On today’s episode, we’re going back into our past stomping grounds as we were new people in business and industry. Reminiscing about Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is one of the first places we lived for a number of years and decided intentionally to go there for business purposes. There’s a guy named Chris Kaminsky who has started Mi3D for Michigan and has a Meetup group and association about 3D printing there in West Michigan. This is reminding us of how we were involved in multiple pre MeetUp.com meetups back in the day when we were there and we were young. There were some of those early CAD meetups because 3D CAD was really new. There wasn’t too many people who did it. They were very, very expensive systems like Alias on Silicon Graphics workstations that were six-figure systems. Your average people couldn’t afford that, big corporations only. Then there came this lower cost CAD and it started with 3D Studio, which had in the early days release 1 and release 2 back then. This was the early to mid-90s. People were really new to it and wanted to know about it and you would get together about all the CAD. We were using CAD and creating models and animations of products that we had designed and that was the real innovative thing.

Today, we talk about 3D printing being able to rapidly prototype or manufacture products without tooling in an additive way. This is the big new hot thing going on. Back then, it was just about visualization, having a rendering. It wasn’t really photorealistic back then but it was a rendering. You didn’t have to draw and sketch it out by hand. The meetups around 3D CAD was the idea that we didn’t have quite as much resources to YouTube videos on how to do stuff. It gave us an opportunity to network with others who are struggling to solve problems; how to create textures or how to do these things and that’s really the whole point of it. When you’re in an emerging technology or a technology that’s learning how to get applied or that has a steep learning curve like 3D CAD. When you have all of those things, you really need to get together and have best practices and have conversations and get inspired and learn from other people and get out of just behind YouTube-ing it. YouTube did not exist when we were there.

We’re remembering even the worldwide web was in its infancy. We had email but it was dial-up internet and you went to AOL or something. From within AOL, you’re on their platform, which is really like a bulletin board service on steroids. You would dial into a bulletin board in the early days. From there, you could click a button to go to the worldwide web. It was crazy. That’s where you would post on a bulletin board that you’re going to have this meetup and you would call people and do it the old-fashioned way.

We wanted to really bring Chris Kaminsky on of Mi3D because we really wanted to talk about that there really is value in creating this local community meetups and getting the groups together and really organizing it. He’s been finding really good success in this and then finding good traffic because he has a great community there in Grand Rapids. We’re going to talk a little bit about that with him so you can see where he’s going. We want to encourage all areas to really do more of this 3D print meetups. It’s very, very valuable to have some face time. Chris presents what we think is a very common experience many of you may have had, or if not, a good model for what you might do in your local area. Let’s go to the interview with Chris and then we’ll talk some more on the other side.