At the Redwood city location there were many artists and small businesses that depended on the facilities. It will be a big blow to them.
I think they got reckless with their expansion. The San Jose location moved to a new location after their lease expired. They chose to relocate to a prime location in downtown San Jose and ended up with a million dollar shortfall to renovate and open the new location. They somehow managed to scrounge the money through an appeal to the community and opened but it must have ruined their financials.
At the same time they were opening in other cities. If their financials in the Bay area were shaky (as they admit in their closing statement on their website) then it is not clear why they were taking on more risk by expanding.
The Austin location [1] was close to Dell's Round Rock campus but it seems most of the maker activities I hear about are in Central or South Austin 15+ miles away.
They had no choice but to expand. They had a fairly large corporate office, which needed income from a lot of sites to cover the overhead. I was thinking about investing and got a good look at the financials - only the three Bay Area shops were profitable. Bottom line, they overestimated how many makers out there are willing to pay $150 per month to support their laser cutter habit.
Usually the Bankruptcy Refree hires really shady resellers.
Those machines will be pieced out--down to the coffee maker.
Tip to those buying; find the guy in the back, barking orders at temp liquidators, with a hint of a Martinni on his breath, and quietly ask him about deals. Make sure he knows you have cash.
I have a fantasy that someone like Google or Facebook, or even a wealthy angel, might be willing to buy all three. If you got them out from under their debt obligations and removed the need to support a corporate HQ, I think it would be do-able.
Could you reveal whether the Bay Area shops were borderline profitable or operating with decent margins ?
I was surprised that they managed to stay open for more than a decade and assumed that they had
figured out a decent sustainable business model.
It's been a little while, my recollection is that they were narrowly cash-flow profitable, but I don't recall at this point whether that included debt service, and this is before they took on a ton of debt to relocate the San Jose facility.
I'm pretty sure if they can get rid of all of their debt, they would make a little bit of cash. But not enough to justify their billing as a start-up.
The other looming issue is that a lot of the equipment at the Bay Area sites is, er, well-loved, and will need to be replaced over the next few years, which is a major capital expense. At the Redwood City shop, the laser cutters are all getting pretty run-down.
I'm kinda surprised to think that about the "Phoenix" (Chandler) location; they were essentially "given" the building they used by the city; it was also a shared space with some portion of ASU (IIRC).
I wonder what will happen with that ASU program (I think it was part of the engineering school)? I wonder if they will simply take over the space and continue using it (though probably closed to the public)?
Really tragic. I toured their SF facilities and was really impressed with the seriousness of their equipment. Definitely a huge leap above the average maker shop.
Ultimately the high price wasn't what held me back from joining, but the tool use policies required by their insurers. You had to pay for a brutally waitlisted class before they'd let you use so much as a laser cutter. I wonder how much this contributed - both the cost of insurance and its consequences - to their decline.
For better or worse, that's been the model at every makerspace I've been a member of/looked into. And I think it makes sense, insurance-mandated or not. Lots of expensive, potentially dangerous machinery that if used wrong can destroy itself, its user, and/or those nearby.
Also, in my experience once you've built up enough trust with the admins they'll let you get a crash course from a member who knows what's up and skip the fees and formal training process.
I think that the "brutally waitlisted" part could be addressed. Or you could cap membership until you can actually accommodate the new members. But both those options reduce short term cash inflow.
Yea, for sure. I suppose that could either be a staffing problem, or demand outstripping (tool time) supply. In the latter case - if there was space/power available - perhaps they could have gotten a second tool. Or from an economics perspective, raise the rates until the demand cooled off a bit. (Of course that kinda sucks as a member, but it also sucks if you're paying and can't get access time to use the tools you want, so it's a bit of a balancing act)
Yeah, this seems to support the story that they just expanded too fast and couldn't keep a handle on things. If they can get folks to pay $1k per year and actually come despite the crowding they can probably get almost as many folks to pay some amount more than $1k per year but not have crowding.
> In the latter case - if there was space/power available - perhaps they could have gotten a second tool.
Given that this was about a waitlist for the "how to use a laser cutter" class, getting another tool probably wasn't going to be economically possible.
The TechShop in my area (Phoenix/Chandler) had six (!) laser cutters - all ULS 60 watt machines (I'm not sure what they had before they closed; I haven't been back in a long while). ULS is based in Scottsdale, so maybe they got a discount on the equipment or something - but regardless, those machines aren't cheap. They are quality machines (heck, the software alone is pretty amazing), and have a cost that reflects it.
thats probably true with the machining tools, but if you wear gloves and a helmet there's really very little damage you can do to yourself or the machine with tig. they also generally make you make mig before tig which is kind of a waste.
if you add up all the fees, assuming you have a big enough space, instead you can buy a lot of that gear used or on the low end. have a blast learning. keep your work and stock next to your tools, and specialize in the processes that interest you.
the only exception i can think of is the sheet metal tools, they need quite a bit of floor space and are shockingly expensive. i don't think tech shop had a water jet, but that too would be worth paying for time on.
I didn't know that, that would have been worth looking into. Depending on your job the local water jet shops can be reasonable. but we pay more than the tech shop monthly for a smallish 2 hr job. Kevin at SMP is pretty close to the ex-TS location.
(industrial space in the bayview has gone up, but its still under $1/ft)
Austin had water jet too. Actually kind of a shame, a sinker EDM should do most of the same and would be a lot cheaper. But people understand what a water jet is.
I remember my experiences in high school metal shop. The teacher impressed on us the dangers of leaving the key in the metal lathe chuck when turning it on. One day, naturally, a kid left the key in the chuck and turned it on. There was a loud bang as the chuck flew up and through the ceiling. It could clearly have killed someone if they were in its path.
I don't want to be around people who use powerful machines without proper training, or around kids using those machines, or using those machines around kids who treat the shop as a playground.
> using those machines around kids who treat the shop as a playground
Definitely the biggest hazard in my comprehensive school tech. classes. Little makes you move to the other side of the room faster than people throwing random pieces of scrap at a powered disk sander, and I'll never forgot the noise an LED makes when shorted across a 230VAC wall socket (with a locker key jammed in the earth pin for good measure...).
I sometimes wonder how the only injuries I got from those years was a minor soldering burn (dropped the iron) and accidentally impaling the palm of my hand with a screwdriver.
The high school I went to in the late 1980s was originally the city community college; the campus was pretty large. The woodshop was located in what was termed the "industrial arts" building (the building essentially was a high school "techshop" all on its own; small engine repair, drafting, autoshop, woodshop, metalshop, etc - all under one roof, three stories tall).
Well, the woodshop itself had equipment that was decades old; some of the equipment was quality stuff dating from the 1930s. We had this huge surface planer machine that could take wood 6 inches thick and 8 feet wide; it took a good 10 minutes for it to come to a complete stop after powering it up.
A friend of mine wanted to see if it would plane 1/2" in one pass off a 2x6; the instructor of the class had no problem with trying it, either!
It did. You wouldn't believe the sound it made, but it didn't miss a beat doing it.
I thought the classes were pretty helpful and a pretty good deal, considering they had a maximum capacity of a few students at a time. I’m sure the instructors were only making peanuts out of it. I didn’t have any trouble getting into class slots at the SF location, when I was trying to do it a couple years ago.
The bigger problem for me was that equipment was under some contention, meaning that it took signing up for a particular (maybe 2 hour) block of time a couple days in advance. I was trying to prototype things and learn basic stuff at the same time, which meant that my original computer designs were typically wrong the first few tries, and I wanted to do several rounds of iterative improvements to my designs. That is: 10 minutes of cutting, followed by 30 minutes of fiddling with a computer program or vector file, followed by 10 more minutes of cutting, etc. With a 2 hour block of time it’s only possible to get through 3 feedback cycles in that style, after which I sometimes had to wait a few days to try again at a time that would fit in my schedule. I would have been dramatically more efficient if I could have shared a 6 hour block of time with 3–4 other people.
I frequented the Redwood City location but bailed after the expansion. Or rather, I bailed after everyone else who I mooched knowledge off of bailed. Still, it was great while it lasted. Ace Monster Toys is similar in the East Bay.
Nice, I hadn't heard of this place before, but a little far for me. I was actually looking at techshop and planning on going there since I had some small projects I wanted to do.
I'm on the peninsula, is there something similar in this area?
There was a location near me, but I could never justify spending that much money on something I'd use for a a day or two a month. Between commutes during the week and traveling on weekends there would never have been time to make it worthwhile. Sad to see them go under though.
You hit on what I suspect is a missed opportunity on their part. There are a lot of businesses which seem to be thriving on the “too cheap to bother canceling even though I stopped using it” idea, like the $10 gym memberships you see.
Perhaps they could have come up with a drastically price reduced membership which only allowed for a couple of days of use per month? It would have eaten into some of their full memberships, but I suspect they could have dramatically grown their membership in that fashion.
People really decided to hate Peter Thiel during the last election. But he is right about the fact that you can’t do anything in the physical world in the United States anymore.
Between housing and real estate prices, insurance, taxes, lack of government support, environmental protections, requirement to pay for health insurance for employees,layers of regulations, minimum wage laws, sexual harassment lawsuits (it only takes one and your company is over)...you just can’t operate a physical space with drills, laser cutters, saws, advanced electronics and machinery at a profit in America anymore.
TechShop was the last gasp of American industry having any sort of future. With Tech Shop, we can also probably say good bye to a good deal of real trade skills people learn at these locations. They really tried to make it work. I have spoken to some of their founders myself - The amount of work it takes to set up even one of these facilities is simply staggering. If I were to show you the spreadsheets, business plans and research these guys invest to open ONE shop it genuinely rivals that of a full startup per location.
My heart really breaks.
There are a few companies able to survive with physical presences like this in the Bay Area now, but they are all backed by the power of Jabil, Flextronics, Autodesk. Some small indie chain can’t make it in these conditions.
Unfortunately, we can expect more of this as a country. We are one recession away from a full republican route (they are doing a spectacularly awful job and deserve to be thrown out) and all signs are pointing to a fully socialist government being next in line.
Socialist governments are not known for their desire to roll back worker protections, undo environmental protections and regulations, nor is their focus on enabling businesses. Although I will say Canada seems to be doing better than us in many ways when it comes to accelerating genuinely valuable little companies like TechShop.
I am genuinely beginning to advise people to consider moving to Asia where innovation is able to happen, it won’t be done in a America anytime soon.
Between Trump and his socialist successor - and the wonderful incompetent state of California I don’t have a good feeling about American innovation anymore.
You know I suspect there's going to be a whole lot of cool tools cheap on the market real soon now ... go out there and start your own, don't complain because someone else isn't
there already is, tech shop or no. machining and fabrication shops are falling like flies. expect to pay about 5x scrap value (used to be 2x, but scrap just fell a lot) for used machine tools from the 60s. new chinese knockoffs can be ok if you are discerning and don't have to pay shipping. an acceptable 9" swing lathe for $1k. bridgeport variable speed 36" mill for $2k. chinese tig for $1.2k. nice 20" throat doall style bandsaw for $1.5k. sweet new horizontal bandsaws are only $1k. 1/4" plasma cutter is $600
though I suspect if you want to open to the public insurance is going to be astronomical
So because one company hardly anyone has heard of went out of business, likely due to mismanagement, that means there is an imminent Socialist revolution?
