Kirk Andersen - Director of Operations at SQ4D

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Kirk, the Director of Operations at SQ4D, and we discuss how his company is 3D printing houses, how 3D printing is the future of the construction industry, and how additive manufacturing will revolutionize the way things are built in every industry. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) I am super, super excited to talk to you about 3D printing houses.

(Kirk at 00:00:45) I'm not that cool of a guy, but the 3D printing stuff is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) I'll agree with that. I'll agree with that. No, I'm genuinely interested in you as a person. How did you get involved in this whole 3D home printing thing?

(Kirk at 00:01:00) I'm just some regular guy. I did a bunch of odd jobs. I tried to do graphic design. I did a bunch of things with school. School wasn't for me. I worked construction for almost ten years and linked up with a friend who's from Patchogue, and he has a couple businesses and he does a lot of construction himself. And he had a lot of problems with the bureaucracy of building in New York, and I've faced that. I've experienced that. You need to do things in such an orderly process, and there's a bunch of red tape to build an entire house. It's one thing to put an extension on a house, to do small things. In New York it's difficult, especially locally, because we're in New York and then we're in Suffolk County, and then we're in the Village of Patchogue. It was hard to just build a normal house. Covering a house with vinyl siding is not accepted in the Village of Patchogue. We had to do cedar shake. So we decided that we're kind of tired of dealing with that. We wanted to speak to a robot. So we've linked up with some friends to start taking the idea of a small plastic 3D printer and just scale it up. Make it 50 feet wide, 20 feet tall, and spit out concrete. That's the premise. That started as kind of not a joke, but just an idea. I mean, this is a dreamer kind of feel, like, can we do this? So we just did that. We scaled it up quarter scale, and then we got some concrete out of that. And then we made it even bigger, and that's the current machine that we print houses with. So we come from this construction background. Me, obviously, you want to learn about me a little bit. That is where we're at. We just want to build. I'm using equipment and I'm just building. You can take the whole 3D printing part, the automation, out of that. We're just using equipment and we're ruggedizing it for job sites. We're making this make sense on a job site. We're not over-engineering. We're not making a BMW engine where there's too many parts and everything has to be torqued so crazy. No, we want to make equipment that can be used on a job site, and we all have came from that mindset—keep it simple, stupid, the KISS method. And that's where we're all aligned mentally and focused to just build houses in a different way. So we're like a family here, a very small company startup, you've seen. And that's exactly what we're doing, is just proving this out, going to a regular neighborhood property and building a house there with a 3D printer. Right now it's like 40% of the house. Eventually it'll be more. More of it will be automated. We're going to 3D print cabinets, stuff like that in the future. It's all about being sustainable, eco-friendly, fast, and affordable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) I love it. When I saw it, I geeked out super hard. So my dad has like two or three brothers, and then their dad. They were all in construction. So they're all general contractors. They build homes. In the summer for school, I would go do some demolition work for them. And, you know, that was like a little summer odd job that I had. And my dad was the only one, you know, that had that builder mindset, but he went into electronic design and started building there. So we were kind of like the odd ones out, but I got to grow up around it with my uncles. And when I saw something like it was a mix of the technology that I love doing something that's historically part of our family business, I was just blown away by it. How did you meet the technical person that helped make this a reality for you?

