[00:00.640 --> 00:02.280]  My name is Chris Meyer.
[00:02.440 --> 00:04.080]  I'm the founder at Sector67.
[00:04.540 --> 00:07.920]  We're a hacker space in Madison, Wisconsin started in 2010.
[00:08.320 --> 00:12.420]  I'm here today to share what I hope is some helpful information for you all.
[00:12.540 --> 00:13.880]  I'm excited to see so many people here.
[00:14.600 --> 00:17.980]  I've got some ideas on hackerspace design pattern.
[00:18.340 --> 00:24.600]  I'm mainly looking to share some knowledge about where we started and how we got to where we are today with you all.
[00:24.880 --> 00:30.840]  Hopefully some interesting stories, perhaps a little bit of financial insight and then ultimately some things not to do.
[00:31.040 --> 00:34.080]  So that way you don't have to learn from my mistakes.
[00:35.060 --> 00:38.220]  Where we are here in the U.S., we're in Madison, Wisconsin.
[00:38.440 --> 00:39.680]  So a flyover territory.
[00:39.920 --> 00:40.840]  You guys have all flown over.
[00:41.100 --> 00:44.020]  Known for beer, cheese and the Green Bay Packers, I think.
[00:44.240 --> 00:48.480]  It's probably covers most of the relevance for Wisconsin or north of Chicago.
[00:48.840 --> 00:52.540]  That's the other easy easy one that we use so people know where we are.
[00:52.860 --> 00:56.000]  I always get asked where the name comes from.
[00:56.420 --> 01:00.700]  I was down... I was a UW student and I went down to Argonne National Lab, which is down in Chicago.
[01:00.980 --> 01:02.840]  They have this advanced photon source.
[01:03.060 --> 01:06.180]  They essentially can make like an x-ray video camera with the thing.
[01:06.480 --> 01:13.800]  I was there while I was writing the business plan for the workshop and I noticed that they had this ring-shaped building down at the bottom split into these wedges.
[01:14.060 --> 01:20.440]  Each wedge is a tangent point off of this accelerator and it was called sector in a number and it sounded really cool.
[01:20.840 --> 01:22.860]  And writing a business plan, a name is just a name.
[01:23.260 --> 01:27.220]  And so I went to buy a website domain and all of the single digit domains were already bought.
[01:27.460 --> 01:30.340]  Somebody else owns, you know, sector one and sector five and whatever.
[01:31.040 --> 01:32.560]  67 was an arbitrary number.
[01:32.720 --> 01:38.600]  It was a number of members that were projected to be needed to be able to pay somebody a salary to run the space as well as keep the space in operation.
[01:39.100 --> 01:40.860]  And so arbitrary numbers for the win.
[01:41.140 --> 01:42.380]  Turns out it's really hard to say.
[01:42.600 --> 01:44.360]  Sector 67 is a bit of an alliteration.
[01:44.860 --> 01:47.240]  Stumbles up a lot of the news reporters, which is always fun.
[01:48.460 --> 01:49.300]  So who am I?
[01:49.420 --> 01:54.380]  I graduated from the University of Wisconsin Medicine in 2008 with a bachelor's of science and mechanical engineering.
[01:54.600 --> 01:57.920]  If you all remember, 2008 was a really bad time to be getting out of school.
[01:58.360 --> 02:00.920]  And hence, I had an opportunity to pursue grad school.
[02:01.120 --> 02:05.580]  I wasn't really interested in diesel combustion, but I was really interested in vehicles and things with wheels.
[02:05.680 --> 02:11.860]  And so I thought I can deal with things with wheels or things that are burning stuff for two years to stick around for school.
[02:11.880 --> 02:13.880]  And hopefully the economy looks a little better in 2010.
[02:14.400 --> 02:15.660]  That's ultimately what I ended up doing.
[02:16.280 --> 02:22.720]  While I was a student though, I had a friend of mine who came to me and said, Hey, I'm really interested in this invention competition, but I need a partner.
[02:23.060 --> 02:30.720]  And I had seen this invention competition that our campus hosted and thought it was neat, but didn't feel like I was prepared to do that by myself.
[02:30.940 --> 02:34.200]  So this opportunity came along, was a great thing for me to pursue.
[02:34.800 --> 02:41.380]  Ultimately, it led to a whole student career of pursuing business plans, business plan competitions and various competitions on campus.
[02:41.800 --> 02:43.480]  So this was not my plan.
[02:43.700 --> 02:50.080]  I do want to make very clear on here, if you look the first year at the bottom of all these categories.
[02:50.080 --> 02:51.340]  I was always a competitor.
[02:52.140 --> 02:53.200]  Anybody know what a competitor is?
[02:53.280 --> 02:54.080]  A loser, right?
[02:54.240 --> 02:54.960]  I was a loser.
[02:55.360 --> 02:58.360]  I participated in these, I lost, didn't win anything.
[02:59.040 --> 03:01.700]  But most importantly, I circled back and did it again.
[03:01.860 --> 03:06.180]  So my point here with this slide is not that, you know, I did all this great stuff, I want a much money.
[03:06.400 --> 03:07.360]  That is not the point.
[03:07.440 --> 03:09.600]  The point is I lost my ass the first time I did anything.
[03:10.020 --> 03:13.340]  And the only success was by doing it again and doing it again and doing it again.
[03:13.640 --> 03:15.140]  You also notice I never got first.
[03:15.920 --> 03:18.220]  I did consistently well, never first.
[03:18.400 --> 03:19.320]  So another life lesson.
[03:19.420 --> 03:23.480]  You don't have to get first, you just have to halfway try to do something and do decent enough.
[03:23.760 --> 03:28.620]  So the reason I bring this up is because I had done these contests and I won some money as a student.
[03:28.720 --> 03:35.560]  If I were smart, I would have taken my winnings and my student loans and smashed them together and then went out and got a real job and not be talking to you all today.
[03:36.080 --> 03:37.760]  Obviously, things did not go so well.
[03:37.960 --> 03:38.820]  I made bad choices.
[03:39.220 --> 03:39.920]  Here I am.
[03:41.420 --> 03:42.640]  So this is 2010.
[03:43.760 --> 03:47.080]  My last year of grad school, I had no good business plan ideas.
[03:47.360 --> 03:53.560]  The other thing I didn't tell you is that every year of this contest, someone else came to me with an idea and they said, hey, you want to be a partner?
[03:53.680 --> 03:54.400]  You want to work on this?
[03:54.540 --> 03:55.680]  You know, you've done this before.
[03:55.860 --> 03:56.500]  Can you help me out with it?
[03:57.280 --> 03:59.260]  This last year, I didn't have any partners.
[03:59.520 --> 04:00.900]  My friends had kind of all graduated.
[04:01.020 --> 04:03.680]  I was like the last bash and a grad student left.
[04:04.240 --> 04:12.900]  And I decided I would pitch a non-profit business in a for-profit like high-growth hockey stick model venture capital business plan contest because that's what they focused on.
[04:13.320 --> 04:14.360]  At least that was my perception.
[04:14.680 --> 04:20.240]  So I gave realistic financials like, hey, you know, we're not gonna make a lot of money, but we'll try and help people do stuff.
[04:21.120 --> 04:31.300]  And the main thing I was there to do was to gather real-life opinions from the business community and people that I respected and to see what they felt about this.
[04:31.400 --> 04:32.880]  Did they think this was a good fit for Madison?
[04:33.040 --> 04:34.060]  Did they think it was a good idea?
[04:34.260 --> 04:36.280]  Did they think I was going to fail miserably and lose all my money?
[04:36.440 --> 04:36.760]  Who knows?
[04:37.560 --> 04:43.580]  Ultimately, I told the judges that I needed $7,000 to buy the equipment to start the workshop and kind of go from there.
[04:44.020 --> 04:45.740]  That was way wrong, but that's not the point.
[04:46.840 --> 04:53.420]  They, of course, issued second place and gave me $7,000, which was kind of the like punch in the face like, all right, now you got the money.
[04:53.540 --> 04:55.280]  You're going to put your money where your mouth is and do this.
[04:56.040 --> 04:59.300]  This is what it looks like to be a student participating in a business plan competition.
[04:59.540 --> 05:01.080]  This gentleman on the right's name is John Nice.
[05:01.240 --> 05:05.660]  John Nice at the time was the responsible for the biggest venture capital investment firm in the state.
[05:06.100 --> 05:12.180]  So the university was bringing in like big, scary people to ask you hard questions, which was a really, really good experience.
[05:12.380 --> 05:17.140]  It gives you a lot of experience being able to talk to people like that and have them ask real questions about a real business.
[05:18.920 --> 05:22.520]  Ultimately, when I graduated, I had had this money from the contest winnings.
[05:22.640 --> 05:23.860]  I interviewed at Google.
[05:24.260 --> 05:26.680]  They were doing at the time this renewable energy is greater than coal.
[05:26.800 --> 05:29.480]  They're trying to do a concentrated solar thermal installation in Arizona.
[05:29.900 --> 05:32.420]  To me, that was like really, really cool.
[05:32.640 --> 05:35.800]  And they had kind of a general opportunity open to do that.
[05:36.180 --> 05:39.200]  I interviewed and then they sort of like changed what they were hiring for.
[05:39.300 --> 05:43.560]  And they wanted an embedded programming developer who had 10 years of software experience, which is not me.
[05:44.180 --> 05:47.840]  So ultimately, again, looked at the rest of the workforce, kind of looks scary.
[05:47.960 --> 05:49.780]  And I thought, you know, what the hell?
[05:50.420 --> 05:52.280]  Economy is sort of rocky yet.
[05:52.640 --> 05:55.240]  There's opportunity with places that we could rent.
[05:55.520 --> 05:58.220]  It seems like there's people who are interested, but let's like try to figure it out.
[05:58.680 --> 06:08.880]  So I went to the 2010 Maker Faire, brought my then girlfriend, now wife, along with, and we figured we'd set out, go check out what this Maker Faire thing was and go visit I3 Detroit.
[06:09.800 --> 06:11.320]  So I went there on the day one.
[06:11.500 --> 06:13.200]  I caught this guy on the right.
[06:13.360 --> 06:15.320]  I don't know if some of you guys might know who that is, hiding in the darkness.
[06:15.500 --> 06:18.480]  It's Mitch Altman, giving a talk on what a hackerspace was.
[06:18.700 --> 06:19.360]  I thought, well, that's me.
[06:19.440 --> 06:20.660]  I want to know what a hackerspace was.
