10 Lessons from Year 1 at Mosaic

A Collection of Thoughts from 365+ Days in the Fast Lane

My time so far at Mosaic Manufacturing has been, to put it lightly, far more than anything I ever thought I would get out of a job, not to mention my first real job out of school.

From visiting the two biggest start-up hubs in the US (SF, NYC), to meeting investors, working on patented technology, brokering large-scale integration contracts, and designing a product from the ground up — it has been a wild ride.

1) Products don’t come from genius, they come from sweat

There exists this prevailing story that great products come from a brilliant moment of insight, where the inventor thinks about a problem long enough that they have a moment of inspiration, plan the entire project, and through the brilliance of the individual alone, the product comes to life. It is the classic “Eureka!” moment that everyone dreams about, but the truth is (as I have had to figure out the hard way) these moments are few and fleeting.

I do believe that there is always a “Eureka!” moment, but it is often small, passive, and in the background. It is the tiny voice in the back of your head that goes “Hey, that’s kinda cool” and is too often drowned out by the louder “That’ll never work”. The secret that every great engineer, inventor, or creator will tell is to ignore the feeling of shutting down that quiet voice, and to give it a chance to grow.

Over the last year at Mosaic, I have had a front-row seat to helping grow a product from a mostly finalized design to a (mostly) completed solution. 90% of the parts had been finalized when I joined the company, we had firmware written, and there we had proven that what we were trying to do could be done.

You would think the gap from “mostly finished” to “shipped and done” would be pretty short, or at least pretty linear. As it turns out, and as many hardware startups before us have discovered, manufacturing is actually really, really hard, and that last 10% is more like the last 80%. Getting from a brilliant idea, to a functioning prototype took almost 2 years, 3 full-time founders, an amazing support network of mentors and advisers, and a whole lot of late nights. But getting from a single product, to a repeatable manufacturing process, a functional product user interface, a simple, well-designed software package, a certified electrically-compliant design, and a reliable hardware product that can deliver as promised, every time — that took nearly 16 people and almost 3 years.

There were many brilliant light-bulb moments, but I think the really miraculous thing that happened along the way wasn’t any single moment, but the commitment by a very special group of people to show up and give it everything they have, day after day. From the founders pulling all-nighters, travelling the world, and showing up every day to motivate the troops with a big smile and a laugh, to the assembly staff who took every bolt, nut, wire and test rig as a reflection of their personal identity:

It takes a village.

Great products don’t appear; they are forced to life, through blood, sweat and tears. And sometimes, ingenuity.

2) Design != Real Life

You would think after doing this whole engineering thing throughout school and now in a professional role, I would understand this tidbit. Unfortunately, it’s taken quite a few mistakes for me to really learn it.

When it comes to engineering, there are an amazing suite of tools available to prototype and design with, including solid modelling software for mechanical design, electronic software for electrical design, wire-framing for app design — you name it, there is likely a software tool to help make that easier for you.

Unfortunately, despite our best professional guesses, a lot of these programs make designing something so simple, it is often removed from the difficulties of reality. When you have to make the transition from digital, software-based perfect, to ugly, real-world-based products, you often lose things in translation.

The motors you thought would have 1 Nm of force actually only have 60% that amount, because electrical and mechanical losses don’t get included in CAD (Computer Aided Design, an engineering tool). That means that nifty gear design you made doesn’t work as expected, and you have to scrap the whole thing and try again.

This is where the term “rapid prototyping” comes from. If everything worked as expected, I suppose there would be no need for “rapid prototyping”, and likely no need for 3D printing. That means I would probably not have a job, and subsequently not be writing this article. Weird how that works.

What we’ve had to learn the hard way, consistently, the entire last year at Mosaic, is that CAD does not reflect reality, theoretical calculations are almost always (significantly) wrong, and not double-checking your assumptions in the real-world is basically shooting yourself in the foot.

Always take the time to prove that what you thought was happening is really happening, the way you designed something holds true when you get samples, and that the world still works the way you anticipated it to.

As they say, measure twice, cut once.

3) Decision = Argument + Evidence

This is something that has slowly become a holy mantra at Mosaic, something that we use as a heuristic (rule of thumb) for every major decision, and something we push every employee to take to heart: a decision is just a combination of a good argument plus compelling evidence.