(Kirk at 00:04:14) So literally, I knocked on the door because I saw that this was happening in my neighborhood. A very small article in a local paper. These guys, my partner Enzo and my previous engineers, they barely even put concrete through a machine, but they went to the media saying, "We're doing this. We're here. This is what we're doing." So I've been in construction. I know 3D printers. It just made sense to me. So I literally just knocked on the door. I said, "What's up? I'm getting involved in this, whether you like it or not." Now I'm part owner of the company. We've rebranded, so I'm cofounder of the new construction end of our company. Because we did make small plastic 3D printers at the beginning. We made them bespoke printers, industrial style. You can print polycarbonate, print nylons, all that stuff on it. And we wanted to have some fun with that and explore the market of that. But there's so many cheap, affordable printers that mass produce that we couldn't keep up. So that's why we even rebranded as SQ4D, which is solely house printers, concrete printers, and just construction equipment. Because our system is just a delivery system. I can put different nozzles on it and deliver different materials. It doesn't have to be concrete. And that's the adaptation—the future materials will change. The machine, the equipment, that'll do one job, and it can do more jobs and be optimized. But the materials going through down the line are going to change tremendously, and the software is going to change tremendously. But like I said, I knocked on the door. They were somewhat established, but that machine that you're seeing on the internet, I built that. I'm heavily involved at this point. And coronavirus impacted us tremendously where it went down to two people in the company, basically. And we didn't know if we were going to be able to do this. We pushed through. We made it through the pandemic. And now while we were doing that, we were doing more of the paperwork and getting it so that we can get this house actually built in a neighborhood—the right building plans, the right permits, having this just be executable like we're building any other house. So those are the early stages. There's a lot of growing pains. We've found out what we like about the machine, what we don't like about the machine, but also keeping in mind, just keeping it as simple as possible. We want to make the job site safer, but also maybe an everyday construction guy could hopefully operate this machine. And if not, it'll be some sort of operator that gets a decent salary. But we're looking to scale up the company right now, mass produce machines, get these all nationwide, and start building everywhere that allows us to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:50) Yeah. When you see it, and I get it, right? You saw these guys doing something on a really small scale, and you just said this was the future and you went and knocked on their door. I love that story because I get to see stuff come through here all the time on the podcast. And every couple episodes I'll be talking with somebody that's building some new technology or something, and I'll just say that is going to win. Long term, that is going to win. And the 3D homes, I mean, I just, I don't see a future where homes aren't 3D printed. After you see it, it makes so much sense. You could just imagine that these machines could just go down a street and print a whole neighborhood.

(Kirk at 00:07:26) That's the theory, that this will really thrive in developments, communities. But that's how we walked into this. We all saw this makes sense, and it has to make sense for sustainability, to save lives and injuries on job sites. It's huge, man. There's 4,000 people every year in America that don't go home to their family. It's a fatality on a job site. These are ocean numbers. We need to reduce that. And the building materials, the cost of building materials—we can obviously, we're going to talk about all this, but this goes really deep. Automating construction, which doesn't exist really at all, is going to change. 3D printing, you could say the word 3D printing, additive manufacturing—it's going to do a percentage of the home, but automation, using arms to place items, this will all be part of it. But at the end of the day, right now, it's not huge. So we have to work around normal building practices, what tradesmen are comfortable with, and just make this good for now, and then it'll continually evolve. So I need to show them I'm building a house. So I show them I'm using concrete that has a very high crush test compression, compression results where we're way above standard. And then I'm using the rebar that they require. I mean, I'm doing everything that is asked, and then that process will be streamlined so that the tradesmen can come in and do their job quicker, that we can get these roofs on quicker, the windows in. Just it's just continually being optimized. But right now, it's just to simply just build a home that's going to last and be stronger than a stick-built home. We have the rising cost of lumber right now. We can't keep up. It's insane. And we can go to California and print concrete homes there, and maybe that's not the norm, but now that house won't burn down. We can go to Florida and really thrive because there's tons of concrete block homes made there. We will make hurricane resistant, flood resistant, termite resistant—these structures will be built to last, and they'll be automated. So we look at this, we look at 3D printing, and it just makes sense. We're going to get good. We're going to get fast, and we're going to get cheap. You don't get that with a lot of things. Additive manufacturing is changing industries by printing organs, printing food. I mean, it's changed. We're printing metals. We're printing rockets. Why aren't we printing houses? We need to get past these regulations. We need to just make this happen. Food, water, shelter—that's what everybody needs. Let's get some shelter. Let's get these going. And this is going to happen. This is going to turn into a multibillion-dollar industry. It's going to be worldwide. I've talked to competitors. I've talked to, if you want to call them competitors—we're all striving to get printers out there, make this a reality. We're in a Henry Ford moment. We're in an industrial revolution moment. We're going to automate a lot of construction, and we're going to see huge benefits from it. A lot of people are afraid this might take jobs, but I'm not looking at it like that at all. We're going to employ people to make these machines. We're going to employ people to program the machines. There's going to be operators that are going to get paid more than a laborer just stacking blocks all day. And again, it's all about sustainability and safety in my eyes. Sustainability—my phone case is 3D printed. It's TPU, it's rubber. I set this, I forget this, I go to sleep, I wake up, I got a phone case. Do that with a house—it's very possible. It's very possible. So that's, it's mind-blowing to people, but it's also very simple at the end of the day. This is a coordinate plane, a Cartesian machine. It moves on a couple axes. We're depositing concrete. We're doing what's asked, putting the structural elements in, and giving you something that you'd be happy to raise your family in. And it's concrete at the end of the day. It's going to last.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:57) Yeah. It'll definitely create more jobs. I found that the people who are scared have always been scared, and they will always continue to be scared. Meanwhile, entire industries will come and go, and the world will continue to grow.

