Storm Tested: re:3D

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Unshakeables Episode – "Storm Tested: re:3D"

Episode Information:

• Title: Storm Tested: re:3D
• Release Date: June 24, 2025
• Host: Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business
• Co-Host: Ryan Pavel, CEO of the Warrior Scholar Project
• Guest: Samantha Snabbs, Co-Founder and Catalyst at re3D

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Introduction to Resilience in Business

The episode opens with Ben Walter emphasizing the importance of building a business capable of weathering unforeseen storms. He introduces Samantha Snabbs, who faced not one but two major hurricanes that threatened her company, re3D.

Ben Walter [00:08]: "There's a lot to be said about building a business that can weather any storm."

Samantha's firsthand experience with Hurricane Irma in Puerto Rico becomes the focal point of the discussion, showcasing her resilience and strategic thinking during crises.

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Samantha Snabbs: A Multifaceted Leader

Samantha shares her unconventional journey, highlighting her diverse experiences that shaped her entrepreneurial spirit.

Samantha Snabbs [03:16]: "I am co-founder and catalyst for RE3D. We're bootstrapped. We don't have an investor."

She defies traditional CEO roles by positioning herself as a "catalyst," emphasizing her role in driving change and facilitating progress within her company.

Early Aspirations and Education

Samantha's ambition led her to aspire to become an astronaut from a young age. Her academic pursuits included co-inventing a significant project in stem cell research, which garnered attention from the Army.

Samantha Snabbs [04:23]: "We kept the bone marrow equivalent going for over a year... a milestone at the time in stem cell research."

Her quest for knowledge and experience extended beyond academia, as she engaged in roles like EMT and volunteer firefighter to bolster her astronaut candidacy.

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Transition from Military to Entrepreneurship

Samantha's military background profoundly influenced her leadership style and business approach. Balancing military obligations with entrepreneurial ventures required immense dedication and adaptability.

Samantha Snabbs [10:13]: "With $120,000 of student loan debt... I enlisted in the military because I do everything."

Her time in the military equipped her with the decisiveness and risk tolerance essential for navigating the uncertainties of running a business.

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Re3D: Innovating with Open-Source 3D Printing

Re3D distinguishes itself in the 3D printing industry through its commitment to open-source principles and community-driven innovation.

Samantha Snabbs [08:11]: "We saw that really predicated on this opportunity to provide a low cost, low power, easy to maintain printer that people could purchase or people could build that was open source."

The company's mission transcends typical commercial objectives, aiming to enable communities to solve local problems through accessible technology.

Product Launch and Early Success

Leveraging the Startup Chile program, Samantha successfully launched Re3D at South by Southwest, securing significant funding in record time.

Samantha Snabbs [12:31]: "We raised a quarter of a million, which at the time was the biggest campaign anyone in that cohort had done."

This milestone underscored the market's appetite for innovative, community-focused 3D printing solutions.

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Facing Natural Disasters: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria

Samantha's leadership was put to the test when Hurricane Harvey struck Texas, followed by Hurricane Irma hitting Puerto Rico shortly after.

Samantha Snabbs [15:48]: "We say if a Puerto Rican designs the design for a Puerto Rican need and they run it, we will let you use it for free."

Despite the devastation, Samantha remained committed to supporting the community by leveraging Re3D's technology to address immediate needs, such as creating anatomical models for menstrual cups and shelters for bees.

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Business Model: Open Source and Community Engagement

Re3D's decision to remain open-source is a strategic move to foster widespread adoption and continuous improvement through community contributions.

Samantha Snabbs [17:14]: "We provide full transparency around everything. We have had people... start their own company and their geography... I think that's awesome."

This approach not only builds a loyal customer base but also cultivates a vibrant community of makers who contribute to the product's evolution.

Challenges and Adaptations

The company faced significant challenges, including a key vendor disappearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Samantha's resourcefulness led her to innovate by pilfering spare parts to keep production running, demonstrating her commitment to resilience.

Samantha Snabbs [19:04]: "I had a moment of desperation... it's not a simple replacement because it changes the layout of all your electronics."

Her ability to adapt under pressure ensured that Re3D continued to operate and serve its customers despite unforeseen setbacks.

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Impact of Military Experience on Leadership

Co-host Ryan Pavel draws parallels between Samantha's military background and her entrepreneurial success, highlighting traits like decisiveness, risk tolerance, and a strong sense of purpose.