Simple right? If used correctly.

Have a great idea you want buy-in for? Pitch it to me. If I think it’s a good idea, or has potential, I will ask you for what evidence you’ve gathered. This is most often where people falter. They have a brilliant idea based on a hunch or some past experience, but they’ve never really taken the time to prove it out or collect meaningful data.

Before we spent $25k on an injection molded part, I want to know that the calculations I did on a new cutter design actually work, and not just work once out of every 5 times, but work every time, consistently, without fail. The only way to know that is to collect more data. Once I have the data, and can build a case that spending that money is worth the investment, I have a strong argument. Presenting that to my boss makes his decision really simple:

Compelling data. Strong argument. Easy decision.

It really is that simple.

But where we often falter is skipping a step for the sake of speed, simplicity, or, in all honesty, laziness. Gathering evidence is about doing the hard work up front, and making sure that when you build an argument, it is based on something objective.

Sometimes collecting data on 200 stepper motors to prove that your supplier is worth investing heavily in is really tedious and boring. Sometimes measuring thousands of drive gears hurts your hands and makes your brain melt. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. That’s life in the fast lane.

But when it comes to making a decision at Mosaic, it really is that simple.

Evidence. Argument. Decision.

4) Document everything

I’ve been burned by this one more times than I can count. There are just so many good ideas that happen in a day (partially true), and just so much going on (mostly true), that you can’t possibly remember it all (very true).

The point of documentation is to transfer knowledge. Not just to others, but to future-you, and to ensure that things don’t need to be repeated due to forgetfulness or misunderstanding. By documenting what you have done, why it is relevant, and how you got to the conclusions that you did, you can go back and justify why things worked out the way they did.

This becomes particularly important if you follow the advice from #3 — often the decision may change as new evidence emerges, and you will need to go back and re-evaluate the decisions you made far previously than you can remember. By documenting the details of the process, you prevent having to redo a lot of that data, or make mistakes due to incorrect or incomplete information.

So when in doubt, write it down.

5) Leadership is a personality trait, management is a skill set

This one took me a while to figure out entirely, but it is more and more true the further I get into the hiring and management sides of the business.

I now strongly believe that being a leader in an organization or within your role is about attitude, perspective, and hard work. These are personality traits — the way you choose to carry yourself as a person on a daily basis.

Management, on the other hand, is a skill set. It is a series of specific abilities that can be taught and executed on at particular times. It often comes with experience and direct training, and something that should be learned by anyone in a management-like role.

I believe we often confuse these two aspects in people within our organizations or people we admire. There’s a substantial difference between a good manager and a good leader.

A good leader can come from anyone in any role. A leader excels at their role to the point they make others around them better. Whether that means completing tasks outside of their job description, or excelling within their role at such a high level as to raise the standard of excellence for the entire organization: a leader leads by example, and makes others better. A leader does not need to come from a position of management, and often they do not, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

A good manager possesses a specific skill set and role within the organization, where they are responsible for and maintain a standard of excellence from every member of the team. A good manager knows how to keep projects on schedule, on budget, and within the limits of mental energy of the team. They know how to work with each member of the team, as well as the team as a whole, in order to get the highest quality and quantity of work from the team.

The more I have been involved in a managerial role, the more I have realized how management differs from leadership.

In order to be a leader at work, I push the envelope of what is possible and expected by our products, contribute to a positive working culture, and keep projects on schedule. In order to be a manager at work however, I have to be in tune with the needs of the team and the members I oversee and work with, as well as how best to support them on a daily basis to produce their best work.

Good management does not equal good leadership. Good leadership does not equal good management. But great managers are good leaders, and great leaders are good managers.

6) Don’t chase the wave, ride it

This lesson is in reference to my vacation to Hawaii last December, where by happenstance I was able to see the Pipeline Masters competition on the North Shore. Watching the best surfers in the world duke it out, some of the core principles to success for this year became suddenly very clear: timing is critical, always be prepared, make the most of what you’re given, don’t be afraid to quit and regroup, and countless others.

But one of the big ones that seemed to hit me as hard as some of waves rolling up the shore was this concept of catching waves.

It’s easier to ride a wave than it is to chase it.

Timing and positioning really help here, but no matter how fast you swim, it’ll always be faster to ride the wave.