(Kirk at 00:11:10) We used to have milkmen. We didn't have refrigerators back in the day. We evolved. We used to have a phone on the wall with a cord. Now you have a computer in your pocket. Jobs will be created. Jobs will be destroyed. This is evolving. This is how we do this. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. I'm glad to be part of it. I'm grateful to be a part of it. This is something I never thought I'd have in my life. Like I said, I was always searching for something, doing different jobs, but I've always had a design and architectural kind of want and need to fulfill. And I just popped right into it. We, I don't know if you're into self-manifestation and the law of attraction, but that's a big vibe around our office. The power of the secret—asking, believing, and receiving, and just putting your mind to it, speaking it into existence, having faith this is going to work out. And it does, man. And we're really applying that, and we're seeing good results. So we're going to stick with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) Yeah. I like it. I think where that concept gets broken down, or where people mess up with it, is imagining that you can do those things without work being applied. It's like you do those things and you apply enormous amounts of effort, energy, and work, and the things come together. You can't just sit around and imagine all day. You have to put the work in.

(Kirk at 00:12:26) You've got to bootstrap. And I think a lot of success, not only is it tied to thinking the right way and having good vibes and stuff, but it's a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work. We've been doing this for years. I've worked countless nights at the office, all hours. But that's part of it. And we're having fun, man. There's no way I'm complaining about this because we're doing some cool stuff. I'm meeting some really awesome people, widening my network, and just trying to show people this is here to stay. This is going to be fun. This is going to be an interesting future. And maybe the machine gets designed and it's optimal, and then there are just tons of these machines out there, a thousand machines. A thousand machines is crazy. That's building a lot of houses all year round if we had a thousand machines. I'm onto another project, man, personally. I might find something else to do, find something else to accomplish. We have other ideas and other things. That's a personal thing. But as far as the company goes, we're going to scale up and put these printers everywhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:21) Yeah. You're an entrepreneur. You want to build autonomously scaling systems that solve a problem, and it can go to 10,000 machines with the right team. But after you put that system into place, it's like, let's go build another autonomously scaling system that will help the world.

(Kirk at 00:13:34) Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I want to build a good future for hopefully my grandkids. I'm sure everyone, I hope everyone feels the same. I hope everyone has, in the deepest of my heart, I hope everyone's trying their hardest every day when they wake up to any application. I just hope you're trying your hardest and not being lazy, just trying to inspire people around you, trying to have these good vibes. That's just how I am personally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:59) You got the home on Zillow—the first 3D printed home on Zillow. That's your home. Tell me about that.

(Kirk at 00:14:04) Yes. Okay. So we got everything in place. I got the land, own it outright. I got permits in place. I'm putting water in the ground right now. I had a delay from the town's utilities, but we're building a house at the end of the day. It's hard to do that from the ground up, whether you're doing it stick, concrete block, whatever. Now I'm doing it with a new technology, but that's all laid out. I'm working as hard as I can to start this build immediately, but it's right around the corner. We have everything in place. We can put that Zillow listing out. We wanted to brag a little bit. We were the first to market.

Kirk at 00:14:39
I felt like we could do that. We've proven it out. I built a 1,900 square foot house, a permitted structure. No one could live in it. I could retrofit it to do that, but I'm on to the next.

Kirk at 00:14:50
That was practice. Now we're doing the real deal, showing up on a block, bringing the printer, bringing our system, doing the concrete work, getting out of there. And maybe people will say we just do walls. No. We do the foundation, the footings.

Kirk at 00:15:02
We're doing a lot of the structural elements of the house. We're pretty much printing the house. You put some windows in and a roof, you can live in there. No problem. We're working on streamlining the electrical work on this house so that it's easier for the next five houses that I print.

Kirk at 00:15:18
So a lot of time and effort is going into this so that I can think less and less about the future projects. But this house is $299. It's going to be brand new. I'm putting in technology, UV purifiers in the fans. If it senses, if the carbon monoxide alarm goes off, the fans all turn on.