Yeah.... thats.... just nonsense.
Makerspaces are very much still a thing, we have a thriving one here and I live in a small town.
> There are a few companies able to survive with physical presences like this in the Bay Area now, but they are all backed by the power of Jabil, Flextronics, Autodesk. Some small indie chain can’t make it in these conditions.
Why do they need to be in such an expensive place then? Go somewhere they can actually afford, like most of the rest of the country.
> Between housing and real estate prices, insurance, taxes, lack of government support, environmental protections, requirement to pay for health insurance for employees,layers of regulations, minimum wage laws, sexual harassment lawsuits (it only takes one and your company is over)...you just can’t operate a physical space with drills, laser cutters, saws, advanced electronics and machinery at a profit in America anymore.
take a deep breath, my friend, it's not the apocalypse. the US still has and is still creating new manufacturing. Tesla in the bay area. Boeing, the oil industry, all of biotech and medical devices. Even in the maker-type-world dig what Adafruit is doing is Brooklyn.
The good ol' days of a middle-class factory floor producing widgets with hand-operated tools is pretty much gone because of labor costs - gone to japan, mexico, then china, and now just gone-gone to automation. If you want to be a Randian captain of industry - that ship has sailed, docked, offloaded, and been towed to the breakers in south asia. If you care more about making new and better things more quickly, this is the best it's ever been.
How silly. One small company fails, and you jump to this end of the US scenario. You really need to take a step back, and get some perspective.
The US is the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world. That happens in the physical world -- something you seem to have forgotten. 150m people go to work everyday, doing plenty of things in the physical world too. Millions of businesses have figured out how to pay for health insurance, office space, and the rest that you think prevents companies from existing.
I'm sure TechShop put in a lot of effort into their locations.. but maybe you should take a tour of a Ford or Boeing plant. They operate all of that equipment, and a lot of far more advanced equipment, all at a profit.
And the socialist bit at the end? Even the Democracts arent that socialist.. no one that far left is electable in the US. Bernie couldn't even get through his own party (and before you scream: but the democrats conspired against him... that's right, his own party wouldn't go along with him).
Today's Democrats are pretty far to the left, but I don't think TechShops' complicated business model failed because of that. I'm sure the high cost of insurance didn't help and thank Obama for that, plus all the lawyers. But the Maker thing was a fad.
It will come back a different way, it's not completely dead, it's just that people realized it is actually difficult to design, cut, carve, weld, mold and otherwise create.
People are down voting you, and yes people hate Pete Thiel. At the same time I see this current thread (the one we're reading, abut TechShop running out of money) full of people saying they would have joined but it was too expensive.
What you are saying at least partially makes some sense and it makes me sad people are downvoting you in a clearly reactionary way.
> TechShop was the last gasp of American industry having any sort of future.
I suspect downvotes because of this, as much as the politics. The absurdity of a small, nonprofitable company being "the last gasp of American industry" and the odd lamentations around that.
I live in the Southeast. Drive through nearly any county in GA, NC, and SC (the region I'm presently most familiar with) and you'll find a surprisingly large number of manufacturing centers.
> With Tech Shop, we can also probably say good bye to a good deal of real trade skills people learn at these locations.
And none of the people working in them were trained by Tech Shop. They were trained on the job or in trade and tech schools.
Sure, your right - I was just trying to say that something was ringing true in his statement ... people finding it too expensive to learn stuff like this, meanwhile the company trying to do it not making enough money to stay afloat.
That is absolutely wrong. There is plenty of physical things you can do in the United States right now. Large manufacturing is cheaper to do in North America than to ship halfway around the world. Manufacturing that can be automated can be done here profitably.
I even work for a company that makes nearly all their products in North America.
I'll miss the option of visiting techshop to take a welding class or use a laser cutter, but it's not like it's the last makerspace even in the bay area...
They informed employees of the shutdown as they were firing them. This was a few days AFTER they revoked the employees insurance benefits without notice or explanation. Those same employees were also told that they're unlikely to get their final paycheck.
As for me, I was suckered into pre-paying for $500 worth of classes that I'll never be reimbursed for. So many people who's livelihoods depended on their facilities were completely blindsided. Members who had been there for years were told they had hours to remove their belongings or they would be confiscated. The whole thing is a complete mess.
All of this just a few weeks after opening a brand new location in Brooklyn. I simply can't comprehend the level of negligence and mismanagement here.
What could you dispute? You authorized the charges and received what you paid for (classes).
That said, training (unless it's useful outside the job) must be paid for by the employer. For example a pool can require CPR training for their lifeguards because you can use that outside being a lifeguard, but Starbucks can't require you to pay for their class because knowing how to make a starbucks drink is too specific.
He didn't receive the classes he paid for, and yes, he can and should charge it back on that basis. You generally have 180 days to charge it back, so as long as the charge was within this time frame, his bank should reimburse him. They'll try to suck the money out of TechShop's bank account, and if the money isn't in their account, their merchant provider will become another creditor in the bankruptcy proceeding for the total amount of chargebacks.
> Credit card companies retrieve disputed funds from merchants. If the merchant is under bankruptcy, I would guess the assets are inaccessible.
The cardholder still gets their money back. In bankruptcy situations, the entity that generally ends up eating the loss is one who processes the payments, not the merchant who sold them.
Yeah, that's my main point really. They failed to show even the smallest amount of consideration for the people who believed in them and what they were trying to build.
Opening a new location is sometimes a last ditch effort to save a company.
With a new location, you get new staff who don't need paying till month end, new things to say to investors when looking for money, new opportunities to get the public to "sign up for a years membership in advance" to both help cashflow and make revenue look better to investors, etc.
> Those same employees were also told that they're unlikely to get their final paycheck.
This as a Finn sounds crazy. Here the employees are protected to a degree if the company goes bankrupt then the government will pay the final paycheck and the government will be the first one to get their money back from the bankruptcy (before any banks/other creditors when any existing assets are sold)
This is what makes a European a European, and an American, American. We have different standards and expectations about the social contract between enterprises and society.
Also, no wonder American companies tend to grow a lot faster without many impediments. The whole American system is built to support and protect the enterprise, not the people. In Europe, as an enterprise, you have a lot more requirements and obligations to fulfill.
And even though I have a disadvantage running a company in Europe as compared to the US, as a European I believe it's the right thing to do.
> This is what makes a European a European, and an American, American. We have different standards and expectations about the social contract between enterprises and society.
As an American this is what I truly hate about corporations. They are afforded person-hood and "citizenship" where it benefits them but are treated as a company / corporation / non-living entity when that benefits them most.
I've been tired of telling international friends that I don't set nor agree with the vast majority of American policies. I, sadly, have no faith that the day will ever come where I won't feel so defensive when the topic of my country and it's influence on the globe becomes the topic for discussion.
> As an American this is what I truly hate about corporations. They are afforded person-hood and "citizenship" where it benefits them but are treated as a company / corporation / non-living entity when that benefits them most.
As an American, I detest this meme, because it perpetuates major misconceptions about corporate law in the US.
Corporations are not granted "personhood and citizenship". People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals.
This concept is often abbreviated as "corporate personhood", which is unfortunate because it's a seriously misleading term. It's not that corporations become people - it's a way of referring to way individuals can exercise their rights through a group. Corporate personhood isn't even a single provision; it's a way of summarizing a collection of unrelated case law in a short phrase.
I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but have a question, as you seem to have thought about this.
I feel the GP's point relates to things like corporations receiving favorable tax treatment when individuals would not; corporations receiving very lenient punishments for crimes when individuals would not; corporations, as above, being able to avoid payments when an individual's property might otherwise be at risk, and so on. Perhaps I'm just not aware that these possibilities are available to me. Am I mistaken here?
Overall, I feel your response deals with the legal framework around what GP said as opposed to the ideas that inspired GP's comment.
>People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals.
I in turn detest this meme. It is symptomatic of everything I think is wrong with corporatism.
Size and power distort incentives and moral accountability. Each individual in a group should continue to have the rights they have as individuals, but these rights should not aggregate with a "simple sum", so to speak. There must be some cost to aggregating your "rights" in this way, because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability, which counterbalance "rights". People behave differently in groups (worse), and with more power (worse), and it is impossible to pin moral blame on a corporation.
People perpetrate violence on other people. People can perpetrate said violence as a group. People and groups with more means (money, power, influence) can perpetrate and get away with more violence, as the scale and degrees of removal from the effects of the violence become incomprehensible. Hence I can't blow smoke in the face of my neighbor because I will feel bad, and I will have to deal with the repercussions. But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job". No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
> because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability
There isn't, legally. If anything, corporate status provides a clearer framework for holding people properly accountable when they coordinate their actions as a group. Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability.
> But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job"
You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential.
> No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions".
The irony is that it sounds like a populist statement that's sticking up for the little guy against the machine, but in actuality it's an incredibly radical statement in favor of stripping power away from the poor in order to preserve the power and status of the extremely wealthy.
> Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability.
To my eyes, a large part of the purpose of corporations is to shirk individual responsibility. What else would LLC stand for?
>You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential.
I attempted to make it clear that the act of incorporating, ceasing to become merely an individual and existing as part of a group in and of itself has dehumanizing influences. The corrupting influence of group-think, moral smokescreening, and increased degrees of separation from the repercussions of one's actions is orthogonal to the corrupting influence of power. Nazi guards could sleep at night after a long day of executions because they were part of a corrupt group that absolved them of responsibility, not because they were mega rich.
To take BP's example, the blame for the spill results from countless decisions which add up to supreme negligence. But it's hard to pin on a single person, it is the organization itself (and its goals) which caused the problem. This negative influence needs to be curtailed, so I think it's inappropriate to consider a group of individuals as having the exact same rights as its constituents summed. When it comes to rights, I just don't buy that 2+2=4.
>>No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
>This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions"
It was a bit inflammatory of me to word it that way, but I still disagree that those two things are "logically equivalent". I just don't think it makes sense to think of rights in aggregate. Aggregating rights in the form of corporations leads to weighting of rights by the amount of money you have. The son of the chairman of Samsung can exert far more influence across his network of conglomerates and paper companies than I ever can. Does his million-fold monetary advantage over me give him a million times more rights across his corporate appendages than me? Should I buy a third of a share in his textiles company which has the president's ear if I want to express my rights? Fuck that. Those aren't rights, it's the pure expression of power and violence, the very thing I want society to curtail.
Look at the number of people put into prison after a corporation commits a crime.
In almost all cases being part of a corporation provides protection above and beyond what an individual has on their own. Arguably, this is the entire point of corporations over just having groups of individuals. Consider a world where there was zero corporate law and a group of people was dumping illegally. Each of them would have massive individual liability.
