April 17, 2019 Dan Rasure sends email

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Dear member,

I know that most of you have been eagerly waiting to hear from us, hoping to learn about the where the new space will be and when it will be open. We know that the uncertainty has been difficult and we thank everyone for their patience. After months of seeking out the perfect space, we have finally found it, but might not be able to move forward without some help. For those of you who don’t know, TheShop.build was sued by the TechShop board just before they file for bankruptcy. I consider this lawsuit to be frivolous and a near constant harassment.

I woke up this morning fully expecting to sign the lease for the new TheShop.build San Francisco facility, but was met instead with a trial budget for the next 7 weeks of the lawsuit with TechShop considerably higher than I was expecting. Without some help, we simply cannot afford the six figure deposit on our new facility in addition to the exorbitant legal fees this lawsuit requires.

The San Francisco facility was sustainable and I am looking for the next several years to be better even than the first in a larger facility with room to make more projects. I am disgusted at how much time, money, and emotion has been spent on the lawsuit with TechShop. The lawsuit has hurt makers and will continue to do so. Machine access has been near and dear to my heart most of my life. All I wanted to do when I started this project was to get the closed makerspaces open and get each of you back in the space building your projects as fast as possible. Instead it has turned into a project of extreme sacrifice for everyone involved. The burden the lawsuit has put on my family has been tremendous and I have a tough time looking at my family knowing how much pain I have caused them.

If I had known the document production process would be so overreaching and burdensome, I would not have pushed to get the San Jose facility open. I have spent more time on the lawsuit than anything else I have done over the past year. We spent well over a 1000 hours complying with the document requests. Months were spent fighting over my spousal communications with my wife and all of my privileged communications with my lawyers.

This is not a model problem. The money, time, and effort that has gone into this lawsuit would have funded several makerspaces. I expect the final legal costs for the lawsuit to be near $2,000,000.

With all this said we have still served over 2000 makers in the past year, we have seen our first tenant company acquisition, art shows, STEAM camps, investments, CEO presentations by makers, and new makers and ideas coming alive.

I don’t know what form it will take, but my hope is that one of you, or several of you, will be able to help us get beyond this final hurdle and bring the community back together under a new roof. We need your help to open TheShop.build San Francisco.


Thank you,

Dan