Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project | Hacker News Reader

Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project

recode.net

22 pointsshill11 comments

"For McCabe, being in Vegas felt like being on a spiritual journey." Perhaps not the right person to get into prototype manufacturing. There's no indication in the article that anybody associated with the project had any manufacturing experience. Or prototyping experience. Or even basic machine shop skills.

"With the funding closed, Factorli is setting out to buy a whole bunch of equipment, and also to build software that helps all the systems talk to each other and work at full capacity." That's a hard, but mostly solved, problem. There are commercial solutions from most of the CAD vendors. The ones that do the whole job almost automatically are not cheap. (Here's what you get at the high end, for $22,000 per seat, using a $700K 5-axis mill: "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knuz38oT2kc") If you're prototyping electronics, there are already services that do that. That's mostly a remote business; you send in files in standard formats and get electronics back.

Similar services are available for machined parts. See "emachineshop.com". They have a cute little free CAD program which understands what they can make, and will price the job for you, giving advice on how to cut the manufacturing cost.

There's a serious effort at Octopart to standardize the parts and process for building little computer-interfaced devices, so the "Internet of Things" crowd doesn't have to do so much original engineering for each new product. They might have gotten on board with that.

Another solution would have been to buy a TechShop franchise. Then, alongside that, set up some services which make prototypes using TechShop facilities. Such things have grown up around other TechShop locations, although with only modest success.

It's disappointing that this outfit produced nothing.

Also, you don't need millions in equipment to start producing useful stuff that people will pay for. I've been able to get a lot done with just waterjet and laser cutting.

Yes. What I observe at TechShop is that the flat cutting machines (laser cutters, water jets, CNC routers, and plasma cutters) produce most of the output. While TechShop has both manual and CNC mills, and 3D printers, they're used far less.

The fact that you can order dirt-cheap machined parts, sometimes delivered overnight, is why I never understood the popularity of 3D printing.

what are your favorite sources for these machined parts? i'm really interested.

There's got to be a lot more to this story.

Factorli sounds like a viable business, but not really something that would attract venture capital money.

What happened to the millions of dollars in tools and equipment?

We are buying != we bought. I've been quoted 30% deposit and 70% due after a 6 month manufacturing lead time for heavy equipment (>250k). I'm not sure what they were buying but a lot of machines I've dealt with are made to order for application considerations. Most likely she had not purchased anything yet. If she had, deposits were probably lost.

That was quick! Article never explained McCabe's falling out with the Hsieh posse. Curious about that.

Did you miss this?

"At least one employee had complained to Downtown Project management, calling her “a bully,” one source told us. Also working against McCabe was the fact that she did not follow Holacracy, the flat power structure favored by the Downtown Project leadership."

The way those two sentences followed the first seem to convey to me as additional problems but not the cause of the falling out. Also the first sentence of the paragraph is oddly constructed. Also those two items don't sound like a sudden falling out to me.

The write up is so brief that it is really hard to tell what happened.

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