A Discussion with re:3D

Burton Goldfield: I have a very special guest today. Her name is Samantha Snabes and she is the co-founder of an amazing company called re:3D. Before we get started, Samantha, I wanted to say thank you so much for your service. I know your story and it is simply incredible. So, thank you.

Samantha Snabes: Well, thanks for having us. We're proud to be TriNetters.

Burton: Oh, well, thank you so much. I wanted to start by you telling folks who don't understand 3D printing and tell us a little bit about what it is and what is a Gigabot.

Samantha: Sure. So, 3D printing is really just a process called additive manufacturing, where you're putting two things together to make an object. So for example, if I took a can of whipped cream and I made the poop emoji, that would be like 3D printing, right? And then in essence, it's very similar to what we do. We take plastic and we melt it and we use it to draw an object layer by layer. What we're seeing here is a vase and we're making this vase by drawing the bottom and then going around and drawing the sides until we have the object.

Now, what makes our company a little bit different is we like to make big things with the human scale or the astronaut scale. And we need a printer starting in 2013 as a spinoff of Engineers Without Borders, NASA Johnson Space Center that was the size of the toilet. Now they go as big as the shipping container and in cost per scale they're the most affordable printers in the world. We now offer services around that and thanks to the support of the community, we've been able to get some additional research dollars and prize dollars to modify our printer. So, it can print from pallets, little like beads. I don't know if you can see at your end of the video, just poured it all over my computer, or flakes.

And why do we think that's important? Because it allows you to be able to print from shredded up garbage. So now we can print with garbage or non-garbage with practice filament that looks like rope or you can print with these beads or ground up material.

Burton: So, what was the secret to getting the costs down? So the availability goes up on these printers and was that an important design factor?

Samantha: That's a great question. My co-founder Matthew who's the brains of the company, said that he thought it was important to make things as simple as possible. At the time where we were getting into industrial 3D printing with our platform similar build volumes would be 50 to a hundred thousand dollars.

Burton: Right.

Samantha: So what we thought about was, you know what was really necessary. So you'll notice with our design, some people might say it's not as sexy as our peers, but it is very open, has minimal materials which is nice because it makes it lightweight. And then we do all of our manufacturing in house.

Burton: Oh.

Samantha: So we discounted our time greatly in the beginning and still do, which helps us cut down on some of the labor costs. And then by doing batch when you're factoring in-house and fabricating a lot of our components, we're able to save on creeping and duty from abroad. But that's allowed us to further reduce it and quite frankly, because there wasn't as much competition in the space, our peers were able to have a bigger margin. And for us, we decided we wanted to intentionally keep the price point as low as possible, so we operate on a smaller margin than some of the other platforms.

Burton: So tell us why you left NASA and went to re:3D? That must've been a big decision and certainly reflects on both the culture and the passion you have around this product.

Samantha: Yeah, you'd think it would have been a bigger decision especially considering that my whole life, I wanted to be a be an astronaut. I still do. And, you know, actively watching this space guard and space force conversations right now. But what had happened was really more of a kind of a slow process. And we've learned afterwards that our peers saw the writing on the wall. But myself, I think I fall into the category of accidental entrepreneur.

So what had happened was when I got to NASA, I had the opportunity to volunteer with Engineers Without Borders, NASA Johnson Space Center. The open source movement was starting. And I was in a role with NASA was really engaged with them about access and being able to make your own tools and support yourself independently. And then my co-founder, Matthew, was really involved in the 3D printer movement at the time, then had one of the very first printer bots from Kickstarter.

And it, you know, it didn't take long for that, those conversations to turn into conversations about having 3D printers. What we learned is that the things they wanted to make were not the size of a desktop printer. That was common at the time. They were, you know, the size of a birthing stool or lower limb prosthetic or tool. As we started collecting these use cases and came up with this idea basically to have an open source a 3D printer that was a size of a toilet.