Strawman. You clearly aren't awake to the corporate cancer that has metastasized through corrupt political-media-corporate complex that controls America with manufactured libertarian propaganda and consent.
The problem is that companies can spend their money on free speech without undergoing double-taxation. If the same money was allocated to an individual first it would be taxed.
The issue with this perspective is that corporations generally are not chartered such that they provide their employees with a voice in its executive actions. There’s also a level of (soft) coercion in that employees’ jobs are on the line.
As a result, granting a corporation blanket rights (eg to donate money) is not implicitly granting those rights to the group, it is granting them only to a small number of individuals within that group.
You say “individuals can exercise their rights through a group”. Most individuals are in fact prohibited from exercising their rights during working hours beyond what is of interest to the corporation, and do not have a direct voice in what the corporation’s goals are.
Thus mediating privileges of a 10,000-person organization as if it speaks with the voice of 10,000 people is effectively reassigning the voice of a large chunk of people to a much smaller chunk of people. If the group only has the legal rights collectively as the sum of its individuals, it is creating an inherently non-democratic power block within a democratic society.
> This is what makes a European a European, and an American, American
> Also, no wonder American companies tend to grow a lot faster without many impediments. The whole American system is built to support and protect the enterprise, not the people. In Europe, as an enterprise, you have a lot more requirements and obligations to fulfill.
Huh? Developed EU countries eagerly open branches in newer EU states so they can benefit from American-style treatment of the employees... and these branches don't grow at all - it's just about cheap workforce and all profits are funneled out (franchises, copyrights, and various "sandwiches"). You should really understand that there are people paying hefty price for your cozy warm employment conditions and it's not in some remote Asian country - it's just across the border, within the same economic and political union.
Except in France, unemployment is 10% while in the US it's 4%. My point on this is that it's a lot bigger of a risk to start a company in France, it's harder to hire and fire and thus it makes it a more risk-adverse environment.
So the thought experiment -- is it better for someone to work for a year and then get fired unexpectedly or not work at all and collect unemployment money for 3 years?
I thought about opening an office in France for a dev team, but after looking at the real costs -- there's no way I could afford it. The actual salaries are fine, but adding in social charges, then all of the ridiculous "protections" -- it's easier for me to hire guys in Serbia, pay them well while not having the financial risk of having to take care of employees when my business may not be able to support them.
So there are 5 French engineers that aren't working now and 5 Serbians that are because I can't afford the risk of hiring French workers because as the business owner, I'm the "bad guy" -- despite funding my little company out of my own pocket and not even being able to pay myself a salary. To be on the hook for French social benefits and the job protections when I can't even provide that for myself? No thanks.
So I've had Serbian devs for the past 2 years and exactly zero French devs -- despite paying the Serbians the same net salary I would have paid the French.
I'm an anecdote, but that's the other side of this "protection" that EU workers "benefit" from -- it's great when they DO have a job, but there are countless jobs that don't exist precisely because of these policies -- and the jobs that do exist pay far less than American jobs (despite similar living costs) because companies have to price the risks into the salaries they offer. So rather than paying a dev $100k per year plus benefits -- a French company would pay $40k per year plus benefits. Then they have roughly 1.5 years of "cushion" in case they're stuck with an employee they can't simply fire.
Before folks start to talk about how France has better social benefits and thus a lower salary is ok.. Net disposable income is vastly less than in the US. And, US companies provide health/disability/etc. benefits in addition to a higher salary. So the idea that French companies pay a lower salary because health insurance is free is just ridiculous -- since French companies aren't paying for health insurance, they should be able to pay even higher salaries than the US right? But the reason they don't is because they have to hedge the risk that they can't fire this employee.
I'd rather work an uncertain year at $150k than three years of $40k guaranteed, but that's just me. I'm an optimist while most French I know are decidedly pessimistic.
I'm sympathetic to your general point but it doesn't seem very relevant to this discussion.
It's one thing to have employment law where you can't hire/fire people at will. I agree that's relatively inflexible and I'd prefer the American model (as a European). There's no free lunch here, you either need to pay for this out of your taxes (as in France), or pay lower taxes and save for the unexpected loss of job yourself (as in the US).
It's an entirely different thing that a company can't meet its basic contractual obligations, i.e. the ability to pay salaries. That's a case where a contract was made, there seems to be something very wrong with basic US corporate law that would allow this to happen, i.e. a company should have enough assets on hand to pay salaries in the event that it goes bankrupt.
In most of Europe companies are obligated to insure against this eventuality. I can't drive a car on public roads without insurance, why should a company be allowed to operate if it isn't insured against failure to meet its basic contract obligations?
> I'm sympathetic to your general point but it doesn't seem very relevant to this discussion.
That you should judge the economy as a whole instead of picking one aspect and extrapolating what "our values are".
Europeans tend to view issues through a classist lens. That society is split up into the workers, and the capitalists, and that your ranking in the social hierarchy is solidified.
For better or worse, we don't see it that way. Today you're a worker, tomorrow you're a business owner. I would say America has more workers-turned-entrepreneur than anywhere else in the world. We have more millionaires who came from "worker" background than anywhere.
I've seen it first hand on multiple occasions. I've seen immigrants come to this country with nothing, work incredibly hard, build a business from scratch, and turn into employers in their community. It's the story of my family and many others here.
If the barrier for these immigrants starting a business was anything like complying with EU regulation - I promise you these businesses and their communities would not exist.
I don't understand what you think any of this has to do with the topic of unpaid wages owed to workers.
Do you think a critical part of the American success story is the ability of these workers-turned-entrepreneurs to skimp out on paying them the wages they owe?
> why should a company be allowed to operate if it isn't insured against failure to meet its basic contract obligations?
Because it is meeting its contractual obligation. The liquidation preferences were already part of the corporate bylaws when the employees joined. If the agreement was violated then we have a court system to work it out.
The founders screwed up here and in this iterative game of prisoners dilemma their next venture won't be so easy. But I don't think we can point at this scenario and draw any systematic conclusions. The companies that would need this insurance are the one's that can afford it the least. Which is why "startups" have this profile of high risk and most likely a total bust.
Having the option to work in a high risk environment is important because as individuals we all have a different risk profiles. And if you look at our public listed companies some of these risks have payed off immensely.
Since the context of this thread is the oddity of the American system compared to most other western countries, yes, of course you can draw systematic conclusions. Workers aren't systematically unable to get their final paycheck in most other western countries.
There's a small flat corporate tax for this sort of thing, which addresses your point that startups would need to pay higher insurance rates for this. The insurance is run by state. The reason should be obvious, because you still want innovation and new companies, so it amounts to a net subsidy from big corporations to small ones.
Unless you think unpaid wages are some big part of US GDP it's pretty hard to argue that the lack of this is some huge part of the US's success story.
There's also no limit on working in a high risk environment. There's just a higher bar to being able to form a limited liability corporation.
Sure, you can work with a bunch of people and if it all collapses none of you get paid, but you don't get to do through some arrangement that looks like a normal job. They need to explicitly sign up for that, e.g. as co-founders or through some other painfully obvious mechanism, not just some clause in the bylaws that nobody working at Starbucks is ever going to read.
> Workers aren't systematically unable to get their final paycheck in most other western countries.
How is a one-off event systematic? This is a chapter 7 bankruptcy. The employees become creditors and participate in the liquidation. If the founders were using bankruptcy intentionally to not pay wages then it becomes a matter for the department of labor. All these employees are eligible to collect unemployment in the state they're employed.
These guys spectacularly crashed and burned for this to happen. Starbucks wouldn't file a chapter 7, they'd restructure and wages wouldn't be effected. If you want judge the entire US economy from this article and draw parallels about how this makes Americans and Europeans fundamentally different then you're painting with too broad of a brush.
> Europeans tend to view issues through a classist lens. That society is split up into the workers, and the capitalists, and that your ranking in the social hierarchy is solidified.
And yet social mobility between the classes (they exist in the US too even though you don't necessarily think in terms of them) in many European countries is better then in the US. Especially the nordic countries. Pretty much the only EU countries doing worse then US are UK and Italy and the difference between US and UK is much smaller then US and Finland for example.
Maybe we Europeans are a bit pessimistic when it comes to our economic futures but in terms of the chance of making from poor to rich (or vice versa) in many places we are doing better then the US.
There's some truth here but it seems we're comparing apples to oranges considering Finland is the size of a US city. I wonder how a top US city compares to Finland for example, or the EU as a whole compares to the US in class mobility.
The correct answer in your case is to give your employees ownership or give them shares or find investors or increase your social safety net to be suitable for underfunded startups.
Of course it is cheaper for you to hire in Serbia than in France, it is a poorer country with lower cost of life. That's about it.
What does "harder to hire" in France even mean? You make a contract and someone starts working for you on the following day. Actually, you do not even need to make a written contract, just have him come to work and pay him, that's enough to define employment.
What is so risky about firing in France? If you fire someone with a good reason, you have to pay him the astounding, horrific, monstrous amount of... 1 week of pay per year of service. If you fire him for no good reason, that is not much worse, you risk (as in, that's if you really screw up (or get screwed)) a few months of pay and that's it.
You can make provision as much as you want, there is no way it is going to cost you more than the difference between 40k and 100k (I take your numbers, which are also off, but that's another problem). Let alone every year for every employee.
I am always amazed at the so much praised risk-taking entrepreneurship (which is prone to brag about its boldness and how it deserves to be rewarded for the huge risks it takes)... who hates nothing as much as the smallest existing risk. I've come to think that it is probably afraid of its own shadow when it walks down the street.
> since French companies aren't paying for health insurance
What? Of course they do. How do you think the health insurance and other services are funded? It is just fixed by law and not depending on the mood on the employer.
You can ramble on as much as you like, but your decision can be summed up as just "it is cheaper to hire someone in a poorer country", which is nothing new. You did not choose to avoid France to go to Germany or Switzerland, you chose an Eastern country, you chose Serbia where the average salary is 6 to 8 times lower!
To be fair the US system has advantages. Hiring and firing people is a lot easier and faster.
I do think that in the long run making your employees happy and loyal is worthwhile. But treating your workers as disposable trash is also a viable strategy in some sectors.
In the U.S., employees are also protected to a degree. Unpaid wage claims up to $10k, including vacation, severance, or sick leave pay, are prioritized over general unsecured creditors. [1]
Are there creditors that have preference above unpaid wage claims in the US (like banks)? In my little country in Europe (NL), wage has near absolute preference so there is little chance of unpaid wages not being paid. Almost any company has some assets. In Finland (see GP) there's even government insurance.
You can see the list in the link above, but the short answer is very few, such as domestic support (alimony, child support) and administrative expenses of the bankruptcy. The most important creditors with higher priority who are not on the list are secured creditors, such as lenders with mortgages on real and personal property -- but I'd be surprised if this varied much internationally.
Prioritized wages get paid even before unpaid taxes do.
