Original subtitles

[Brad Feld] If you're a leader, if you're a CEO,

every day there is something new that you didn't count on

that comes up and smacks you in the face.

You will disappoint people. People will disappoint you.

The competitive environment will change. The macro environment will change.

A great partner will turn into a horrible enemy.

A company you've never heard of before

will come out with something that changes the game every single day.

As long as you're in that chair,

there's gonna be some new thing that comes out of nowhere...

that you didn't see coming that you had to deal with.

I'm really inspired by Apple...

because they took a mainframe technology

and put it on desktops,

and so, in many ways, there's a lot of parallels there.

We're taking mainframe-sized technology,

stuff that was the size of a refrigerator that we couldn't afford,

and we're putting it on desktops.

What I'd like is to build a big tech company...

that does what only, I think, a few tech companies have done before

in terms of developing real, new technology

all the way up to... end consumer products.

[Steve Jobs] Every once in a while,

a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

[audience applauding]

I came out to the Silicon Valley because we were gonna change the world.

3D printing to me was that exact same feeling.

We're gonna change the world again, except this time,

I think if the last revolution was about bits,

this one is about atoms.

It may be the most eye-catching development in printing

since Gutenberg invented the printing press 600 years ago.

In every case, a digital blueprint is either sketched or scanned

and then sent to a 3D printer.

The printing itself can be done by extruding a liquid,

usually plastic, drop-by-drop,

or by using a laser to fuse resins and metals.

Last year, we created our first Manufacturing Innovation Institute

in Youngstown, Ohio.

A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the-art lab

where new workers are mastering the 3D printing

that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.

This is a revolution. This is something really big.

This is the time to grow and grab market share.

This is how new markets work.

It's conceivable that some of the developments

that come from the 3D printer

might put the first person to create that device,

where it's that simple,

on the pedestal of "major social innovator,"

of a guy whose name will be remembered

the same way that Henry Ford's name gets remembered,

the same way that Steve Jobs' name gets remembered.

Working with people is one of the best ways to make friendships.

And MakerBot was grown...

was really born out of the friendships that were made at NYC Resistor.

We knew each other

because we'd stayed up really late hacking on stuff before.

-It's satisfying, isn't it? -Oh, man, this is great.

-[Pettis] Awesome. High-five. -High-five!

I'd been building 3D printers for about a year then...

and the things I started doing was going on the hunt for some co-founders

to help me really build this as a business and as a company,

realized that my friends, Bre and Adam,

would probably make really good co-founders.

Zach basically said,

"Hey, let's all quit our jobs and start building robots for a living."

And the laws of the universe

actually require you to always answer yes to that question.

Um...

Yeah, here she is. This is actually... This is Eve.

This is our first prototype.

It's dusty, but it works and we love it. Mmm!

Right now, what's happening as we are talking to you,

our first generation MakerBot.

The first MakerBot to ever spit anything out

is currently spitting something out.

[Hoeken] From there, it was just

non-stop late nights, ramen-fueled innovation.

A couple of months later, we started MakerBot Industries.

The three founders of MakerBot had this in mind from the beginning.

Adam was gonna focus on software.

Zach was gonna make the machines and make them run better...

design the electronics...

and Bre was going to help shape design and direction,

but he would be the figurehead.

He'd be the one...

"Put Bre in front of the camera. Get him to go out there,"

because he was so beloved in the maker movement.

Hey, Bre Pettis here, and I'm gonna try and make a video.

Here we go. Okay, we're at MakerBot Industries.

I'm gonna give you a short tour.

Okay, here's our garage.

It's full of stuff. It's being painted. It's very exciting.

Okay, there's the kitchen, there's the bathroom,

and here's all the MakerBots getting ready to go out.

Okay, to finish up our tour here, this is my desk, that's Adam's desk...

He's working NYC Resistor today. ...and that's Zach's desk.

Okay, that's your whirlwind tour of MakerBot Industries.

We'll be seeing more of you this month as we do more of these videos.

Ta-da!