Ryan Pavel [24:34]: "Her story about trying to balance these sorts of things as well, launching this, getting this grant, while also trying to launch her business... requires deep resiliency."

These qualities, honed through military service, are instrumental in navigating the complexities of running a business amidst crises.

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Closing Insights and Advice

As the episode concludes, Samantha imparts valuable advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, emphasizing the importance of embracing imperfections and seeking external feedback.

Samantha Snabbs [32:27]: "It's okay to be ugly. Let your ugly baby fly."

This philosophy underscores the necessity of iterating and improving based on real-world experiences and user interactions.

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Conclusion

"Storm Tested: re:3D" serves as an inspiring testament to the resilience and ingenuity of small business owners. Samantha Snabbs' journey with Re3D exemplifies how diverse experiences, strategic openness, and unwavering commitment can transform challenges into opportunities for growth and community impact.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ben Walter [00:08]: "There's a lot to be said about building a business that can weather any storm."
• Samantha Snabbs [03:16]: "I am co-founder and catalyst for RE3D."
• Ryan Pavel [24:34]: "Her story about trying to balance these sorts of things as well... requires deep resiliency."
• Samantha Snabbs [32:27]: "It's okay to be ugly. Let your ugly baby fly."

Transcript

[Samantha Snabbs]

Ruby.

[Ben Walter]

There'S a lot to be said about building a business that can weather any storm. What does that really mean, though? Well, we've talked about diversifying clients and income streams. We've talked about building a strong company culture or having a mission to guide you through those dark days. But sometimes there's a literal storm and it's coming right at your business. What do you do? And it's not a rhetorical question because it happened to Samantha Snabbs twice.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I'm googling, there's still a Facebook post out there. Has anyone ever been through a Cat 5 hurricane before? What should I do?

[Ben Walter]

If you guessed, one, be enlisted in the Air Force, and two, have a heap of good luck? Well, you'd be right. Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Puerto Rico and Samantha was on the island. But one of her superiors saw her Facebook post and called her up.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Lieutenant Snabs, at midnight tonight, you are activated again. In response, he's like, you're the first man in for the response for the hurricane. It got really confusing. We didn't have power and water. I was wearing a uniform, but still helping out, parallel wrapping up my 3D printer and putting it into a closet to protect it because I knew the windows were going to get blown out.

[Ben Walter]

And if the windows got blown out, well, there went the company. On today's episode, how Samantha and re3d survived. Welcome to the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On the Unshakeables, we are sharing the daring moments of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it, I'm pleased to say. Today we have a first on the Unshakables. We are welcoming a former guest back as a co host. So Ryan Pavel, who is the CEO of the Warrior Scholar Project, has graciously agreed to come back. We've heard his story and now he's agreed to come back and co host with me and talk about someone else's. So, Ryan, welcome back.

[Ryan Pavel]

Thank you so much for having me. This is quite an honor.

[Ben Walter]

The whole thing's very meta. Let's see where it goes. I think the obvious place to start, and frankly, the reason we asked you to come back on the show is.

[Ryan Pavel]

Is my 3D printing experience.

[Ben Walter]

Right, right.

[Ryan Pavel]

You can say it. It's okay. That's what I'm known for.

[Ben Walter]

For those of you who don't know, Ryan was in the military and currently runs a not for profit that helps military veterans matriculate into higher education. And so he's done a lot of thinking about what it means to be a veteran and what it means to matriculate into civilian life after being in the military. So Samantha's story is sort of a little bit of both. Right. Because she founded it while she was still in the military. But lots of people also start school when they are. So that's not unprecedented. But this is different.

[Ryan Pavel]

Absolutely. There's something that's really invigorating about that.

[Ben Walter]

This is different is really the aim of today's episode. So why don't we start it now? We usually just name the one city that the company is from, but this is different on today's episode. Re 3D. From Chile, Puerto Rico and Austin, Texas. Samantha is the CEO of Re 3D, but that's not her title.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I am co founder and catalyst for RE3D. We're bootstrapped. We don't have an investor. We manufacture these huge 3D printers out of the US we kind of did everything the different way. And I think catalysts are really cool enzymes. My job's kind of like everyone's number two. Just trying to help things move along and witness the change in the process, so. So it seemed appropriate that the CEO title reflected that path.