Probably because the security is specific real property, so that someone can't give everyone a $100k/week raise and then declare bankruptcy and use the court against the secured creditor. If this were not the case then it would be hard to convince someone to lend for the various bits of real property that make commerce work. Secured creditors are taking on a risk, but not a very big risk because they have first claim on the secured property.
In Denmark we have a government body litteraly called the "salary guarantee foundation" (well obviously it is named in danish), which pays salaries (including those you are entitled to after you are fired) up to 160K DKK (so around 21500 EUR).
That foundation then goes first in queue in the bankrupcy claims (but often doesn't get anything)....
But the salary up to that point is safe for the employee... no matter if the company has any assets or not..
(EDIT): oh yeah, and we have state funded health care too...
This is flat out wrong. In bankruptcy in .nl, the uwv (a semi government agency) takes over responsibility for paying up to 13 weeks before and 6 weeks after termination of employment, which is usually a few days after the bankruptcy. Apart from that, wages are 'preferenced' but at the same rank as the uwv and the tax office. However, all of those come after the 'separatisten', which are creditors with a 'security right' (don't know the english term). Which means in practice (since most companies will have pawned their assets to banks for credit lines) that banks will get the most money, 'preferred creditors' some money and others nothing. So while in nl, in case of bankruptcy, most employees will get all wages and overtime they were owed, it has nothing to do with some 'near absolute preference' they supposedly have. And if you don't start bankruptcy proceedings at most say four to six weeks after you didn't get paid, there is a real chance you won't get your full wage. And this is by design, it says so in the 'parlementaire geschiedenis' of the law (record of the discussions around new laws that provide context for future interpretation)
Source: have degree in Dutch law, this is elementary 'employment law', but 30 secs of googling will show that I'm not just making things up.
What was $500 in classes supposed to get you? It sounds like they were charging quite a bit for classes to make sure you knew how to not kill yourself on various equipment.
This was a few days AFTER they revoked the employees insurance benefits without notice or explanation.
There is somewhat of a saving grace here. Under federal law, these employees automatically qualify for a special enrollment period through the health insurance marketplace since they lost their employer-provided health insurance [1]. Since this happened during November, they can have coverage beginning December 1 as long as they sign up before the end of the month.
True but it's hard to see the silver lining after being denied a prescription refill at the pharmacy and only finding out why when you turn up for work the following day.
If you are denied a prescription refill because of an insurance lapse, you can get reimbursed for your out-of-pocket expense once you have insurance again. It's true that some people may not be able to pony up $100 for a refill, but if you do, you'll get reimbursed.
I checked the TechShop reviews on Glassdoor a month or so ago. While you have to put all such reviews through a b.s. filter of your own design, the overall impression was that the business was sinking and that management was wildly out of touch. Looks like some of that was accurate.
As I read it, the mismanagement is going broke before closing up shop. If the whole thing has been nonviable for a while, canceling insurance without notice and failing to issue final paychecks is a nasty thing to do.
They had one store that was break even. Then they tried to go all silicon valley and take on as much investment and expansion as they could. They followed each unprofitable expansion with another one until they ran out of people to fool in to investing in their ponzi scheme.
I say this having seen the investor prospectus.
In 2009, they had one store that was break-even. The plan at that time called for opening "149" stores by 2015.
By 2015, there were 2 out of 8 stores that were break even, the rest were money pits.
If they stuck with growing slower and reinvesting profits, instead of taking on investments in an effort to make a unicorn, the bay area shops would still be open.
Both. An all-you-can-eat buffet with caviar wouldn't pencil out either, but that's what they wanted to create. $99/mo for access to $500K of machines doesn't work. Pay-as-you-go is the only way it works and this was presented to them multiple times. The licensing "pivot" was basically them telling other people to go lose money with their flawed business model.
I belonged to the Redwood City TechShop for a year and was surprised five years ago seeing a TechShop planned for Raleigh, NC when we were thinking of moving to RTP. I'm not sure that it ever opened, it didn't last long.
We ended up in Winston-Salem, NC instead, and I look forward to checking on Mixxer when it opens, $550/year, https://wsmixxer.org/. Winston-Salem has a big arts community, might be an interesting place.
I was a member at TechShop RDU for a couple years. It started as an independent makerspace, got acquired by TechShop in 2011, then closed in 2013. It was a really cool place and I miss it. A lot of interesting characters there.
As others have said in this thread, I think TS had a tough value proposition to build a business model around. Classes were a pain and a fairly big start-up cost for new members, but inevitable to satisfy insurance requirements. The monthly membership fee was fairly cheap considering the awesome equipment they had, but expensive if you could only manage to go a few days a month. Plus whatever storage fees for larger projects and/or the hassle of carting your stuff around.
On top of that, management at both locations I used (RDU and Arlington) seemed a bit chaotic. Sad to see them go out of business either way.
What a shame. There was one right next to the San Jose State University campus. They were forced to move when construction on new private student housing began where their building had been located. After a lot of hardship and pleas for donations they had just finished moving into a new location right on 2nd street in the middle of downtown.
I was a member of Austin’s TechShop for two years. It was interesting contrasting it to the ATX Hackerspace. The hackerspace (a few years back, anyway) was much better at building a community. The fee was only $35/mo, and they had a starving student discount, and you were also free to invite your friends to tag along. As a result, there were always people just hanging out at the hackerspace. A lot of near-college-age space cadets and techno-dreamers, and they’d be there all day. You could go there to work on a project, or just to mooch off of the conversation.
TechShop never developed a community. It felt sterile in comparison. The fees were more like $125/mo (at the time, and only went up from there). There was no central area to hang out in and chat. And inviting a friend along cost something like $20. These conditions resulted in the demographic becoming more like a bunch of upper middle class dudes who managed to get a few hours away from the fam to work on their project. There was no social core, it never became a hang-out.
There were also some financial issues which really turned me off. I had spent about $1500 on classes early on (thinking I’d just get signed off on all of the machines asap so that I was free to work on anything), but I later found out that if you didn’t badge into a machine for over 12 months, your credential for that machine expired and you had to pay to take the class again. Boom, easily $1000 down the drain. By the time they started hiking up their membership prices, I was disillusioned and declined to renew.
To each his own I guess, but socializing and constant noise around when others are socializing is the main thing I hate about hacker spaces. I would gladly pay extra to have a "sterile" workplace for my projects.
At TechShop they were really conscientious about safety, but I don't think that extended into "hand tools". Power tools, certainly.
And I don't have any problem whatsoever about restricting access (and policing) to the larger or more dangerous equipment.
Lathes and milling machines can easily maim and kill if not treated with respect and knowledge. Laser cutters must be supervised when running, or a fire is easily possible (not to mention understanding why you shouldn't cut sheet PVC in a laser cutter). Water jet and plasma table cutters are not toys for the uninitiated.
I have zero problems with such rules. It's one thing if you own the tools yourself in your home shop; do what you want, whatever consequences result. But when you are doing it in a public or semi-public manner, having such rules and regulations should be a sign of quality of the space.
Obviously you have no interest in hackerspaces then which is fine. The community is half of the equation though, if there's zero value to you from the community then a more sterile TechShop-esq place is obviously your place to be.
I was lucky enough to have visited both the Austin TechShop and ATX a few years ago while I was in town. Both places were great for different reasons. I'm pro-hackerspace but I was also very interested in seeing a TechShop first-hand. I was surprized how much community involvement was required to keep TechShop running despite being a commercial place. There were multiple tools that were pointed out on my tour that would "become available" once a volunteer had more time to get them running and develop a class. The sad thing though was just how expensive all the classes were. At ATX I heard that a number of members also paid for memberships at TechShop too. It was heartening to see that both places could co-exist without competing for funding/memberships.
I did a trial membership of the Menlo Park, California facility in 2009. It didn't have the vibe you mention, either, but it seemed like more fun than the quiet shared office spaces I was considering at the time.
What stopped me from signing up after the trial was the no-kids policy. I think the age minimum was 16. While I understand why this was the case -- insurance requirements, danger, and you don't want other people's brats treating the place like a playground -- it completely ruled out joining. If I couldn't stop by there on the weekend for even half an hour while my kids sat quietly in the corner reading books, then all my hacker exploits would be hidden from them, and I want them to be exposed to that stuff.
ATX Hackerspace has made a lot of progress over the last few years. It's one of the better hackerspaces I've been seen as far as sustainable growth, community, and business structure. If anyone has been displaced by TechShop closing, I'd recommend you give ATX Hackerspace a shot.
Wow. I'm speachless. I remember when Obama visited the TechShop near me in Pittsburgh. This was supposed to be the next big thing! The harbinger into the Uberization of the workforce. What a bummer and major dissapointment. I met with the staff there numerous times; they were fantistic people - well educated and helpful. This is just so dissapointing. There are quite a few makerspaces and hackerspaces in Pittsburgh. I hope this doesn't spell the end of this movement.
dheera, I was in the same boat - hacker dojo has at least one of those things. There's a "techshop orphans" group on facebook coordinating things right now for ex members/employees.
Civilization has successfully wiped out yet another source of small joys for folk. But we endure and continue making.
it seems really sad that these longstanding resources don't get as much attention in the maker community as they should. the teaching staff is usually super experienced and helpful, the costs are priced to allow people to get themselves into regular blue collar work. most importantly for me they are trying to train you to be a professional craftsman, not just getting you to the minimum level that you can show up once a month and mess around and probably not hurt yourself.
ccsf welding courses are vastly more useful and 1/4 the cost of a crucible course
There's a political angle or herd mentality that makes it hard to go to CC. If you can get past it, they are great places for an individual to learn, but if the social or social media stuff is a significant fraction of being in the makerspace, then its not going to work.
If you want to make contacts, that's different from running a lathe, but maybe I'm oversimplifying.
I will say that people at makerspaces generally want to be there, whereas people in CCs generally see it as more of a steppingstone to a decently paying job. You might get more out of one or the other, but there's no denying that makerspaces charge extortionate rates for machines that the CC provides virtually for free, if you know the prof well enough so he lets you sneak in.
Also hacker dojo mentioned that they are willing to accomodate the needs of techshop refugees (they're basically the only serious space now all the way from SF SJ). They have a small space now and if people pitch in a lot more can happen (equipment is quite cheap when 10 or 20 people pitch in).
You'd be surprised at what is possible using only hand tools, a table saw, a scroll saw, and a welder, plasma cutter, and right-angle grinder.
Heck - if you're only doing metal work, the last three can be all had for less than $2k (if you aren't too picky about brands).
Now - if you're wanting a place like this because you don't have the space or such to have your own "shop area" (like a garage or shed), that's understandable.
But really, if you can swing it, going with the basics can sometimes yield just as good results. For instance, take a look at this image:
The guy is a friend of mine, and that's his shop. His name is Lance Greathouse. I volunteer on weekends and such to help him with his non-profit, Wheelchair Labs. We take donated powerchairs, like the one he's sitting in, clean 'em up, fix 'em up, then donate them back out to those in need. I've seen lives change because of this.
