Mark Hatch says the Maker Movement is changing the world. He knows and he’ll tell you how.
Hatch is CEO and co-founder of TechShop, a fast-growing chain of co-working spaces where people come to build prototypes for the products they want to sell. What the shops really produce are entrepreneurs and economic impact.
The former Green Beret and author of the 2013 book Maker Movement Manifesto will deliver the School of Engineering’s Chambers Family Entrepreneurial Lectureship on Oct. 7 at 4:10 p.m. in Jacobs Believed In Me Auditorium, 134 Featheringill Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture will be live streamed here.
His lecture title is “BOOM! The Maker Revolution: How the Maker Movement is changing the world and why you should join the movement.”
Hatch promises an “explosive presentation” on how the acts of radically democratizing access to the tools, knowledge and community needed to create things has fundamentally and irrevocably destroyed the barriers to innovation. He will share details about dozens of companies that have launched for only a few thousand dollars, how a homeless man remade his life with a $50 investment, and how some makers have already changed the world.
The creator of Square Reader, the small device that plugs into a cell phone or tablet headset jack and allows uses to accept credit card payments, got his start at TechShop.
“Probably TechShop’s most impactful startup is Square,” Hatch told writer Loren Feldman in a Forbes Q&A feature.
“James McKelvey came up with the idea. A guy who had worked for him was Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. James called him up and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea about a dongle that goes on the phone and everybody will be able to take credit cards that has a checking account instead of just those the bank has approved.’ So they went to Silicon Valley and talked to ostensibly the smartest investors in the world — and they turned them down. So James came to our Menlo Park location, learned how to use a mill, a lathe, learned the basic electronics, learned how to use an injection-molding machine and built the original three prototypes.”
Other businesses born at TechShop include Embrace, which makes an inexpensive blanket that keeps premature babies warm; electric motorcycle creator Lighting Motorcycles; and Solum, which created a soil-testing process for reducing unnecessary fertilizer applications. More than 30 percent of the concepts born in TechShops carry some element of social good, according to a GreenBiz article.
Under Hatch’s leadership, TechShop revenue grew 20-fold in five years and multiple new locations have opened across the United States.
Hatch has held executive positions at firms including Kinko’s, Avery Dennison, and Health Net. He has been recognized by San Francisco Business Times as one of the Bay Area’s Most Admired CEOs, and by Popular Mechanics as one of 25 movers and makers who are reinventing the American Dream. Hatch has spoken at events such as SXSW, Techonomy, TEDx, and The Clinton Global Initiative. He holds an MBA from the Drucker Center at the Claremont Graduate University.
The Chambers Family Entrepreneurial Lectureship in the Vanderbilt School of Engineering is a semi-annual lecture series is endowed by the Chambers Medical Foundation.