Kirk at 00:15:38
If the air cycling, it'll sense that there's maybe COVID in the air. There's stuff that I can't even think, but we're trying to make this a smarter house. I could put smart switches. I could work this all off of Wi-Fi, but we're going to keep some of it traditional, some of it smart. But this is going to be a very efficient house for $299 when everything else in the area is $450 and up of a comp.

Kirk at 00:16:02
This is 1,400 square feet. We bought this land for $150,000. Like, that's a lot of money for a piece of land. It's not the greatest property, but I find the beauty in that because I'm going to go drive down this block. I'm going to bring my machine, and I'm going to print it, and I'm going to get out of there.

Kirk at 00:16:19
It's a regular everyday approach. But coming in on that price, we've had crazy interest, crazy offers, inquiries. We've gotten offers way above. And if I don't know if you've seen the market, especially locally—

Joel Beasley at 00:16:32
Oh, yeah.

Kirk at 00:16:33
It's through the roof. I mean, people have to put $30,000, $50,000 over asking now to get a house. There's, it's very, it's a seller's market for sure. But we're just building a house, man. That's how I'm looking at it.

Kirk at 00:16:45
It's just building a house. I've never built a house from the ground up personally, but we're doing it. I have the people in my corner. I have my H2M architects and engineers that we've been working with that have drawn up our plans. Wonderful resource.

Kirk at 00:16:58
Amazing guys over there have helped us move the boundaries out of the way so that we can do this. And I ask them a question and I get an answer. And it's awesome to have that. I'm super grateful for them. And they're just helping us propel not only us into the future, but how architects and engineers work with these files.

Kirk at 00:17:17
You were talking about the BIM models. That's going to be a standard where you can just go online and get someone's manufactured part in a 3D model and implement it into how you're going to build something, anything. It doesn't have to be a house, but we're doing that. I'm doing that with plumbing products. I'm simulating how these plumbing products are going to look at my wall, how it's going to actually be applied.

Kirk at 00:17:36
The future of this stuff should be streamlined and very quick to where it's just a flash drive. Here's your house.

Joel Beasley at 00:17:42
Yeah. They're doing it with, like, Boeing, like jets. They're giant engines. They can 3D print these parts for them, and then they have these networks. I was talking, I don't know if I was talking someone from Boeing or someone that was doing security.

Joel Beasley at 00:17:58
But basically, they've got these networks where they're sharing these schematics with each other because there's different facilities. Right? And so rather than having these certain parts, it just makes more sense. You can have a giant 3D printer and print them right there. And so you're like 3D printing jet engines.

Kirk at 00:18:18
Exactly. Everyone's just on the same page. All this stuff can be cloud-based so that you can reference a file and make sure all your dimensions are right. And it's just the world of digitizing construction or digitizing engineering and manufacturing of things. It's inevitable. It's going to happen.

Kirk at 00:18:32
Imagine that happening for houses and architectures, how that's going to change their job, how it's going to change the schooling. I mean, they're talking about there's additive manufacturing in universities right now, and there's kids messaging me on Facebook and LinkedIn that they're writing their thesis on additive manufacturing construction because they're learning about it in school. This is coming, man. It's right behind us.

Kirk at 00:18:54
That's why I just, I feel like we're one of the top guys actually doing this. That's why I'm here on a podcast. Right? It's happening. We're one of the guys. It feels good, but we're going to build this house.

Kirk at 00:19:06
We're going to get someone living in it, and I mean, they're going to get interviewed, the people that are buying this house. They're going to get interviewed by a ton of people. You know, 10 years after living in this first 3D printed house. How does it feel? How did the house last? You know, there's going to be questions. There could be problems with the house. I'm doing everything I can to deter that, but it's a house at the end of the day. Things shift, things move. It's concrete also at the end of the day.

Kirk at 00:19:28
But it's just building, man. I just need to get people shelters and use automation. Use this machine. It just makes sense.

Joel Beasley at 00:19:36
Tell me about the first structure. You said you built this first structure. I saw the video of it printing, but you could retrofit it, but you're not. You're moving on to this other house. But like, where is that piece of land? And is it just sitting there on the land now?

Kirk at 00:19:51
Yeah. So we did that. We worked with a cement yard out in Riverhead. So all this stuff is in the town of Riverhead. That's where we're building.

Kirk at 00:19:56
They've been very open-minded, progressive with the 3D printing. They know how a regular 3D printer works. We brought them to the house multiple times. It's been standing there for almost two years. It was finished in 2019.