The same is true for start-ups. I believe wholeheartedly that we ran an extremely strong Kickstarter campaign. I believe our marketing is solid and our product is revolutionary. I believe our team is solid and we have a strong business model.

But I would be sorely mistaken if I didn’t acknowledge at least a majority part of our success to the fact that 3D printing is a hot topic.

When it comes to starting a business, I do believe you can succeed when the odds are stacked against you and you give it a superhuman effort. Sometimes you can make magic happen despite swimming upstream. I also believe that some businesses succeed for no other reason than they happen to go with the current. Many, many dot com startups were bought for this reason — they weren’t particularly successful businesses, and in fact many of them floundered miserably after exiting, but they managed to find a hot topic and be in the right place at the right time.

But more than anything, I’ve learned that sometimes you just have to ride the wave. If you swim your heart out upstream, you may get somewhere, but it’ll be slow and laboured. If you coast and go with the current, you can end up somewhere with minimal effort. But if you give it all you’ve got and catch the current, that’s where the magic happens.

If you want to build something revolutionary, working hard and having the right people in the right seats just may not be enough. Sometimes, you have to get lucky.

Like in professional surfing, to score big, you need the right skills and be prepared, but you also have to catch the big waves.

Sometimes being successful means finding the areas where big waves are coming and getting in the right position. Understanding when and where is 90% of the challenge.

So when that big wave comes, you’re ready.

Because it’s easier to ride the wave than it is to chase it.

7) Sell it first, build it second**

**But keep your promises

This is something that everyone else seemed to have figured out long ago, but took me a while to really grasp.

It is totally acceptable to sell a product before you build it.

Mind blown.

I mean, Kickstarter is essentially this exact concept taken to its logical conclusion, but who knew you could do this with large-scale projects as well.

This is extremely common in the B2B market, but it had never really occurred to me to sell the concept of a product before you had it built in order to mitigate all the risk.

Call me slow (I am, I’ll admit it) but I think this is one of the fundamental errors most companies make when trying to hit a home run. You’re better off getting at least one contract (it’s hard) before you build that amazing product you’ve been envisioning, why not get someone else to pay for it?

The biggest challenge here is, of course, keeping your promises. If you are going to sell something before you build it, you still need to build it, and build it beyond what anyone had expected it to be. Often that means pushing timelines, hitting milestones, and beating performance goals — easier said than done.

But if you can make some amazing promises and sell them on the future, and then deliver everything they had hoped for and more…

You might find yourself selling a few more future projects.

8) Always Be Learning

This one seems redundant given that this entire article is about the things I have learned in the past year, but I think it is still worth emphasizing.

Something we look for in co-op students and new hires, and especially in existing employees, is the humility and initiative to always be learning. It is more about a growth mindset than about actively learning something new every day, as often the work we do on a daily basis requires a “beginner’s mind”.

If you want to solve an incredibly difficult problem in a simple and elegant way, you had best be humble enough to accept that you will likely not get the best answer on the first go. When it comes to solving some of the problems we have run into this past year, a healthy dose of humility often accompanies a side of hitting your head against the wall. At the end of the day, everyone at Mosaic is at the beginning of their careers (some have more experience than others, but for the most part we are all under 30 and <5 years experience) so it is important that we acknowledge we have a lot to learn.

Something I have realized the hard way, and am reminded of daily, is that it is okay to not know what you’re doing (to be honest, most people don’t), but it’s not okay to have a fixed mindset. If you’re not willing to learn, you’re only as good as your past experience, and when it comes to startups, most of the time that’s not good enough.

Over the past year, I have changed the way I fundamentally understand design. I used to think that design involved lots of formulas and tables that have been well established, and then a brilliant engineer (me, or equivalent) takes these physical principles and applies them in a creative way to get a result that solves the problem. I have since come to the realization that in cutting edge industries and when you’re solving hard problems, those formulas and tables don’t exist, so it is up to you to build them.

It works like this:

Research <-> Design <-> Product <-> Manufacturing

If you have the research, you can begin working on the design. When you have a final design for a system completed, you build it into a product. When you have a product that works, you manufacture them at scale. This is the hardware cycle.

