bjbjv steve: hey, everyone. welcome to anotherepisode. today i'm talking with michael clive, who started the mojave makers space, and we'regoing to chat about how he got started, what he's doing, and some of the things they'reworking on and some advice he has for you if you want to start your own. so, michael,thanks for joining us. michael: hi. it's good to be here. i'm glad that i keep running intopeople as excited about this concept as i am. steve: very cool. so, kind of a 30-secondpitch, what is mojave makers space? michael: it is a place that isn't a bar, work, or homewhere you can go and work on your projects and hang out with people that you know andlike and do whatever you want. steve: very cool. and mojave is the hot bed of the newspace movement, but that's really not just
what it was made for. it's really kind oflike that other place for people to work on stuff that is engineering, but not necessarilyaerospace related? michael: yeah. well, here in mojave, there are very few new aerospaceventures that do not have some kind of connection to mojave. so, we're kind of like a hub of. . . people have called us the silicon valley of aerospace. i'd be inclined to agree, exceptsilicon valley had better restaurants. so, what this place is all about is really tokind of give people an outlet. when i was doing computer graphics for a living, i reallyneeded a place to get out and get my engineering side expressed, because i was all day tryingto express my artistic side and all day trying to, you know, my assignment was to make stufflook cool and whatever. i joined a hackerspace
in culver city called crash space, and thatreally changed my life and i got a chance to express a lot more of my technical side.when i moved to mojave, i kind of wanted to continue that, but i do highly technical stuffall day. so i wanted a place where i could express more of the creative side and kindof less goal directed development that i like to do, you now, the stuff i do for fun. otherpeople take it in many different ways. like the way i see it is that i provide . . . we,mojave makers, provide a canvas, and you bring whatever paint you want and you paint on itand we all kind of get together and have a very organic agreement process where thingsget done. but i, for one, i'm engineering a space to be a comfortable place for me todo my non-goal directed development. there
are other people that want to develop companies.there are other people that want to tinker around with airplanes or build rockets orwhatever. i'm happy with all of it. i personally enjoy being around people that are productive.steve: it's kind of all over the place, but, yeah, it's a really cool spot to go and meetother people who are technical savvy and want to do cool stuff. michael: yeah. steve: so,when did you get the idea for this makers space? is this something you've been thinkingabout for awhile, because it's fairly . . . it opened recently. but is this something you'vebeen working on for some time? michael: well, so, what happened is i moved out . . . i washeavily involved in crash space down in l.a. i was involved in that for about two years.i was the facilities manager. i had a lot
of tools there. i spent a lot of time there.a lot of my friends came from that circle. when i moved out to mojave after i got thisjob here at xcor, i was lacking that in my life and the nearest hackerspace was 100 milesaway and i did not like that. so, it's always been in the back of my mind to start one here,but i didn't know . . . i just needed somebody else to say to me, yeah, let's do that andthat somebody was ethan who i met, interestingly enough, and here's my favorite part abouthackerspace, the tools and the machines and [inaudible 03:57] that's fine, that's helpful.i build these places because of the people. so, i found out about ethan through my buddy,jerry isdale, who runs hackerspace in hawaii. steve: okay. michael: and he was reading ablog that says this guys coming to visit mojave
because he got an internship there and he'sa major member of another makers space in alabama, makers local 256. so i got a heads-upabout another maker person showing up in mojave from a guy who runs something in hawaii. i'min mojave, this guy's coming from alabama, and i invite him to a party. we hang out.he and i kind of start energy it takes to get the team together and make it happen.so we got a team of five folks together pretty early on, about january i would estimate,and we started meeting every week and kind of moving forward on stuff, and our big breakcame when we presented to the east current airport district board and we convinced themto provide us a great deal of assistance in securing our location. they really love it.they love the idea, and they loved the idea