[06:20.820 --> 06:23.520]  Maybe there's some of you all in the room now who want to know what a hackerspace is.
[06:24.700 --> 06:26.760]  It turns out they don't let anybody speak of these things.
[06:27.060 --> 06:30.600]  So day two, they're like, oh, this guy, he wants to start a hackerspace.
[06:30.740 --> 06:32.200]  Maybe he's got some stuff he can share.
[06:32.460 --> 06:33.760]  You know, he's doing like this business stuff.
[06:33.900 --> 06:34.720]  We're not really familiar with that.
[06:34.760 --> 06:35.840]  So maybe the audience has some questions.
[06:36.120 --> 06:38.280]  So I got invited onto the panel, which was hilarious.
[06:40.120 --> 06:41.840]  And, you know, I tried to contribute where I could.
[06:42.600 --> 06:48.440]  Ultimately, Mitch was kind of touring through Wisconsin and he had offered, you know, hey, if I'm ever in the state, I'd be happy to do an event.
[06:48.700 --> 06:49.400]  I teach soldering.
[06:49.520 --> 06:51.040]  I teach people how to build electronics.
[06:51.560 --> 06:56.280]  So we kind of didn't tell the university and put up some signs and got some people to show up in the evening.
[06:56.480 --> 07:00.600]  And, you know, how do you get permission to the university to host a soldering seminar in a class?
[07:00.860 --> 07:03.380]  And yeah, you just kind of do that and do it at night.
[07:03.500 --> 07:04.320]  Nobody worries about it.
[07:04.700 --> 07:09.020]  So Mitch came graciously, taught people how to solder, brought in one of his suitcases full of stuff.
[07:09.020 --> 07:09.920]  And we had a great time.
[07:10.260 --> 07:12.580]  And it seemed like there was interest in our community.
[07:12.900 --> 07:15.360]  It seemed like a lot of people showed out for that more than I expected.
[07:15.360 --> 07:17.180]  And I thought, this is the cool thing to do.
[07:17.660 --> 07:21.340]  So of course, the next logical thing is I can't keep like hiding at the university at night.
[07:21.460 --> 07:23.400]  We're going to have to like figure out a space to go rent.
[07:23.700 --> 07:26.900]  And these are real pictures of real places that I went looked at.
[07:27.520 --> 07:29.400]  The relevant one there is the bottom right.
[07:29.560 --> 07:33.320]  That is actually 1960s civil defense supplies stuck in a basement.
[07:33.660 --> 07:37.340]  The real estate person was walking me through the building was like, oh, nobody's wanted to go down in the basement.
[07:37.540 --> 07:38.640]  You want to go down in the basement?
[07:39.040 --> 07:41.280]  This is before the day, like cell phone flashlights.
[07:41.500 --> 07:44.560]  So I went down there with my point and shoot camera and flash one off.
[07:44.660 --> 07:47.260]  And I went, and I go back up.
[07:48.760 --> 07:53.080]  So that was an interesting reality of like looking around at places, trying to figure out what you're doing.
[07:53.380 --> 07:56.920]  Ultimately, this middle place in the center was an old lawnmower repair place.
[07:57.360 --> 07:59.500]  That's who we ended up signing a lease for.
[07:59.580 --> 08:00.460]  And by we, I mean me.
[08:00.620 --> 08:02.340]  I always say we, because it's a lot of volunteers.
[08:02.360 --> 08:04.140]  At this stage, it was literally just me.
[08:04.740 --> 08:10.420]  So I looked at all these places, and I signed a personal guarantee on a lease.
[08:10.540 --> 08:16.640]  And what that means is that I, no matter what, I'm going to lose $20,000 of the next year to make the space work.
[08:16.680 --> 08:22.940]  And we're either going to house some really big parties and get some money back, or maybe we'll like get some tools, get some people together and do some cool stuff.
[08:23.700 --> 08:27.600]  That was a super scary thing, like to have to do that.
[08:28.920 --> 08:30.380]  We had our first ever meeting there.
[08:30.540 --> 08:36.780]  This was like literally kind of a renovated, renovated, renovated, renovated and renovated again, added on to old crappy garage building.
[08:37.480 --> 08:41.300]  And that sort of, I think matches up well with all hackerspaces around the world.
[08:41.420 --> 08:43.960]  They always end up in like a little bit destitute real estate.
[08:44.260 --> 08:45.280]  And it was pretty cool.
[08:46.580 --> 08:48.440]  Stormy here made the first ever project.
[08:48.560 --> 08:49.640]  Never met this guy, walked in.
[08:49.640 --> 08:50.940]  He's like, Hey, I heard you got workspace.
[08:51.020 --> 08:52.600]  I need to build a bicycle.
[08:52.820 --> 08:54.360]  Somebody in your community is disabled.
[08:54.740 --> 08:55.840]  I'm trying to travel in through.
[08:55.940 --> 08:58.600]  I got a commission to build a bike so that they could ride a bike around.
[08:58.720 --> 08:59.800]  They got hurt in a bike accident.
[08:59.880 --> 09:01.040]  They don't have a sense of balance anymore.
[09:01.480 --> 09:04.660]  And so they wanted to make it so a caregiver could ride on the back, have steering and brakes.
[09:04.980 --> 09:09.200]  And then the gentleman in the front could pedal, but make sure he couldn't fall over.
[09:09.480 --> 09:16.580]  So this was a really cool first project really to see, come out of the shop and see the success of, and then understand and realize sort of what was there.
[09:17.660 --> 09:24.600]  The student newspaper, of course, picked up a headline, which is by far the best description I've ever seen, which is, East Side Sector hosts hackers.
[09:25.080 --> 09:28.760]  And the byline is, UW grads program anything and everything at nondescript warehouse.
[09:31.360 --> 09:32.080]  Total match.
[09:32.280 --> 09:32.860]  They nailed it.
[09:34.360 --> 09:36.520]  It was a classic crappy building though.
[09:37.020 --> 09:38.640]  So, you know, there's roof leaks.
[09:38.780 --> 09:44.360]  Thank God for hail as our landlord is never going to fix the roof, but the old drive by hail guy, oh, there's some roof damage there.
[09:44.440 --> 09:45.320]  You guys, we need a new roof.
[09:45.440 --> 09:46.620]  We can follow our claim with insurance.
[09:47.140 --> 09:48.020]  So we got a new roof.
[09:48.100 --> 09:49.380]  And so we're kind of here.
[09:49.620 --> 09:55.140]  So this 2010 to kind of conceptualize the idea, wrote this business plan, this fictitious plan around what would sort of work.
[09:55.380 --> 10:00.800]  And 2010 to 2012 was like this slow determined growth, you know, sort of day to day people show up, do stuff.
[10:00.960 --> 10:01.400]  It was cool.
[10:01.880 --> 10:03.280]  Very slowly acquired tools.
[10:03.560 --> 10:07.560]  My wife was super happy to see all this crap get out of the apartment and have like a space for it.
[10:07.840 --> 10:08.540]  So that was good.
[10:09.440 --> 10:16.760]  Um, ultimately though, 2012, the landlord came and said, Hey, just to let you know, your lease is month to month.
[10:16.920 --> 10:18.280]  And we're going to like level this building.
[10:18.400 --> 10:22.140]  We got a proposal from a developer to do some housing project here, a housing redevelopment.
[10:22.200 --> 10:24.140]  And we're going to, we're pretty serious.
[10:24.300 --> 10:25.480]  We're thinking about moving forward on that.
[10:25.600 --> 10:28.200]  You guys should really think about where you're going to go next or what you're going to do next.
[10:28.740 --> 10:29.440]  Our landlord was nice.
[10:29.640 --> 10:33.600]  They had a crappy building and they were sort of, uh, helping out artists and stuff in the community.
[10:33.600 --> 10:36.240]  But this housing development was ultimately what their plan was.
[10:36.340 --> 10:39.240]  They were beholden to an investment group and they were trying to make money on what they do.
[10:39.860 --> 10:44.780]  And so, um, thankfully that quarter like subsided, that project fell through.
[10:44.900 --> 10:46.740]  They didn't have the state financing they were hoping for.
[10:47.200 --> 10:52.260]  And consequently, we had a little bit of a break and a little bit of a break, started 2013 hit.
[10:52.360 --> 10:57.460]  And we really hit a stride, had a lot of community partnerships, working a lot of projects, a lot of MakerBots.
[10:57.540 --> 10:58.980]  This was the early days of 3D printing.
[10:59.200 --> 11:04.100]  This really gives a fun perspective on like modern printers, where people are so upset that they don't just print perfectly.
[11:04.460 --> 11:10.380]  This stuff was like, you manually set the bed, you set the head, you hit print, and it just printed relative to wherever the hell it was.
[11:10.720 --> 11:15.060]  And you adjusted the bed speed to move relative to the extruder, because you couldn't adjust the extruder.
[11:15.180 --> 11:16.940]  It just ran at whatever the hell speed it ran at.
[11:16.940 --> 11:20.260]  So every single one of these was tuned to run to the extruder and move the bed around fast.
[11:20.660 --> 11:23.820]  And they were called cupcakes because they could literally print a thing the size of a cupcake.
[11:24.220 --> 11:27.320]  So that was the rationale around MakerBots.
[11:28.040 --> 11:33.460]  The cool thing was then is there was a student who wanted to build a better prosthetic gripper.
[11:33.600 --> 11:36.980]  And so he was participating in the same invention competitions that I did as a student.
[11:37.220 --> 11:45.580]  And so I was really, really excited to be able to help him work through the development process and be able to do that in an environment that really supported those ideas and those things.
[11:45.580 --> 11:53.900]  So he worked on a differential grasper and went and competed in the invention competition and did really well and actually ultimately formed another business in a subsequent year.
[11:54.020 --> 11:55.300]  And he's still running that business today.
[11:55.520 --> 12:01.420]  And so this was a cool experience for me to be on the other side of helping other people a way that I wish I had been helped when I was doing these things.
[12:01.880 --> 12:03.520]  We hosted a thing called Startup Weekend.
[12:03.620 --> 12:11.520]  It was like a 54-hour work over the weekend building companies and inspire other entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurship ideas in the community.
[12:11.840 --> 12:13.100]  This is the early days at Kickstarter.
[12:13.100 --> 12:16.880]  So somebody made, it's called Portable Scores, it's the Digitally.
[12:17.000 --> 12:24.360]  So the idea was like a scoreboard you could set on the side of a pickup game of soccer or whatever, and you could keep track in a very visible way so the teams could play a little more competitively.
