Matt Smith Log

Wed Dec 31, 2025

Amazing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFyre8_5MuE

Let's call the online thing the Future Fab Crash Course. I think we can shoot for 300 signups each month and run the course monthly for a solid pipeline. See initial notes on curriculum - this is first braindump. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wKq1zQQQdWpbX8J59a1SlAYKN7fCt11UVQKnc-YhtEc/edit?slide=id.g3b41ded17f5_0_0#slide=id.g3b41ded17f5_0_0

It is cryptic, but I will start crafting a more compelling narrative. Basic narrative:

The applied version of Fab Academy. Learn to design-build-productize anything on Amazon. I think we can introduce about 50 key tech modules, so people start using them in a meaningful way like Legos because everything is Construction Set Approach - with key critical components made accessible. Builds open lots of open source work. Includes CAD, studying design guides, basic calculations for reality check, and making design workbenches in FreeCAD using AI. With cohort, we learn to go through an entire collab dev process - just at the phase of how it works and how to design things. 

The beauty would emerge from numbers. I can teach the high coordination required, and process to do meaningful development like any engineer team would do - except we are democratizing technology and making it accessible. With tangible outcome of real products, sellable on Amazon. Crowd collab would equip large groups to agree on a product and develop together (no 'defection' defined as people going off into a corner and developing products solo, which is just lame as it never gets anywhere because of the extreme effort required to attain high quality to the point of Distributed Market Substitution. 

So I am excited because if we could develop a kickass integrated design program that any hungry participant - with you being a good test case - can take on and actually learn critical skills in only a week - that would be magic towards democratizing production. And this is the 1 week remote thing - from there we have an on-ramp to the on-site - where you actually do and build. But with the prerequisite of learning the basic keys of collaborative product development.

This would be a good call to make sure that all the tech aspects and teachability and 'setting up people for success' happens. That mean high quality presentation - and a chance to collaborate with any subject matter experts (such as say precision automated vehicles) - to get all these high tech tools into normal peoples' hands. So maybe we can reach out and collaborate within our networks to do this. We could make a callout to our communities to deliver this - just noticed you partner with Craig Ballantyne. It seems that he'd be interested in this effort.

The idea is to prepare something that nobody has done before - and we have a lot of experience with actual build-out of lots of the systems involved - so this is really about productization of the 2 last decades of our prototyping across different areas (homes, machines, CNC, 3D printing, automation, etc). This could be super interesting - because technology is amazing - and all we're doing is enabling access and simplifying the human interface to technology to achieve ambitious society-wide goals of leveling the playing field across many sectors of the economy.

Anyway, super excited. MJ