DancoOkay. I'm here with Ben Einstein, the founder of Bolt. Tell us about Bolt.

EinsteinSure. So again, seed-stage investment firm focusing entirely on hardware companies. So every company that we work with is building some physical thing. And as part of the investment that we make, we spend a ton of time, energy and resources on helping them actually build that product, which is very different than building a typical software company.

And so we have a full staff of engineers, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, embedded systems development, industrial design, and then someone who helps build prototypes, a full shop that companies can use.

DancoIt’s like a dream toy, the ultimate do-it-yourself place.

EinsteinIt’s pretty cool. We're really lucky to have a space that we can actually use to make stuff. But that comes out of the fact that that's my DNA, is just making things. But that comes out of the fact that that's my DNA, is just making things. That's what I am here doing.

And this is a really good way for me to make a lot of things that are interesting really fast. And so this came out of frustration from the product design world. Many people are familiar with companies like IDEO, or here in Boston, Continuum is very well-known, or Altitude, Frog Design, Smart Design — there's a bunch of 'em.

And these companies are all services businesses that are hired by Fortune 500 companies to design new products. And that relationship is very interesting, you get to work on lots of different things, it’s very exciting and creative, and you get to move around a lot, which is fun.

But you have this very toxic relationship which is based around money that says, "We built this product that's pretty good, but we want to make a couple changes. It’s gonna cost you money to do that." And so you solve for mediocrity. And it’s a very frustrating thing. As a creative person, you want to have free reign, basically, to build a great product.

And so Bolt was designed from the ground up to be this very aligned sort of design consultancy. That was the initial premise. And we work exclusively on an equity basis, and we invest capital, that's a big part of our business. But a ton of the reason that people take money from us versus someone else is all of the focus on building the product and the company.

And so it’s not a mentor once a week that's gonna talk you through a business plan. It is sitting on the ground in front of a CAD program, describing exactly how a part should be designed for injection molding, and actually sitting there and doing it. And so it’s a very different relationship than a typical venture firm or incubator, accelerator, whatever category people put us into.

DancoAnd a similar firm, in a sense, for the software side, would be Blade. So Paul English is there, sitting down —

EinsteinSure.

DancoYou know, I'm not going to use the word incubating, but I think that's the correct use of it, of having these firms staying with the same mentors and people. What actually brought me today is I was walking by and I saw Warren Katz talking like that, and I know Will Herman's here. You've got the best of the best.

EinsteinWe have this awesome crew of people that we're really pumped about. And many of them are either — if they're not hardware entrepreneurs — plenty of them are — they have a shop in their garage, or they built their own house or whatever. They have some connection to making things.

Which is surprisingly common. You learn this about a lot of people. One of the things when I was raising the first fund that I got from individuals, this feedback I heard all the time, was, "Yeah, when I was at MIT, I was an electrical engineer and I was totally in love with making circuits and all this stuff, and then everybody just started doing software, and so my company was a software company, but at home I was hacking on Arduinos and I had a shop, and I was making cabinets," or whatever.

And so you have this very strong entrepreneurial connection to physical things. And we're seeing this, at a very high level, we're seeing a renaissance of that in a lot of ways. And so this was a place that was designed, I think, pretty uniquely, to help companies do that. But it attracts all these people that you wouldn't expect, that they're like, "Oh, this is really cool."

DancoAnd in order to be a mentor here, you have to be able to have already modified your lawnmower to 55 miles an hour.

Einstein[laughs] Sure, yeah. You have to ride on it like a sports car. Yeah. I mean we're not super strict about anything like that, but it just tends to be — so much of it is about community, building people that really care and connect about similar things. And so we have probably 95% of our investors, they care about physical things very deeply.

And so it’s enjoyable for people here to just hang out, because there are people who have similar belief systems, and it works well.

DancoWhat is your vision for growth, number of teams that you're going to have. You'll never have more than two teams, have more than 50 teams, or...?

EinsteinYeah. The growth stuff is really challenging for any very hands-on space like this. We spend a lot of time talking to Y Combinator and other programs that have this — it’s all about bandwidth. It’s all about, we see 5,000 companies every six months, we want to do 100 deals or whatever. And that just doesn’t work for us because we believe in picking a couple of winners and spending a ton of time and energy focusing on those companies for a year, two years, ten years, or whatever it takes.

And so we have companies that fly back from LA and do design reviews but they find it useful. And so that is — again, it’s very atypical for someone doing this kind of stuff. But I don't see it actually getting much larger in terms of the number of companies in a given period of time, because it’s very hard to manage this stuff with quality in mind.

So I imagine... We do about 10-12 investments per year. I imagine that will stay relatively similar going forward.

DancoDoes that mean there are ten companies here at any one time? There's always one dropping out, another one comes in?

EinsteinWe don't have any specific requirements for companies moving here. So we have a couple companies that actually never moved in here. They just come in all the time and work with our team or whatever.

DancoBut they would be idiots not to be Boston to be able to access these —

EinsteinThat's right. It just doesn’t make sense for them. But we have one company that's in San Francisco. They were like, "We'll come out in the beginning for a month or two, and then we'll work remotely." And a month or two turned into three, turned into four. And so I think they genuinely value the time. I think that's been useful for them.