[12:24.680 --> 12:28.420]  Of course, you know, when you got the mini bikes, good to run out of time around the race there too.
[12:30.120 --> 12:32.520]  Somebody called me and said they wanted to host a play.
[12:32.820 --> 12:35.680]  And I was thinking like, there's a million places to host a play.
[12:35.920 --> 12:38.440]  Why the hell do you want to host it out of hackerspace?
[12:38.440 --> 12:42.720]  And then I saw the title, Gruesome Playground Injuries, and I was like, ah, this is a good fit.
[12:42.900 --> 12:44.700]  Maybe we can make that happen.
[12:45.060 --> 12:50.120]  So a lot of it was around trying to use the space in a flexible way and see what the community wanted to do with it.
[12:50.380 --> 12:54.260]  There's also an event that my wife Heather here, she's going to kill me for that picture.
[12:55.620 --> 13:00.860]  We saw at I3 Detroit where the Detroit Maker Faire was called Detroit Soup.
[13:01.100 --> 13:03.440]  And so the idea was soup, salad, and bread for a minimum amount is like $10.
[13:03.440 --> 13:07.080]  And you take the proceeds from the meal and you have presenters during the meal.
[13:07.180 --> 13:08.240]  So imagine you all are here.
[13:08.340 --> 13:10.240]  You pay 10 bucks to get in eating food.
[13:10.240 --> 13:17.100]  And then somebody up here is presenting a community project that they can innovate and work on within the next month to come back to the next meal and talk about progress.
[13:17.440 --> 13:20.680]  So we were giving away essentially micro grants from the proceeds from the food.
[13:20.780 --> 13:22.160]  It was like $500 to $1,000.
[13:22.300 --> 13:27.900]  And it was a really cool community event activity that got, again, a lot of other help to kind of spurn and grow a community.
[13:29.020 --> 13:33.600]  One of the things that's near and dear to my heart is teaching and encouraging other people to learn.
[13:33.860 --> 13:35.980]  This was a MG21 students.
[13:36.160 --> 13:37.840]  There was an alternative school nearby us.
[13:38.200 --> 13:40.060]  And the students wanted to build a 3D printer.
[13:40.220 --> 13:44.660]  And so their teachers had reached out and said, hey, do you think you could help a group of our students put together a 3D printer?
[13:45.280 --> 13:51.660]  It turns out the idea of building a 3D printer is way more fun than the pragmatic actual like day-to-day build the 3D printer.
[13:52.140 --> 13:54.540]  But to their credit, they got the thing together as a Rostock Max.
[13:54.740 --> 13:56.560]  It was a Delta printer, which is a whole another headache.
[13:56.800 --> 13:58.680]  But it looked really cool in the pictures.
[13:58.720 --> 14:00.220]  They got to pick what they wanted to build.
[14:00.220 --> 14:00.960]  So that's what we did.
[14:02.000 --> 14:07.220]  But that was a really fun experience to be able to see the impact that you could have again to students and to learning.
[14:07.800 --> 14:09.700]  I got invited down to South by Southwest.
[14:09.840 --> 14:16.180]  I gave a talk on hackerspaces down there, which was another cool engagement to be able to go across the country and see what's going on.
[14:16.540 --> 14:19.980]  And then I don't know if anybody's familiar with this Power Wheels racing series.
[14:20.180 --> 14:21.200]  This is PPPRS.
[14:21.280 --> 14:22.060]  It was around for a while.
[14:22.800 --> 14:30.640]  We were the three-time reigning champions in kids electric vehicle racing, which was, yeah, no, trust me, no applause necessary or deserved.
[14:32.040 --> 14:34.900]  There was a $500 budget racing car racing contest.
[14:35.320 --> 14:38.400]  And the cars, prior to our cars, kind of went like 10 miles an hour.
[14:38.580 --> 14:40.880]  And you'd cruise around the track and had plastic tires.
[14:40.880 --> 14:42.960]  You'd skid around and look for moxie points.
[14:43.760 --> 14:49.820]  And unfortunately for the organizers, three of us were college students that built race cars and myself included.
[14:50.220 --> 14:52.740]  So we wanted to make the cars go fast.
[14:52.900 --> 14:55.460]  So they ended up going about 30, 35 miles an hour.
[14:55.740 --> 15:00.580]  And that was the point where they were like, yeah, like one layer of hay bales isn't really enough.
[15:01.060 --> 15:03.140]  And so anyway, we had some fun doing that.
[15:03.620 --> 15:08.320]  The local press picked this up and was like, oh, we had this champion racer from the community.
[15:09.680 --> 15:11.400]  Wired Magazine ran a story on it.
[15:11.600 --> 15:13.200]  And then also we got on the cover of Make Magazine.
[15:13.720 --> 15:18.160]  Much of this, you're going to poor Peter here, who was one of my, at the time, high school students, who was very shy.
[15:19.120 --> 15:21.080]  And so I got him to the bottom left.
[15:21.120 --> 15:22.580]  I got the old only signed copy.
[15:23.980 --> 15:26.580]  But the point is, is balancing culture.
[15:26.740 --> 15:30.080]  So this is like a very public, very kind of out there thing.
[15:30.620 --> 15:34.800]  But the people at the shop, like I walked in one morning and this was a sign stuck to the door.
[15:35.060 --> 15:36.680]  It was like, don't trust technology.
[15:36.680 --> 15:39.400]  We had an art contest at 11 p.m.
[15:39.800 --> 15:41.120]  And you told us to use up the paper.
[15:41.380 --> 15:45.080]  And so you get bonus points for serif fonts written at the bottom.
[15:46.200 --> 15:48.400]  So yeah, this is, I mean, it's hackerspaces, right?
[15:48.460 --> 15:49.560]  It's all kinds of crazy stuff.
[15:51.860 --> 15:59.880]  Ultimately, this picture here, it's a little bit hard to see, but our city, this is kind of illustrating the problem with our city.
[15:59.960 --> 16:01.040]  Our city is built in an isthmus.
[16:01.040 --> 16:10.120]  So we've got the state capitol here, campuses here, and then there's a whole bunch of sort of state level, like university hospitals, all in this area, south of campus.
[16:10.380 --> 16:15.000]  So from a hackerspace perspective, to try to stay relevant to people, you want to be as close to campus as you can.
[16:15.600 --> 16:18.680]  Unfortunately, land is gobbled up by people who have way more money than we do.
[16:19.180 --> 16:25.480]  And so this kind of in the back of my head, this inkling of like, trying to find a permanent space to house this place had always been there.
[16:25.960 --> 16:29.420]  And so this was a high altitude balloon that we flew that happened to go right over the city.
[16:29.460 --> 16:32.240]  But it just gives us a really interesting perspective so you guys can understand.
[16:32.420 --> 16:33.960]  Like we're buttressed by these two lakes.
[16:34.200 --> 16:35.580]  It makes property expensive.
[16:35.980 --> 16:38.920]  And then nothing's gotten worse than property recently.
[16:38.920 --> 16:43.560]  So this was a hard thing to kind of come to terms with and figure out how to move forward with.
[16:44.980 --> 16:47.060]  So the next thing then is we had some attention.
[16:47.400 --> 16:50.880]  We had people who wanted to sort of take advantage of that attention in the community.
[16:51.220 --> 16:53.240]  But in the sense that this time was a partnership.
[16:53.240 --> 16:59.320]  So the idea was the entrepreneur community said, hey, you're doing really cool things, stuff that we don't understand, but we see that it's valuable to the community.
[17:00.080 --> 17:03.440]  We'd like to see like a tech hub get built.
[17:03.800 --> 17:08.700]  So would you guys be interested in us partnering with the tech hub to be able to try to make...
[17:08.700 --> 17:09.920]  We know you need a permanent home.
[17:09.960 --> 17:14.620]  So we'd have been out in the community pushing that message, trying to see if we could scare up something that we could get into.
[17:15.100 --> 17:23.800]  So of course, classic marketers are like, oh, we've got to get a picture of the Capitol in the background and the run up to the Capitol on this isthmus and gets you on the rooftop and take some pictures and do some marketing.
[17:24.180 --> 17:27.160]  And so this worked on for three years.
[17:27.300 --> 17:38.540]  So we had weekly meetings for three years trying to push the ball forward on building out like a community developed space that was entrepreneurial led and to try to push to having a permanent home.
[17:38.720 --> 17:45.640]  Our literal one condition was that we had to either condo the building so that we own the space that we were in or otherwise own the building outright.
[17:45.900 --> 17:53.300]  There was no way that we were going to be renting again because the whole notion here is we want to move all this crap one time, not move it again, and then be good.
[17:54.220 --> 18:03.200]  So we got to kind of planning out a variety of buildings, toured through a lot of buildings, looked at a lot of stuff, and ultimately worked forward on this for a long, long, long time.
[18:04.220 --> 18:06.380]  Three years into it, of course.
[18:07.020 --> 18:08.260]  Anybody can see this coming, right?
[18:08.360 --> 18:09.740]  Except for me, working on it hard.
[18:11.200 --> 18:16.240]  The press, of course, got out their Photoshop skills and the runner was ready to go, slipped on the banana peel.
[18:17.460 --> 18:19.060]  So it's hard to see down here at the bottom.
[18:19.200 --> 18:20.700]  It says, it's a quote from me.
[18:20.800 --> 18:24.600]  It says, we were very concerned about having a place to be because the amount of equipment we have makes it very hard to move.
[18:24.820 --> 18:26.600]  Resetting our business takes about two years.
[18:27.180 --> 18:28.300]  How wrong was I?
[18:28.500 --> 18:30.760]  Two years, not nearly as long as it takes.
[18:31.940 --> 18:36.260]  Ultimately, the partners of this project had an opportunity to partner with American Family Insurance.
[18:36.540 --> 18:38.480]  American Family is headquartered in Madison.
[18:39.060 --> 18:41.060]  They saw this as like, oh, this would be cool.
[18:41.180 --> 18:44.440]  We want to build a building and we want to have some community buy-in and building this building.
[18:44.440 --> 18:47.360]  So why don't we invite this entrepreneurship product development?
[18:47.640 --> 18:50.760]  It turns out American Family, a lot of their money actually goes into an investment arm.
[18:50.900 --> 18:52.520]  They invest money into high-growth startups.
[18:52.960 --> 18:53.740]  Big surprise.
[18:53.740 --> 18:56.320]  What do you think insurance companies do with the money that they're giving them?
