineering labs.

There is an explicit ban on projects outside the predefined limits. Trust me when I say, we have almost zero competition from them.

Starforge Foundry needs to be a cultural icon and staple of A&M. That type of notoriety will be achieved over time and typically can be achieved with care, patience, word of mouth and most importantly a really good product.

And so say hypothetically that this all pans out, and we bring cool people to this makerspace. What exactly happens when you have a bunch of highly agentic creative people in a place with almost zero restrictions?

A little bit of chaos, and a lot of just building things, cool projects left and right. Potentially even a sort of launchpad for many startups or small commercial ventures.

A lot of my projects have been kickstarted by meeting someone new. And a lot of people in my inner circle have had their lives changed by meeting a single person who completely changed their outlook on life.

All it takes is a single person. Now imagine dozens of them working on many different projects, in sync and individually.

Culture.

Alright, let’s talk culture. Culture is Absolutely Critical. Capital C.

If we mess up the culture, we are done. Luckily though, we won’t. Because I’ve been down that road. I have led teams to failure in multiple different fashions. I have destroyed projects with bad leadership and learned volumes from it.

Oh no, we are not making that mistake twice. Let’s take a detour for a second. What makes college pranks special?

I’m talking things like the MIT police car hack, where they placed a police car on the dome of some building. Why was that widely acclaimed? Why did the MIT students LOVE that? Why did it live on in infamy in the metaphorical prank hall of fame?

Because it felt to the MIT students, like One of Us did this. And nobody could stop Us. We didn’t have to ask for permission from nobody, and that is Awesome. If a college administration has to approve a prank, in most people’s books, it has already failed.

Facilitated pranks do not work. In the same fashion, facilitating culture in a top down fashion also does not work. Not in the slightest. If I tell everybody in the makerspace to wear hoodies and jeans so they could look cool like me, most of them would just tell me to shove off.

You can’t tell people what to do and expect them to feel like you are anything short of their boss. We will revisit this subject soon.

Culture must be grass roots. Every member must have a say in it. Not democracy exactly, because that is putting too much structure to it.

It’s almost like being in a masjid. When you walk into a masjid, you can tell pretty easily how the community is. Everyone there is invested in keeping the masjid clean, worshipping and meeting their friends. They feel like it’s Their masjid. It’s not the Imam’s masjid, it’s not the Builder’s masjid, it’s Theirs.

We want that same exact feeling. I want people to be able to feel like this building is Their makerspace, so they can take care of it like it belongs to them, so they can keep an eye over it, like it belongs to them.

We sort of built a culture like this in our lab in high school, and given that me and others before me have all moved on and the lab is still going despite losing it’s teacher means that we all collectively succeeded.

The role of the Directors.

We can’t be the bosses of the place. Obviously we decide where the red lines are, but it generally if we do this correctly, it will be mostly self policing. Over the years I’ve noticed some things about leadership. The best leaders are treated as though they are part of the community, not elevated on a pedestal or considered better than the rest of the community. Leading in fear is an exercise in futility. Beating with a stick is not the quickest path to exponential personal growth.

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I can put myself on a pedestal. I can force people to obey me. Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should. If people begin to feel like I think I’m better than them, I lose all my friends and everyone will get distant to me and all my relationships get disingenuous really quickly. This applies to the other directors and the staff members. It should feel like the community has a huge say in what happens in the space.

It shouldn’t feel like we’re dictators, benevolent dictators even. It’s not a good way to lead. It’s not a good way to understand the needs of a community. The moment the leader no longer becomes a community member, his ability to rule effectively is diminished significantly. I feel like leader is the wrong word, steward of the makerspace is probably a more accurate term.

Matthew, Michael and I can’t sit there tooting our horn and announcing how cool we are for starting this. We can’t sit there and pretend like we are better than everyone else. We should say we started this because it needed to be done, and everyone in the community is along for the ride.