of anything where you have the young engineersin mojave actually having something to do in mojave and not immediately driving offto lancaster. so, yeah, the one thing people who are listening to your show don't knowis that mojave has a population of 3,000 people, and the most exciting nightlife is at denny's.so we have the world's most sophisticated aerospace program all around us, and we'rethe cultural equivalent of . . . i mean, breadbasket, texas, was more culturally situated i'd say.although, we are in the shadow of los angeles, which is great advantage. steve: there arelots of cool tools, but then the social life is a little lacking? michael: yeah. yeah.we've lots of cool stuff to do at work, but even then it's not like we can really talkabout what we really, really do at work because
a lot of it is secret. xcor is decently secret,but they're clearance people at other companies here that can't even begin to talk about whatthey do. so, by nature it becomes a very isolating place. it was designed to be isolated, inorder such that we could do the kind of things that we do. i'm like, that's fine. we canbe isolated, but let's not be isolated from each other. steve: that's a really good point.so, how difficult was it to convince the airport to help you with this? michael: actually,easiest sell in the world. this was seriously like the easiest sell and like [inaudible06:32] a few of my advisers and people have been saying, oh, we need to prepare this andwe need to do this and we do all these things. but i always kind of knew that when you strikea match, you set a fire. so, you know, i walked
into the head of the airport office, his nameis stu whit. he's a great guy. i barely got like three words out of my mouth when he hadto take a phone call, and by the time he's off the phone call, he told me, "i'm on board.it's fine. yes, we'll do this." i'm like, "is that all?" he's like, "no, no, no, there'sa little bit more, but pretty much, yeah, that's all." so, we went through the process.we presented to the airport district. we have a quorum. we have a board of directors fromall different [inaudible 07:21] companies. i'd name names and labels, but i don't know,some people don't want the actual company they are associated with exposed, so i won'tdo that. steve: fair enough. michael: it was incredibly easy. steve: so have the companies,themselves, in mojave been supportive of what
you're doing? michael: kind of. i mean someof them have been very supportive. some of them are looking at us with a weary eye becausethey are concerned of us being a clearinghouse for the kind of secrets they don't want toget exposed or get out. basically, there are lots of companies here that depend upon ipand secrets to survive, and that's fine. i have no interest having anybody share thator anything. they're just concerned that because there's a bunch of people from other companieshanging out here, that, of course, people are going to talk and, oh, no, their preciouscompany secrets will be exposed. i'll just say, "well, that's called personal responsibility."steve: but it's like you said the last thing that you guys want to do is talk about workwhen you're not there. you're not at work.
so you guys want to talk about anything butwhat you're doing at work? michael: exactly. i really have no interest . . . and i havea roommate who's an aerospace blogger and i work in the industry and i run a lot ofevents and i'm just knee deep in space stuff and i kind of get really tired of it. i'mall about like talking about anything but here. steve: yeah, that makes sense. you havegotten some equipment donated. from when i saw your presentation, you had like a bigcnc machine and all that stuff. have you gotten more stuff lately? michael: oh, yeah, yeah.i mean, we're actually getting to the point where we're getting a little bit packed. i'mlooking around both rooms. we're going to very, very soon have to start kind of throwingstuff out almost or organizing more aggressively.