Anyhow, he's been doing this for a while, and the non-profit is fairly recent; prior to that, it was just a side hobby (inspired by his brother, who passed away) - but he was donated a bunch of chairs and such that couldn't be re-used. We've used them for parts, and he's used them for years to build robots and other toys.
See that 6-wheel machine to the right? It's powered by a couple of large wheelchair motors, driving the wheels using a chain drive. That gun thingie on the top is an actual flamethrower he built (he's an expert in fire effects, too). The whole thing is radio controlled. Anyhow, that robot was hand-built, using pretty much a welder, a right-angle grinder, and a cutting torch (acetylene). There was drill press involved, too. Plus hand tools and some other power tools.
Virtually everything you see in that picture, minus the chair Lance is sitting in, was made without access to a lathe, cnc mill, or laser cutter. We do have a plasma-torch CNC table, but we've never gotten it to work properly (it never holds the arc for more than a few inches of travel). We've found, though, that we can do anything with just a bit of imagination and gumption.
Just keep that in mind. Rarely is it the lack of the proper tools or space that holds you back. Re-evaluate what you want to do - maybe you do need the equipment you mention (for instance, the stuff we do is very much "one-off" items; if you wanted to do production quality, larger runs, or you need more precision, then you'd probably want better tools).
Or - maybe you might be able to get along with other tools?
I hate to be the guy who says he saw this coming, but I doubt I'm the only one who did. Renting out prime real estate in downtown areas, buying very expensive tools and machinery, and letting people use them for a very small percentage of the cost? Not a good business model.
It wasn't always prime real estate. In San Jose, they were on 2nd Street, which is a no man's land due to high crime. They got lots of concessions from the city to go there, but still couldn't make it.
I felt the same way when I toured the Austin Techshop. They touted some hugely expensive machine and I was thinking 'How many people need to cut an 8 inch block of marble with precision?'
Honestly, I think a similar concept would work with much more basic equipment.
For those of you in SF, you should look into Noisebridge. They don't have nearly as many tools or machines as TechShop, but they have a lot and it's all free.
Eh good riddance. I recall encountering a litany of safety issues at their first location. For instance... a properly set up machine shop has the milling machines placed in the corners of the room, and the remainder with shields around them. This is so that if a part is improperly fixtured, the part won't be shot out of the vice at a neighboring operator. When a certain mill made a terrible noise at the speed I needed to operate it at, I was told to crank the speed up until the noise went away. This is when the location was run by the core group of people who started it... and thus I'm not surprised that it was mismanaged at scale as it grew.
I could never justify joining the Pittsburgh one when it was open. I did visit a few times and always felt like they had too many employees and too much space for what they were. They also chose one of the most expensive places to rent in a city filled with affordable real estate.
These kind of facilities should be paid for by tax dollars (which they are in other countries). They provide a needed place for people to tinker and learn which is beneficial to the community overall.
I suspect there is still a business model there. When I was looking for access to machine shop tools in Boston area (I primarily needed a good accuracy CNC mill) I found nothing that worked for me. Best match was a "maker space" with a mess inside, 4 machines 2 of which were broken (including their one CNC) and remaining two looking suspicious.
How can I use machines? Take a class after sign up. When is the next class? Not sure, in a few months maybe; they fill quick, too, so keep checking often. The attitude of an admin I checked with was "get lost, we have enough members already".
I finally found what I needed at a university hobby shop: working machines, busy but good access to tools, efficient admins. To get CNC access I needed 2 short classes that I could both schedule within 2 weeks.
Before I found that though I would gladly pay higher membership fees for a clean, efficient machine shop access. Just my 2c.
Market size would be a challenge. You likely represent a very niche segment - a highly technically savvy hobbyist who wants to work on tools yourself for the love of it.
For anyone doing requiring 3D printing, CNC etc professionally or even as a semi serious hobby, I'm sure there would be firms who can execute and fedex you the job.
Here in Singapore when I moved into our apartment, I ended up having to design a custom child safety lock for my windows. I found quite a few 3D print shops which could deliver the next day at quite a reasonable rate - fast enough for me to iterate the final design within a week.
Possibly, but I am not sure about this. When I was looking (about 5-7 yrs ago, US, Boston area) there were two types: cheap and nonfunctional beyond toys or "we run your jobs for you". First type, as they are cheap, have no interest in new members building things; in fact, as the membership is so cheap they try to sell all sorts of overpriced classes as memberships do not cover costs.
At the other end there are those who take your design and ship you the product, as you said. This is OK for many cases, but gets pretty expensive and inefficient for prototyping. And there was nothing in between to fill this wide gap.
In fact, when I was looking for such a shop and asked friends if they know a place that would let me pay membership to use a decent quality 3+ axis CNC mill and a laser cutter no one knew of a place but several said if I found one, would I please let them know. So I suspect the market is there.
The situation is much better with 3D printing -- there are small shops everywhere and some could even let you come inside and iterate if you chat with owners. However, inexpensive 3D printing is nowhere near the accuracy, reliability and robustness of the end product you get with inexpensive milling.
I think you just answered your own question there. Look up the price of a 3-axis mill with the capabilities you're looking for. The cheapest you'll find is probably the Tormach 440, which starts at about $7K. A laser cutter in the range you're likely looking for runs about the same. Now look at the unit economics on that and figure out how many people like you would need to pay to use the machines before breaking even, before even getting into rent, maintenance costs, insurance, and the inevitable repairs needed when a non-professional uses it and breaks it. It's just not worth it to have that level of machinery available to the public unless it's part of a bigger TechShop-like setup where dues are a grand a year and classes that much again (there's a similar place to TechShop in Orange County, for example, with an almost identical cost structure).
For what it's worth, I run a 3D printing shop (we also have a laser cutter and woodworking equipment) and we let people prototype on our machines occasionally. 3D printing is an order of magnitude more accessible than milling, and probably about twice as easy as laser cutting, and if one of our machines goes down due to user error, it's cheap and easy to replace parts and won't stop operations since there are plenty of others.
> This is OK for many cases, but gets pretty expensive and inefficient for prototyping
I used to think so too once upon a time and i used to etch PCBs myself etc. Then my child was born and the value of my own time sky-rocketed. Now even when prototyping my hobbies, I'd rather focus on the work where my doing it adds value especially with the internet making producing custom designs a commodity.
More broadly, it's kind of sad how little actually came of the "Maker Movement," at least in terms of startups. MakerBot sold for $400M and there are plenty of small 3-D printer companies targeted at hobbyists. Ponoko and Shapeways are solid if unspectacular. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are both solid projects, AdaFruit and Sparkfun are solid businesses. Make: Magazine is cool, but still a niche publication.
Of course, startups aren't the only measure of success. The net positive is hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of younger hackers who may go on to build the next hardware company based on lessons learned at a MakerFaire.
> More broadly, it's kind of sad how little actually came of the "Maker Movement"
I'm not sure I agree. However I do believe the "Maker" movement was over sold by O'Reilly media and Dale Dougherty in particular. I stopped subscribing to Make Magazine few years back when it became apparent it was little more than a print version of Hackaday or Instructables.
Regardless of Maker. There is a plethora Robotics Competitions, existing Hacker spaces and STEM is huge.
The number of kids that were going to tinker at home is a fairly fixed. Where we'll really move the needle in terms of more people getting into engineering is in formal education (inc Robotics competitions).
Disclosure: I'm a little biased, I help design and build IDE's for some of these comps, e.g. http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/what-is-zr/ but I also have advocated and help implement "maker spaces" in my local school system. There is a sea-change, so I'll push back on the idea that little came of the 'maker movement'
I totally agree — There was just this point where the Economist and other general interest publications were covering it like the 3rd industrial revolution. More robot clubs are great, but it's hard to think of a single billion dollar company that came out of it.
This is rather unexpected and surprising to me. I wonder what it was about the business model that just didn't work?
When they opened the Chandler location here in the Phoenix area, I quickly signed up for a year's membership, but that turned out to be a mistake. I certainly didn't get my money's worth, but the mistake was on my end, not theirs: They were located in the east valley (where it seems all the cool kids are), and I live in the west valley; it was a good 100 mile drive round-trip for me to go there. I hardly ever went as a result, and the membership was wasted.
The space itself was amazing otherwise; had it been closer to my home I am sure I would have used it more often than I did for the tools I didn't otherwise have at home (like the laser cutters, for instance). I was always impressed how they had workshops for just about everything you needed to take an idea from a concept (CAD/design) to finished prototype.
There more more than a few startups that got their start at TechShop; one of the more famous examples was Square (they prototyped the original swipe reader thru TechShop).
I am now wondering what, if anything, this says (or what effects it will have) about other maker and hackerspaces. We don't really have very many in the Valley. For myself, I'll just continue doing what I've always done, and work from home or over at my friend's shop.
Update: the founder of Square is re-opening the St. Louis location.[1]
The Deputy City Manager of San Jose has his staff looking into what to do about the San Jose location.[2] There's a good chance San Jose and the Downtown Development Association will make something happen. They're very aggressive in building up downtown San Jose. In 2008, it was almost totally empty, and they want startups to locate there.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI think they got reckless with their expansion. The San Jose location moved to a new location after their lease expired. They chose to relocate to a prime location in downtown San Jose and ended up with a million dollar shortfall to renovate and open the new location. They somehow managed to scrounge the money through an appeal to the community and opened but it must have ruined their financials.
At the same time they were opening in other cities. If their financials in the Bay area were shaky (as they admit in their closing statement on their website) then it is not clear why they were taking on more risk by expanding.
[1]: https://goo.gl/maps/39QQvxgc3f32
Those machines will be pieced out--down to the coffee maker.
Tip to those buying; find the guy in the back, barking orders at temp liquidators, with a hint of a Martinni on his breath, and quietly ask him about deals. Make sure he knows you have cash.
I have always found bankruptcy sales depressing.
@dang - YC should buy them!!!
I'm pretty sure if they can get rid of all of their debt, they would make a little bit of cash. But not enough to justify their billing as a start-up.
The other looming issue is that a lot of the equipment at the Bay Area sites is, er, well-loved, and will need to be replaced over the next few years, which is a major capital expense. At the Redwood City shop, the laser cutters are all getting pretty run-down.
I wonder what will happen with that ASU program (I think it was part of the engineering school)? I wonder if they will simply take over the space and continue using it (though probably closed to the public)?
Ultimately the high price wasn't what held me back from joining, but the tool use policies required by their insurers. You had to pay for a brutally waitlisted class before they'd let you use so much as a laser cutter. I wonder how much this contributed - both the cost of insurance and its consequences - to their decline.
For better or worse, that's been the model at every makerspace I've been a member of/looked into. And I think it makes sense, insurance-mandated or not. Lots of expensive, potentially dangerous machinery that if used wrong can destroy itself, its user, and/or those nearby.
Also, in my experience once you've built up enough trust with the admins they'll let you get a crash course from a member who knows what's up and skip the fees and formal training process.