Kirk at 00:20:07
This is a structure in a cement yard pretty much. I could send you some photos of some drone footage, and it's in a cement yard. So we played around, and we proved it out right there. It's 10 minutes away from the future property, and anybody can go visit this house. We had open houses for not only for homebuyers.

Kirk at 00:20:25
We had some media there and we even brought an open house for agents and realtors to explain the technology to them, show them the walls, have people just in this and they understand it. And what I love is that children, youth, they come and they just see it. Oh, it's a 3D printed house. No big deal. It's no big deal to them. And that's what it should be because it's a 3D printer. It's a robot. It does its thing and doesn't care.

Kirk at 00:20:47
It doesn't even know what the house looks like. It just knows instructional code. So we're going to use this technology that's starting to be adapted and accepted everywhere and build more houses. So you can go visit this house. It's out here. I can give you a personal tour if you want. There's plenty of footage. I've done so many interviews with people, show them the curved wall is a big talking point because the curved wall doesn't cost me any more than a straight wall. That doesn't exist in other construction. You have to cut wood or stone or do anything else to make that curve. That's time consuming.

Kirk at 00:21:16
That's time, cost. I'm just telling it where to go. I'm icing a cake. I'm following a floor plan. How I want it and instructing the machine how to do it. It doesn't change the cost based on the geometry of that. The same thing for the inside of the walls.

Kirk at 00:21:31
On the inside of the walls where we're putting the plumbing, the electric, and the insulation, I'm putting in structural elements custom. This software doesn't exist, so we had to make it. It's going to be a lot easier to build houses, in my opinion. So let's keep rolling forward. Let's keep improving that exchange of files and just make this easier.

Kirk at 00:21:57
I could see it being so much easier. I can model something in a CAD environment, put it in my program, and have something printable in pretty much minutes. Why not? Like, it just makes sense, man. I'm doing this every day.

Kirk at 00:22:09
I live, breathe, eat it. Every day, I learn something new to make my process better. That's what I love about this, and that's what I love about any other project is just to continually improve, show people you can do it too.

Joel Beasley at 00:22:23
Do you think that in the future, there'll be other materials other than like, cement or concrete that you're using to actually build the house?

Kirk at 00:22:33
Yeah. Thousand percent. Those recyclable materials, it's going to be a geopolymer mix. It's going to be something that I can't even think of chemistry-wise. There's going to be a lot of other materials that we can put through.

Kirk at 00:22:45
I mean, there's hempcrete out there. It doesn't have a strong compression strength, but it's environmentally friendly. I've seen some printers out there, I think it's the WASP, that use like dirt and hay bales. I don't know what it is exactly. But they use naturally sourced materials. It's not going to be as strong as concrete, but it's still extruded through a system like theirs, like ours.

Kirk at 00:23:06
Everyone has a different machine design, robotic arms. We feel like the gantry is good, but we have a system where I can take a nozzle on and off. I could put a drill head on and off. I could put anything on this system and have it instructionally do something and extrude anything. It's changing the hoses and changing the pump would aid you in different materials with different viscosities.

Kirk at 00:23:32
But I don't see it being concrete forever. But it'll be concrete for a bit because it's an accepted material. It'll be concrete infused with things and different types of mixes to add to the strength, to make print times quicker, to do overhangs better. The mix will be optimally designed and developed for the next 20, 50 years. I mean, this is where we're headed.

Kirk at 00:23:58
We both agree robotics and automation is going to change construction, how we build. The material is going to evolve to get something that doesn't off-gas, get something that's safe, and to your friend's point is to limit the waste. Like a plastic 3D printer. I get that filament. I get the role of that. I know how much of that filament I need to produce that product. Let's do that with a house.

Kirk at 00:24:22
There's no more cutting two-by-fours and you having all this waste. There's no more waste of mix. It should all be calculated. I'll have the volumes of how much concrete is going to take to build this house. I'll have the volume of how much insulation I need to put in these walls. I'll have the linear lengths of everything in a digital file. It's going to be awesome, man. It's going to be awesome.

Joel Beasley at 00:24:42
I love it. Right? It's like we can bake a cake with everything that's in the box.

Kirk at 00:24:46
Easy Bake Oven. Right?

Joel Beasley at 00:24:48
There we go. Dude, this is so exciting. In the future, do you think we're going to be like, 3D printing on the moon or on Mars?