But more often than not in my day-to-day job, the research that we have gathered is only good enough for a specific design, which is only good enough for a specific iteration of the product, which is only good enough if we are able to manufacture that at the scale we need without design changes. To bad as soon as you change something, you start back at zero.

So when I do research from now on, the goal is not to find the specific answer to the problem at hand, but to understand the fundamentals behind the problem so that you can always solve that particular problem for your given scenario.

In short, go deep on topics, and always be learning.

9) Be Ruthless With Your Time, It’s Expensive

This one has been a particularly difficult lesson to learn as I have had a bad habit of committing to things since high school, but it has become only more and more relevant in my daily life.

Imagine for a minute that you are an expert in a given field that is in high demand, and you have clients lining up outside the door for your specific talents. In short, you can make as much money as you want, and can easily charge $1000/hour consistently.

How much would you work? What about your family? What about your side projects? What about all the things you wanted to do outside of work that aren’t getting done yet?

The truth is, your time is always worth $1000/hour and you need to start acting like it.

One day in my life, I hope I run into the scenario where I have enough experience and am valuable enough to charge $1000/hour and set my own terms. But chances are when I get there, there will be much more I wish I could be doing with my time.

Remember that classic novel you never read? It should take you 15 hours to get through — that’s $15k — are you willing to spend that kind of money on it? Maybe. Maybe it changes your life and the way you think about the way the world works. It might just be worth it. The $30 price tag seems pretty irrelevant now, doesn’t it?

Remember that TV series on Netflix you binge watched on a Sunday last week? How much did you learn from it? How much joy did it bring you? That’s what I thought. In the 10 hours you spent melting your brain, you lost the equivalent of $10,000. Doesn’t seem worth it now, does it?

And every time someone asked you to go for coffee to “pick your brain”? Was it worth it? Sometimes, certainly, but for the most part, they didn’t really add much did they?

This year has made it abundantly clear that the amount of time I waste is staggering. But more than that — sometimes you just gotta watch some Netflix, hey, that’s totally okay — I’m never going to be able to finish all the things I want to do in my lifetime. That is a sober thought.

Climbing Mt Kilimanjaro? Maybe not. Surfing pipeline on North Shore? Maybe not. Reading Hemingway’s collective works, writing a novel, or learning a foreign language? Perhaps.

But I had best get started now.

And really, really prioritize.

Now all this said, I don’t make $1000/hour at Mosaic, which is totally understandable (I’m not that good), but I only get one shot at today — best make the most of it.

Be ruthless with your time. Today only happens once.

10) The Best Ideas Happen on the Walk Home

This one happens often enough to be comical.

Ever have one of those days where you just can’t seem to solve the problem, no matter how hard you bang your head against the wall?

And then as soon as you give up and leave the office, you get that spark of inspiration and solve the problem?

Yeah, me too. All the time.

It is often hard, especially at the pace of a startup, to take the time that you need to let innovation come to you. I wholeheartedly believe that you don’t go to brilliant ideas, they come to you, and even more so they come to you when you’re ready for them.

Often when you’re heads down on a project, and can’t seem to see the forest through the trees, you find yourself hammering away on the same problem with the same approach and getting the same result — a whole lot of nothing.

I find the moment I remove myself from the environment and let my mind go silent, suddenly the answers come in a flood. It’s like when you’re walking out of the exam and suddenly know all the answers to the hard questions you couldn’t figure out in the moment.

This has been a hard lesson to learn, but finding the balance between pushing through the hard times, and giving yourself a break to let the ideas come to you, is a lifelong challenge. The best of the best figure out how to manage this paradox, and capture the muse when she arrives.

Lesson here: push yourself, but not too hard — sometimes you have to let the answers come to you, not the other way around.

Overall, this past year has been more than I ever thought it would be.

Here’s to another amazing 12 months, and beyond.

A bit about me…
I’m Brendan (hey!) the OEM Hardware Lead at Mosaic Manufacturing where we are building the future of 3D Printing Technology.

In my spare time, you can find me kicking a soccer ball, drinking double Americanos, adding to my cookbook collection, and repping Venture for Canada (Class of 2015, waddup).

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Hit me up on LinkedIn or Instagram, and check out the cool stuff happening over at the Mosaic blog!

PS: Shout-out to one of the most bad-ass girls I know, Victoria, for her original article that gave me the idea for this one.