[18:57.000 --> 18:58.880]  I made a handy Venn diagram here at the bottom.
[18:59.020 --> 19:00.300]  Hopefully, it's easy enough to read.
[19:01.500 --> 19:05.880]  Not a lot of overlap, it turns out, between insurance companies and hackerspaces.
[19:05.880 --> 19:08.840]  This is not a thing that they are super excited about.
[19:09.100 --> 19:13.220]  And so to me, looking at this opportunity for partnership made no sense at all.
[19:13.220 --> 19:19.020]  The opportunity was to rent from them, guarantee they were going to look at us and be like, there was like a kid in there with a saw.
[19:19.300 --> 19:20.520]  We can't have any of that.
[19:20.700 --> 19:22.640]  You're going to have to straighten this out right away.
[19:22.880 --> 19:23.460]  No chance.
[19:24.020 --> 19:26.860]  And so you could see the writing on the wall like this was not going to work.
[19:27.000 --> 19:32.600]  And so we folded, folded three years of work, said, never mind, we're going to figure it out on our own.
[19:32.780 --> 19:33.760]  We will move forward.
[19:34.120 --> 19:35.180]  We need to own the space.
[19:35.400 --> 19:36.200]  We need to know what we're doing.
[19:37.280 --> 19:40.000]  And you will run into this if you get into developing new spaces.
[19:40.520 --> 19:46.060]  Again, there's nothing wrong with this as long as all the stakeholders are on the same page and we're ready to move forward on the terms that we could move forward on.
[19:46.720 --> 19:51.380]  But at that time, we had to also know like, no, we're going to have to fold out of this.
[19:52.000 --> 19:55.960]  Of course, at the exact same time, our landlord's like, hey, we got a new development project.
[19:56.300 --> 19:58.460]  This is a four year kind of gap.
[19:59.180 --> 20:00.620]  We're really going to do it this time.
[20:00.760 --> 20:02.300]  Like we got financing is way better.
[20:02.580 --> 20:03.340]  Interest rates are better.
[20:03.460 --> 20:04.480]  Everything looks better for us.
[20:04.640 --> 20:05.860]  You guys should figure this out again.
[20:07.540 --> 20:10.100]  We had a real estate agent who was chasing me for years.
[20:10.880 --> 20:16.600]  Annette, to her patients, understood that I was crazy and understood that I had terms that were like non-negotiable.
[20:16.740 --> 20:21.960]  And she gave me space to say, if I found a property, I could negotiate directly with the owner.
[20:22.320 --> 20:28.440]  But if she found the property, then she would get to be the agent in the middle and be the tenant representative and help us and support us through the process.
[20:29.080 --> 20:32.540]  And so she came to me and said, hey, I heard things aren't going great.
[20:32.540 --> 20:34.160]  I think I've got a property for you guys.
[20:34.300 --> 20:35.060]  It's not very far away.
[20:35.360 --> 20:37.880]  We should go take a look at it and we should see if it's a fit or not.
[20:38.320 --> 20:41.160]  Turned out the people who owned it owned a lot of property in the area.
[20:41.340 --> 20:45.980]  They were very tied to the community and they knew they'd heard about us and kind of didn't understand what we were doing, but thought it was cool.
[20:46.400 --> 20:48.420]  And so they were willing to sit down and talk to us.
[20:49.460 --> 20:50.940]  We were able to put forward a verbal offer.
[20:51.060 --> 20:52.680]  They gave us some, some nice terms on it.
[20:54.040 --> 20:56.920]  And the hard part then was you got to figure out how to pay for this thing.
[20:57.220 --> 21:00.580]  So it's one thing to like figure out where you can go and put a number on it.
[21:00.580 --> 21:04.140]  It's a whole nother thing to actually scare up the money, to put it together, to move forward.
[21:04.460 --> 21:12.760]  And the 400,000 is literally to buy an aluminum skin, 1949 warehouse, no heat, no air conditioning, floors all out of level.
[21:13.680 --> 21:17.120]  There's raccoons living in the roof, there's squirrels in the walls, there's rats.
[21:17.320 --> 21:21.600]  I mean, it was, it made our current property look really nice, put it that way.
[21:22.220 --> 21:23.480]  So we got back to planning.
[21:23.620 --> 21:26.900]  And so we did, we laser cut out like work boundaries for the tools.
[21:26.900 --> 21:31.700]  And like part of this was like to keep people thinking about how to structure a space and how to move forward.
[21:32.040 --> 21:35.680]  As, as a membership community, of course, my job is to keep our members happy.
[21:36.000 --> 21:42.960]  When they hear like, oh, we're moving into a shithole building with no heat, no air conditioning, and the guy running the show might be crazy.
[21:43.700 --> 21:49.700]  You got to do something to give people a productive outlet to like focus on and think about and, and conceptualize around.
[21:49.920 --> 21:52.500]  And so this was a really engaging, interesting activity.
[21:52.500 --> 21:54.000]  We made like a dozen of these layouts.
[21:54.160 --> 21:55.500]  This is not the layout that we did.
[21:55.660 --> 21:57.440]  And ultimately, none of them were the layouts that we did.
[21:57.560 --> 22:05.000]  But it was a really provoking exercise to try to think about noisy, dirty stuff, transitioning into clean, quiet space.
[22:06.260 --> 22:12.380]  Of course, the press was tracking all this because they had a ton of clicks on the like, oh, you know, this project fell apart and imploded.
[22:12.500 --> 22:13.540]  They always loved to run those stories.
[22:13.920 --> 22:17.200]  And so they wanted to be the first ones to pick up the scoop on like, where were we going to?
[22:17.200 --> 22:19.060]  So this is the building we were looking at.
[22:21.280 --> 22:23.520]  It was a construction warehouse, storage warehouse.
[22:24.300 --> 22:28.080]  And we needed to fundraise to be able to get enough money to build this thing out.
[22:28.240 --> 22:30.560]  So the $400,000 was just to buy land by the building.
[22:31.160 --> 22:41.300]  We estimated, wrongly, that it would take about $750,000 to build out the rest of the structure, get reasonable walls around it, get it insulated, get it heated, those kinds of things.
[22:41.520 --> 22:42.640]  Make a floor that's sort of flat.
[22:42.640 --> 22:42.680]  So that's what we're going to do with that.
[22:44.140 --> 22:46.960]  My lesson here is a trick for fundraising.
[22:47.660 --> 22:51.220]  Later on in the slides, I'll show you, I didn't earn any money from this project at all.
[22:51.300 --> 22:52.460]  This was like my job, right?
[22:52.560 --> 22:54.560]  Full-time job, like 80 hours a week kind of thing.
[22:55.300 --> 22:58.640]  I took no salary for five years doing this.
[22:58.800 --> 23:00.320]  I worked other jobs.
[23:00.320 --> 23:06.480]  I did consulting, I did contracting, all sorts of goofy stuff, because I needed this project to like have legs and run and have a runway.
[23:06.780 --> 23:17.240]  And the notion that we were going to need to do a fundraising campaign at some point by deferring a salary for a long time, I was able to get about a quarter million dollars in the bank just in cash, knowing this was going to have to happen.
[23:17.840 --> 23:24.460]  And that allowed us to transition to be like, oh, we've got $300,000 towards the $750,000 goal.
[23:25.420 --> 23:34.960]  As you guys know from watching Kickstarters and other things, if you go out there and you have zero dollars, no one except for like your grandma who loves you is going to give you $20 and that's going to be the end of it.
[23:34.960 --> 23:39.240]  If you can go out to the fundraising campaign and you can say, hey, I've got a bunch of money.
[23:39.240 --> 23:41.240]  We just need everybody else to chip in a little bit more.
[23:41.640 --> 23:43.520]  You'll be infinitely more successful.
[23:44.240 --> 23:51.380]  Ultimately, the other point down here is, you know, $3,000 is a lot of money, but it's not like an insurmountable, insane amount of money.
[23:51.620 --> 23:54.520]  So we had 118 people who gave us about $3,000 on average.
[23:54.700 --> 23:57.660]  The largest single donor was somebody who gave us $70,000.
[23:58.460 --> 24:04.860]  It was a friend of mine from college who had done a real startup from again, meeting from these business fund contests.
[24:04.980 --> 24:07.060]  There were other people doing real businesses that made real money.
[24:07.860 --> 24:11.540]  Ultimately, they were able to sell and they said, hey, you know, it was really fun working with you.
[24:11.600 --> 24:13.120]  I hear you're doing cool stuff in the city.
[24:13.220 --> 24:14.060]  I hear you're helping students.
[24:14.200 --> 24:15.960]  You're helping other people perform and build businesses.
[24:16.400 --> 24:17.420]  I want to encourage that.
[24:17.620 --> 24:20.280]  And so ultimately, they said, we'll help out.
[24:20.440 --> 24:22.500]  That was the money that we needed to close on the building.
[24:22.640 --> 24:25.720]  We were short and they were like, look, we'll help you out over the hump.
[24:25.720 --> 24:26.360]  Let's do this.
[24:27.760 --> 24:29.260]  We should have ripped the building down.
[24:29.500 --> 24:31.340]  This was halfway torn down.
[24:31.500 --> 24:37.220]  We were tearing all the old insulation, tearing all of like the poor framing, the drop ceiling that had been rained on for years.
[24:37.220 --> 24:39.640]  There's literally like a dead raccoon up here in the ceiling.
[24:39.780 --> 24:41.220]  It was, it was a little rough.
[24:42.520 --> 24:43.280]  Poor raccoon.
[24:45.300 --> 24:47.340]  And I've been alluding to this the whole time.
[24:47.580 --> 24:48.120]  A little crazy.
[24:48.540 --> 24:50.360]  The deal is this building was landlocked.
[24:50.400 --> 24:52.940]  We had a talco on one side of us, two roads and a railroad.
[24:52.940 --> 24:55.400]  So there's no way we were ever going to be able to expand our property.
[24:56.040 --> 25:02.580]  So the thought process was rather than have a 10,000 square foot building today, we could have a 20,000 square foot space someday.
[25:03.240 --> 25:10.400]  If we could put together enough money to lift the roof up, add another floor now and make that happen before we start renovating it.
[25:10.820 --> 25:13.300]  And again, we're working on like a limited timeline.
[25:13.520 --> 25:14.740]  Like our landlord is on our ass.
[25:14.860 --> 25:16.860]  So like, hey, 2017 is going to roll around quick.
