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Welcome Zach Dunham of Kickstarter!
- Zach has a music background with experience in pro audio (he obviously didn’t record this show because it doesn’t sound all that great). He later dreamed of becoming a Foley artist.
- His first Kickstarter project (before working there) was the public radio. This has recently relaunched as a Kickstarter Gold project!
- The original project had 1700 backers and sold an additional 400 after the campaign. The project was on Grand St, which was purchased by Etsy.
- Zach took the MIT 6.002x class with some friends, including former guest Todd Bailey.
- Bolt Boston meetup
- Their manufacturing was with friends in a warehouse, referred to as “Manufacturing salons”.
- A Raspberry Pi running PiFM would help to program the radios.
- The radios contain the FM IC from Silicon Labs, the SI4702
- Hackaday post on FCC
- Kickstarter is a “public benefit corporation” which is even more stringent than a B corp.
- Each year they publish their stats
- They have a Policy and Integrity team that helps to fight scam projects.
- Read more about their Community here
- The Neolucida was another successful project that was at Maker Faire Bay Area. It’s coming back as an “XL” version.
- If you want updates from any project, back the project with $1.
- A while back, Kickstarter sent out a request for projects. Zach is the outreach coordinator on creative tools. Heather in the UK works on design projects and Clarissa in the Bay Area does science and exploration.
- Wazer was a good example of one of the projects they’d look to have on their site.
- Kickstarter is not a store.
- A while ago they launched Kickstarter Live which is meant to connect project creators directly with backers.
- Their newest initiative is the Hardware Studio, which is a joint venture with Avnet and Dragon Innovation.
- Founder of Dragon, Scott Miller has been on the show in the past.
- Andrew Seddon was also mentioned, a past guest.
- They needed to troubleshoot the radio front end. It turned out to be the Class D amp interfering with the frequencies.
- Ben from Bolt wrote that “Kickstarter is debt“. This was also said by Kane Hsieh who gave a talk at Chris’s meetup recently.
- There is a “Right way to fail”
- The Toolkit knowledge base will be one of the first things to launch from the Hardware Studio.
- Connection is a program members will be able to apply for (the “approved” projects)
- Perpetual motion TED talk
- Check out Zach’s personal site or follow him on Twitter.
- As a reminder, they recently relaunched the Public Radio on Kickstarter and you can back it!
Another great interview Chris, time to dump Dave and get a female co-host.