In the early days, I would argue with my co-founders...

and we would all argue over who gets to be Woz...

'cause Woz is really... He is the hacker. He's the tinkerer.

Like, who doesn't wanna be that guy?

And everybody pointed at me and said, "You have to be the Steve Jobs,"

and I was like, "Oh, I wanna be Woz."

Oh, there we go.

What a neat kid. Nice-looking kid.

He grew up in an entrepreneurial household.

So he saw productions.

He saw things getting produced.

He saw the end product.

He saw from the beginning of a company to products.

Hmm.

Brand's everything.

Brand is perceived value.

It doesn't matter if you've made a better product.

If people don't perceive it, it's not gonna sell.

[Stephen Colbert] Welcome back, everybody.

-[audience cheering] -My guest tonight

is the co-founder and CEO of MakerBot Industries

whose machines print three-dimensional copies.

Great. Now after the office Christmas party,

-we'll have a stack of 3D butts. -[audience laughing]

Please welcome Bre Pettis!

[audience cheering]

Every industry in every revolution needs a leader...

and for me, Bre is that person.

He is articulate. He is passionate.

He is a visionary.

He sees it in its biggest possible potential.

MakerBot is the poster child for 3D printing today.

Bre Pettis is donning the cover of magazines

in much the same way that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

were on the cover back in the PC revolution.

Head over to makerbot.com, check this out.

Get your own

before they take over the world and prevent you from doing so.

Yeah, get 'em... Get a robot.

Make stuff.

We're in an interesting position right now

because we've come a long way,

we've grown a lot, we've got some sustainability,

and then we've got competitors

that are really large businesses and with lots of money.

They can just be like, "We're gonna enter this market."

[imitates rumbling noise]

And we're like, "Oh, we're the small guys."

[narrator] Ever since the Industrial Revolution,

we've learned to make things, lots of things, quickly and cheaply.

All that's about to change, though,

thanks to a remarkable new invention called stereolithography.

I think a good way to describe it is to call it a three-dimensional printer.

3D Systems invented 3D printing...

just about 30 years ago,

and today, from these humble beginnings...

we are the leader, we are the innovator,

we are the largest player in content-to-print.

You have the large 3D printer manufacturers.

These are 3D Systems, Stratasys.

They control the industrial 3D printing market.

[Bruce Bradshaw] Stratasys has a great reputation.

It has a great brand in the marketplace.

It's clearly known as the leader in the 3D printing space.

Has been that way for a long time.

And when you think about who the customers are

for 3D Systems and Stratasys,

it's been the industrial customers.

Aerospace, automotive, medical and dental.

So it seems like that industry has matured.

But in the last few years, what's happened is

there's been this evolution and revolution of desktop 3D printers,

and so now you have companies like MakerBot,

and it's changing the dynamics of the industry.

On one side, you have these large $100,000 3D printers,

and on the other side, companies are trying to build $200 3D printers.

Everybody thought

home computers were a really, really, really cool thing...

that only nerdy people were ever gonna be into...

and they thought that for a good 20 years.

3D printers are on that same kind of arc.

Nobody's printing titanium on their desktop today.

Nobody's printing themself a new kidney

and then installing it on their kitchen table today...

but that doesn't mean those things are impossible.

So, when you think of these printers making little plastic things today...

and you just extrapolate the same way...

we're gonna be printing customized clothes.

You'll never have to wear something that doesn't fit anymore.

Shoes, every product...

will be printed individually for everybody from this revolution.

There's nothing new about the tools we're talking about.

They've been around for decades.

What's new is words like "personal," like "desktop."

Suddenly, we'd put them in the hands of regular people

who will come up, if history is any guide, with better uses,

more exciting, innovative uses of these tools

than any professional ever could.

That's the moment we're having right now with manufacturing.

[Reichental] What got us here is not gonna get us to the next level.

In this new era...

all the hard-and-fast rules are out the window.

Yeah, the big companies have really neglected the consumer market...

I think, for many years.

Now they're starting to realize, "Maybe there's something there."