[25:17.020 --> 25:18.020]  You guys better figure out what you're doing.
[25:18.160 --> 25:19.920]  End of this year, we're really thinking about doing this.
[25:20.420 --> 25:24.220]  And so we talked to some house moving companies.
[25:24.380 --> 25:28.400]  Chicago is actually famous for having moved like the entire downtown to put sewage underneath it.
[25:28.540 --> 25:30.200]  They built all the buildings as low as they could.
[25:30.440 --> 25:32.120]  Later on, sewers came out.
[25:32.260 --> 25:36.340]  Turned out people could like flush waste down the toilet, wanted it to go away instead of go in the swamp underneath them.
[25:36.460 --> 25:40.300]  So they lifted up all the buildings in Chicago or moved them to put in all the sewer system.
[25:40.640 --> 25:45.540]  So our region is kind of known for like, you know, the goofy, crazy things with really big things.
[25:46.000 --> 25:50.140]  So there's a house moving company that a family owned business, which is how they get insurance.
[25:50.460 --> 25:51.940]  It's all family or owners.
[25:52.220 --> 25:54.240]  No employee insurance required.
[25:55.360 --> 25:57.880]  And let me get to...
[25:57.880 --> 25:59.220]  This might work, might not.
[25:59.360 --> 25:59.660]  Let's see.
[26:00.080 --> 26:01.420]  Oh, got to click over here.
[26:02.580 --> 26:04.840]  And then I got to pull VLC over.
[26:05.100 --> 26:05.260]  Nope.
[26:06.900 --> 26:07.960]  There, we're on it.
[26:08.020 --> 26:08.380]  Hang on.
[26:10.880 --> 26:15.380]  And I got a cute video here of the building going up.
[26:16.940 --> 26:19.240]  So this is you riding on the roof of the building.
[26:20.260 --> 26:24.240]  And what they're doing is they've got these huge piles of timber, that's all oak cribbing.
[26:24.560 --> 26:28.980]  And they've got a one foot hydraulic jack on top and then two independent jack systems.
[26:29.420 --> 26:33.880]  And the independent jack systems literally have a person on one side of the room and a person on the other side of the room, and they're watching each other.
[26:34.060 --> 26:38.140]  And they're adjusting the hydraulic flow to keep the building leveled as they go up.
[26:38.280 --> 26:41.480]  So they go up a foot, then you'll see them run up to the top of the column, throw these timbers in.
[26:41.480 --> 26:43.240]  And these timbers are like 80, 90 pounds a piece.
[26:43.520 --> 26:49.440]  Set the building back down on the timbers, reset the jack up a foot, then they jack up another foot, and they're just doing that 10 times.
[26:50.080 --> 26:50.980]  Sounds really easy.
[26:53.380 --> 26:54.320]  It's a little bit of work.
[26:54.540 --> 26:57.440]  And then you can see all the equipment running around, these folks running around.
[26:57.600 --> 27:05.300]  So it cost us $25,000 to lift the roof, which, again, for the future needs of space, really crazy cheap.
[27:05.640 --> 27:09.200]  Our only other quote was a firm out of Chicago, a quarter million dollars.
[27:09.740 --> 27:12.480]  So when these guys were like, ah, yeah, 25K, we'll get that done for you.
[27:12.560 --> 27:15.140]  We were like, where do we sign?
[27:15.980 --> 27:19.140]  We waited a week, called them on the phone, talked to them, like, all right, yeah.
[27:19.320 --> 27:22.720]  So, I mean, you know, a little expensive, but, like, we think we might be able to swing it.
[27:23.600 --> 27:24.840]  And where do we sign?
[27:25.260 --> 27:26.480]  And so that's what we ended up doing.
[27:26.880 --> 27:29.260]  And so they got the outside columns on.
[27:29.360 --> 27:35.260]  So you can see we had put in this metal framework underneath here, got these outside columns in, and then the roof was supported.
[27:35.460 --> 27:38.800]  And our neighbors were all like, what the hell happened?
[27:38.800 --> 27:42.600]  I was home in the morning, and I came home in the evening, and the building is bigger than it used to be.
[27:43.920 --> 27:49.340]  And so these guys, when they finished up, they told me it's the biggest thing they've ever moved the highest.
[27:50.360 --> 27:57.220]  Which is good to know when they're done, not when they're starting.
[27:58.860 --> 28:00.720]  Let me get us restarted here.
[28:03.520 --> 28:04.480]  And, yeah.
[28:04.720 --> 28:09.800]  So, you know, if everybody already thinks you're nuts, what's the harm?
[28:12.560 --> 28:15.200]  So, if anybody's squeamish, the next slide.
[28:15.720 --> 28:16.580]  You've been warned.
[28:16.740 --> 28:18.900]  It's not terrible, but it's me being hurt.
[28:19.840 --> 28:23.240]  So the headline is, Man Hurt in East Side Explosion, Fire Department Says.
[28:24.140 --> 28:29.940]  So I was working late at night, working on getting this building stuff ready and getting these columns in place.
[28:31.520 --> 28:32.560]  And, yeah.
[28:32.720 --> 28:33.620]  Sorry, folks.
[28:34.080 --> 28:36.060]  That's why I've got the cool-looking arms.
[28:36.140 --> 28:37.100]  Only in hindsight.
[28:38.880 --> 28:40.220]  So I got hurt.
[28:40.400 --> 28:42.220]  And I'll cover that in another two slides.
[28:43.720 --> 28:44.980]  And there was a Kickstarter.
[28:45.340 --> 28:49.080]  And so the community got together in six days.
[28:49.600 --> 28:52.000]  Some friends raised $113,000.
[28:52.880 --> 28:54.800]  And that allowed us to keep moving forward.
[28:55.540 --> 28:56.700]  Anybody else a super nerd?
[28:56.980 --> 28:58.440]  Ever see this cover here?
[29:00.060 --> 29:02.320]  This is criticality accidents.
[29:02.520 --> 29:06.780]  These are when, in the nuclear development, something trivial and stupid happens.
[29:07.220 --> 29:10.520]  So somebody, you know, has the demon core or the atomic bomb parts.
[29:10.760 --> 29:12.380]  They slap them together and a bunch of people die.
[29:14.440 --> 29:15.740]  I am a super nerd.
[29:15.840 --> 29:16.500]  And you read through those.
[29:16.620 --> 29:17.720]  And it's all, like, trivial things.
[29:17.900 --> 29:19.400]  Like, just stupid things combined.
[29:19.700 --> 29:20.420]  Circumstance combined.
[29:20.600 --> 29:21.120]  People get hurt.
[29:22.500 --> 29:23.900]  I had two trivial areas.
[29:24.080 --> 29:25.120]  Placement and Circumstance.
[29:25.920 --> 29:28.620]  I was working on moving this column.
[29:28.740 --> 29:29.860]  Probably not this column.
[29:29.980 --> 29:30.840]  But a column very similar.
[29:31.080 --> 29:32.300]  This column is 700 pounds.
[29:32.340 --> 29:33.160]  It's 14 feet tall.
[29:33.700 --> 29:35.420]  And I needed to get it into a certain spot.
[29:35.420 --> 29:38.000]  In order to get it placed in the right spot on the foundation.
[29:38.880 --> 29:40.760]  The forklift couldn't quite get where it needed to go.
[29:40.980 --> 29:42.260]  So I was going to scooch it.
[29:42.380 --> 29:44.400]  And I was working at 11 o'clock at night by myself.
[29:45.020 --> 29:46.280]  Which is not a good sign.
[29:47.000 --> 29:51.500]  And the day prior, I had gotten a bottle for the propane-powered forklift.
[29:51.800 --> 29:52.900]  And I brought it inside.
[29:53.100 --> 29:54.460]  And I've got a 10,000 square foot warehouse.
[29:54.580 --> 29:57.300]  And I just set it somewhere, right?
[29:57.440 --> 29:59.400]  I mean, no spots as good or as bad as any.
[30:00.640 --> 30:02.100]  Mythbusters could not reproduce this.
[30:03.700 --> 30:06.400]  This column tipped over and there's a thing called a crush ring.
[30:06.500 --> 30:07.520]  That's what the top of this column is.
[30:07.660 --> 30:09.000]  It's to guard the valves and the valve assembly.
[30:09.340 --> 30:12.620]  This column tipped over and it missed the crush ring by like an eighth of an inch.
[30:12.820 --> 30:15.500]  It hit the shoulder of the tank and can opener the tank.
[30:15.680 --> 30:18.580]  Kicked it over and fortunately shot it away from me about 15 feet.
[30:19.260 --> 30:22.500]  The old primitive brain kicked in.
[30:22.500 --> 30:26.220]  You smell the propane and you're like, oh, the door is like right next to where that tank went.
[30:26.300 --> 30:27.760]  Maybe I should, oh no, I should go the other way.
[30:28.100 --> 30:29.440]  So I took off, started running.
[30:30.040 --> 30:33.540]  Got about 10 feet away and the forklift was idling and it kicked off the propane.
[30:33.580 --> 30:35.320]  So I built my own fuel air bomb.
[30:35.540 --> 30:37.300]  Got to watch the flames catch up.
[30:37.840 --> 30:38.440]  It's not good.
[30:40.580 --> 30:45.220]  So turns out one of these bottles of propane needs a lot more respect than I think anybody gives them.
[30:45.220 --> 30:51.300]  They have 948.08 sticks of TNT inside of them.
[30:51.820 --> 30:53.320]  Not the same release rate.
[30:53.400 --> 30:58.360]  So if anybody's a super combustion nerd, the TNT releases way faster than a propane burns.
[30:58.500 --> 30:59.260]  But the point is still there.
[30:59.340 --> 31:00.480]  There's a lot of energy in that thing.
[31:02.380 --> 31:03.760]  So I got hurt.
[31:03.760 --> 31:06.480]  I get to spend 30 days in the hospital.
[31:06.900 --> 31:08.160]  Where is my slide?
[31:09.180 --> 31:10.220]  We'll get to it eventually.
[31:11.660 --> 31:13.560]  And yeah, burns are no fun.
[31:13.560 --> 31:17.720]  So please be respectful around accelerants, fire producing things.
[31:18.040 --> 31:18.560]  Be smart.
[31:18.740 --> 31:19.300]  Be careful.
[31:19.800 --> 31:20.800]  So where were we?
[31:21.040 --> 31:22.820]  We got the building lifted up 10 feet.
[31:23.000 --> 31:23.940]  I was in the hospital.
