When Google Fiber arrived in Kansas City the startup scene changed. While funding opportunities haven’t quite caught up with the buzz and the community of startups who are stoked about the extra band-width, teams want to be there. And the quality of teams that want to be there is quite impressive.
Alexa Nguyen and her 4-person team at Handprint are one of those teams. Handprint is a startup that makes 3-D printing easy for everyone. They testing the user experience on the elderly and children first.
Handprint landed themselves the chance to put down roots in K.C. when they won Feld’s KC Fiber House Competition. They won themselves free rent for one year and an open-ended mentorship relationship with Brad Feld, Techstars Founder and startup scene mega-star. Brad Feld is very familiar with the opportunity that 3-D printing brings. His venture capital firm, Foundry, led a 10 million dollar round in Makerbot in 2011.
We caught up with Alexa to ask her a few questions, and these are her answers:
When you were a little girl did you ever imagine that you would be a part of a company in a high risk/high growth situation, such as the tech startup scene?
I spent hours researching “careers” to try and figure out what I could be passionate about for the rest of my life. None of them included “move to Kansas with 3 boy dropouts and build a software company”. But it’ll be normal for kids growing up over the next 5-10 years to be thinking about startups as viable options, and that’s really cool.
How did you get into software? Is this where your core competency is?
My co-founders got me “into” software, though I definitely can’t say I’m in the software game yet. I’m motivated daily by their brilliance, this language I can’t fully speak, and the world’s need for hackers, so I’m taking advantage of my team and learning a lot. I’m really excited about learning front-end development, so I can really dig into UX (User Experience) and become an Internet marketing queen.
Historically, tech startups and hardware startups have been male dominated. Why do you think that this is?
Handprint
Startups in general have been male dominated. Evolutionarily speaking, men are programmed to take risks to attract the ladies, and the startup life of exploring/innovating was always seen as pretty risky. Honestly, it’s easier to look past the risk in a situation that’s almost entirely under my team’s control and how well/strategically we execute our idea.
Is this something that should be changed, in your opinion?
This is something that IS changing.
If so, how do you think we can change this?
My generation gets that women are ballers and will hire based on skill. As women, we have to keep being awesome and doing awesome things. Though the ratio is skewed, women are already in positions of power where they can set the example and prove that tech and hardware startups need females. It can only get better from here.
You are living in Kansas City as a part of google fiber and the Feld KC fiberhouse. How has living and working amongst such a concentration of startups helped your company?
The Feld house is located in the Kansas City Startup Village, this atypical little neighborhood where over 20 startups work and/or live within 5 blocks of each other. The emotional support that comes from having a bunch of friends who are passionate about the same problems and live similar lifestyles keeps me from burning out when things get brutal. We’re also really lucky as a team to have moved into a neighborhood filled with seasoned, accomplished, and welcoming startup people who have become our mentors.
Brad Feld, Foundry Group
Willingness and enthusiasm from city politicians looking to support the scene makes this entire movement more accessible. I’ve also seen corporations (who have the resources), namely Sprint, start to step up and really get involved in driving the revolution forward. They recently announced their accelerator powered by Techstars, which is really exciting, and they’ve got some other great ventures in the works. And 1 Million Cups!! 1MC has helped rally and unify our community, giving us a way to feel like we’re making progress instead of sitting in our separate silos. There are the obvious networking, education, and awareness aspects of 1MC, but don’t underestimate the power of unifying and inspiring the community.
Where do you see 3-D printing in the next 5 years? Will we see a mass adoption and printers in every home? Will the materials change? Will the printers become smaller and smaller?
Yes to mass adoption!! Innovation on the hardware side is happening at a crazy pace. Printers are getting cheaper, and a study just came out saying the average family can save $500-$2,000/year by owning one. The revolution is really just waiting on usable software.
The current, popular material is corn-based PLA. And there are a lot of materials that are compatible with 3D printers; it’s just not cost efficient for them to all be available to personal printers yet. But hold fast, we’ll see the industry go nuts over the next 5 years.
What do you think that you bring to the Handprint team as a woman? Are there gender differences that impact the way you relate to your team?
I think men are more willing to communicate frustration to a female, so I’d say a higher level of communication within my team. And as far as gender differences, not really. We’ve been living together in close quarters for 10 months and know each other really well now, so we’re all just humans to each other at this point.