[Ben Walter]

Now that's one title that I've never heard before, but it's very cool. Samantha has run almost every aspect of her company a little differently and in turn has run her life a little differently. She grew up wanting to be a CEO. The idea of wearing power suits to boardroom lunches was intoxicating to her. While other kids might have read Garfield, she read Dilda.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I'd always wanted to be an astronaut. Been proudly passed over very quickly a couple times primarily because of patient experience. Go figure. Was one of the youngest the first time I applied.

[Ben Walter]

She didn't have enough experience, so she went out and got experience by doing things. A lot of things. In fact, she even created a company. As an undergrad.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I helped co invent something for our JARPA research project. We could mechanically or chemically induce bone marrow cells to become a bone marrow. And our big claim to fame is we kept the bone marrow equivalent going for over a year where the cells were self renewing, which was a milestone at the time in stem cell research.

[Ben Walter]

The army ended up buying that project.

[Samantha Snabbs]

By the way, and then deferred graduation and picked up some majors to stay in at that company because I couldn't afford my student loans.

[Ben Walter]

On her quest to become an astronaut, she took on a lot of extracurriculars. She was an EMT and a volunteer firefighter to help her chances.

[Samantha Snabbs]

So all of us, like you want to be a master scuba diver. You do all these extra things. Like I did microgravity University to fly in the vomit comet improve. If it didn't go past the teeth, it didn't count. And I could hold my stuff together and then got a job with NASA.

[Ben Walter]

Before you get too excited, I'm sorry to say that's not quite where this episode is going to. Samantha unfortunately didn't become an astronaut that day, but her desire to be one came in handy. The NASA Johnson Space center life science department wanted to find someone exactly like.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Samantha under the age of 30 that had sold a life science company, preferably if they have a couple patents that had a heart for space. It was pretty short list and I was really lucky.

[Ben Walter]

Her first job was as a deputy strategist and her focus was quote, standing up innovation as a concept, unquote.

[Samantha Snabbs]

So like even open co working spaces were still a new thing. And all this paperwork and drama to convert an unused space into a place people would go and share ideas. To working with the San Diego Zoo and standing up partnerships around biomimicry, to connecting with heart surgeons or people in oil and gas to understand fluids through pipes. Or I had to go to Google and General Mills and do benchmarking for NASA thinking about how we collaborate with nascar.

[Ben Walter]

As part of her work she helped create a new division called the Health and Human Performance center. And she brought innovators from these companies from around the country to speak in corporate. We sometimes call that a lunch and learn. And during the time she was at.

[Samantha Snabbs]

NASA, let's see, 2008 or 9, I.

[Ben Walter]

Started, there was a lot of talk about social entrepreneurship, how living and working.

[Samantha Snabbs]

In space could better translate to scenarios in Earth disaster response, low resource environments that kind of overlapped a period of time where I had been traveling to Nicaragua and Rwanda with Engineers Without Borders and had a lot of like minded friends at NASA who were just thinking about social impact.

[Ben Walter]

Oh, and did I mention that Samantha had gotten her mba? She had an mba.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I ended up finishing it. When I was working at NASA and became very curious about microfinance. I was volunteering with Opportunity International which is microlending, particularly in Nicaragua, and was very humbled when I would get in country to see all of the resources and time we invested on bringing things in for really brilliant people that really didn't want to be dependent on aid or a big business or our cartel or a government fill in the blank. They wanted to support their communities themselves. In parallel, I would get shown in these locations mounds of electrical equipment that was just sitting in the sun because there's a wrong voltage, it couldn't be maintained, it wasn't culturally relevant. Like the list goes on and on.

[Ben Walter]

Samantha would talk through all of this with her friends, you know, informally.

[Samantha Snabbs]

We were just grabbing beers together. I started to co organize some friendships around this concept of the toilet sized 3D printer.

[Ben Walter]

So for our listeners, back up a little bit and tell people what is 3D printing and what was the idea behind re3D in terms of being different from other 3D printers.

[Samantha Snabbs]

3D printing has been around now for golly about 40 years. And typically what was available until what we call the open source movement. There were large industrial systems. We never intended to have the business. So it was more around this idea of enabling anyone, anywhere, anytime to problem solve and support their communities in an open way. And we saw that really predicated on this opportunity to provide a low cost, low power, easy to maintain printer that people could purchase or people could build that was open source. For context, if you've been to like a school or a library, you may have seen a machine that takes like a rope like material and it gets really hot and melts it like a hot glue gun. And then it draws something and layer by layer, like a pancake, it stacks up. Some people call it polymer printing or desktop 3D printing.