our big equipment donation, there are kindof two sets of equipment donations and there's all the stuff that i had done at crash space,which is milling machines and lathes and etc., and i brought them all up. well, i didn'tbring them all up. we got our team together, and we went down there and we loaded up thetruck. we headed up here and we got them all over here. then, i have a buddy at union swissmachining company who, by serendipity, happened to have a very powerful machine that he waswilling to give us. it's a daiwa puma 10s lathe in decent condition. very old machine,but still very effective. so we got that donated. we also got a whole bunch of equipment donatedfrom another member, matthew. andrew's donated some electronic stuff. we've gotten stufffrom the local board of directors of the eastern
airport district. you know the guy that runsthe radio shack has given us a lot of stuff. we have first-class airline seats that stuwitt donated to us. we have parts of a 747 sitting around. we have couches donated bymy buddy, ryo sakaguchi. we've got tons of shit, basically. and we haven't even beenaround. that's the thing i need to state. we haven't even officially opened doors. officialdoor opening should be tomorrow. but we had what we called a soft opening a few timesand we have collected a few members in the soft open period. kind of the first monthof us sort of being in the game is going to be may, meaning tonight i need to get thedoor lock working. yeah, we haven't even begun to begin, and we're already very, very welloff, as far as hackerspace is concerned. so,
i'm pretty happy and pretty confident aboutus moving forward. steve: which is really cool. it seems like you don't have the normalproblem of opening a space, then getting people. it was like the will was there, the need wasthere, and like you said, you lit the match and now you're just dealing with the fire.michael: i wouldn't quite say it's that simple. we do have an issue in that we do need tobring up paying members to a certain level by a certain date or else we won't be ableto pull it off for much longer. i have to say i am concerned about that, and it's mostlybecause of two factors. number one, mojave salaries are not the same as l.a. salaries.number two, the population of mojave is lower than l.a. so, in l.a. you can sustain threeor four hackerspaces, and in mojave i'm trying
to sustain one. i'm thinking i hope i canleverage a self-selection of the kind of creative people that kind of like to work here againstthat. all told, i really would like to have 20 members, 20 to 30 full time, significantmembers. like right now we've got about five or six that steadily show up, which is cool.i want that kind of energy where i can show up and it's people that i barely know in thespace, not people that i've worked with for awhile. steve: so, are you self-sustainingat 20 or 30 paying members, is that kind of at the point where you guys are good? michael:yeah. yeah. at about 20 or 30, we're covered, i believe. steve: okay. very cool. so, haveyou been getting the word out? has it all been just word of mouth? have you done anyofficial marketing, anything like that, or
is it just sort of wait and see and kind ofsee how it goes? michael: we have marketed heavily within mojave. mojave's not a verybig town, so it's very easy to market here. you, basically, go to the one sandwich shopand put flyers around. one of our member's girlfriends made cupcakes for a bunch of thedifferent companies and we packed flyers in with the cupcakes and delivered them to variouscompanies. we've gotten word out in the newspaper. we've done facebook advertisements. that'show we've gotten a lot of our equipment donation that i even forgot about, like the hydraulicpress. we sent an advertisement somewhere and some guy found out about us and decidedto come. so, yeah, we have marketed. i would say that we have done about half the marketingwe could. the next step of marketing is physical
marketing where, basically, we put signagearound the building and directing toward the building, and then that's when we will startsucking people in by just being here, which is kind of the ultimate way to gain membersis going to be having people just drive up and be like, "i've heard about this placeand i want to see it." the airport's not that big. there are 2,000 people working on itand about 12 companies of note, probably about 50 companies total. the word's out fairlysignificantly, but as it moves forward i hope we can get more. we're also going to be engagingin outreach at the high school. i'm going to a meeting with a bunch of high schoolers.oh, yeah, we've also been selected . . . i don't know if i should talk about this, but,yeah, we've been selected for a few more interesting
things which will get us a lot of press soon.steve: that's good. that's good. and space frontier, which organization is helping . . . michael:i'm sorry. it is the . . . steve: space studies institute? michael: space studies institute.robin snelson and lee valentine have been a wonderful help through this whole process,and helping us out and kind of getting it started. as soon as we're an organization,we will no longer be under their umbrella, but right now we're being . . . our existenceis kind of under their aegis. steve: right. so, how did you get them involved? michael:personal friends of robin snelson. steve: okay. michael: if you wanted some advice forpeople that want to start hackerspaces, the number one you need is social capital. ifyou have social capital, then you can get
away with anything. the second thing you needis actual physical real capital. that is important. you need something around three to five grandto really get one of these off the ground. if you're starting from nothing, you needmore. but if you are starting from something, about three grand outlay, expect that as kindof a minimum. a lot of people like to start slow and kind of . . . i don't really believein that philosophy. i like to go big or go home. i segued into this because you had thewhole social capital thing. pretty much all the wonderful good things that have happenedhas been because of social networks, which a space like this is designed to re-enforcethose exact kind of networks. this is where people meet each other. this is where peoplehang out. this is where people become closer
