Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Incubation: Zach Smith, HAXLR8R”.
Everyone, my name, is Zack hokan and I’d like to talk to you today about accelerator, but first a little bit of background about myself. I started out as a web developer about 10 years ago and Doug and kind of got sucked into this whole world of making and building stuff discovered robots with the advent of cheap, 3d, printing and reprap about five years ago and then started a 3d printing company Called MakerBot with a couple of friends of mine and through that about two years ago, ended up going to China to figure out how the heck do we make these, because we just couldn’t keep up with it in in the states in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, MakerBot kind of went to the dark side, but I ended up just falling in love with China going out there. It’S just an amazing place so staying out there. I was part of this program called accelerator as a mentor and it’s a hardware, startup incubator. We take 10 companies in we show them through the whole process of like how do you prototype? How do you find a factory? How do you get going and basically take your product from idea to something you can launch and then turn into a business? And so this year I joined as the director of the program and have helped our ten companies launch we just launched on Monday, and almost all of them will be at maker faire. There’S only one, it’s not quite family-friendly, so we didn’t bring them.
So this is shen jen. This is the city where we’re based where Cyril and I live. Zeros. My partner with accelerator and SH engine is a city of about 8 million people, it’s kind of small by Chinese standards, but it’s known as the factory of the world because so much of the stuff that we use day-to-day is manufactured and built here.
And so one of the reasons I love this city is because it’s like a cornucopia of making, so in the States – and you know I built stuff in in the US for a while – you know we have all these resources like Mouser and tech shop and all Of that stuff, like gin gin, is like living in side of that place right. So it’s as if mouths are just opened up their warehouse doors and you can go in walk through the aisles and be like. Oh that looks cool. I had no idea how to search for that, but I want that and you can do that inch engine, so the goal of hacks l8er, here’s kind of like the crux of what we want to do. We want to take you from an idea.
Maybe it’s your at like garage prototype stage or maybe you’re you’re. Just still, you know ID on paper and we want to don’t there’s another picture here. Okay, so this is no Miku, and so we want they were from last year, and so we help them go from this maker style, DIY kit to a final product, and why is that not showing up bummer well anyway? So they took that product, they redesigned it and got to a manufacturer device, and then they were able to launch on Kickstarter to great success, and so this is kind of what we want to help. People do, and so there’s one critical thing that we really focus on, and this has kind of been something we’ve been evolving as well. Is that launch ebel needs to be manufacturable.
If you don’t have your plan and the understanding of how you’re going to make something, when you have a massively successful kickstarter project, then you’re in some some hot water. So this is how we do it. First of all, our office is located in la tombe. So if you’ve ever been djin djin, you know that this is it’s like a 15-block area, and it is just massive electronics market, like you, can literally get any electronics component.
You want you walk into the markets, their multi floors, you go from chips and resistors and passives on the first floor to like fully assembled computers on the eighth floor. It’S just it’s mind-blowing and if you come, our office is right. There we’ll give you a tour, and it’s really fun so the thing that we think is really important: there’s two things: finding your manufacturing partner and prototyping and Inter ating really quickly. So, as a lot of people have talked about at this program, prototyping and iterating and hardware is still rather tough.
It’S nowhere near close to software, where you can it multiple times in a single day, but accelerator we’re trying to fix that an inch engine, particularly you can iterate extremely extremely quickly, so there’s three things so one in-house tool. So these are the things that kind of everybody nowadays. Have you have your 3d printers? You have your cnc machines and we’re starting to experiment with some new stuff like desktop pick and place machines that allow you to have a robot assemble your electronics right there. For you directly from eagle and so we’re playing with these finding, which ones work, which ones makes sense, the other thing is using and having cheap access to high-end prototyping techniques.
So, for example, these are just like really nice scenes, there’s the 3d printed part and then the Helios bars guys went out. We have just a huge network of 3d printer shops that can turn around your parts in days, sometimes as fast as one day and for really cheap, because it’s located in Shenzhen China. So the other thing that is really nice about China is because it’s this manufacturing center there’s so many tools that in the states are kind of nish and specialty, but over in China, are very widely used, and so the economies of scale and just the surplus capacity Really work in your favor, so the thing that I love the most is laser-cut smt, stencils, so doing. Smt electronics as a hobbyist is pretty tricky, like so most people kind of gravitate towards the through-hole stuff.