[Ben Walter]

Now most of these printers, they use plastic and in many places around the world, well, there's an excess of plastic waste. You could purchase plastic filaments to use in the machine, or you could shred plastic waste and reuse it to make something totally new. That's what Samantha wanted to do. Print from garbage. A lot of people used the printers to make phone cases or toys. In fact, a friend of mine used them to make little elephant figurines. And this shouldn't be a surprise. People come up with all kinds of things. But Samantha, she had bigger goals.

[Samantha Snabbs]

They were talking about composting toilets and tools and birthing stools and all these things I hadn't even imagined and said we were going to try and make a printer under $10,000, which is about the 10th of what the equivalent was at the time. We got a little bit of momentum on a few community platforms and then heard about this thing called Startup Chile that gives you $40k to start or scale your idea in Latin America.

[Ben Walter]

Samantha threw her hat in the ring and they were selected and that's how she got the startup money for Re3D.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I guess the other part of the story too is I took a break from contracting for NASA to go to officer school for the Air Force.

[Ben Walter]

Okay, yes. So one more thing related to becoming an astronaut.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I had heard that being in the military could help your chances. So with $120,000 of student loan debt on my lunch hour at NASA at 29, I enlisted in the military because I do everything, like so smartly. Stupid. It was all back.

[Ben Walter]

Ryan, it's so great to have you back.

[Ryan Pavel]

I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

[Ben Walter]

Having listened to Samantha, I think what I was struck by more than anything is building a product that you don't know how it's going to be used is a really weird thing.

[Ryan Pavel]

There's something about this, like, comfort with the unknown that she consistently demonstrates. There are so many things in her story where she is following the thread one step at a time. Self deprecating for some of the choices that she makes. Saying the timing from which you join the military is stupid, but like, clearly it's worked out for her and she really does have this ability to be able to embrace all of these things along the way. So there, there's also this risk tolerance that really, I think defines a lot of what she's been able to accomplish.

[Ben Walter]

I mean, she has been on the vomit rocket, so you gotta believe.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah, yeah. Multiple times. Right.

[Ben Walter]

You would not find me there, I can tell you that.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah. I don't know if this stood out to you in the same way it did for me, but throughout this, her direct language, like the way that she's able to embrace things and this is something which is, I think, certainly influenced by the military connection. She has no problem being direct, but I also think that that's part of who she is and how she's been able to be successful is she's not afraid to embrace the hard problems and she's not going to run away just because something is unexpected.

[Ben Walter]

Yeah. I think she's an interesting mix of humble and self reflecting, but also risk tolerant and ambitious.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah.

[Ben Walter]

Ambition takes different forms. Humility takes different forms. Risk tolerance takes different forms. Those are all necessary ingredients, but they can look and feel very different. And her combination is unusual, if not unique. Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a bit. But for now, let's hear the next part of her winding path with RE3D startup Chile.

[Samantha Snabbs]

In 2013, we found out they were going to have a booth at south.

[Ben Walter]

By Southwest Samantha asked if Startup Chile would get them tickets to south by Southwest. And if they did, they she'd launched the company live at Startup Chile's booth. They had eight weeks to make it happen.

[Samantha Snabbs]

We did do it and we launched on Kickstarter. I built the campaign without the name of the product from Santiago. The team built the hardware, launched it in person at south by Southwest. The press comes through first, and we were funded in one day, 27 hours, and then we raised a quarter of a million, which at the time was the biggest campaign anyone in that cohort had done.

[Ben Walter]

The US Government saw the success of the Startup Chile program and wanted to do something similar in Puerto Rico. They poached one of the directors of Startup Chile to run it and he called Samantha.

[Samantha Snabbs]

He's like, Samantha, if you're going to print from shredded up garbage, you should do it on an island. It's an extreme use case of people that sometimes have to pay to get rid of their waste, that are resource constrained and don't want to be importing stuff.

[Ben Walter]

So Samantha, she went to Puerto Rico.

[Samantha Snabbs]

At a considerable cost to us. At a bootstrap company, we had brought in the first filament printer. We had it live to do classes and workshops on the island and had just introduced herself to this program.

[Ben Walter]

And then she went to Korea with the Air Force.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I've had short activations over time and training commitments where I had to use my vacation at re3d to support that. One of them was I had to do a big exercise for like a month and a half in Korea.

[Ben Walter]

At the end of the exercise, everyone has the chance to go to the demilitarized zone between north and South Korea. Cool. Well, pretty cool to some people. But while she was there.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Harvey hits.

