Jefferson Nunn With John Dogru of 3DOS – Around the Block

Jefferson

00:19: Welcome to another edition of, “Around The Block with Jefferson Nunn.” And I’m here today with John Dogru with 3DOS. How’re you doing today?

John

00:28: Doing great. Thank you for having me.

Jefferson

00:30: So, we were just talking a little bit about all things Blockchain and Ethereum. And everything else shall be a little bit more about what it is that you do and how blockchain is powering your technology.

John

00:44: Yes, so with 3DOS, we’re looking to build the world’s largest decentralized manufacturing network. So as you may know, manufacturing is going decentralized. And when you go decentralize, a lot of new challenges appear. And one of that is with royalties and IP protection. So, we’re using Blockchain, not only allowed to have creators upload any design they want, but they can go to market instantly and protect those royalties for life. So that’s in a nutshell, 3DOS, we’re using the NFTs, to be able to provide royalties for designs and producing those designs on demand only when they’re purchased in the country that they’re needed.

Jefferson

1:31: That sounds fantastic. So walk me through it, let’s say I just have a T-shirt with something printed on the front and back. And it’s my design, I would upload it to your network. And then what happens?

John

1:46: Yes, so if we back into how it works today, usually, if you want a T-shirt made, you would have to contact a bunch of suppliers, you would maybe have to get a limited number of orders. So you’d have to get 10,000 or 50, however many and be me, you’d have to store that somewhere. And then only when it’s purchased, it has to ship that back out again. So the way we work is we have all these manufacturers on-demand manufacturers globally. And so if you have a design for T-shirts, you basically upload it, you select the materials, but the type of outfit it is if it’s a hoodie or a T-shirt, or Baseball cap or 3D printing, which where we came from, and then you put it onto your Instagram, your shopping, cart, Amazon, wherever it may be. And when it’s purchased, we take the zip code adverse to that person, we locate a local manufacturer and it gets delivered. So there’s no inventory, there’s no risk to the creator to try a new idea. If it doesn’t get purchased, it doesn’t get made.

Jefferson

2:54: That’s incredible. And it sounds like it’d be better for the environment overall to but you also mentioned royalties as well, which is kind of interesting. So, let’s say I have a very successful design and somebody else wants it. They buy it and I would be paid as well?

John

3:12: Yes, so the smart contract can be configured in a number of different ways. So, let’s take, for example, art. Today, in physical art, usually the designer gets paid on the first sale, and then that’s it. So let’s say you made some new Picasso art, and you made $100 off it, the next guy sold it for $100,000, the next guy sold it for $100 million, you would never get a cut of that, in today’s world. So one of the things with the physical art world is we’d like to connect that digital royalty to that physical art. So the next person that buys it, not only do they have to physically pay for and transfer the item, you need to just like when I go to the DMV, I buy a car from someone, I need to change the title, right. So, when that happens, the initial artists could keep getting royalties. So the smart contract would allow them to keep getting royalties as that item is resold over and over again.

So that’s one example, is helping those artists that are making physical items to get secondary, tertiary markets get their royalties. That’s one example.

The other example is, let’s say I make a new iPhone case. And I want to have it 3D printed. Well, today, you would have to again, go and get like 1000s of those made, and you’d probably go to Alibaba. And for the first week, you’d be the only one that has an iPhone case. But then a few weeks later, it’d be on every Alibaba website, and you basically lost your IP. So, the key to decentralization is being able to protect the designer, and the artist and this happens for the most part in the music world. But they’ve got big lawyers, they’ve got big contracts, auditing worldwide to go after people trying to produce copies. Now, the reality is that most of the people want to pay the artists most people are honest and that’s what iTunes proved is, if you can make it at a price point that’s affordable and easy to use, people want to pay the artists. I don’t really hack movies or go to Napster anymore. I just go to iTunes I pay for, I go to Netflix, and I paid for it. And it’s on demand. So, this is kind of the two use cases, if you want to make a lot of units, and you want to be able to sell it. Or if you’re an artist that makes a unit and wants to make sure that they get royalties as a result, the 3DOS blockchain architecture helps make that come true.

Jefferson

5:50: Yes, it sounds like we’re one step away from the replicator with this technology where you can just press the button and outcomes say Nike shoes. But tell me a little bit more about the extent of this technology. We mentioned two simple things like shoes and T-shirts, but what about more complex thing that might have motors and gears, but they still work for that?