[31:24.220 --> 31:25.700]  My volunteers take over.
[31:26.040 --> 31:29.580]  This is one of those tests for, are you building a good community?
[31:29.740 --> 31:32.660]  Or are you building a one insane person who's like doing everything?
[31:33.200 --> 31:34.700]  Turns out I was building a good community.
[31:34.840 --> 31:36.380]  And so these folks took over.
[31:36.720 --> 31:38.720]  They continued to move the ball forward on the project.
[31:39.080 --> 31:40.200]  They made plans.
[31:40.200 --> 31:49.300]  They signed a guarantee on a $75,000 erection plan to get the concrete panels that I was going to set in place with a forklift erected with a crane from the manufacturer of those decks.
[31:49.640 --> 31:51.340]  And they kept moving forward.
[31:51.360 --> 31:53.500]  Which is what they knew needed to happen.
[31:55.140 --> 31:56.900]  There's a whole other side to this.
[31:57.200 --> 32:02.080]  Which is the legal and like functional requirements to build a building.
[32:03.660 --> 32:05.880]  And I just wanted to... I won't spend a lot of time on this.
[32:05.980 --> 32:07.080]  Anybody can come up and ask me afterwards.
[32:07.460 --> 32:08.860]  We did all of our own plans.
[32:09.120 --> 32:10.240]  We did all of our own engineering.
[32:11.180 --> 32:13.320]  We did all of our own construction wherever we could.
[32:13.940 --> 32:17.300]  Fund trivia in Wisconsin, there's no license around fire alarms.
[32:17.420 --> 32:18.640]  So I installed the fire alarm.
[32:18.820 --> 32:20.500]  Turns out anybody can be a fire alarm installer.
[32:20.820 --> 32:23.720]  You got to be an engineer to do the plans, but not to be the installer.
[32:24.160 --> 32:27.640]  Other trades are licensed like plumbing, electrical, those types of things.
[32:27.640 --> 32:29.540]  You have to have somebody who's going to be your contractor.
[32:29.840 --> 32:32.120]  Who, again, can pull the plans and supervise.
[32:33.160 --> 32:35.020]  But you've got to have somebody who's willing to do that.
[32:35.640 --> 32:38.720]  You've got to have bathrooms, parking, accessibility, health and safety.
[32:38.980 --> 32:42.400]  Those are all to give you a legal designation of what's called occupancy.
[32:42.540 --> 32:46.340]  So occupancy is what allows you legally to have a habitable, usable building.
[32:47.000 --> 32:52.500]  I had a trick while we were doing this building development, which was I wasn't going to take out the bathroom that was in there.
[32:52.660 --> 32:53.980]  So this really shitty bathroom.
[32:54.480 --> 33:00.760]  And the plan was to build the second floor structure, set a spare column, and then set the deck and do everything above this.
[33:01.000 --> 33:06.180]  Later on, support that column, remove it, set the real column in place once the bathrooms were taken out and we had new bathrooms.
[33:06.380 --> 33:08.400]  And that would never have lost us occupancy.
[33:09.240 --> 33:13.600]  The very first thing my volunteers did is they got that bathroom the hell out of the way.
[33:14.680 --> 33:15.360]  Which was good.
[33:15.460 --> 33:16.080]  It had to happen.
[33:16.220 --> 33:17.180]  It made it a lot easier.
[33:17.480 --> 33:20.780]  But ultimately then it took us an extra year to regain occupancy.
[33:20.780 --> 33:24.340]  Because if you have continuity of occupancy, you can kind of do whatever the hell you want.
[33:24.520 --> 33:28.520]  But as soon as you lose occupancy, you have to be full licensed state code.
[33:28.640 --> 33:30.080]  Everybody's got to be happy to sign off again.
[33:32.060 --> 33:33.600]  So did the building plans.
[33:33.920 --> 33:38.080]  The second floor is kind of a blank slate, which we're still working on.
[33:38.420 --> 33:43.920]  The first floor, then we kind of laid it out and we put all of the noisy stuff off to the left side over here.
[33:43.920 --> 33:47.460]  So we put the wood shop, the welding shop, had kind of a flex space.
[33:47.460 --> 33:50.300]  It's an architecture term for like, we don't fucking know what we're doing.
[33:50.560 --> 33:51.960]  So flex, flex space.
[33:52.520 --> 33:55.520]  And then we have like a business incubator and an event space.
[33:55.620 --> 33:57.720]  And the idea was to put those folks further to the right.
[33:57.920 --> 33:59.980]  Which again, diversified income.
[34:00.200 --> 34:02.060]  So we don't have one thing that we do.
[34:02.200 --> 34:05.180]  We do a blend of a whole bunch of things, which helps to make things a little bit easier then.
[34:05.780 --> 34:06.880]  From a revenue perspective.
[34:07.880 --> 34:09.760]  So we had to get our electrical stuff figured out.
[34:09.940 --> 34:13.860]  Of course, being who we are, we didn't like go to the store and buy a new electrical panel.
[34:14.140 --> 34:16.260]  We went into a building that was getting torn down.
[34:16.280 --> 34:23.260]  And we took out the old electrical panel, which had one more year of grandfathered status by the current NEC code that allowed reinstallation.
[34:23.460 --> 34:26.360]  And we put in a new electrical service, which saved us like $40,000.
[34:26.480 --> 34:28.820]  Because this stuff was not cheap then, it's not cheap now.
[34:29.660 --> 34:30.440]  You had to have parking.
[34:31.700 --> 34:37.420]  And so the building inspector was out and he's like, You have to have parking stalls lined out, like, you know, I don't know.
[34:37.560 --> 34:41.020]  Get some brick or something, put some lines in the ground.
[34:41.140 --> 34:42.500]  You can use those as parking stalls, whatever.
[34:43.060 --> 34:45.300]  So I went out and I used to do landscaping when I was younger.
[34:45.600 --> 34:49.280]  I dug in these bricks and like laid out bricks, painted them yellow to make the lines.
[34:49.400 --> 34:50.340]  Because that's what he told me to do.
[34:51.000 --> 34:53.580]  He just wants permanently marked lines in the ground, seems reasonable.
[34:54.660 --> 34:57.900]  And then a guy shows up and he's like, the hell's with the bricks?
[34:58.100 --> 35:00.740]  Like you told me to put bricks down and paint them to make permanent lines.
[35:00.880 --> 35:02.660]  He's like no, no, no, no, you gotta brick the whole parking lot.
[35:02.660 --> 35:04.600]  I'm like, I'm not going to break the parking lot.
[35:04.920 --> 35:05.960]  I'm going to pour concrete.
[35:06.420 --> 35:12.500]  So this was all of us waiting, having never poured concrete in our lives, for the concrete truck to show up.
[35:12.620 --> 35:16.540]  And I don't know if anybody's ever poured concrete, but you order a batch of concrete.
[35:16.540 --> 35:17.940]  It's 9,000 pounds of concrete.
[35:18.120 --> 35:18.460]  It's coming.
[35:18.700 --> 35:20.900]  They're going to dump it out of the back of the truck, whether you want it or not.
[35:21.380 --> 35:22.560]  And it's going to go somewhere.
[35:22.580 --> 35:24.240]  And that concrete then starts clock.
[35:24.720 --> 35:28.360]  You've got about an hour to place it, get it smoothed out-ish.
[35:28.400 --> 35:31.840]  And then you've got to wait about three hours, depending on the temperature and all sorts of things.
[35:31.840 --> 35:33.420]  And you've got to get it finished and smoothed out.
[35:34.040 --> 35:42.000]  So we had precisely zero people who had done that, except for this one guy in the yellow boots who did flat work like 20 years ago and hadn't done it since.
[35:42.100 --> 35:43.940]  And he hurt his back, so he couldn't do any of this stuff.
[35:43.980 --> 35:45.420]  But he could totally tell us what to do.
[35:46.660 --> 35:47.420]  Which is awesome.
[35:47.560 --> 35:48.020]  Thank you, Paul.
[35:49.240 --> 35:54.340]  And this, we set a first footing, or set a first kind of run, and it was 10 feet by 50 feet.
[35:54.660 --> 35:58.500]  And if it didn't work out, you have to get out the jackhammer and get rid of it, because there's nothing else to do.
[35:59.700 --> 36:00.600]  Our first winter.
[36:00.800 --> 36:01.820]  So remember, I showed you...
[36:01.820 --> 36:02.360]  We had a few slides earlier.
[36:02.600 --> 36:03.500]  It was like October.
[36:03.500 --> 36:04.960]  We kind of started in on this stuff.
[36:05.300 --> 36:06.540]  We froze our ass off.
[36:06.660 --> 36:07.760]  It was like negative 10 out.
[36:07.860 --> 36:19.140]  The neighbors were bringing us tea, feeling terrible, because we were all out there freezing to death, trying to get the insulation up, because they couldn't pour concrete inside unless the building was insulated, because the concrete's got to stay warm while it cures.
[36:19.320 --> 36:20.420]  It's got to stay warm for like a month.
[36:21.580 --> 36:25.320]  And yeah, so we were all trying to not die, getting this stuff done.
[36:25.560 --> 36:27.020]  We had to hire a contractor.
[36:27.320 --> 36:32.720]  So Fendorf came in, their professional contracting construction firm, came in, they poured the concrete floor.
[36:32.960 --> 36:36.920]  Our floor varies from 13 inches thick to one inch thick, depending on what area of the building you're in.
[36:37.160 --> 36:40.380]  This original floor was like poured at some point in the last 50 years.
[36:40.380 --> 36:44.000]  And there's literally fingerprints from when they were pulling the concrete around, smoothing it out.
[36:44.380 --> 36:49.140]  So it was, we had a donor who earmarked $10,000 for a flat floor.
[36:50.680 --> 36:52.800]  Because he was like, you guys are idiots.
[36:53.080 --> 36:56.820]  Why the hell are you going to build this building, build all around, and then have a floor that's all at a level?
[36:56.900 --> 36:57.860]  And we just didn't have money.
[36:57.980 --> 37:00.680]  It was a choice of like, do you want heat or do you want a floor?
[37:01.000 --> 37:02.760]  We're like, well, we already kind of have a floor.
[37:02.760 --> 37:04.380]  So we're going to go with the heat thing for now.
[37:04.640 --> 37:05.940]  Maybe we'll do the floor thing later.
[37:06.500 --> 37:08.040]  So thank God for that.
[37:08.220 --> 37:08.620]  That worked out.