[Ben Walter]

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August 2017, doing a lot of damage to areas of Texas and Louisiana, including Houston, my hometown, where her life and work were. At the time.

[Samantha Snabbs]

That was a no moment because I am literally standing on the border of North Korea as my factory that I've been away from five, six weeks. I was really stressed about it. We had teammates that were like up on their roofs calling to do check ons every other day because of like flooding there or going to help their neighbors or they had friends or family that lost their houses.

[Ben Walter]

But Samantha couldn't go to Houston after her exercise in Korea. She had to go back to Puerto Rico.

[Samantha Snabbs]

So I'd been in PR a month prior. One of my co founders comes down to relieve me so I can randomly go to Korea, which is confusing and Harvey hits. I fly then from Korea all the way to Puerto Rico to relieve him, arrive exhausted.

[Ben Walter]

And that's when she heard about another hurricane Irma heading straight for Puerto Rico.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I literally put a Facebook post out that said, has anyone ever been through a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane? Is there anything I should do to prep? And immediately the Air Force is like, dude, you gotta find somewhere to go. And the governor comes on and he's like, we're gonna lose power for at least a month or two. So the Air Force tells me, okay, at midnight tonight we're put you on order. So if you're injured, at least you're covered. And the next morning you need to be in uniform. Because I knew it was going to be bad. And I was then in uniform in parallel wrapping up my printer and putting it into a closet to protect it because I knew the windows were going to get blown out. I saran wrapped it. For some reason I thought that was a great idea. In a closet, trying to find somewhere to shelter down.

[Ben Walter]

Samantha was able to move the printer, thank goodness. But the island was devastated. Despite the lack of water and power, Samantha decided to stay.

[Samantha Snabbs]

We say if a Puerto Rican designs the design for a Puerto Rican need and they run it, we will let you use it for free. And all the feedstock we have till it's gone. And the things that people suggested were not a single thing that we would have thought people would have needed after a hurricane.

[Ben Walter]

Like what?

[Samantha Snabbs]

So the first design we got was from the Feminista Colectiva in different groups. And it was to print flexible open source anatomical designs to demonstrate menstrual cups.

[Ben Walter]

So many communities around the island were cut off from running water and sanitation. So women's health nonprofits were handing out menstrual cups to be used in place of tampons or pads.

[Samantha Snabbs]

And they're supposed to tell like a 12 year old or 40 year old woman how to use one. There's not a appropriate way to demonstrate this. So we made one that could be modified depending on whatever request there was very quickly. It was a great use of flexible filament. We made things for bees because all of the leaves were off the trees and the bees needed somewhere to gather as people set out sugar water. It was just really cool.

[Ben Walter]

Then two weeks after that, Hurricane Maria hit.

[Samantha Snabbs]

We stuck it out, the program paused and they said anyone could leave and we were the only company left. But that's our long story about Puerto Rico and hurricanes. We say it's where we do applied research. It's just Been incredibly informative and have shaped our company in a way that we never expected.

[Ben Walter]

So one thing I'm not quite sure I understand right now, Samantha, is who are your actual clients? Who buys the printer?

[Samantha Snabbs]

Our customer base has always been pretty diverse and that's probably what would make us less attractive too for investment if we were going to fundraise. Because it's what we call a broad based technology. There hasn't been a lot of very hyper specific and repeatable markets around 3D printing. So you end up selling to everyone. There's a lot of interest from the defense, aerospace and space community. So that is a big demographic for us. It works out well because we understand it. But I would say it depends on if the printer prints from garbage or virgin materials. But loosely, it's education for us universities and national labs studying new materials, needing to build big things or a lot of little things to do different studies. And then about a quarter of it is manufacturing.

[Ben Walter]

So talk to me a little bit about the fact that the product is still open source. And I know you're a mission driven company, but you're still, as you said, you've been profitable since day one. Why that decision? What does it mean? How do you manage it?

[Samantha Snabbs]

Yeah, pretty poorly for us. What it means is we haven't filed for a patent. If somebody asked us for a drawing or a supplier, we provide it. We have full transparency around everything. We have had people that it appears that, you know, they loosely took the design for their own need or start their own company and their geography and I think that's awesome.

[Ben Walter]

Said no entrepreneur ever.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Yeah, I think it's an honor. But the reality of it is you have to be improving the system all the time. So rather than taking a lot of cost into patents and litigation, we just try to put it in feature development to stay competitive. And for us, competitiveness is more about continuing to enable people to overcome the challenges they're experiencing so they can solve their problems locally.