John

6:17: In the beginning, no. And they were focused on simple designs and ultimately, yes. I think ultimately, yes, it will go into assembly and more advanced manufacturing, but even today a lot of things you see on eBay, GoPro mounts, iPhone cases, new inventions, brackets, there’s a lot of single piece simple designs that we can start with, which is plenty good, you know, statues, sunglasses, and yes, also shoes, there’s been a lot of music artists that are making 3D printed boots, 3D printed sandals, so there’s plenty of things that are easy to make.

They’re simple designs, that 3D printing and some of the other injection molding technologies can satisfy. So we’ll start there, which is plenty big market. But ultimately, yes, there are over 10 million factories in the world. And so you will have access to those capabilities and that’s the ultimate goal, right, is to make it so that anybody can take an idea to market.

Jefferson

7:31: Yes, the reason why I mentioned you know, bar complex things is, I remember back in the early, like, 1999 days, even as modern and that was, I mean, we had the internet. But we were still sending 50 Page faxes to China to try to and they were still getting wrong.

So, it sounds like this process would enable us to like you say, a good things check quicker, because you basically upload the design, and then you’ll be able to receive it in a few days. If it’s not right, you can then go tweak the design. So it would enable more just-in-time prototyping type of things vs the current process of trying to fax and email things around, right.

John

8:23: Yes, reducing latency from design to manufacturing, has been our goal since 2014. And we started in 3D printing. So we have currently the world’s largest 3D printing network in the world by MIT, Harvard deal, Purdue, Duke Caltech. And the idea was, if a person had an idea, how quickly could they push a button and get it made. And most 3D printing was offline, it was very fragmented, they’ll have different operating systems.

So to use one was like a cappuccino machine, you would have to know how to operate it, walk up to it, use it. And as soon as we connected it to online through a web browser, it did very similar things to what web browsers did to checking email, you didn’t have to have some downloaded applications, you’d have to be a scientist to run email, you could just go to a web browser and connect to that server, providing a service. So we were able to reduce this latency. So anyone who have an idea 2 o’clock in the morning, they can be in their pajamas, upload a design, push print, see real-time it being made, and pick up the part in the morning.

Now, we want to take it one step further from 9 million CAD files, we have online 200,000 designers that have made things for themselves. We assume that someone else may want what they made. And with the click of a button, they can go straight to eBay, Amazon, whatever website, Instagram and sell it, and if someone likes it, and they purchase it, they have the protection of the royalties. They’re paying their artists, and we can have it made on demand anywhere. So if you’re somewhere in Africa, you’re somewhere even in Ukraine, areas that are not accessible through geopolitical issues, geographic boundaries, we smash all through that so that’s the beauty of blockchain, right. So, to be able to send money anywhere in the world, no matter what the government’s policy are.

So, if we can do that, from digital to physical items, I think it will change the game.

John

11:48: Yes, it starts from a early struggle. So as a kid, I was always going to RadioShack, putting things together hardware, infrared diodes, resistors, making my own photon, laser tag guns. And I quickly realized, it’s out of reach for most people to be able to build a physical product and take it to market. So then I quickly shifted to the computer science world where you could build and break and push to production without any friction. And I knew these two worlds will collide at some point, I know that a computer would become a Raspberry Pi, and it’s $20. But then you still need to wait to make those form factors. So you take the Raspberry Pi, you put it into a form factor you 3D printed, and it’s a heart pace monitor, it’s an elevator controller, it’s an IoT clock, whatever your imagination is.

So when I saw that delay between digital and physical, is becoming smaller. And if you look at any of the startups that are making IoT products, robotics, drones, they all have 3D printers. So they’re able to quickly iterate. And in some cases, we just got a call from a client, and they’re in Poland. And they’re 3D printing drones. I’ll let you guess what for. And so they’re able to now stack 40-50 printers together, and they’re making production parts. So, what used to be only for prototyping is now being used for small-scale production. So it’s really starting to happen. And it’s really breaking the barrier of entry for anybody to get into manufacturing.

Jefferson

13:24: That’s fantastic. I do remember fondly the RadioShack days, I would write program, literal programs on those GRS 80s. And the store clerks usually never mind and I guess, spend an hour writing a program for fun. I think that’s the thing is, there’s a definite need for being able to iterate faster, on a computer program, you know, you can hit run and see a run, if it’s not working, you go back,you edit it, no big deal. Five minutes later, you can write it again. It’s a little bit harder to do it when your manufacturer is 10,000 miles away, which is why Dd printers are such a game changer. And then you mentioned being able to make drones.

So tell me a little bit more about it’s like what Elon Musk said failing faster? Do you think we’re going to be heading into that world where we will literally be failing faster, so that we can get it right, and get it out there?

John

14:32: Absolutely.

