2018cnc8-9

56 www.CNC-West.com CNC WEST August/September 2018 CAD/CAM/CNC Perspective By: Tim Paul Manager- Manufacturing and Business Strategy Tim.Paul@Autodesk.com Instagram: OneEarTim Interview with Carl Bass (Former Autodesk CEO) that consuming it prevents you from doing anything else. On a personal note, my kids were going off to college, so this allows me to travel for fun and have a lot more free- dom, so it seemed like the perfect time. Tim: Did the activist investors prolong the decision or change the timing? Carl: By the time they came around we were on the verge of making the announcement. To make a successful transi- tion I ended up staying probably a year longer that I wanted to. Tim: How did the activist investors change things? Carl: Honestly, for me it was kind of fun. They came with a not very well thought about agenda of what we should do. So, I got a big kick out of proving them wrong. Tim: Let’s talk about your shops. Can you explain what shops you have, what they mean to you and why you have them? Carl: I have two shops. One is basically filled with wood working tools and one is filled with metal working tools. I ended up with two shops because wood and metal mix so badly. Even if I could I wouldn’t really want them in the same place. They are both for making one off projects. There is almost nothing we do that resembles job shop work. Everything is either a one off or prototype. If I look around I’m building a wood/epoxy/composite canoe over at the wood shop. Here we are building the electric cobra, a 3D metal printer and we have the robot doing some sand- ing and grinding where we are teaching a robot how to sand, grind and polish. So, those are good examples of the projects we are working on. None of them are repeatable. None will be hundreds or thousands of parts. They are all about extending capability. The thing that I am mostly focused on are how quickly can I go from an idea to a fin- ished artifact for things that interest me. Tim: Are you doing these things to feed your brain? Or for what reason? Carl: Ya, that’s it. I look at a lot of these things and go, that’s interesting. Tim: What roles do Bets and Chris play in your shops? Carl: At each place they really take care of the shops and we work on projects together. They each have their own A couple months ago Carl Bass’s name started popping up in my tech industry news feeds followed by some “What are Carl and Amar up to?” text messages. So, I thought I would reach out to Carl and find out what he has been up to since he retired from his position as CEO of Autodesk. As eager to talk shop and hospitable as ever, Carl said to stop by any time. T ucked into the tight grid of Berkley streets between houses and commercial buildings is a nondescript building where Carl spends much of his time these days. The bland outside gives little indication of modern machining and fabrication equipment within that any professional shop would be proud to have. No matter which door you enter it’s hard not to get distracted by the numerous projects scattered throughout the newly remodeled shop. At one end, a Factory Five Cobra kit car is being built as an electric powered hot rod. Past the new Matsuura MX-330 5 Axis mill and electric-powered auton- omously-driven Go-Kart I saw an intriguing Kuka Robot with DeWalt sanders attached to the end. But it’s the details like the hand-crafted furniture and kitchen cabinets, made right down the street at Carl’s wood shop, that set it apart from your average prototyping shop. I caught Carl as he was finishing up a CAMPlete class in his office. Tim: What have you been up to since stepping down as the CEO of Autodesk Carl? Carl: I’ve been having fun playing with robots, traveling and spending time with my family. Tim: Before we talk about why you stepped down as the Autodesk CEO I wanted to ask how you became the CEO. Is it something that you pursued or something that found you? Carl: It definitely found me. I did not pursue it. My wife always described me as the reluctant CEO. Most of my leadership posi- tions were never partic- ularly interesting to me. They just came about. The very first time they wanted me to be the Vice President of Au- todesk I avoided them for a week. Sometimes you push for things, sometimes you get pulled and sometimes you just do what you know is right. Tim: Now can you explain your thoughts behind what led you to step down as CEO of Autodesk? Carl: Sure. Number one, this wasn’t the job I always wanted to do. I enjoyed it, there were lots of parts of the job I really liked. But, it was a job. And, it’s a pretty all-con- suming job. One of the things you find in a job of that size is that there is always more work than you can do. So, you are always in triage and there is always a huge amount of pressure to be doing more. There are just no more hours in the day to do more. And, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had an inkling that there were more chapters and there were other fun and interesting things to do. And, with a job