Given that this was about a waitlist for the "how to use a laser cutter" class, getting another tool probably wasn't going to be economically possible.
The TechShop in my area (Phoenix/Chandler) had six (!) laser cutters - all ULS 60 watt machines (I'm not sure what they had before they closed; I haven't been back in a long while). ULS is based in Scottsdale, so maybe they got a discount on the equipment or something - but regardless, those machines aren't cheap. They are quality machines (heck, the software alone is pretty amazing), and have a cost that reflects it.
if you add up all the fees, assuming you have a big enough space, instead you can buy a lot of that gear used or on the low end. have a blast learning. keep your work and stock next to your tools, and specialize in the processes that interest you.
the only exception i can think of is the sheet metal tools, they need quite a bit of floor space and are shockingly expensive. i don't think tech shop had a water jet, but that too would be worth paying for time on.
The SF TechShop did have a waterjet, capable of cutting through basically anything.
(industrial space in the bayview has gone up, but its still under $1/ft)
0x10, "Data Link Escape"? How did that get there, I'm really curious.
I don't want to be around people who use powerful machines without proper training, or around kids using those machines, or using those machines around kids who treat the shop as a playground.
Definitely the biggest hazard in my comprehensive school tech. classes. Little makes you move to the other side of the room faster than people throwing random pieces of scrap at a powered disk sander, and I'll never forgot the noise an LED makes when shorted across a 230VAC wall socket (with a locker key jammed in the earth pin for good measure...).
I sometimes wonder how the only injuries I got from those years was a minor soldering burn (dropped the iron) and accidentally impaling the palm of my hand with a screwdriver.
Well, the woodshop itself had equipment that was decades old; some of the equipment was quality stuff dating from the 1930s. We had this huge surface planer machine that could take wood 6 inches thick and 8 feet wide; it took a good 10 minutes for it to come to a complete stop after powering it up.
A friend of mine wanted to see if it would plane 1/2" in one pass off a 2x6; the instructor of the class had no problem with trying it, either!
It did. You wouldn't believe the sound it made, but it didn't miss a beat doing it.
The bigger problem for me was that equipment was under some contention, meaning that it took signing up for a particular (maybe 2 hour) block of time a couple days in advance. I was trying to prototype things and learn basic stuff at the same time, which meant that my original computer designs were typically wrong the first few tries, and I wanted to do several rounds of iterative improvements to my designs. That is: 10 minutes of cutting, followed by 30 minutes of fiddling with a computer program or vector file, followed by 10 more minutes of cutting, etc. With a 2 hour block of time it’s only possible to get through 3 feedback cycles in that style, after which I sometimes had to wait a few days to try again at a time that would fit in my schedule. I would have been dramatically more efficient if I could have shared a 6 hour block of time with 3–4 other people.
https://www.acemonstertoys.org/
I'm on the peninsula, is there something similar in this area?
Perhaps they could have come up with a drastically price reduced membership which only allowed for a couple of days of use per month? It would have eaten into some of their full memberships, but I suspect they could have dramatically grown their membership in that fashion.
Between housing and real estate prices, insurance, taxes, lack of government support, environmental protections, requirement to pay for health insurance for employees,layers of regulations, minimum wage laws, sexual harassment lawsuits (it only takes one and your company is over)...you just can’t operate a physical space with drills, laser cutters, saws, advanced electronics and machinery at a profit in America anymore.
TechShop was the last gasp of American industry having any sort of future. With Tech Shop, we can also probably say good bye to a good deal of real trade skills people learn at these locations. They really tried to make it work. I have spoken to some of their founders myself - The amount of work it takes to set up even one of these facilities is simply staggering. If I were to show you the spreadsheets, business plans and research these guys invest to open ONE shop it genuinely rivals that of a full startup per location.
My heart really breaks.
There are a few companies able to survive with physical presences like this in the Bay Area now, but they are all backed by the power of Jabil, Flextronics, Autodesk. Some small indie chain can’t make it in these conditions.
Unfortunately, we can expect more of this as a country. We are one recession away from a full republican route (they are doing a spectacularly awful job and deserve to be thrown out) and all signs are pointing to a fully socialist government being next in line.
Socialist governments are not known for their desire to roll back worker protections, undo environmental protections and regulations, nor is their focus on enabling businesses. Although I will say Canada seems to be doing better than us in many ways when it comes to accelerating genuinely valuable little companies like TechShop.
I am genuinely beginning to advise people to consider moving to Asia where innovation is able to happen, it won’t be done in a America anytime soon.
Between Trump and his socialist successor - and the wonderful incompetent state of California I don’t have a good feeling about American innovation anymore.
though I suspect if you want to open to the public insurance is going to be astronomical
Yeah.... thats.... just nonsense.
Makerspaces are very much still a thing, we have a thriving one here and I live in a small town.
Why do they need to be in such an expensive place then? Go somewhere they can actually afford, like most of the rest of the country.
There's also all sorts of zoning hell.
The good ol' days of a middle-class factory floor producing widgets with hand-operated tools is pretty much gone because of labor costs - gone to japan, mexico, then china, and now just gone-gone to automation. If you want to be a Randian captain of industry - that ship has sailed, docked, offloaded, and been towed to the breakers in south asia. If you care more about making new and better things more quickly, this is the best it's ever been.
The US is the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world. That happens in the physical world -- something you seem to have forgotten. 150m people go to work everyday, doing plenty of things in the physical world too. Millions of businesses have figured out how to pay for health insurance, office space, and the rest that you think prevents companies from existing.
I'm sure TechShop put in a lot of effort into their locations.. but maybe you should take a tour of a Ford or Boeing plant. They operate all of that equipment, and a lot of far more advanced equipment, all at a profit.
And the socialist bit at the end? Even the Democracts arent that socialist.. no one that far left is electable in the US. Bernie couldn't even get through his own party (and before you scream: but the democrats conspired against him... that's right, his own party wouldn't go along with him).
It will come back a different way, it's not completely dead, it's just that people realized it is actually difficult to design, cut, carve, weld, mold and otherwise create.
What you are saying at least partially makes some sense and it makes me sad people are downvoting you in a clearly reactionary way.
I suspect downvotes because of this, as much as the politics. The absurdity of a small, nonprofitable company being "the last gasp of American industry" and the odd lamentations around that.
I live in the Southeast. Drive through nearly any county in GA, NC, and SC (the region I'm presently most familiar with) and you'll find a surprisingly large number of manufacturing centers.
> With Tech Shop, we can also probably say good bye to a good deal of real trade skills people learn at these locations.
And none of the people working in them were trained by Tech Shop. They were trained on the job or in trade and tech schools.
I even work for a company that makes nearly all their products in North America.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Techshop/comments/7d7e0m/san_franci...
As for me, I was suckered into pre-paying for $500 worth of classes that I'll never be reimbursed for. So many people who's livelihoods depended on their facilities were completely blindsided. Members who had been there for years were told they had hours to remove their belongings or they would be confiscated. The whole thing is a complete mess.
All of this just a few weeks after opening a brand new location in Brooklyn. I simply can't comprehend the level of negligence and mismanagement here.
Did you pay with a CC? I would dispute the charges.
That said, training (unless it's useful outside the job) must be paid for by the employer. For example a pool can require CPR training for their lifeguards because you can use that outside being a lifeguard, but Starbucks can't require you to pay for their class because knowing how to make a starbucks drink is too specific.
"pre-paying". He paid in advance, and the classes will now not be going ahead.
The cardholder still gets their money back. In bankruptcy situations, the entity that generally ends up eating the loss is one who processes the payments, not the merchant who sold them.
With a new location, you get new staff who don't need paying till month end, new things to say to investors when looking for money, new opportunities to get the public to "sign up for a years membership in advance" to both help cashflow and make revenue look better to investors, etc.
This as a Finn sounds crazy. Here the employees are protected to a degree if the company goes bankrupt then the government will pay the final paycheck and the government will be the first one to get their money back from the bankruptcy (before any banks/other creditors when any existing assets are sold)
Also, no wonder American companies tend to grow a lot faster without many impediments. The whole American system is built to support and protect the enterprise, not the people. In Europe, as an enterprise, you have a lot more requirements and obligations to fulfill.
And even though I have a disadvantage running a company in Europe as compared to the US, as a European I believe it's the right thing to do.
As an American this is what I truly hate about corporations. They are afforded person-hood and "citizenship" where it benefits them but are treated as a company / corporation / non-living entity when that benefits them most.
I've been tired of telling international friends that I don't set nor agree with the vast majority of American policies. I, sadly, have no faith that the day will ever come where I won't feel so defensive when the topic of my country and it's influence on the globe becomes the topic for discussion.
As an American, I detest this meme, because it perpetuates major misconceptions about corporate law in the US.
Corporations are not granted "personhood and citizenship". People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals.
This concept is often abbreviated as "corporate personhood", which is unfortunate because it's a seriously misleading term. It's not that corporations become people - it's a way of referring to way individuals can exercise their rights through a group. Corporate personhood isn't even a single provision; it's a way of summarizing a collection of unrelated case law in a short phrase.
I feel the GP's point relates to things like corporations receiving favorable tax treatment when individuals would not; corporations receiving very lenient punishments for crimes when individuals would not; corporations, as above, being able to avoid payments when an individual's property might otherwise be at risk, and so on. Perhaps I'm just not aware that these possibilities are available to me. Am I mistaken here?
Overall, I feel your response deals with the legal framework around what GP said as opposed to the ideas that inspired GP's comment.
I in turn detest this meme. It is symptomatic of everything I think is wrong with corporatism.
Size and power distort incentives and moral accountability. Each individual in a group should continue to have the rights they have as individuals, but these rights should not aggregate with a "simple sum", so to speak. There must be some cost to aggregating your "rights" in this way, because there is a clear dampening factor for aggregate blame and accountability, which counterbalance "rights". People behave differently in groups (worse), and with more power (worse), and it is impossible to pin moral blame on a corporation.
People perpetrate violence on other people. People can perpetrate said violence as a group. People and groups with more means (money, power, influence) can perpetrate and get away with more violence, as the scale and degrees of removal from the effects of the violence become incomprehensible. Hence I can't blow smoke in the face of my neighbor because I will feel bad, and I will have to deal with the repercussions. But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job". No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
There isn't, legally. If anything, corporate status provides a clearer framework for holding people properly accountable when they coordinate their actions as a group. Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability.
> But BP can spill 4.9 million gallons of oil in the gulf because not a single person will go to jail, the fees are a negligible cost of doing business, and nobody feels bad because everyone was "just doing their job"
You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential.
> No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions".
The irony is that it sounds like a populist statement that's sticking up for the little guy against the machine, but in actuality it's an incredibly radical statement in favor of stripping power away from the poor in order to preserve the power and status of the extremely wealthy.
To my eyes, a large part of the purpose of corporations is to shirk individual responsibility. What else would LLC stand for?
>You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential.
