

Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project - shill
http://recode.net/2014/09/30/factorli-an-early-casualty-of-the-las-vegas-downtown-project/

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Animats
"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"](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.

~~~
chromaton
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.

~~~
Animats
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.

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chromaton
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?

~~~
sachingulaya
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.

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

~~~
Luyt
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."_

~~~
msie
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.

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