[Ben Walter]

Solving problems locally is an issue Samantha and her team have also had to embrace. One of her key vendors ghosted her during COVID disappearing with what those in the know call a Raspberry PI.

[Samantha Snabbs]

It was just this little part of the brains of the machine that connects us to WI Fi too.

[Ben Walter]

And now you're in the know. But if you still don't know, it's a tiny computer about the size of a credit card that can be used for almost anything. Samantha had a few sources for these. Some were overseas and some were stateside. And you probably remember all the delays, getting things shipped from overseas during COVID But the U.S. vendor, he just disappeared.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Just completely ghosted us, like, went out of business. And he has supplied basically the brains of the machine to a number of printing companies, as well as the thing that you touch and use to run the controls. And, like, you can't ship without that. You can't build printers, you can't test them. And then it was so bad, I hired an Uber driver who worked as a bouncer to go with me to his office I'd been to before. I don't know what possessed me.

[Ben Walter]

What possessed her was the fire of a thousand small business owners before her.

[Samantha Snabbs]

I had, like, a lot of money, hung up, and was extending my lead time, which was further impacting my ability to even sell new units or do research projects. I was just like, up a creek even to, like, replace that. It's not a simple replacement because it changes the layout of all your electronics, wire lengths, hundreds of other parts, your whole manufacturing process. So I had a moment of desperation. I tried twice to hunt this guy down. I still have never heard back from him.

[Ben Walter]

Samantha pilfered some spare parts from other electronics and decided to run with it. Anyway, I was like, hey, we're just.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Going to go ahead and we're going to put this in machines, in sales. We're going to try to explain to our customers what we're doing. And when they get the machine, it's going to have a big sticker on it that says, congratulations, beta user. Please contact support3d.org with any questions. Your printer comes with lifetime customer support. And then about a year later, we would check in. Most of them had minor issues and feedback. We would ship them with the actual version once we ired out the kinks. But that was my stupid idea. You know, we're around today. Was that the best call?

[Ben Walter]

And there's no way to know. RE3D's journey has had lots of ups and downs, as all companies do.

[Samantha Snabbs]

So like last year we moved our factory. I broke two legs at an ankle reconstruction and my elbow. And then I'm like clearing the land of the shop and get a crazy poison. IV infection leads to a staph infection. I have other requirements from the Air Force. And then I'm shorting work. I've been in 14 years, so you kind of see those peaks and valleys. But I wouldn't say I do it great.

[Ben Walter]

And so what does the company do when you get called up?

[Samantha Snabbs]

That is unfortunate timing right now because I was just called up for six weeks it's pretty imperfect. You just try and make it work. But I am learning about where the overlaps may be. I just finished Air Command and Staff College, which is basically like another master's in leadership and you're having to do a lot of writing and introspection and those networks have been really invaluable. I didn't go to Harvard, but I probably have access to a lot of that same type of networking reach back because of my Air Force experience.

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[Ben Walter]

To bring you back in here. So Samantha's story kind of has it all. I mean, she has an interesting background. The way that she formed the business. She's had a couple of, oh, moments that were pretty harrowing. It's a unique product. I certainly haven't heard anything else like it. She doesn't have a standard business model. I mean, we pretty much can put this into about four or five buckets of oh, this is different.

[Ryan Pavel]

Absolutely. I don't actually know anybody who's walked that path before. There's a lot of value in really being able to learn from them. Like how did they piece that sort.

[Ben Walter]

Of thing together completely. I sort of wanted to start though, talk to us a little bit about coming out of the military into a fast paced business life.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah, I think that there are a lot of ways in which people will describe the military community with really broad terms. And I think I talked about this a little bit the first time that I met you here and when we were doing that episode is when you think about things like every veteran's a leader. Well, some veterans, right? Some people really learn those skills. Other people may have the potential to be leaders, but they didn't have much opportunity to be able to do that when they were in. But there is something to be said for every veteran will have worked in some sort of high paced environment. They'll have had to work with people that bring a wide variety of skills, a wide variety of backgrounds to accomplish some sort of mission. Veterans want to continue to find that sort of sense of purpose, Right. They strive to be able to recreate that same sort of environment and be.

[Ben Walter]

Part of something bigger than themselves, right?