I attempted to make it clear that the act of incorporating, ceasing to become merely an individual and existing as part of a group in and of itself has dehumanizing influences. The corrupting influence of group-think, moral smokescreening, and increased degrees of separation from the repercussions of one's actions is orthogonal to the corrupting influence of power. Nazi guards could sleep at night after a long day of executions because they were part of a corrupt group that absolved them of responsibility, not because they were mega rich.
To take BP's example, the blame for the spill results from countless decisions which add up to supreme negligence. But it's hard to pin on a single person, it is the organization itself (and its goals) which caused the problem. This negative influence needs to be curtailed, so I think it's inappropriate to consider a group of individuals as having the exact same rights as its constituents summed. When it comes to rights, I just don't buy that 2+2=4.
>>No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
>This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions"
It was a bit inflammatory of me to word it that way, but I still disagree that those two things are "logically equivalent". I just don't think it makes sense to think of rights in aggregate. Aggregating rights in the form of corporations leads to weighting of rights by the amount of money you have. The son of the chairman of Samsung can exert far more influence across his network of conglomerates and paper companies than I ever can. Does his million-fold monetary advantage over me give him a million times more rights across his corporate appendages than me? Should I buy a third of a share in his textiles company which has the president's ear if I want to express my rights? Fuck that. Those aren't rights, it's the pure expression of power and violence, the very thing I want society to curtail.
Look at the number of people put into prison after a corporation commits a crime.
In almost all cases being part of a corporation provides protection above and beyond what an individual has on their own. Arguably, this is the entire point of corporations over just having groups of individuals. Consider a world where there was zero corporate law and a group of people was dumping illegally. Each of them would have massive individual liability.
As a result, granting a corporation blanket rights (eg to donate money) is not implicitly granting those rights to the group, it is granting them only to a small number of individuals within that group.
You say “individuals can exercise their rights through a group”. Most individuals are in fact prohibited from exercising their rights during working hours beyond what is of interest to the corporation, and do not have a direct voice in what the corporation’s goals are.
Thus mediating privileges of a 10,000-person organization as if it speaks with the voice of 10,000 people is effectively reassigning the voice of a large chunk of people to a much smaller chunk of people. If the group only has the legal rights collectively as the sum of its individuals, it is creating an inherently non-democratic power block within a democratic society.
> Also, no wonder American companies tend to grow a lot faster without many impediments. The whole American system is built to support and protect the enterprise, not the people. In Europe, as an enterprise, you have a lot more requirements and obligations to fulfill.
Huh? Developed EU countries eagerly open branches in newer EU states so they can benefit from American-style treatment of the employees... and these branches don't grow at all - it's just about cheap workforce and all profits are funneled out (franchises, copyrights, and various "sandwiches"). You should really understand that there are people paying hefty price for your cozy warm employment conditions and it's not in some remote Asian country - it's just across the border, within the same economic and political union.
So the thought experiment -- is it better for someone to work for a year and then get fired unexpectedly or not work at all and collect unemployment money for 3 years?
I thought about opening an office in France for a dev team, but after looking at the real costs -- there's no way I could afford it. The actual salaries are fine, but adding in social charges, then all of the ridiculous "protections" -- it's easier for me to hire guys in Serbia, pay them well while not having the financial risk of having to take care of employees when my business may not be able to support them.
So there are 5 French engineers that aren't working now and 5 Serbians that are because I can't afford the risk of hiring French workers because as the business owner, I'm the "bad guy" -- despite funding my little company out of my own pocket and not even being able to pay myself a salary. To be on the hook for French social benefits and the job protections when I can't even provide that for myself? No thanks.
So I've had Serbian devs for the past 2 years and exactly zero French devs -- despite paying the Serbians the same net salary I would have paid the French.
I'm an anecdote, but that's the other side of this "protection" that EU workers "benefit" from -- it's great when they DO have a job, but there are countless jobs that don't exist precisely because of these policies -- and the jobs that do exist pay far less than American jobs (despite similar living costs) because companies have to price the risks into the salaries they offer. So rather than paying a dev $100k per year plus benefits -- a French company would pay $40k per year plus benefits. Then they have roughly 1.5 years of "cushion" in case they're stuck with an employee they can't simply fire.
Before folks start to talk about how France has better social benefits and thus a lower salary is ok.. Net disposable income is vastly less than in the US. And, US companies provide health/disability/etc. benefits in addition to a higher salary. So the idea that French companies pay a lower salary because health insurance is free is just ridiculous -- since French companies aren't paying for health insurance, they should be able to pay even higher salaries than the US right? But the reason they don't is because they have to hedge the risk that they can't fire this employee.
I'd rather work an uncertain year at $150k than three years of $40k guaranteed, but that's just me. I'm an optimist while most French I know are decidedly pessimistic.
It's one thing to have employment law where you can't hire/fire people at will. I agree that's relatively inflexible and I'd prefer the American model (as a European). There's no free lunch here, you either need to pay for this out of your taxes (as in France), or pay lower taxes and save for the unexpected loss of job yourself (as in the US).
It's an entirely different thing that a company can't meet its basic contractual obligations, i.e. the ability to pay salaries. That's a case where a contract was made, there seems to be something very wrong with basic US corporate law that would allow this to happen, i.e. a company should have enough assets on hand to pay salaries in the event that it goes bankrupt.
In most of Europe companies are obligated to insure against this eventuality. I can't drive a car on public roads without insurance, why should a company be allowed to operate if it isn't insured against failure to meet its basic contract obligations?
That you should judge the economy as a whole instead of picking one aspect and extrapolating what "our values are".
Europeans tend to view issues through a classist lens. That society is split up into the workers, and the capitalists, and that your ranking in the social hierarchy is solidified.
For better or worse, we don't see it that way. Today you're a worker, tomorrow you're a business owner. I would say America has more workers-turned-entrepreneur than anywhere else in the world. We have more millionaires who came from "worker" background than anywhere.
I've seen it first hand on multiple occasions. I've seen immigrants come to this country with nothing, work incredibly hard, build a business from scratch, and turn into employers in their community. It's the story of my family and many others here.
If the barrier for these immigrants starting a business was anything like complying with EU regulation - I promise you these businesses and their communities would not exist.
Do you think a critical part of the American success story is the ability of these workers-turned-entrepreneurs to skimp out on paying them the wages they owe?
> why should a company be allowed to operate if it isn't insured against failure to meet its basic contract obligations?
Because it is meeting its contractual obligation. The liquidation preferences were already part of the corporate bylaws when the employees joined. If the agreement was violated then we have a court system to work it out.
The founders screwed up here and in this iterative game of prisoners dilemma their next venture won't be so easy. But I don't think we can point at this scenario and draw any systematic conclusions. The companies that would need this insurance are the one's that can afford it the least. Which is why "startups" have this profile of high risk and most likely a total bust.
Having the option to work in a high risk environment is important because as individuals we all have a different risk profiles. And if you look at our public listed companies some of these risks have payed off immensely.
There's a small flat corporate tax for this sort of thing, which addresses your point that startups would need to pay higher insurance rates for this. The insurance is run by state. The reason should be obvious, because you still want innovation and new companies, so it amounts to a net subsidy from big corporations to small ones.
Unless you think unpaid wages are some big part of US GDP it's pretty hard to argue that the lack of this is some huge part of the US's success story.
There's also no limit on working in a high risk environment. There's just a higher bar to being able to form a limited liability corporation.
Sure, you can work with a bunch of people and if it all collapses none of you get paid, but you don't get to do through some arrangement that looks like a normal job. They need to explicitly sign up for that, e.g. as co-founders or through some other painfully obvious mechanism, not just some clause in the bylaws that nobody working at Starbucks is ever going to read.
How is a one-off event systematic? This is a chapter 7 bankruptcy. The employees become creditors and participate in the liquidation. If the founders were using bankruptcy intentionally to not pay wages then it becomes a matter for the department of labor. All these employees are eligible to collect unemployment in the state they're employed.
These guys spectacularly crashed and burned for this to happen. Starbucks wouldn't file a chapter 7, they'd restructure and wages wouldn't be effected. If you want judge the entire US economy from this article and draw parallels about how this makes Americans and Europeans fundamentally different then you're painting with too broad of a brush.
And yet social mobility between the classes (they exist in the US too even though you don't necessarily think in terms of them) in many European countries is better then in the US. Especially the nordic countries. Pretty much the only EU countries doing worse then US are UK and Italy and the difference between US and UK is much smaller then US and Finland for example.
Maybe we Europeans are a bit pessimistic when it comes to our economic futures but in terms of the chance of making from poor to rich (or vice versa) in many places we are doing better then the US.
https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways...
Of course it is cheaper for you to hire in Serbia than in France, it is a poorer country with lower cost of life. That's about it.
What does "harder to hire" in France even mean? You make a contract and someone starts working for you on the following day. Actually, you do not even need to make a written contract, just have him come to work and pay him, that's enough to define employment.
What is so risky about firing in France? If you fire someone with a good reason, you have to pay him the astounding, horrific, monstrous amount of... 1 week of pay per year of service. If you fire him for no good reason, that is not much worse, you risk (as in, that's if you really screw up (or get screwed)) a few months of pay and that's it.
You can make provision as much as you want, there is no way it is going to cost you more than the difference between 40k and 100k (I take your numbers, which are also off, but that's another problem). Let alone every year for every employee.
I am always amazed at the so much praised risk-taking entrepreneurship (which is prone to brag about its boldness and how it deserves to be rewarded for the huge risks it takes)... who hates nothing as much as the smallest existing risk. I've come to think that it is probably afraid of its own shadow when it walks down the street.
> since French companies aren't paying for health insurance
What? Of course they do. How do you think the health insurance and other services are funded? It is just fixed by law and not depending on the mood on the employer.
You can ramble on as much as you like, but your decision can be summed up as just "it is cheaper to hire someone in a poorer country", which is nothing new. You did not choose to avoid France to go to Germany or Switzerland, you chose an Eastern country, you chose Serbia where the average salary is 6 to 8 times lower!
I do think that in the long run making your employees happy and loyal is worthwhile. But treating your workers as disposable trash is also a viable strategy in some sectors.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/11/507#a_4
Prioritized wages get paid even before unpaid taxes do.
That foundation then goes first in queue in the bankrupcy claims (but often doesn't get anything)....
But the salary up to that point is safe for the employee... no matter if the company has any assets or not..
(EDIT): oh yeah, and we have state funded health care too...
Source: have degree in Dutch law, this is elementary 'employment law', but 30 secs of googling will show that I'm not just making things up.
At least we got a good explanation, but not thanks to me.
It might be interesting to speculate on potential reasons for that.
There is somewhat of a saving grace here. Under federal law, these employees automatically qualify for a special enrollment period through the health insurance marketplace since they lost their employer-provided health insurance [1]. Since this happened during November, they can have coverage beginning December 1 as long as they sign up before the end of the month.
[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/have-job-based-coverage/if-you-lo...
That is the question... is it mismanagement, or is the business model fundamentally flawed and unworkable?