[37:09.540 --> 37:14.000]  Plumbing, of course, you have to have plumbing like to, as the saying goes, the shit runs downhill.
[37:14.520 --> 37:18.620]  And it turns out in Wisconsin, our frost line is like four feet down.
[37:18.880 --> 37:22.180]  And so the plumbing has got to come in four feet below the building.
[37:22.500 --> 37:29.340]  Well, if you want to run plumbing through 160 foot long building, you're going to need all that pitch to get all the way 160 feet away.
[37:29.340 --> 37:32.080]  And so this was in January, the ground was frozen.
[37:32.480 --> 37:38.040]  So we had to get a torpedo heater, bunch of insulation, stack it on top of where we knocked out the concrete because the concrete could break out.
[37:38.200 --> 37:43.680]  But the ground was like, it was very between mud when it melted because it was frost to like frozen.
[37:44.080 --> 37:46.560]  So we'd run this torpedo heater for like six hours.
[37:46.700 --> 37:49.280]  You'd get down about six inches of soil, dig it out.
[37:49.500 --> 37:52.760]  And then you'd put all the insulation on top of the thing and run the torpedo heater again.
[37:53.820 --> 37:58.380]  So like we literally fought tooth and nail for every tiny aspect of this property.
[37:59.000 --> 38:00.140]  Great way to learn plumbing.
[38:00.540 --> 38:02.000]  Rip out old plumbing from an old building.
[38:02.340 --> 38:07.960]  The even better way to get toilets is to use the 50 year old toilet that's been in a municipal building forever that was getting torn down.
[38:08.140 --> 38:11.540]  Because if it survived that long, it'll survive just fine on our use case.
[38:12.800 --> 38:15.700]  Yeah, we were real excited to have a flush toilet again.
[38:15.860 --> 38:18.560]  We got rid of the portage on that was outside for like a year and a half.
[38:19.260 --> 38:21.800]  And so this is a great picture kind of showing this transition.
[38:21.800 --> 38:28.600]  So we were insulated in the building, working our way along and then putting up siding and just working our way progressively through it.
[38:29.020 --> 38:31.240]  And just kind of went a little bit at a time.
[38:31.980 --> 38:39.280]  So it took about a year to get from where it was lifted up and sort of the framing there.
[38:39.620 --> 38:43.260]  Rip down the old siding, which is just like aluminum foil literally.
[38:43.640 --> 38:48.760]  And then get up steel framing framed and then plywood on the outside.
[38:49.380 --> 38:50.960]  This was not done on the inside.
[38:51.280 --> 38:52.400]  Like nothing inside was done yet.
[38:52.560 --> 38:55.000]  We were just trying to get a box that we could heat or cool.
[38:56.140 --> 38:59.340]  Because October 2018, our landlord knocked down our old building.
[38:59.500 --> 39:04.880]  And we had to have all of our shit out and moved over here before then, because obviously we had nowhere to go.
[39:05.080 --> 39:08.720]  So we were doing construction while moving all of our stuff while trying to make all this stuff happen.
[39:08.820 --> 39:10.020]  It was not very much fun.
[39:13.040 --> 39:13.440]  Salvage.
[39:13.620 --> 39:14.940]  We did a lot of building salvage.
[39:15.200 --> 39:16.340]  Building stuff is really expensive.
[39:16.580 --> 39:21.980]  If you can repurpose or reuse old building stuff, it not only matches with the hacker ethos of saving stuff from the garbage.
[39:22.380 --> 39:27.600]  But also with the checkbook, we saved about $220,000 in junk that went into our building.
[39:28.060 --> 39:32.180]  And you'd think like, why the hell wouldn't everybody do this, right?
[39:32.260 --> 39:33.600]  Free stuff come out of a building.
[39:33.720 --> 39:34.960]  This building is getting torn all the time.
[39:36.100 --> 39:36.460]  Cool.
[39:36.780 --> 39:37.620]  Just go get the stuff.
[39:37.780 --> 39:38.920]  And then, oh yeah, that's right.
[39:39.100 --> 39:40.400]  You've got to store it until you need it.
[39:40.960 --> 39:48.120]  So our entire upstairs of our entire building for a couple of years was full of shit that we had taken out other places.
[39:48.320 --> 39:50.060]  Because the other hard part is you don't know what you need.
[39:50.760 --> 39:55.480]  You'll never ever think about it, but there are left hand doors, there are right hand doors, and there are double doors.
[39:55.680 --> 39:58.400]  If you use the wrong door in the wrong spot, the whole room doesn't work.
[39:58.700 --> 40:00.940]  And so we had to get a whole bunch of doors.
[40:00.940 --> 40:07.020]  Then when you have volunteers go salvage the doors and the frames, there's a lot of goddamn door sizes.
[40:07.180 --> 40:10.080]  And you can't just like take the door and shove it in the wrong frame or it doesn't work.
[40:10.860 --> 40:12.080]  So this sucked.
[40:13.980 --> 40:14.800]  But it worked out.
[40:14.940 --> 40:18.300]  We saved a lot of money and reused stuff, but it's like, it's not as easy as it sounds.
[40:19.180 --> 40:23.920]  The other fun thing when you buy an old building, you get to find stuff in the ground sometimes.
[40:23.920 --> 40:28.320]  So we were digging along the building to put in insulation along the slab around the foundation.
[40:28.760 --> 40:30.540]  And we found a pipe that smelled like gas.
[40:30.980 --> 40:37.400]  And we had done a phase one environmental assessment, which is like you go look at the old paperwork from the DNR filings in the state and the city and whatever else.
[40:38.000 --> 40:40.940]  And we knew that at some point this place was called the Good Oil Company.
[40:41.120 --> 40:43.100]  Who the fuck picks the Good Oil Company as a name?
[40:43.240 --> 40:46.160]  That is not a good name for an oil company, but that's what they called it.
[40:47.000 --> 40:50.160]  Evidently they refueled their trucks here using a gasoline storage tank.
[40:50.620 --> 40:54.260]  And we had notes from when they took out the pump.
[40:54.600 --> 40:55.880]  There's no note about the tank.
[40:56.300 --> 41:03.060]  So the person who owned this property was kind enough to allow us to do a phase one assessment where they run this ground penetrating radar all over the parking lot.
[41:03.760 --> 41:05.480]  Looking for an empty steel tank.
[41:05.580 --> 41:08.580]  Turns out this is like the easiest thing ever to find with ground penetrating radar.
[41:08.860 --> 41:11.540]  The hard ones to find are fiberglass and full of water, full of fluid.
[41:12.520 --> 41:15.420]  So they ran over the thing and said, oh, no, nothing there.
[41:16.200 --> 41:16.860]  Everything's cool.
[41:17.120 --> 41:17.860]  You guys are good.
[41:18.440 --> 41:20.940]  The only thing I think of is the detector wasn't plugged in.
[41:21.100 --> 41:21.800]  Something wasn't working.
[41:22.000 --> 41:23.020]  It's really hard to test the things.
[41:23.140 --> 41:24.500]  You need something buried underground to find.
[41:24.720 --> 41:25.680]  I have no idea.
[41:25.880 --> 41:27.220]  But they didn't find it.
[41:27.420 --> 41:32.540]  The environmental engineering firm who did the phase one work, I think, sensed that they didn't want to get sued.
[41:32.980 --> 41:37.280]  So they charged us $5,000 to come do the assessment and do the testing and do whatever else.
[41:37.640 --> 41:38.740]  I removed the tank.
[41:38.760 --> 41:40.560]  We hand shoveled all above it.
[41:40.560 --> 41:42.360]  And then I rented a mini excavator.
[41:42.660 --> 41:44.880]  Turns out that tank was heavier than the mini excavator.
[41:45.240 --> 41:52.320]  But if you bump it into the wall, the hydraulic bypass in the mini excavator will pull up just a little bit when it goes weightless.
[41:52.340 --> 41:53.940]  And then it'll go back to holding.
[41:54.240 --> 41:58.440]  So I just kept bumping it off the wall until it got up and out of there.
[42:00.420 --> 42:00.980]  What's that?
[42:01.740 --> 42:02.480]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[42:03.460 --> 42:04.920]  They checked it with a sniffer.
[42:04.920 --> 42:06.680]  It was a non-explosive environment.
[42:06.900 --> 42:08.240]  But thank you for your concern.
[42:09.960 --> 42:16.600]  So this environmental engineer goes down to the bottom of the hole, picks up a scoop full of sand and goes, Hell yeah, you guys will be fine.
[42:18.860 --> 42:22.180]  Because they had to send off a sample to verify the groundwater wasn't contaminated.
[42:22.180 --> 42:30.020]  Because if we had contaminated groundwater for the rest of our lives, we would have had to pump water out, strip the volatiles off, and then pump it back, which would have been not good.
[42:30.760 --> 42:31.580]  Other fun one.
[42:31.780 --> 42:36.340]  We were built close to this Tauco property line, and our property was really old, and their property was really old.
[42:36.440 --> 42:43.200]  But it turns out if you redo the wall on adjacent properties within 15 feet of the property line, by national code, it has to be fire rated.
[42:43.500 --> 42:49.880]  We put up all the plywood, all the insulation, getting ready to put up siding, and the building inspector is like, You got fire rated plywood in there, right?
[42:50.260 --> 42:54.540]  We're like, no, the plywood is underneath the drywall that's fire rated, so it shouldn't matter, right?
[42:55.120 --> 42:56.680]  No, no, no, you got to rip all that down.
[42:56.680 --> 43:03.300]  This is a 32-foot wall by 60 feet wide, and my volunteers were tired.
[43:04.260 --> 43:06.920]  And so we had to take it all down and put it all back up again.
[43:12.080 --> 43:13.500]  This one speaks for itself.
[43:14.740 --> 43:17.900]  So very quickly, my last couple slides here, by the numbers.
[43:18.120 --> 43:19.200]  So this is our financials.
[43:20.500 --> 43:27.940]  Again, once 2012 hit, recognize the value of keeping that net value going into the savings account.
[43:28.120 --> 43:32.240]  This is where that $200,000 came from, was five years of operating savings, essentially.
[43:32.900 --> 43:35.100]  And those savings were not going to me.
[43:35.260 --> 43:36.780]  That's my salary at the far right there.
[43:36.940 --> 43:42.800]  So my initial investment was $10,000 I put in from the savings from the business plan contest.
[43:42.800 --> 43:48.440]  I got it back five years later, so net zero, no interest, it's real nice.