It’s a massive temptation to act all high and mighty for starting this, because it makes a person feel powerful. Really powerful, it plays to their ego and humility goes out the window. It elevates your status relative to your peer in an explicit fashion, to the point where they begin treating you differently. It’s no wonder that narcissist leaders all wound up horribly paranoid. Yet it’s human nature and we need to make sure it doesn’t corrupt what we’re building.

We have to avoid this at all costs. We are nothing but stewards of this space.

Anyone who sees me or any of the directors/staff members acting in this way, immediately tell them or me. It leads to nothing but a road of misery and should be avoided at all costs. As much displeasure as bringing it up in the short term may bring, delaying it will only cause far more later on.

Startup.

Some part of me wants to “play startup“ as Michael calls it. And that’s something that we will allow, encourage even. But in a controlled fashion.

I think the culture that we build in which we incubate startups is extremely important to the future of those companies. Our biggest thing is we want to encourage is open sourcing designs. It’s better for the culture of the makerspace, it’s better for the culture at large, and it’s better for the culture of the company. It just straight up forces you to be inherently better.

( listen, culture is Really important, it affects first impressions majorly)

We have two 3d printers. A Prusa Mini and a Creality Ender 3 pro. The Prusa is open source, and the Creality is more or less a cheap copy. The Prusa is Way better, much better built, much more usable, people like it more, Prusa is able to charge more and still be out of stock most times. The company has built a whole community around it and it’s a joy for everyone involved.

More importantly, when companies open sourced, they are forced to shed bloat. They are forced to move faster than those who copy them. They are forced to simply be better. I think in this age, where information is really cheap and easy to get/pirate, if somebody is really determined to steal your IP it will happen, and sitting there guarding it is honestly a waste of time.

Just innovate faster! Tesla is also open source. You can’t call them anything short of a massive success, having achieved what they set out to.

It forces you to actively shed bloat, move faster, be better, have a more consumer friendly product, because if you don’t somebody else sure can. And at a certain point when you are big enough, there’s only a few companies in the world that can float enough capital to compete with you and by that point, your culture is entrenched so it is impossible for them to be faster than you due to bureaucratic and administrative bloat. These are things that happen inherently, but need to be actively avoided.

I almost want to push a new culture of technology companies. There’s obviously the Silicon Valley model, but I think of that as iteration one and that we can take what worked from that, apply it, and learn from the mistakes of that experiment.

Things like right to repair would be inherently available, and if the culture of the company echoes the open source ethos, then it makes it really hard for a bad actor to slowly guide the company towards stupid shit like planned obsolescence and horrible business practices.

Listen, I’m capitalist to the core, BUT I despise the business acting actively against the best interest of it’s consumers. I think open source from the start inherently prompts a much better culture and resulting company and the second and third order affects I think are generally positive.

I’m not going to force people to open source their projects, but we’ll heavily encourage it.

We’ll just go ahead and open source our training and classes. Now some people might say that we are sacrificing profit and are putting the community’s interests ahead of our own, but you know what. If we push the right culture, people will refuse to let the space go bankrupt. I personally would do it, my cofounders would and I’m sure our members would bail us out when the tide gets too tough.

A for profit business model wouldn’t work for what we want here. If people see us raking in personal profits hand over fist, they’ll feel like we are being disingenuous. And they will be correct.

This is not the ticket to being rich. It is the launchpad for what we will build next. It is critical infrastructure and not a money making vessel. Don’t worry about us, we’ll be very wealthy one day, no qualms about that, but not through this directly.

I think that moving quickly is the biggest and best sign that a company is doing well. The enthusiasm and raw energy of a successful startup is very much tangible. And the culture we’re building will push that and yield much more resilient companies.

In Conclusion

We’ve made it beyond max-Q ( point of highest stress and most likely failure) for this project. Now that we’ve made it this far, I’m supremely confident we will make it further and succeed in our objective. Give me feedback on these ideas. We’ve mulled them over and this I think is the most distilled version I’ve come up with. Curious if there’s some aspect I missed or something I’m wrong about (very much likely).

A favorite picture of mine.

I’d like to end this with a picture of my favorite type of boat - a classic sailing yacht! I was going to use a captain and ship analogy but decided against it.