Kirk at 00:24:58
I think so. I'm more focused on Earth. That's my take on it. Especially while I'm around. But this is how we colonize other countries is sending a robot up there and doing the job, creating the shelter so that we can take the transport, displace from Earth, and enter that pod or whatever it is.

Kirk at 00:25:18
And the design of that machine, that's yet to be determined. It could be a gantry. It could be robotic arms. There's a really simple way to make shelter is to use balloons and cover it in concrete. Inflatable shelters. It's all doable, but, again, I'm focused on residences on planet Earth for the next 100, 150 years, hopefully.

Joel Beasley at 00:25:41
Yes. 150 years.

Kirk at 00:25:42
I'm a big fan of Elon. I'm a big fan of space exploration. But you gotta, you can only do so much, I think.

Joel Beasley at 00:25:52
Oh, for sure.

Kirk at 00:25:53
Once I established Earth, then let's go beyond in the galaxy.

Joel Beasley at 00:25:58
Right. Like, I hear him in his interviews. He did one with Joe Rogan, and he was like, do you think you'll do, I think it was like, like electric planes. He goes, I think if I did electric planes, my brain would break.

Kirk at 00:26:09
Because he's already doing cars and Solar City and all of these other projects.

Kirk at 00:26:14
No. He makes a lot of good points. I really enjoy him. I mean, people think of this future of flying cars. Like, we already have that. It's called a plane. Like, we have these things. We just have to look at things differently. And additive manufacturing is going to make us look at how we build houses differently, and this is all customizable too.

Kirk at 00:26:47
It's one of my favorite parts is the floor plan does not have to be the floor plan. Of course, I have to fit in a neighborhood. It has to look good in a neighborhood, especially developments. But if you want to get crazy architectural, like, fancy artistic stuff, you can do that. The house can be completely round. The house can have all these jagged lines. You can do whatever you want. But we just need to have that accepted. If you want to go into the forests and do your little weird shack, that should be perfectly fine. Buy a 3D printer, get the system going.

Kirk at 00:27:02
Eventually, it'll be a button, but there's a lot to it right now.

Joel Beasley at 00:27:07
Yeah. No. Are you selling these, though? Like, can like, a builder?

Kirk at 00:27:11
We plan to in the future. There's a couple shots on goal how we want to do this. Right now, we're just building. That's what we're doing. We're building.

Kirk at 00:27:21
We're developing. I'm developing another machine right now. It's going to be way better. It's going to be more portable. It's going to be lighter. It's going to be easier to operate. And like I said, lighter and more portable. That's huge for shipping. That's huge for global shipping. I do want to sell this to someone in New Zealand. Let's, we have to cut the weight so that I can send this out there.

Kirk at 00:27:48
And just foolproof, dummy-proof, because I know this machine in and out. I know all the bolts, nuts, everything about this, but I want someone that can just walk up to the thing. It makes sense. That's what we do with doors, like door design. Put the push and pull thing. You just, you don't want to think about it. There's a lot of value in that. So if you can just walk up to this machine, easily see how it's erect, fasten this, put it up.

Kirk at 00:28:03
Hopefully, some of these guys don't have to be that intelligent on the job site, and they can produce houses. I want to make this easy. And if you make something easy, it becomes more affordable.

Joel Beasley at 00:28:15
So there's a company called Stripe, and they do credit card processing. They're a multi-billion dollar company. It was these two brothers, and they built this company. And now they're like, multiple billionaires. Right?

Joel Beasley at 00:28:28
And I was using their product when they first started because what they did that was really unique was they made the credit card processing super, super, super easy for software engineers. So nobody was built, none of the credit card processing companies were building for software engineers. They were building, they were just selling through the businesses and it was actually really difficult to integrate and to use. And they came around and said, all right, let's build something that's just ridiculously easy for the software developers to use. And then all the developers will learn this and then they'll all tell the business people this is the technology they want to use.

