Inspiring and catalyzing creativity worldwide, Mark Hatch has been instrumental in jumpstarting the Maker Movement. He has now joined Network Society Ventures as a General Partner, leveraging his knowledge, skills, and passion to invest together with us in a new generation of startups.
The opportunity to transform your ideas into reality is so powerful, that many are taken aback by the apparent or real barriers, and never take action. There are a lot of reasons not to do things: the financial risks involved, the social stigma of failure and the opportunity cost of not doing the well known things. Past problems can be solved, to a given degree and at a known efficiency, with tools from the past. But new problems require new tools, which can be born only from new ideas. Lowering the barriers to creation, and allowing an increasing number of people to experience its exhilaration is extraordinarily important.
“How hardware startups can achieve scale today”
The Maker Movement represents this lowering of barriers. Learning how to use tools of rapid prototyping enables people to become confident to try out their ideas. Being able to see what needs to be changed, how to iterate when somebody actually uses what you built, allows faster exploration. The cost of mistakes is lower. The inspiration to explore different designs creates a path towards success.
Mark is the co-founder and former CEO of TechShop, a do-it-yourself workshop and fabrication studio. It is the largest public-access computer-enabled manufacturing platform in the world, with a dozen locations open and hundreds more planned over the next decade. His best-selling book, The Maker Movement Manifesto, was published by McGraw-Hill in September of 2013 and has become the leading resource for organizations and individuals who want to understand and engage in the movement. He is an entrepreneur, author, investor and a former Green Beret. He has held executive positions focused on innovation, disruptive technology and entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship in various industry sectors including packaged goods, manufacturing, retail and healthcare.
I am excited to have Mark join us as a General Partner at Network Society Ventures. His background and expertise in the Maker Movement, enabling hardware companies in the healthcare, IoT, energy and other spaces rapidly accelerate their development, is perfectly aligned with our investment strategy.
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