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah, exactly right. Giving back. And we do hear that as well in her story, right? This idea of some sort of social enterprise, it's not just a business for the sake of the business side, but it's also about this idea of how do you have some sort of societal impact with what she's doing. Her story about trying to balance these sorts of things as well, launching this, getting this grant, while also trying to be able to launch her business and manage that. You need to dig pretty deep into that resiliency in order to make those types of things happen. And so I do think that this is again, why so many veterans, even if they are pursuing something else outside of military service, there still is that desire to continue to give back. I see this all the time in the folks that we work with. You know, as you mentioned, Warrior Scholar Project is focused on the education piece, but it's much more about like, how do you build perspective and how do you figure out what civic engagement, civic service looks like for you? And so what I hear from her story as well is so much of that of saying it's not just about building a product and doing something like that, it's how do you leverage that and how do you channel all of these things that you learned in the military and all these people that you worked with in order to do something that's bigger. And I think that that insatiable desire for impact is part of why you see so many veterans that are entrepreneurs that have some sort of desire to be able to continue to grow. The military changes you and it sets your ambitions higher in the vast majority of cases.

[Ben Walter]

I mean, the other thing that I notice in Samantha, she's incredibly decisive. The military requires, even at a junior officer level, no one's looking over your shoulder. You have to make decisions. And obviously in extreme cases, you have to make life or death decisions. But even in peacetime, you are expected to make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions. You know, she talked a lot about her leadership training from the military, but I think a big part of that is likely her ability to make decisions, particularly when you have imperfect information.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yes, yes, very imperfect information. And part of that, I think can be something which can be a sort of a natural quality that people have pre military or like, maybe they're attracted to it because they want to be in a position that they can actually affect some sort of change. They can make those sorts of decisions. But I think also culturally, perhaps to your point, that is something which is instilled even at the junior ranks. True in the officer corps, and it's also true for the enlisted. So enlisted is about 82, 83% of the military. This is the group of people that, for example, me joining at 17. If you're an officer, you're often still joining when you're like maybe fresh out of college to be then put in these positions that you are overseeing all of this equipment and these decisions. And it's not always life or death, but it is contributing towards this incredibly important mission that has really high stakes. And that can be really challenging, to put it mildly. But it's also where you grow. I think that there's a lot of people that would be put in her decision and would say, you know what, this is actually too much for me to do both of these things at once. Maybe I can be in the Guard and I could have more of a run of the mill job. But for her, she clearly was yearning for something. She had this idea. Right. And pursued that while also pursuing her deployments and her military obligations. That's a level of tenacity that I think many people are not necessarily. They don't have in their hopper.

[Ben Walter]

Well, not just tenacity, but energy.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah. Is it inherent energy or is it caffeine? Right. That's the question. Maybe a little bit of both. But thinking about whatever deal she's working out there where she has 12 hours on one shift and 12 hours on another, you do need to dig pretty deep into that.

[Ben Walter]

Well, I want to pivot a little bit, Ryan, and talk about her business model because we haven't had anyone on the show who has quite that business model. You know, most of the people that we've had on have completely proprietary businesses and she's sort of done that. But Sort of not. So she has made her product infinitely configurable. She calls it open source. She allows her customers to make changes to the product and in fact encourages it. She's teaching people how to use it in different creative ways and then letting them get creative. We haven't quite seen that before. And it's a pretty brave thing to do to say, okay, well, I want this to be so widely adopted, I'm just going to make it open and available.

[Ryan Pavel]

Right. And part of that could be, maybe the genesis of that is a business case to say that this will mean higher market share, that more people would be attracted to it. But also it could be something which is entirely different motivation, which is just, yeah, I want to create this, but I don't necessarily have all the ideas about how this thing could potentially be configured, like by actually making it available for other people to customize it to their particular uses. I think that that same lesson, that same idea applies well outside of something like what she's created there, where if somebody creates a thing, other people can iterate on that and potentially make it even better. You see this all the time, even in the work that we do in the higher education space. If somebody can take that idea and do it better than we can, then that means that somebody else can do it better and iterate on that sort of thing. So I think that the core of that is something which is really inspiring and clearly has worked to great success for her.

[Ben Walter]

To me, it's more that she is making the play that I want this thing to be ubiquitous. And the best way to make it ubiquitous is to open it up, not close it down. Because if I close it down, I invite more competition. If I open it up, there's every reason to use that. And even if my margins are a bit smaller, it's a bigger pie and that's the way to go.