Joel Beasley at 00:29:01
And it was a brilliant, like, play. Right? Because that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what transpired.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:09) And I would tell all of my friends, like, oh man, you could take an 80-hour credit card processing project down to like a few minutes if you just use this technology. And it was comparable fees and everything like that. And so when I hear about the future and this 3D printing and the design thinking, the company that I see that wins—like, you can always have a good business, right? There's always room for multiple companies to have great businesses and do well and be profitable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) Always. People vastly understate how big the market is in any industry. But the company that I see that becomes like the billion-dollar company here, and that becomes like the household name for the 3D printing houses, it's whichever company can put it into the hands of the builders first. Like, whether—so like, if I'm, you know, sitting here and I'm an architect or software engineer at a construction company, like, the idea that I can go buy this kit, that is this printing kit, and I can actually start designing the homes in it and doing it and using your software to help build the homes I wanna build.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) The infrastructure play—like, you're providing the tools for these people to use these printers and build. That's the one that I see as the big one. Do you have ambitions to go there or is that too far down the line?

(Kirk at 00:30:30) No, I think that's the goal is to give contractors, construction workers a leg up, is to make this more affordable, make it make more sense. So the setup of the machine is where we're going with that. And also the materials that we use currently—I use sand, Portland cement, and water. These can be locally sourced anywhere.

(Kirk at 00:30:46) There's a couple other printers, I believe, out there that use a specific mortar. You have to buy that mortar to go through their system. Don't wanna do that. I don't wanna do that. I wanna use what we've been using, what's locally sourced across the globe, and to make this just make sense.

(Kirk at 00:31:01) This is gonna be in someone's hands. They're not gonna look at the manual. You know, there's people out there that just don't follow instructions. I like to read the book and make sure I'm doing everything right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:10) Not me.

(Kirk at 00:31:11) But sometimes you just wanna start screwing things together and doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) That's me. That's me. I'm 100% that person. Like, I go at it. I go, I'm gonna go get some experience with this so that when I read the instructions, they make sense.

(Kirk at 00:31:25) So there's two sides to the coin there. And so people are gonna do that. They're gonna take my equipment and do things that I wouldn't want them to do, but that's part of the world. That's the reality of this. So I'm making the equipment so that you can abuse it and still use it. You can do something wrong. You could maybe forget a bolt, and it's still gonna work. I'm looking to make the next machine as easy as setting up scaffolding. And there's a lot of elements that can be improved, but we're just gonna build. At the end of the day, it's just a machine, that tool, this equipment that anybody can just hopefully use. We're looking for ease of use, dummy-proof, and resilient.

(Kirk at 00:32:04) I'm using high-grade aluminum, stainless parts, 3D-printed parts, stuff that can be easily replaced, easily sourced. Go to Home Depot, grab that. It's just to keep the cost down of the machine. Obviously, it's gonna ripple out to everybody using a cheap material, not some $50 bag of special mortar or—I mean, even if it's $20 a bag, that's still a lot for one bag. And just automating the system a bit more, automating the delivery of these materials so we can have vacuum silos so no one's breaking bags, and this could eventually be a one-man operation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:43) Dude, I love it. This is so exciting. We are literally talking about the future, and it's happening right now. There's so many different things occurring in every part of every industry. It's like we're in this explosion of technology and advancement.

(Kirk at 00:33:01) I think so, man. I really do think in additive manufacturing as one element of all the industry changing right now, additive manufacturing is an industrial revolution. We're going to reduce waste on items. The bonding of these layers is going to be better. The machines are going to be easier to use and use basic materials.

(Kirk at 00:33:20) It's just gonna be optimized, and that's what we do. That's what scientists and engineers are just trying to do. I mean, TVs were huge at first, and now they're paper thin. Like, I apply the same thinking to all this because it's gonna happen. And I hope people see that. This is good. This is very good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) So do you have like investors lining up? How are you funding this?

(Kirk at 00:33:42) Right now it's all privately funded—me and my partners. We have all the control right now. It's good. We're happy with that. There's a lot of interest. There's a lot—man, there's a lot of interest in buying homes at cheap prices. There's a lot of interest in buying our machines just to build. There's a lot of interest in buying stake in the company. But we're exploring options. We're just, we're entertaining all of our options right now to see what fits best for us with our mission, with our mindset, with our pockets. At the end of the day, it's all about the dollar.

(Kirk at 00:34:17) But we're gonna build right now. We're gonna build locally. We're gonna build where we can build right now. But that doesn't mean I'm stopping just, you know, playing ignorance to the rest of that. I'm trying to put a flag in California. I'm putting a flag in Florida. We're working on expanding this as much as possible, but I also have to focus on just getting these builds out and getting people living in these houses. There's no one that lives in a 3D-printed house, and if they do, it's under certain jurisdictions and a little bit of a loophole as far as being maybe a disaster relief situation where if the municipality wanted to, they could say, no, you can't live here anymore. Not taking any shots at anybody, but I know this because no one has held up a certificate of occupancy and says you can live in this house for a 3D-printed house. That doesn't exist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:04) Really?