But if you have a laser-cut solder stencil, it makes the the hardest part getting the right amount of solder on the right part on your board, so that when you put your components on in solder it everything goes well with a laser-cut seller stencil. And that’s what this picture is here. We can get these for 15 bucks next day and they just it’s so easy. You use the same Gerber’s from your boards. They sent out. You can get a full set up to prototype your electronics in 24 hours for like 50 60 bucks and having that extreme speed and low cost means it’s really easy to iterate. Iterate iterate prototypes aren’t bleeding you out, so it’s just a great place to do that. The other thing is because you’re in China, you can go find your manufacturer. You can meet with not only like a cm.
Who would be the person like bringing it all together and building your final prototype, but you can go meet with the individual people. Who would be doing the processes, so you could go meet with a specialty manufacturer and ask the questions specific to the process you’re going to do so. For example, we have a company Helios bars, they make smart handlebars for your bike, and so these guys have like all these ideas and all of you like do we use carbon fiber? How do we, how do we shape it? The right way to put our PCBs on the inside, and so we just you, know, push them out the door said: let’s go find manufacturers that do all these things we went.
We sat down. We asked them all the hundred questions going around in her head. If I can you do this, can you do that? Can you make holes how big in the holes be? What’S it cost for tooling and kind of got this feeling this sense of how the ecosystem all all fits together, and so we call this interactive designing, like you, should not be designing in your cave, like a lot of people like Scott are talking about dfm, like You can’t do dfm if you don’t have an M the manufacturer, because all of these processes are so different. Everybody’S product has unique requirements and really the only person that can give you that final answer is the person who’s going to make it and manufacture it, and so it’s extremely important to go, find them early on in the process before you’ve sold a million units before You’Ve, you know promised people that oh yeah, we can make this widget for 99 bucks and it’ll be no problem so, like with accelerator, we help you find that right away.
So you can avoid this, this tragedy of success, of promising something that you can’t deliver. So you know we. We believe that every product is different. Like not every product works in a toy factory. You know we have people making lamps so we went out and we found a lamp factory. We have people making bike handlebars and is it going to show up? No, it’s not so we have people making bike handlebars.
We went out and found a nice bike factory. We have people making bluetooth, vibrators, guess what we found a vibrator factory, and you know it’s like by working with these experts. You kind of over this whole hurdle of oh. How do we make it? I mean imagine explaining to a toy factory. How are we going to make this this bicycle? They don’t know how to weld aluminum. They don’t know how to hide, reform, aluminum tubing and so you’re able to harness this kind of innate built-in knowledge of how to do these processes from people who spend time doing it. The other thing is using local components, so as someone who’s kind of made, this jump from like let’s design in the u.s. to design in China, like the price you get on.
Digikey and Mauser is like not even there’s some sort of magically between the price and trying to like there’s no direct correlation, the prices for components in the local market like connectors, like I, you know paying like two dollars for a connector, seeing like price of like One to two dollars for just simple: pin header connectors on Mauser and then going to China and realizing these things are our cents per pen. It’S just you know, you can’t get your true bom cost. If you’re not using the price of the actual components that are going to be used, I mean you could manufacture a product using parts directly made from digi-key, but it’s going to price your product way. Out of what people are going to want to pay and so being in China means you can go there, you can design with these parts. You can know the real price, because you’re talking to a manufacturer, you’re buying these things in the market, yourself, you’re, getting a sense of what things actually really truly cost. And the other thing is, you know if you design your product using all the really nice components from digi key and mouse, or you know like the top cream of all these components, and then you switch to like the lower-cost capacitors.
You switch to the lower-cost connectors. There’S all sorts of weird little problems that are going to pop up, because maybe the quality is a little bit lower. Maybe you know the tolerance is not quite on and if you’re using the local components, it means that you’re going to run into these problems sooner and, as we all know, the sooner you fail, the sooner you can find the problems fix it and get on with Your life, so this is the the first year we’ve done two batches so far this one.
We had nine teams from all over the world, mostly from the US, but we definitely get some chinese and european teams as well. This was the team. This year we just launched everybody, it will be at maker faire and we’re accepting applications now for the third batch which we’re doing to this year, we’re going to start the next one in August and yeah.
If you have a sweet idea, come to accelerate or calm, you can apply and will be will be choosing in. In the next month, Archie a woman gave a show Tomlin so regal neo Phaeton bong, the tron yay mahjong Geoghan woman liyan Qi how about yet .