We would have been the least likely kid on the block

to jump into the consumer space.

We jumped into it about 12 months ago. Consumer, for us, has been a real success.

And what we've done, simply, is say...

"We want to bring

a different kind of experience to the consumer market

where they don't have to be technical, they don't have to build it."

[interviewer] I see, I see.

See, what you're seeing here is two different approaches.

Yeah, it looks like it.

One for the technocrat, which is a lot of fun...

I disagree with that, actually.

-Well, okay, the hacker, then. -No, I disagree with that, too.

-We made this for everyone. -[Lewis] Everyone.

It all comes all together.

You put it-- You get it. You take it out of the box.

You can make awesome things for cheap.

I think this might be a little bit easier...

I disagree.

...and I want this in my home, Bre.

That one, it just doesn't go with my aesthetic.

There's lots of machines now. When we started, we were the only one.

Now, we're kind of... I guess we're sort of in the middle.

We've got the big guys out there that are much bigger than us

and we're competing with them.

And then we've got lots of small guys... and gals

who are competing with us that think we're the big guys.

Okay, so this is the machine.

Have a laser here.

This is a Blu-ray laser.

The laser cures one layer of the part,

and then the Z-Stage lifts that layer up

and comes back down one layer higher,

and then the laser cures another layer.

My parents are both Russian immigrants. I was born here.

But they're both engineers or in technology to some degree,

so I've definitely been wanting to build things my whole life.

I thought, "This is a quintessential geek

we are bringing up," right?

He will be absolutely outside of reality, he will be...

-Mad scientist. -...obsessed with what he is doing.

Hi. I know why the symbol of Gold is Au.

Because that's the first two letters of its Latin name.

That's easy.

We met at NASA Robotics Academy.

So a lot of people call it robot camp or space camp or nerd camp.

Actually, we met Ian there as well.

Everybody made a lot of friends, but Max was aloof. Aloof smart.

So... he's like, "Why do I have to work with all these..." you know...

[chuckles]

Was the impression.

When he was younger, he said he was bullied, these things,

and I think he didn't feel like he ever really fit in,

and that, I assume, would make someone very guarded,

cynical of the world, cynical of people around him.

[Lobovsky] As I was finishing my masters,

I was very exposed to this idea of personal fabrication,

of having tools to make anything available on your desktop.

So, in order for him to start a 3D printing company,

he decided that he's gonna quit.

He was in PhD program at MIT.

So, he decided that he's not gonna continue.

He is gonna concentrate on 3D.

-My eyes look so red on this thing. -I know.

Smoking the marijuana.

Hello. I'm David Cranor. Oh, fuck. Fuck my balls. All right.

Formlabs is developing a 3D printer

to help hobbyists, researchers and small businesses and schools,

-and realize their ideas and... -We gotta restart. I did one of these...

[chuckles]

Formlabs basically started...

in the basement of the house that David and I were living in.

Hi there. Hello.

Basically, I've always wanted to be an inventor since I was a kid.

I always looked up to the...

My movie hero was the dad in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

[clattering]

We got this all started together,

and we had, definitely, a lot of complementary skills.

We built a prototype,

and we were thinking about how to turn this into a business.

Here it comes.

We were making some progress, but it was definitely tough going.

One day, they showed me this rook they printed on the first thing,

and I was like, "Well,

so, what are you guys gonna do with this stuff?"

[Cranor] Natan came to us one day and was like,

"I start companies. I know things about that.

I've done it before, so you should let me talk to you about it."

I said, "Somebody needs to do something better than MakerBot."

We knew that there was a chunk of the market...

that feels a bit uncomfortable with all the DIY,

and feels slightly uncomfortable buying a $100,000 machine.

I know, there were people out there. There was MakerBot out there,

and all these extrusion-based printing processes.

But the real gold standard in 3D printing technology

is stereolithography.

But the machines are just fantastically expensive

and they're only made by big companies like 3D Systems and stuff.

The founders of the company decided to go after stereolithography,

so this is the first desktop stereolithography printer.

The point is you can get quality similar to really high-end machines.

