Ten Have's childhood seems to have epitomized this spirit. His father, John, an aeronautical engineer with the Royal New Zealand Air Force, was always making something -- including an airplane and an electric car -- and David would spend hours flipping through the do-it-yourself aviation catalogs lying around the house. "I just had an insatiable desire to make things," says John. He did his work in a 40-foot shipping container that was packed with a lathe, a drill press, and a band saw. When the family was transferred to a new base, the container would show up on the front lawn a month later.
Ten Have inherited his father's desire to make things but not his father's ability to make them. He stands just 5 feet 6, is slight of frame, and walks with a pronounced limp. As a boy, his ineptitude with a soccer ball made it hard for him to make friends, and his clumsiness led to squabbles with his dad in the workshop. "Our fights were always around quality issues," he says. "I just wasn't good with the machines."
So David became a geek, turning his creative energy to computers, which were more forgiving physically and, at least to him, just as satisfying as the biggest, baddest machine. He majored in computer science in Wellington's Victoria University, paying his tuition by doing freelance software development. It was the beginning of the dot-com boom, and he became enthralled with the idea of starting his own company. He devoured copies of the latest American tech magazines. "I totally bought into the Silicon Valley story," he says. "It was the first time I knew what I wanted to be." With dreams of becoming a player, he dropped out of his technology-management master's program and, after a short stint at a local software developer, struck out on his own.
Provoke Solutions was the sort of software consultancy that would be familiar to most American entrepreneurs. Founded by ten Have and four friends in 2001, it sold and customized Microsoft products, mostly to government agencies and financial services companies. Provoke grew rapidly, and by 2005 it had 30 employees and revenue of about $2 million. But ten Have grew increasingly bored with software consulting. He found himself lashing out at the Microsoft salespeople, who were pushing products that he considered inadequate and uninteresting. "The rep would come with a new product and I'd say, 'That's not great; that's crap,' " he recalls. In an act of silent protest, he bought an Apple iMac for $2,000, a large sum of money to spend on a computer in New Zealand and an odd move for the CTO of a Microsoft consultancy.
As he picked fights with his company's one and only supplier, he found himself increasingly at odds with Provoke's CEO, Mason Pratt. It wasn't that he thought Pratt was doing a bad job; he just wished the company were a bit more ambitious -- and, on some level, he wished the company were his to run. "What I wanted was a big international company," says ten Have. When Provoke prepared to open an office in Auckland, ten Have argued in vain that instead of tackling Auckland, the company could just as easily go to Sydney, a market that is bigger than the entire country of New Zealand. His partners didn't want to leave home. "It was a matter of walking before we ran," Pratt says. "But Dave had bigger goals and aspirations. It was almost like keeping a bird caged."
Bored and frustrated with his professional life, he turned back to his childhood. He was tired of software, he decided. What he wanted was something real, something physical. "I wanted to make beautiful objects," he says. "I wanted to re-create the indescribable experience of opening that Apple box. I didn't want to run a small bespoke software company in New Zealand." He started thinking about skateboards. He had never been able to ride them, but he had always been fascinated by skateboard culture, and he had noticed that women were taking up the sport. He wondered if there was room for a kind of skateboard with a bit of elegance.
Ten Have spent hours playing with a computer design program and finally settled on a design that called for a carbon fiber deck with mother-of-pearl patterns inlaid on top. Instead of standard skateboard wheels, he imagined custom-made chrome hubs that would evoke a 1950s Cadillac. Though in the back of his mind ten Have thought he might try to sell the boards, more than anything he wanted to get them made. He started calling manufacturers.
Many people have, at one time or another, wanted to make something, but few act on those impulses. The modern supply chain, with its promise to deliver anything and everything cheaply and immediately, has conspired to dull the maker's spirit in many of us. This is partly because our stuff has gotten more complex -- there are now computers in our phones, our cars, and even our toasters -- but also because making something from scratch has become comparatively expensive. With $200 desktop computers at Wal-Mart and $100 wooden tables at Ikea, the very idea of making or repairing something seems futile. Why fix it when you can just throw it away and get a new one for less money? Why spend weeks or months fashioning the perfect dining room table when you can buy a new one whenever you feel like a change?
Ten Have became painfully aware of this reality as he tried to get a few skateboards made. Nobody wanted to produce the boards in the small quantities he wanted. "It was a bit disillusioning," he says. The machine shops he talked to were used to dealing with large clients and big orders, and, because price competition is rampant, they were wary of even quoting prices at all. When ten Have would offer to pay above-market rates, most shops simply told him to get lost. "The experience was an eye opener," he says. "I mean, cripes, how does somebody get something into the marketplace?"
In the end, it took ten Have three months of negotiating with a machine shop in Christchurch, several hundred miles south of his home, to get just two of his skateboard decks made. He spent thousands of dollars and had to fly to Christchurch to close the deal in person. He never figured out how to get his wheels made cheaply and eventually gave up on the idea of going into the skateboard business. He framed the boards and hung them up in the house that he and his girlfriend share. As he shows me his work, which is genuinely striking, he doesn't crack a smile. "The ability to make stuff has been leached out of our society," he says. "It's sad. No, it's worse than sad -- it's almost a criminal act. Because when you think about what has happened -- the rendering down of a population to be consumers -- what you're really doing is rendering people unable to think critically." He decided his next company would address this deficit: It would make it easier to make stuff.