That’s why I even created our first company 3D printer OS, I initially bought a 3D printer. And you print it once, twice, three times 10 times until you get it right. But what would it take in most people years, six months to years to go through these iterations until you find the product, I was able to do in weeks. So reducing that latency and be able to take a design to the product in hours is a huge game changer.

Jefferson

15:03: Yes, that’s fascinating stuff.

And that’s why I think going into the future. We’re going to be-I know everybody’s been harping on the metaverse, but I still think web three is really going to be what’s next yes, I think the metaverse will come. But I think that a little bit further down the line equipment is just not there yet, nor is the operating system there yet, right. But Web3.0 we still have a need for everything from cars to computers to pick something. I think the future home might even have a literal printer or some kind of a materials printer that could print dresses or T-shirts, or who knows, entire cars down the line, right. So, you mention kids at RadioShack, right, there could be some kid, they bought the 3D printed a car. So tell me more about maybe what that world might look like?

John

16:07: Sure. If you kind of have a graph, and you look at like automation, right, everything’s getting more and more automated. You saw Tesla come out with human robots to help them on the factory. So if you kind of graph that out, and the ability for companies to take new products to market, if you remember, even like the iPhone 5SE, that iPhone was there for years. And now there’s a new one every year, there’s a new product, computers too, like they’re coming out quicker and quicker, the iterations are happening faster and faster. And so the latency between having an idea and taking the market, it’s going to become real-time at some point. And you’re starting to see that with, it was only the big boys that could play in this industry. And now you’re seeing startups take physical products to market. So technology is growing at an explosive rate.

The 3D printers or automated manufacturing systems are getting much more advanced. They are in 3D printing clothes, they’re 3d printing, ears, hearts, food, basically, 3D printing is nothing more than a robot that can put things dot-by-dot in the order that you intended. And they’re in 3D printing circuits. So, I think the future is moving to a world where anyone from a web browser that has enough design experience or team of designers can literally create products, even test products with AI and machine learning before they even go to 3D printers. That’s another thing that’s happening is people are now trying to reduce the latency. So, when you hit print, it comes up exactly as you intended.

So, this latency is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And the future we see is, the future of decentralized manufacturer sees from design to product in hours. Not weeks, not months, not years.

Jefferson

18:19: That’s exciting. Especially, I remember, during the COVID days, there was a national panic on getting respirators together. I looked at the design of the respirator. And I literally thought in my head, a 3D printer can make that in no time.

John

18:42: And they were doing that. But 20% of our network during the pandemic got converted to make 3D print medical items. Something as simple as we take credit for like a nuchal cord, for giving birth a clamp for umbilical cords, those are being printed in Africa, or things that are on the front line in Ukraine that you can’t get in there, right supply small little things that really are showstoppers for military, for hospitals, they can make those things on demand. And during COVID we saw in Tesla factories, converting a certain percentage of their production to make things for COVID. So this is where 3D printing really started to shine because not everything could be shipped from one country.

Jefferson

19:30: That’s amazing. So last, kind of thought is, if you’re a young business person or even perhaps programmer, developer, just getting your start doing even manufacturing or just Ethereum blockchain programming in general, what would you recommend or say to them? How would you guide them in their development?

John

20:00: Well, I think the number one thing is making sure you’re developing something that has a real-world application. Everyone wants blockchain thinking. I’ll just make something for blockchain. I think we’re about to kind of weed out a lot of those projects that don’t have real-world applications. When you look at the fundamentals of human society you’ll get even where the money came from, money came from people producing real products, services or goods. And if you’re blockchain technology doesn’t make real products, services, and goods or is backed by those three things, then it’s actually weaker than money. So, I think there were a lot of Ponzi schemes, a lot of people saying they had a white paper that would provide value. And a lot of these stable-coins weren’t even backed by dollars. And we saw what happened to them. So, I think we’re gonna see a huge shift. And people are going to be looking to have products that solve real-world problems. So in our case, manufacturers, decentralizing and the issue is, how do I protect my royalties, how do I ensure that things are authentic in this new decentralized world, and that’s where blockchain really comes into play.

So, I would encourage, if you’re building blockchain product, you need to solve a real-world problem. And it needs to be backed by real products, services, or goods. If it’s not, it’s going to be speculative. And it’s most likely going to be a policy dump.

Jefferson

21:35: Right. Well, thank you so much, John, for being on the show. If people want to get in touch with you. What’s the best way to do that?

John

21:43: You can contact me by emailing [email protected] or you can go to 3dos.io and I’ll be happy to work with you. As we help the next generation take physical products to market.

Jefferson

21:57: Awesome. The links will be at the top of the show page and thanks again for being on the show.

John

22:02: Thank you, Jefferson.