No one's really done a prosumer 3D printer.

No one's done a 3D printer that we really want.

So we decided to do that.

[indistinct conversations]

I didn't hear about 3D printers in my life.

It wasn't something that was talked about, and then it just started blowing up.

-It did. -MakerBot especially.

-It's crazy, yeah. [laughs] -Especially MakerBot.

[Pettis] In many ways, it's a frontier. It's still young.

People haven't done everything yet with 3D printing.

So we get to make a trail. It's cool.

It's a nice pleasure.

-Cool. Good to meet you. -Glad to meet you, too.

[female teacher] One, two, three, MakerBot.

[all] MakerBot! [female teacher] Thank you, Bre!

[all] Thank you, Bre! [laughs]

For me, personally, I got into open source by being a teacher.

I would take my lesson plans

and put them up on GeoCities back in the day,

and other teachers would do the same thing.

Because we were sharing, it lightened the load for everybody,

and it meant that we saved time and built a community.

When we started MakerBot, we knew we were gonna be open source hardware.

In the open source world,

developers share the backend knowledge of their products with the public,

and if anyone in the community makes an improvement upon their work...

that progress is folded back into production.

And what happens when everyone is sharing in that sort of way

is that improvements happen at a much faster rate.

[O'Brien] So, the technology is gonna improve over time,

but what's being built today, where the value is gonna be...

is in the networks and the communities that are built around 3D printing.

[Griffin] Early on, everybody looked at MakerBot

as a model for how open hardware might go forward...

and DIY projects, in general.

The thing that would just break our hearts...

is if someone were to take this design and make it really cool

and not release those designs.

So, as long as they stay open

and everybody can have access to them forever,

then that's what we want to happen.

If you wanna solidify the future where open source is the norm...

you have to support companies that do open source

'cause I wanna live in that future where we share things

and the world is a better place for it.

[interviewer] Desk of Michael Curry.

Do you want me to give you the short tour?

-[interviewer] Yes, please. -All right then. Come on.

Welcome to MakerBot's stellar offices.

-Back here you've got... -[interviewer] 314 Dean Street.

[Curry] We've got marketing milling around.

-What's up? -[Curry] Please sit down.

Let me show you the single most luxurious part

-of MakerBot Industries. -[interviewer] Please.

Just recently cleaned...

we have the MakerBot bathroom.

Something like 70 human beings use this bathroom at any given time.

[chuckling]

Let's face it. This is MakerBot.

We're sitting in what used to be an ice cream warehouse.

Nobody is here because the pay is amazing.

Nobody is here

because they think our stock options are gonna be worth millions in the future.

People work here because they believe in what we do,

and because they like the people they work with.

If a guy comes through a circle in the ceiling,

I am just gonna laugh.

[laughing]

Welcome to MakerBot.

You never quite know what's gonna happen next.

You have to be able to thrive on the chaos of it.

It's sort of a rite of passage where people would come in,

you have to build your chair yourself, right.

I mean, we're sitting on pieces of plywood here.

Certain people can't deal with that.

Matt and Rose are taking those parts and putting them together in kits.

[Griffin] Everybody showed up

because there was a notion that

we were all inventing what was gonna come next.

This wasn't a company.

This was a movement. This was a revolution.

So, I became really addicted to 3D printing.

I drank the Kool-Aid,

and I said, "Wow, I have to come work for this company."

[Pettis] We were like, "5,000 square feet. This is gonna take us years to fill up."

And then two months later, it was full.

And three years later, we're 85 people, which just boggles my mind.

Bre is trying to take this germ of an idea...

that 3D printing doesn't have to be $80,000 machines,

it can be $2,000 machines.

And the story there, the larger story, that MakerBot's trying to tell is,

is functionally, anyone can do this.

And so, I think Bre, not only is he a good storyteller,

but he's enlisted people that are helping him tell this story.

[Feld] One of our big drivers is that

the entrepreneurs that we invest in are obsessed with their product.

These guys were obsessed.