DancoWell, it’s still early. There must be some type of up or out or graduation process. Have you come to grips with that? Or how do you think —

EinsteinWhat usually happens is companies get too big. And so once they get past eight, nine, ten people, it just becomes, they kind of like push themselves out. It’s like, "This is uncomfortable for me to take these four desks here and cram everybody in here." And so they go get their own space. And that's happened with about five companies so far.

And in a year and two months or whatever it’s been, that's pretty successful, I think. We feel pretty good about that.

DancoWell, let's take a look at that space.

EinsteinSure. Happy to show you.

Sort of like general office space. Bolt is divided into two floors. The top floor is sort of common area and office space that the companies can use — a lot of meeting rooms and the typical things that you would find in co-working space or an incubator. Open seating for all the companies, and there's about seven rooms around the space that people can use.

But all the cool stuff is down in the shop.

The bottom floor here is really focused on prototyping. And so everything here that we have is designed to build ones and twos and threes of things. This is not manufacturing or large production or anything like that. And so the middle area that you see here is all dedicated team space that companies get in addition to their space upstairs — they have access to a work bench setup where they can kinda make a mess, as we say.

And then there's about four or five little sort of sectional areas that have specific focuses in terms of technology. So —

DancoI haven't seen a Bridgeport working in a while.

EinsteinYeah, well, there's one here. There's actually two here. And so we have a pair of milling machines here. These are old Bridgeports. They have a great story behind them, actually. They sat next to each other in a tool and die shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut for 60 years.

DancoIt’s good to see they're still together.

EinsteinThey're great. And then we have a big engine lathe.

We're gonna do a little bit of filming here, Jeremy. And so this is to make radially symmetric parts, which are very useful for certain kinds of things — axles and stuff.

And then this is a CNC milling machine, which is sort of the modern equivalent of a Bridgeport. So this takes big hunks of aluminum and steel and plastic, and carves them out using a computer program, versus by hand, which is —

DancoI consider it a 3D eraser instead of a 3D printer.

EinsteinSure, that's a great way to put it. It’s like a sculpting machine. And then a lot of our companies have electronics. And so this room is sort of full of all of the electronic things. So, oscilloscopes and function generators and spectrum analyzers, and all the things that are used to make circuit boards, which is a big part of the way most of these products work.

Lots of standard components and wire and all kinds of other things.

Danco[laughs] I'll maybe do a snapshot. That's classic.

Einstein[laughs] And this is, by some, the most interesting room. This is what we call rapid prototyping. And so this covers 3D printing, which is something that people talk very often about. Which has been around for a long time, really useful for prototyping. We cover pretty high-end printing here.

So we have what’s called a laser cutter down here. This does flat material — so sheets of acrylic and plastic and wood, and fiber board and glass and metal, and whatever. And then these two printers here are FDM machines.

So this is a really sort of quick and easy and cheap machine, and this is sort of the Ferrari of 3D printing.

DancoAnd someone's been playing around a little.

EinsteinYeah, so these are all test parts that [companies often recommend]. And this is a really high-end 3D printer that's built by the company that bought Makerbot.

DancoRight.

EinsteinYou may know.

DancoStratasys, right?

EinsteinYes, that's right.

DancoAnd this is Formlabs, which was the —

EinsteinThis is Formlabs, yeah.

DancoI want to say they were the runner-up in the beauty contest in that movie about —

EinsteinI think they were the winner of that movie, yeah.

DancoThey stayed the purists.

EinsteinYes, that's right, and they're doing quite well. They're based here in Somerville. And I think they're up to about 100 people now. So they're doing great. And we had one of the earliest printers. This is actually a new one, but we've had a handful of them. So this is where all the 3D printing happens.

So this is one of our companies, is a wine startup.

DancoWow.

EinsteinAnd so they're doing real sort of degradation and testing of wine. Which is sometimes more organized than this, but you can sort of see little wine beakers.

And then the last sort of like main functional area here is —

DancoWoodshop.

EinsteinIs, yeah, we call this model making. And so this covers making sort of rough prototypes of things that are and really designed to be super functional, but are really useful in assessing whether something's gonna work. Or look good.

And so this is a band saw, this is a big vacuum former. This makes plastic molds. So this is like a little sort of computer mouse that comes off of a machine like this. This is actually a piece of testing equipment that allows us to do temperature cycling. We have one of our companies' products in there.

And this is a weather system. And so this is being cycled through very intense heat and humidity cycles. And so we can actually make sure that the product is accurately [unintelligible] and remains precise.

And, let's see, we have saws and drill presses. This is a sandblast cabinet, this is a cleaning system for our 3D printed parts, and a big drill press.

DancoWell, what I think is most impressive here actually is the cleanliness of the place, see all the dust collection systems. You may argue about a little bit — I've been in a lot of factories, and they don't look like this. So obviously, we keep the clean floors here. A clean floor is a clean mind.

Ben, thank you so much, and good luck.

EinsteinThank you.