[43:48.820 --> 43:53.720]  The next year my board made me take a salary, which is smart on them, for only part of the year.
[43:54.240 --> 43:55.960]  I had $24,000 a year I made.
[43:56.140 --> 43:59.320]  Good salary and a master's degree for engineering, no big deal.
[43:59.960 --> 44:01.080]  Don't tell your kids.
[44:03.020 --> 44:07.980]  And I would say the best parallel here is like a snowball debt method, right?
[44:07.980 --> 44:10.600]  So we never took any debt, not any loans.
[44:10.740 --> 44:12.520]  This is our next financial.
[44:12.660 --> 44:14.460]  So we kind of ended in 2016 on this one.
[44:14.900 --> 44:15.680]  Picked up here.
[44:15.840 --> 44:18.820]  This is from GuideStar, which nicely keeps track of the financials on nonprofits.
[44:19.340 --> 44:22.900]  And you can see in that 2017 year that we're doing a fundraising, we had a huge bump.
[44:23.120 --> 44:24.480]  Those are all those donations for the building.
[44:25.140 --> 44:28.460]  And then in subsequent years we had a drop and then we had a huge drop for COVID.
[44:28.760 --> 44:34.220]  And so we had like this transition, transitionary time, just really lucky is what I'll say.
[44:34.220 --> 44:36.200]  That was about the best thing we do.
[44:36.300 --> 44:39.860]  Because if COVID had hit in the middle of this or who knows what, it would have been more of a nightmare.
[44:40.340 --> 44:44.760]  So I've had a few careers, general contracting, motivating volunteers to help with stuff.
[44:45.860 --> 44:48.560]  One other goofball thing we do is we resell stuff on eBay.
[44:49.380 --> 44:52.600]  Please don't go buy random shit from our eBay store unless you actually need it.
[44:53.540 --> 44:55.020]  We sell all sorts of industrial surplus.
[44:55.140 --> 44:55.900]  People give us stuff.
[44:56.040 --> 44:57.180]  We can't just hoard it up in the shop.
[44:57.280 --> 44:58.180]  The best thing we do is sell it.
[44:58.900 --> 45:03.080]  This actually, again, moving 2016, revenues went through the floor.
[45:03.080 --> 45:05.620]  You can't run an eBay store and build a building at the same time.
[45:06.220 --> 45:09.920]  But after that, you can start going through all the shit you have upstairs and going, we don't need this.
[45:09.980 --> 45:10.580]  We don't need this.
[45:10.660 --> 45:11.360]  Let's sell this stuff.
[45:11.480 --> 45:12.400]  Let's get this stuff out of here.
[45:13.700 --> 45:18.660]  And so my kind of parting advice here would be entrepreneurship is really hard.
[45:18.880 --> 45:19.680]  It's not fun.
[45:20.380 --> 45:21.700]  Everybody's got this like high growth.
[45:21.900 --> 45:23.740]  You know, I'm going to make a jillion dollars doing this stuff.
[45:24.780 --> 45:26.900]  It's really hard to do and to stay motivated.
[45:27.160 --> 45:32.600]  But in the same sense, the payoff to me is working with kids, working with adults, working with people and teaching them stuff.
[45:32.760 --> 45:34.000]  And that's what I have a lot of fun doing.
[45:34.760 --> 45:37.960]  Unfortunately, playing general contractor takes away a lot of that.
[45:38.080 --> 45:42.260]  I look very much forward to in the next couple of years, wrapping up construction and getting back to it.
[45:42.860 --> 45:51.040]  A homework assignment for you all, if you're interested in starting a hacker space or a maker space or a whatever space, community space, there's this old book, Ray Oldenburg.
[45:51.180 --> 45:52.060]  It's called The Great Good Place.
[45:52.220 --> 45:53.200]  It's about third spaces.
[45:53.460 --> 45:54.540]  The idea of it's not work.
[45:54.540 --> 45:55.160]  It's not home.
[45:55.160 --> 45:57.940]  It's where do you go to hang out with people, shoot the shit, whatever.
[45:58.340 --> 46:00.160]  Some people, it's a bar in England.
[46:00.700 --> 46:04.960]  This whole middle section of this book is all about English pubs, which are like the neighborhood gathering points.
[46:05.160 --> 46:10.440]  But the first section of the book and the last section of the book are very relevant for trying to create a community space.
[46:10.620 --> 46:12.560]  And I always recommend people check this book out.
[46:12.740 --> 46:15.000]  You can definitely find a PDF online for free.
[46:16.560 --> 46:18.020]  This would be the proof of our community.
[46:18.020 --> 46:27.080]  This screwdriver set is ten years old and they're all still there, which is unheard of.
[46:27.260 --> 46:30.720]  I had to replace this about two years ago because they started breaking apart and the tops get sharp.
[46:30.940 --> 46:33.820]  So I figured we'd get rid of the sharp parts of it.
[46:35.280 --> 46:36.840]  Chicken tax, cat tax.
[46:37.120 --> 46:37.940]  Does anybody have any questions?
[46:52.460 --> 46:56.860]  Most of your funding is coming from like grants and donations.
[46:57.180 --> 47:00.100]  Do you have membership dues or anything like that?
[47:00.100 --> 47:02.540]  So the question was just for the remote audience.
[47:02.740 --> 47:04.160]  Where is our money coming from?
[47:04.320 --> 47:07.420]  The contribution slide is totally mislabeled.
[47:08.160 --> 47:11.020]  GuideStar bulks a bunch of weird categories in the 990s together.
[47:11.920 --> 47:13.860]  The majority of our revenue comes from memberships.
[47:13.920 --> 47:14.840]  It's $100 a month.
[47:14.980 --> 47:17.400]  It's $50 for college students, $25 for high school kids.
[47:17.720 --> 47:21.140]  And then it's $200 to have your own seven foot by seven foot like shared office space.
[47:21.880 --> 47:24.500]  And that is the bulk of our income.
[47:24.800 --> 47:28.960]  eBay contributes actually a big chunk of it when we started doing the charitable resale program.
[47:28.960 --> 47:34.920]  And then that momentary blip in time when we were doing the building construction was the only time that we've been doing fundraising.
[47:35.420 --> 47:37.240]  So the majority of this is organic.
[47:37.240 --> 47:41.220]  It was savings from being stupid, not paying myself anything.
[47:41.460 --> 47:45.280]  That was ultimately what allowed us to then do that successful fundraising campaign.
[47:45.800 --> 47:47.140]  But yes, we do charge dues.
[47:47.620 --> 47:50.340]  And it's all month to month, so it's not like there's a contract or anything.
[47:51.040 --> 47:51.380]  Yeah.
[47:52.240 --> 47:53.920]  So how do you deal with...
[47:53.920 --> 47:56.360]  So you've got a lot of tools that a lot of amateurs are using.
[47:56.960 --> 48:00.500]  I know my local hackerspace makes you watch videos and things for training.
[48:00.620 --> 48:02.900]  But has anybody ever gotten hurt other than yourself?
[48:03.040 --> 48:04.020]  Has anybody ever gotten hurt?
[48:04.220 --> 48:08.980]  And how do you deal with people using tools that they may or may not be qualified to use?
[48:08.980 --> 48:11.440]  So I will say yes.
[48:11.580 --> 48:12.760]  I'm the only one who's actually got hurt.
[48:12.980 --> 48:16.580]  The only other person who's got hurt in any substantial way was when we were doing a demo.
[48:16.820 --> 48:18.740]  Somebody swung an axe at the aluminum.
[48:19.180 --> 48:20.240]  And they...
[48:20.240 --> 48:21.200]  I don't know what the hell they were doing.
[48:21.340 --> 48:23.280]  But he smashed his finger on the beam.
[48:23.440 --> 48:24.480]  Like hit the beam with that.
[48:24.540 --> 48:28.020]  It was just like a messed up finger for a while until the fingernail grew off.
[48:28.140 --> 48:28.640]  So that was okay.
[48:28.980 --> 48:32.080]  Other than that, no, I teach everybody everything.
[48:32.460 --> 48:35.200]  So again, the reiterating theme on this talk is I'm an idiot.
[48:35.820 --> 48:36.460]  I'm an idiot.
[48:38.440 --> 48:40.780]  The good thing about that is that's how I avoid injuries.
[48:40.900 --> 48:42.180]  I make sure there's very consistent training.
[48:42.300 --> 48:45.620]  And I train things on like an apprentice basis on a goal or objective.
[48:45.820 --> 48:50.020]  So I don't have like a generic catch-all like, Oh, I'm going to teach you everything on the machine shop how to use all of it.
[48:50.260 --> 48:51.200]  I have a...
[48:51.200 --> 48:53.420]  You want to cut a two by four and a half on the chop saw?
[48:53.740 --> 48:54.960]  I'll show you how to use the chop saw.
[48:55.300 --> 48:58.240]  If you need to like rip some weird board or something, come and ask me.
[48:58.240 --> 49:00.880]  And I would be happy to help you figure out which tool is appropriate.
[49:02.200 --> 49:05.780]  That's bad on me because I don't have very wide throughput, right?
[49:05.880 --> 49:06.980]  I'm limited in my time.
[49:07.220 --> 49:09.660]  But it's good in that I don't waste a lot of people's time.
[49:09.660 --> 49:12.800]  And they don't waste a lot of my time teaching things either way that aren't helpful.
[49:12.980 --> 49:16.080]  Because it tends to happen that people forget stuff unless there's a relevance to it.
[49:16.260 --> 49:18.740]  So if you have a direct application for the thing, you will remember it forever.
[49:19.160 --> 49:21.340]  If you have like, Oh, some guy ran me through the woodshop.
[49:21.520 --> 49:24.800]  I totally know how to use everything now because we looked at everything for like five minutes.
[49:25.440 --> 49:26.740]  That really scares me.
[49:27.580 --> 49:29.780]  But it works clearly for a lot of spaces.
[49:29.960 --> 49:31.160]  And so it's okay.
[49:32.820 --> 49:33.220]  Other...
[49:33.220 --> 49:34.680]  It looks like I'm out of time.
[49:34.920 --> 49:36.800]  So I will stick around out there.
[49:36.800 --> 49:39.180]  If anybody has any questions, I'm around the rest of the time.
[49:39.180 --> 49:41.280]  I will be wearing a Sector 67 shirt.
[49:41.400 --> 49:41.840]  So hunt me down.
[49:42.100 --> 49:42.500]  Thank you all.
[49:42.500 --> 49:43.440]  Applause.