Like, eyes-falling-out-of-their-head obsessed with this product,

and that really turned us on.

And then the last is we thought Bre was awesome.

To me, our biggest challenge is actually that we've grown so quickly.

We're a young organization.

Every single one of us is in over our heads.

Every single one of us is clawing to catch up

with the potential and what's actually happening today.

[Cranor] Formlabs is like the ragtag group of people with various different skills.

We would tell people that we're getting the band back together

when we were trying to hire people,

'cause I would call friends from grad school

and Max would call friends from back in the day,

and be like, "We're getting the band back together!"

[Luke Winston] Welcome to Formlabs. Give you a little tour.

So, I'll start with our software department over here.

Hi.

And then moving out of our enormous software department.

Over here's our-- He's our electrical engineering department.

Yeah, you're a whole department.

Zak right here is... He is our graphic and web designer.

When I started, it was really small.

It was four of us.

My dirty secret is that before I came here,

I actually applied to work at MakerBot,

and a mark against them

that they decided not to hire me and now I'm here,

and so, they didn't hire me so I have to crush them.

We decided that it would be a good idea to do a Kickstarter...

because we had a prototype. It was coming together.

All right, guys.

Nice. Can't wait.

People put in a substantial effort into making videos, taking photos...

building websites with more information.

We really actually diverted the focus of the company to that for a couple months.

[camerawoman] Okay, action.

And so now, it's time to start gearing up manufacturing

so that we can get it into the hands of users everywhere

but to do that requires substantial resources.

[camerawoman] Okay, cut.

So, we weren't entirely sure what was gonna happen.

We were pretty sure we'd made something pretty dang cool...

but the waters of the market are always a bit fickle.

We were wondering if we would sell the first printer before noon.

We'd launched it at 9:00 a.m. or 8:00 a.m.,

and we sold one within two minutes.

By noon, we sold probably about 100.

I thought if we do really well, it'll be over a million.

That's, like, if we do like really... that would be amazing.

And that was like pipe-dream level.

Over the 30-day campaign, we reached $2.9 million.

I think we're still the highest project in the technology category on Kickstarter.

[all] The day is coming!

Whoo!

We describe this right now as, like, the honeymoon period, so...

That's what we're waiting to see play out.

[Virginia White] Oh, shit! We forgot Jory.

[all laughing]

[Lobovsky] You set a timeline for yourself on Kickstarter

and you just have to start moving there or bad things will happen.

When we started...

we had to take investment from friends to be able to actually initiate it.

And when you do that, when you take investment,

you have a responsibility to grow the company.

All right, how do we get up there?

Uh... Press one of those elevator buttons.

Pretty fancy.

I know. An elevator!

I feel like I work for National Grid.

[Pettis] Hey, guys.

-Hey, Bre. -Good morning, Bre.

We decided to look for a bigger space, and so we moved the office here.

It's a little bit of a different game when you have this many people.

I suppose it's like... going to the Major Leagues or something like that.

[Gunipero] It's too big. I almost liked...

I really liked being on top of everybody.

It feels great. It feels new.

It feels like we just jumped. It doesn't feel like...

When was I here?

I was here on the 21st, and we were all in that office.

Now we're on the 21st floor,

looking at Lady Liberty and the Manhattan Bridge.

Now, the whole business is 248, 250.

Maybe it's 260 today.

We've literally hired 80 people in the last month.

It's a bigger team, so it requires more infrastructure.

I saw Bre as someone with incredible vision, incredible charisma...

but he hadn't really been tempered by the ups and downs,

by the hard, stressful things,

by the inevitable stuff that's gonna get screwed up,

especially in a fast-growing business.

It's a real hard reality...

that I'm just one person,

and I can only get so much done in a day,

and I can optimize a day to get a lot of stuff done,

but it's still very limited in what you can do.

[Feld] So it was very clear

that one of the things that we could do to help

in one of the next steps...

would be scaling up, not just the company, but the team.

Our lead investor, Brad Feld, is a good friend of mine.

I've known Brad for a long time, uh...

and I was just ending a job

and so he said, "Maybe you should try this company MakerBot."