(Kirk at 00:35:05) Doesn't exist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:06) You're gonna be the first?

(Kirk at 00:35:08) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) Dude, this is awesome.

(Kirk at 00:35:13) But it's—this is the first of many for us and for all these other companies is to just make this a product, man, to stop looking at a house has to be framed and done this way. This is just a different way. It's a different tool. It's equipment. That's what I want people to understand because that'll make our jobs easier.

(Kirk at 00:35:31) I want people to come to that model home that we have, touch it, feel it, pick the walls. It is strong concrete. Like, it's not going anywhere. The concrete—the cement plant that we printed this in, it's like a wind tunnel, dude. This thing has been through storms. Nothing's happening. And all the rebar's in place. Everything that needs to be done was proven on that house so that I can do this more and actually sell this house to somebody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) Yeah, it's like the same materials. It's just a different way to get them onto the location.

(Kirk at 00:36:02) Exactly. So instead of a cinder block, a CMU, concrete block, instead of that, I'm just doing it in place on-site, making the mix on-site. And I do the proper testing. We do crush tests on the site. So as my mix is coming out, before it goes through my hose, I do the proper cylinders. I fill them properly, tamp this—you have to be certified to do this. And I do that one at the beginning of the print, the middle of the print, and the end of the print. These get set aside for 28 days, and I get my crush test results. I can frame that result and give that to you and show you that this is stronger than most houses in the area.

(Kirk at 00:36:37) It just makes sense, man. And that mix will change. The mix will get cheaper, but we're showing you that you can do it with this, that you can drill into these walls because there's not heavy aggregate. We don't use stones. I could, but we don't use stones because I don't need to.

(Kirk at 00:36:54) And then you can just drill into this wall and hang your photo, hang your TV, whatever. It's gonna be more planned out. Things will be more wireless in the future. You can't get away from AC voltage and water—wireless water—but, you know, it'll all get smarter. It'll get easier to build these homes. It'll be more seamless. And I'm trying to have the electricians, plumbers, HVAC guys come in and make their job easier. Spend less time on job site because that'll save everybody money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) Yeah. So when you're 3D printing, you can actually—like, I saw the—we don't have the video and stuff up in front of us, but I saw the videos and—how do you run electricity?

(Kirk at 00:37:36) There's conduit. In that one house, there's surface-mounted electrical. In this next project, already got this covered. Everything's in the walls. Everything's in the walls.

(Kirk at 00:37:47) Once the plumbing and electric is in, we fill this with an aminoplast foam insulation. It has an R-value of seven per inch, and we're already meeting the standard with that. And any environmental code we're meeting—it's going to be an efficient house. We can do radiant floors. I can print right over the radiant floors and have your slab printed right there. I embedded it there. So the staging of the process, we're trying to make that work for the plumbers, the electricians, limit our time on the site, limit their time, make the house efficient. It's gonna be awesome, dude. It's going to be improved. There will be systems, tools, and processes made for this in the future.

(Kirk at 00:38:30) We're gonna develop that. Competitors are gonna develop that. Someone with those fresh eyes that steps back and says, don't do it that way, would you? Do it this way. And that'll change the entire industry, and that's a patentable tool or object, and it's all gonna happen. This is how it happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:44) For some reason, like, I've got it in the back of my mind that a charity would want to buy one of these so they could go to another country and just like bulk print a row of shelters and stuff for people. And I was thinking, what's the most basic way you could do that without it, you know, with it still being okay and like, you could, you know, have a somewhat finished concrete slab with some walls. I saw the walls. The home actually looks beautiful. It's got like a unique look to it, and I would have no problem with that as a home. I think it's interesting.

(Kirk at 00:39:19) No, there's so many possibilities. I mean, the print size—we could do these affordable small houses with a cheap floor with your basic necessities. I mean, ICON's doing that small stuff. We're—I think we're perfectly capable of doing that. The machine's perfectly capable of doing that. Right now, our focus is like more full-size homes, trying to just get the everyday regular people in something that they can have a family in. But yes, we can do affordable stuff. This would be great for disaster relief. Putting up a concrete structure after a storm hit just so we can house people. It can be done. You can print 500 square feet, 5,000 square feet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.