I say this having seen the investor prospectus.
In 2009, they had one store that was break-even. The plan at that time called for opening "149" stores by 2015.
By 2015, there were 2 out of 8 stores that were break even, the rest were money pits.
If they stuck with growing slower and reinvesting profits, instead of taking on investments in an effort to make a unicorn, the bay area shops would still be open.
We joined with a few other startups to offer something to the members who were affected.
glowforge.com/techshop
We ended up in Winston-Salem, NC instead, and I look forward to checking on Mixxer when it opens, $550/year, https://wsmixxer.org/. Winston-Salem has a big arts community, might be an interesting place.
As others have said in this thread, I think TS had a tough value proposition to build a business model around. Classes were a pain and a fairly big start-up cost for new members, but inevitable to satisfy insurance requirements. The monthly membership fee was fairly cheap considering the awesome equipment they had, but expensive if you could only manage to go a few days a month. Plus whatever storage fees for larger projects and/or the hassle of carting your stuff around.
On top of that, management at both locations I used (RDU and Arlington) seemed a bit chaotic. Sad to see them go out of business either way.
video featuring many of the regulars at the SJ location https://youtu.be/vYBivF3YNlg
TechShop never developed a community. It felt sterile in comparison. The fees were more like $125/mo (at the time, and only went up from there). There was no central area to hang out in and chat. And inviting a friend along cost something like $20. These conditions resulted in the demographic becoming more like a bunch of upper middle class dudes who managed to get a few hours away from the fam to work on their project. There was no social core, it never became a hang-out.
There were also some financial issues which really turned me off. I had spent about $1500 on classes early on (thinking I’d just get signed off on all of the machines asap so that I was free to work on anything), but I later found out that if you didn’t badge into a machine for over 12 months, your credential for that machine expired and you had to pay to take the class again. Boom, easily $1000 down the drain. By the time they started hiking up their membership prices, I was disillusioned and declined to renew.
On the other hand it sounds like the safety paranoia (have you been inducted to use this hacksaw?) is even worse than at hackspaces.
And I don't have any problem whatsoever about restricting access (and policing) to the larger or more dangerous equipment.
Lathes and milling machines can easily maim and kill if not treated with respect and knowledge. Laser cutters must be supervised when running, or a fire is easily possible (not to mention understanding why you shouldn't cut sheet PVC in a laser cutter). Water jet and plasma table cutters are not toys for the uninitiated.
I have zero problems with such rules. It's one thing if you own the tools yourself in your home shop; do what you want, whatever consequences result. But when you are doing it in a public or semi-public manner, having such rules and regulations should be a sign of quality of the space.
I was lucky enough to have visited both the Austin TechShop and ATX a few years ago while I was in town. Both places were great for different reasons. I'm pro-hackerspace but I was also very interested in seeing a TechShop first-hand. I was surprized how much community involvement was required to keep TechShop running despite being a commercial place. There were multiple tools that were pointed out on my tour that would "become available" once a volunteer had more time to get them running and develop a class. The sad thing though was just how expensive all the classes were. At ATX I heard that a number of members also paid for memberships at TechShop too. It was heartening to see that both places could co-exist without competing for funding/memberships.
What stopped me from signing up after the trial was the no-kids policy. I think the age minimum was 16. While I understand why this was the case -- insurance requirements, danger, and you don't want other people's brats treating the place like a playground -- it completely ruled out joining. If I couldn't stop by there on the weekend for even half an hour while my kids sat quietly in the corner reading books, then all my hacker exploits would be hidden from them, and I want them to be exposed to that stuff.
I'm most interested in having access to a laser cutter, mill, and lathe.
Civilization has successfully wiped out yet another source of small joys for folk. But we endure and continue making.
If you develop a good relationship with the prof, he'll let you run a mill.
Take a class or two, and see how far it gets your. They are usually pretty cool.
ccsf welding courses are vastly more useful and 1/4 the cost of a crucible course
If you want to make contacts, that's different from running a lathe, but maybe I'm oversimplifying.
I will say that people at makerspaces generally want to be there, whereas people in CCs generally see it as more of a steppingstone to a decently paying job. You might get more out of one or the other, but there's no denying that makerspaces charge extortionate rates for machines that the CC provides virtually for free, if you know the prof well enough so he lets you sneak in.
you can also search by tools/equipment here: https://baqqer.com/equipment
You'd be surprised at what is possible using only hand tools, a table saw, a scroll saw, and a welder, plasma cutter, and right-angle grinder.
Heck - if you're only doing metal work, the last three can be all had for less than $2k (if you aren't too picky about brands).
Now - if you're wanting a place like this because you don't have the space or such to have your own "shop area" (like a garage or shed), that's understandable.
But really, if you can swing it, going with the basics can sometimes yield just as good results. For instance, take a look at this image:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*1e8OyXBwVk0Pnd-eM...
The guy is a friend of mine, and that's his shop. His name is Lance Greathouse. I volunteer on weekends and such to help him with his non-profit, Wheelchair Labs. We take donated powerchairs, like the one he's sitting in, clean 'em up, fix 'em up, then donate them back out to those in need. I've seen lives change because of this.
Anyhow, he's been doing this for a while, and the non-profit is fairly recent; prior to that, it was just a side hobby (inspired by his brother, who passed away) - but he was donated a bunch of chairs and such that couldn't be re-used. We've used them for parts, and he's used them for years to build robots and other toys.
See that 6-wheel machine to the right? It's powered by a couple of large wheelchair motors, driving the wheels using a chain drive. That gun thingie on the top is an actual flamethrower he built (he's an expert in fire effects, too). The whole thing is radio controlled. Anyhow, that robot was hand-built, using pretty much a welder, a right-angle grinder, and a cutting torch (acetylene). There was drill press involved, too. Plus hand tools and some other power tools.
Virtually everything you see in that picture, minus the chair Lance is sitting in, was made without access to a lathe, cnc mill, or laser cutter. We do have a plasma-torch CNC table, but we've never gotten it to work properly (it never holds the arc for more than a few inches of travel). We've found, though, that we can do anything with just a bit of imagination and gumption.
Just keep that in mind. Rarely is it the lack of the proper tools or space that holds you back. Re-evaluate what you want to do - maybe you do need the equipment you mention (for instance, the stuff we do is very much "one-off" items; if you wanted to do production quality, larger runs, or you need more precision, then you'd probably want better tools).
Or - maybe you might be able to get along with other tools?
Honestly, I think a similar concept would work with much more basic equipment.
The various Hackerspaces seem like a good bet.
How can I use machines? Take a class after sign up. When is the next class? Not sure, in a few months maybe; they fill quick, too, so keep checking often. The attitude of an admin I checked with was "get lost, we have enough members already".
I finally found what I needed at a university hobby shop: working machines, busy but good access to tools, efficient admins. To get CNC access I needed 2 short classes that I could both schedule within 2 weeks.
Before I found that though I would gladly pay higher membership fees for a clean, efficient machine shop access. Just my 2c.
For anyone doing requiring 3D printing, CNC etc professionally or even as a semi serious hobby, I'm sure there would be firms who can execute and fedex you the job.
Here in Singapore when I moved into our apartment, I ended up having to design a custom child safety lock for my windows. I found quite a few 3D print shops which could deliver the next day at quite a reasonable rate - fast enough for me to iterate the final design within a week.
Possibly, but I am not sure about this. When I was looking (about 5-7 yrs ago, US, Boston area) there were two types: cheap and nonfunctional beyond toys or "we run your jobs for you". First type, as they are cheap, have no interest in new members building things; in fact, as the membership is so cheap they try to sell all sorts of overpriced classes as memberships do not cover costs.
At the other end there are those who take your design and ship you the product, as you said. This is OK for many cases, but gets pretty expensive and inefficient for prototyping. And there was nothing in between to fill this wide gap.
In fact, when I was looking for such a shop and asked friends if they know a place that would let me pay membership to use a decent quality 3+ axis CNC mill and a laser cutter no one knew of a place but several said if I found one, would I please let them know. So I suspect the market is there.
The situation is much better with 3D printing -- there are small shops everywhere and some could even let you come inside and iterate if you chat with owners. However, inexpensive 3D printing is nowhere near the accuracy, reliability and robustness of the end product you get with inexpensive milling.
For what it's worth, I run a 3D printing shop (we also have a laser cutter and woodworking equipment) and we let people prototype on our machines occasionally. 3D printing is an order of magnitude more accessible than milling, and probably about twice as easy as laser cutting, and if one of our machines goes down due to user error, it's cheap and easy to replace parts and won't stop operations since there are plenty of others.
I used to think so too once upon a time and i used to etch PCBs myself etc. Then my child was born and the value of my own time sky-rocketed. Now even when prototyping my hobbies, I'd rather focus on the work where my doing it adds value especially with the internet making producing custom designs a commodity.
Of course, startups aren't the only measure of success. The net positive is hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of younger hackers who may go on to build the next hardware company based on lessons learned at a MakerFaire.
I'm not sure I agree. However I do believe the "Maker" movement was over sold by O'Reilly media and Dale Dougherty in particular. I stopped subscribing to Make Magazine few years back when it became apparent it was little more than a print version of Hackaday or Instructables.
Regardless of Maker. There is a plethora Robotics Competitions, existing Hacker spaces and STEM is huge.
The number of kids that were going to tinker at home is a fairly fixed. Where we'll really move the needle in terms of more people getting into engineering is in formal education (inc Robotics competitions).
Disclosure: I'm a little biased, I help design and build IDE's for some of these comps, e.g. http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/what-is-zr/ but I also have advocated and help implement "maker spaces" in my local school system. There is a sea-change, so I'll push back on the idea that little came of the 'maker movement'
When they opened the Chandler location here in the Phoenix area, I quickly signed up for a year's membership, but that turned out to be a mistake. I certainly didn't get my money's worth, but the mistake was on my end, not theirs: They were located in the east valley (where it seems all the cool kids are), and I live in the west valley; it was a good 100 mile drive round-trip for me to go there. I hardly ever went as a result, and the membership was wasted.
The space itself was amazing otherwise; had it been closer to my home I am sure I would have used it more often than I did for the tools I didn't otherwise have at home (like the laser cutters, for instance). I was always impressed how they had workshops for just about everything you needed to take an idea from a concept (CAD/design) to finished prototype.
There more more than a few startups that got their start at TechShop; one of the more famous examples was Square (they prototyped the original swipe reader thru TechShop).
I am now wondering what, if anything, this says (or what effects it will have) about other maker and hackerspaces. We don't really have very many in the Valley. For myself, I'll just continue doing what I've always done, and work from home or over at my friend's shop.
The Deputy City Manager of San Jose has his staff looking into what to do about the San Jose location.[2] There's a good chance San Jose and the Downtown Development Association will make something happen. They're very aggressive in building up downtown San Jose. In 2008, it was almost totally empty, and they want startups to locate there.
[1] http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/inventors-take-heart-...
[2] http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/16/rip-techshop-san-jose-...
[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/128112754534676/