[Ryan Pavel]

Well, you also get people that know your company for that. If this is a value and you're actually living out that value, then you can get a community even before coming here, just looking on the website and doing some research into a company community is this really important piece of it. How do they engage with their community? And so they have this maker community where they have people that have this thing, this core product that they've created, but then have all their own customizations, all their own iterations of it. And that's the sort of thing that really instills loyalty. Like, this is amazing. I didn't just buy it for this one specific use case, but actually it doesn't quite fit my niche need. No. I have the ability to do more.

[Ben Walter]

To be fair, I kind of want one now.

[Ryan Pavel]

Right. Yeah, I know. Let's go. Right. She compares everything to toilets. And, like, that's a hook for me. If you were to look her up on LinkedIn, she talks about her passion for toilets before she talks about anything else. Right. And I'm a sucker for something in LinkedIn which is just bucking the trend a little bit.

[Ben Walter]

You don't see that often.

[Ryan Pavel]

She had me a toilet. Now I really want one after learning more. But I was sold early on.

[Ben Walter]

Bill Gates has been big on that. Right. They've been trying to recreate the toilet for years because one of the number one drivers of global health is sewage and sanitation.

[Ryan Pavel]

Yeah. So you don't necessarily know where I think that inspiration is going to come from. And I think that this is one of the points you already made as well. But who has this type of specific story? Well, nobody. Right. She's been able to carve her own path and has clearly learned a lot of lessons along the way.

[Ben Walter]

I'm expecting great things from her. Ryan, while we're here, what's the latest on Warrior Scholar Project?

[Ryan Pavel]

So Warrior Scholar Project continues to grow. We are hungry to be able to serve more enlisted veterans. So we work with enlisted veterans who are interested in pursuing education as a way to build perspective and to grow their civic impact after military service. And we are never going to stop. The population continues to grow. Every year, there's about 100,000 more enlisted veterans that are starting higher education. We want to reach more and more of them. This summer, we'll work with about 20 colleges and university partners. We're working with community colleges. We have a Graduate Pathways initiative in between last time we talked and now we launched a Career Pathways initiative to be able to help deepen the connections in between career ambitions and education. We want veterans to be able to answer those questions before they start school about where they want to go, as opposed to trying to figure it out after they graduate. And then our other big update is that we're actively working on an online course that's going to go live later this year. This has been an initiative that's been years and years in the making, and we cannot wait to actually see that come to fruition.

[Ben Walter]

Yeah, you can get drive real scale with that, right?

[Ryan Pavel]

That's exactly right. My operating assumption is the government is never going to adequately prepare people for transition, so we're going to fill some of that gap.

[Ben Walter]

You think your market is stable.

[Ryan Pavel]

Well, you'll like this. Dr. Laurie Santos. We actually modeled it off of her course, the happiness course that she has at Yale. It's a phenomenal course. And so we worked with the same team and we modeled the same sort of dynamic instruction so that we can actually have something that people are really interested in understanding what college success looks like for military veterans.

[Ben Walter]

Opportunity more than obligation. That's awesome.

[Ryan Pavel]

There you go.

[Ben Walter]

Ryan, we've known each other for almost a year now. I consider you a friend. And I just want to say thank you for coming back and sharing your time with us again on the Unshakables.

[Ryan Pavel]

Thank you very much for having me here. I'm excited to be here, and I also consider you a friend.

[Ben Walter]

Ben, I want to end with this question that we ask to all of our guests on the show, which is being an entrepreneur or a business owner is really hard. And if you had one piece of advice for current or aspiring business owners, what would it be?

[Samantha Snabbs]

It's okay to be ugly. So often, especially in hardware, you want to hold onto things that make it beautiful or make it like the use case or opportunity you saw in your head. And the reality of it is people are going to kick it around and have a lot of feedback and shape it so the sooner that you can get out there, get it outside of your family, your neighbors, your friends, the.

[Ben Walter]

People that love you, get it into the wild.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Let your ugly baby fly.

[Ben Walter]

Awesome. Samantha, thank you for being on the show. We really appreciate it. You've been a great guest.

[Samantha Snabbs]

Thank you guys so much.

[Ben Walter]

That's a wrap on Samantha's episode. And that's a wrap on season two of the Unshakeables. Thanks to all of you for listening to the incredible business owners that we get to work with every day here at Chase. There are thousands more. And who knows, maybe one day you'll be up here. But for now, I'm Ben Walter and this was the Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. Thanks. Thanks for listening.