friends and allow future endeavors such asthis one to actually happen. steve: so, was it a tougher sell to the space studies institutethan it was to mojave? did they need some convincing, or was it you had the connectionsand they really loved the idea so they just went for it? michael: really, there's beenabsolutely no sales involved on this thing. basically, everybody's . . . i don't thinkyou quite understand how starving mojave is for any sense of community. robin, i toldher about the concept at one of my parties. i usually throw these parties every month.she was all over it, and she kind of from the shadows manipulated things such that bythe time we were presenting to the board of directors, they were already were behind it.so, she did some stuff that i have no idea
what she did, but we are forever gratefulfor it because it made it such that there was no sale. we showed up, said this is whatwe want to do, and everybody on the board was totally on board with it. it was very,very simple to get this to happen, which is as it should be, because i don't think therereally is, you know . . . the complaints that you could have about such a place do exist,and some of them are valid. but it's one of those things where you balance it out againstwhat the benefits are. your costs are so much lower than the benefits of a place like this.steve: yeah. michael: yeah. steve: which is really cool. if i could change tact for justa second, because i saw the panel where tim pickens was talking about the diy space hackermovement. michael: sure. steve: i was really
curious because i know that the question onthat panel was: are hackerspaces ready for an orbital venture? but i was really curiouskind of looking at what you have seen from hackerspaces and working in industry, do youthink the tools are almost there such that a hackerspace could actually create, not necessarilyan orbital venture, but a cubesat, a space craft, a [inaudible 18:13]? what are the thingsthey could do now that weren't even possible 10 years ago with that kind of equipment thatyou guys have? michael: well, the issue again is we're missing the point in that question,and that was kind of the issue i want to make. what you're talking about here is a . . . thereis a technical component of that, right, and if you want me to answer the question canthe equipment of, say, our hackerspace build
a cubesat, i would say give us three monthsof fixing our equipment and we could. we'd have the ability to make a cubesat. couldwe build a cubesat? i would say, probably not, and that's a social issue and that'sa financial issue. because, basically, when you are dealing with a loosely knit or confederacylike this, to get everybody in the group involved in a top-down structured effort is challengingand only usually happens when there's a very decent financial payout for the space or forshared resources or something, which is a point i made during the panel, which the onetime i saw it happen at crash space when everybody teamed up and everything was when we had aboutfive grand on the line for the space. so, we all teamed up. we all did what we neededto do. as far as the kinds of things that
i have seen hackerspaces produce very, verywell is sophisticated small electronic widgets that are usually the brain child of one ortwo members, because we are talking about something where . . . i don't know if youare familiar with the 80/20 rule? steve: pareto. yeah, pareto's law. michael: yeah, the 80/20rule applies in all levels of life and specifically in places like here. the application of thatis let's say you have 100 members, you know only 20% of those people are actually goingto be productive and able to do anything on the project that you are thinking about, right?so, even a fairly large hackerspace like crash space or like makers local or whatever, the80/20 rule applies and then take that now on top of that and say within the 80/20 rulethose 20% have their own projects to work
on, right? steve: yeah. michael: so, it'svery challenging to get a hackerspace to unite on a project. i would say that that is . . . now,at the same time, if an already existing team of people wants to become members of a hackerspaceand use the resources of said hackerspace to do it, that is an appropriate course ofaction. it's kind of like the difference between like a college and a company, right? a companyexists to make a profit, but in a perfect world a company exists to make a good product,right? steve: exactly. michael: and a company would be a company. hackerspace is more likea university or a college where the purpose of it is to really let people study and playaround with what they really want to do in that there is no top-down directed goal ofthe college. although, some hackerspaces,
like null space labs, research intensively,do a lot of work in surface mount electronics and digital analyzers. they have a whole lotof really cool stuff come out of there. we have two products coming out of crash space.we have a bunch of products coming out of null space labs. so, i'm not answering yourquestion, am i? the answer to your question is . . . steve: i should probably ask it better.let's assume you don't have . . . this isn't like a organization-wide project. you knowif you had, like you said, a team of a small dedicated, maybe two, three, four people,do the tools exist such that they could work on a cubesat, an orbital project, i mean something,kind of taking . . . michael: oh, yeah. steve: . . . the organizational aspect of it? likethe tools are that good now? michael: yeah.
