THE ODD COUPLE
OF ALL THE THINGS THAT almost thwarted Danielle Applestone’s life’s work, she never imagined that one of them would be venture capital.
Applestone grew up in the Arkansas woods, in a house built on tree stumps. Her mom grew vegetables and chopped all the wood. Her dad, a disabled Navy veteran who has used a wheelchair since he broke his back, was into making bullets. The family was always modifying things around the house so he could use or reach them. “For me, it was like, holy crap, tools are power,” says Applestone.
But home life was rough. “There are ways to control your family with fear that don’t involve punching them,” she says. At age 8, she tried to run away. In sixth grade, a teacher referred Applestone—by then, a constant tinkerer—to a free STEM camp. At 14, she gained admission to a free STEM boarding school, and realized that science would be her ticket out.
By the time Applestone debuted the Othermill in 2013, she was a single mom who had managed to graduate from MIT and to earn a PhD in materials science. She turned down a job at Tesla, where she would have been the third employee in its battery division. Instead, she built a machine that she believed would teach Americans the skills necessary to take the two million manufacturing jobs projected to go unfilled over the next decade.
More sophisticated than both a laser cutter and a 3-D printer, the Othermill is a computer-controlled milling machine that can cut into aluminum, brass, wood, and plastic with incredible precision. Industrial mills can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are the size of at least one refrigerator. Her team at Other Machine—now called Bantam Tools—had made a plug-and-play desktop version the size of a tall toaster that cost only $2,199. If a 3-D printer could let people make plastic objects at their whimsy, her milling machine could give people the power to produce the stuff that makes the stuff—anything from a circuit board to a gear.
“With a milling machine, the world is your Lego,” says Applestone. Those at the forefront of the maker revolution believe “desktop milling has the potential to be even more significant than consumer 3-D printing,” says Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, an open-source hardware