you get three guys who are smart and 50 grandand assuming they can . . . it always comes down to an issue of capital. i know the questionyou keep trying to ask, and the answer to that question is absolutely yes, these spacesdo have the capability to build these kind of things. some parts do have to be shoppedout to more sophisticated machine shops. the most sophisticated hackerspace, i imagine,is tech shop, which isn't quite a hackerspace in my mind. they are a business. steve: yeah.michael: so, the community aspect of tech shop is not as important. and i know thereare people that are working out of there, team phoenicia is one that is doing an entirelunar lander challenge style flying robot out of their . . . it's will baird is in chargeof that project. they're doing a fairly good
job at a techshop. effectively, any of thesesmall companies is effectively a hackerspace. armadillo aerospace had no more equipmentthan we did when they were getting started. we're only a few . . . we're only about $50,000to $60,000 behind xcor as far as capital equipment, say, in our space. steve: wow. michael: theequipment isn't really the issue. it's a capital and personnel issue. equipment is cheaperand better, and the used market is always a good place. in hackerspaces, it's a placewhere you can go ahead and make that judgment call between is it worth it to buy an oldone and fix it or just get a working new one. if you want a project, you will get the brokenone. if you want a part, you will buy the fixed one. steve: so, in your mind, like theequipment is a non-issue. yeah, the equipment
exists to do that, you can get it, hackerspaceshave it, techshops have it, but really it's about the capital and the people availableto work on it. those are the two stumbling blocks now? michael: yeah. the biggest stumblingblock behind . . . and the will also to do a lot of these kinds of things. paul breed[sp] is a very unique example because paul breed basically used his own personal inertiato do his entire project, right? steve: yeah. michael: amazing guy. the equipment that hehas is just a little bit better than what i have right now. basically, the point isthat it will show you that being clever and dedicated and having a little bit of moneywill cover for anything, but it's really that dedication aspect that i have seen is thebiggest stumbling block to anybody completing
any goal is that they just don't have thefollow-through to push through and actually dedicate the time to it. so, you'll startseeing more kind of projects out of these kinds of spaces of significance when peoplestart becoming more dedicated about working on their projects. again, that social issue,the best we can do is give people the ability. steve: right. michael: yeah. steve: and itkind of goes back to your space is intended to be kind of a watering hole, cultural centerfor mojave. whether people create businesses or they just work on a personal project, that'scompletely cool. your goal is just to get that conversation started. michael: yeah.i, basically, want to get all those people in the room working on stuff. if people justwant to show up and have a beer and then leave,
that's fine. if people want to go on and workon the milling machine and make a sophisticated part for their little private jet that they'rebuilding in their garage or, hopefully, here, i'm okay with that too. if they want to starta business out of this space, up to a certain point, i'm okay with that. once they startmaking money off of it, that's when they need to spread their wings and fly. generally,the purpose of this space is to provide capability. capability is what i'm all about, becausein active development programs what kills you is not having ability. when you leavemomentum, even a little bit of momentum . . . like, for instance, right now i'm installing thisdoor. if i just had a cut-off tool or a grinder or something, i would have been done withit a half hour . . . i would have been done
even before i was on the phone with you, buti didn't have that capability. so i'm muddling through it with chisels and files and justbullshit, basically. it's because i didn't have that capability. so, the more capabilityyou have in a space like this, the more quickly people can achieve their goals. steve: that'sa really good point. michael: yeah. steve: well, thank you. i appreciate your time, andthanks for speaking with me. michael: no problem, man. h\^h gd\^h h^x gd^x h^x gd^x [content_types].xml#!mb ;c=1 _rels/.rels theme/theme/thememanager.xml sq}# theme/theme/theme1.xml g$$da : br {i5@rv*[_x ,l\y ssd+r] 5\|e vky- v4ej 6ngu s?^v *<")qh @\&> 7;wp ebu` 5
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