I always look at this stage of a company as trying to put a spine in a jellyfish.

And in order to do that, you've got to have systems in place of a real company.

You've gotta have process. You gotta know how things work.

MakerBot was made up of and run, at that point,

by almost exclusively by people who were doing this all for the first time...

and one of the first things I think I helped them figure out that summer was

the market is more designers and engineers

rather than, "This is a toy for making toys."

They've gotten to where they have gotten where they are today

without a lot of strategic

knowing where the North Star is and heading for the North Star.

So I would like to see them find that North Star,

run as fast as they can towards it

and just not even look over their shoulder.

How long have you been with the company?

-About six months. My son is the CEO. -Okay. Oh, he is?

He's the maker.

He's the creator. He's the explorer and he's an awesome leader...

and I'm happy to follow his lead.

[Pettis] I get to take it to the next level.

I'm gonna learn a lot about how to operate a company at this level,

and have inspiration and mentorship going forward

about how to take things even farther.

[Curry] The world that MakerBot is trying to create

is very much still up in the air.

We are a business, and we are a printer in search of our killer application,

in search of the thing that makes everybody want us.

How's that national conversation going?

By Defense Distributed in Austin, Texas.

Welcome to the age of the printed magazine.

What are cool things you can make out of plastic?

Well, there's lots of, like, trinkets and action figures and stuff,

but this appeals to a very small set of people.

It's the complex mechanism and the useful object...

that the 3D printer should be able to make

to encourage wide adoption.

But if some of those useful objects are too useful,

well, they won't be allowed to be made.

As is always the case with disruptive technologies...

they can do a lot of good,

and there are always brilliant minds

that will think of all the unintended uses of the technology.

It is 3D printing's first killer app,

and it's one of the things that really sells interest in 3D printing.

People message me all the time and they're saying, uh,

"Okay, yeah, this is cool now. I'm gonna buy a 3D printer.

I wanna make lower receivers and magazines."

That's cool.

[sighs]

I'm gonna introduce you to Cody Wilson.

He has been called one of the most dangerous men on Earth.

[Wilson] We're information anarchists. We don't believe that there is...

public and private information necessarily

or public and private access to things.

There should be one law. If the police can have it,

if the military can have it, then you can have it.

You're not a different caliber or quality of person.

We want to build the printable gun.

[female news anchor] A digital design for a gun

that anyone can download and build using a 3D printer.

Is this guy a hero or a villain?

That's a good question.

[laughing]

Just don't laugh. Just don't laugh.

Joe Biden? This is no country for old men.

What I'm so ecstatic about

is making these Democrats, these Conservatives,

these people who operate through the state,

confronting them very visually, very exotically with a new technology,

with the fact that they can't control the future

the way they tend to pretend that they can.

What happens if people get too freaked out by this technology...

and very restrictive laws are put into place

around the manufacture and distribution of

what's considered to be a "dangerous technology"?

You know, that could happen in six weeks' time.

And that could have a double digit impact upon

all of these companies' revenue streams.

I'm here to say, "No, the vandals are coming.

My generation has other plans

and it's really not to comfort you

or to let you know how you can buy it and use it well.

It's to let you know this...

We intend for this to be a very significant technology

for reasons wholly our own."

[applause]

This is probably my favorite talk to give of the year...

-'cause you all are my people. -[applause]

I would guess that there's probably

somewhere between two and 20 companies in this room.

Something emerging from a hackerspace

or, you know, a project that somebody is doing that they did on the weekend

and then all of a sudden they're finding that

it's really popular and they have to start a business.

[audience applauds]

Mr. Pettis, do you mind if I get the honor of having a snapshot with you?

Sure!

-Great. -Coolness.

Cool. Good to meet you. A pleasure. Excellent.

Hello. Hey, how you doing?

[inaudible]

I think if we had a Bre that represented our product,

then that would be a great thing.

I'm definitely not that person just because

I'm generally not a good public speaker and things like that.

You know, I'm not charismatic.

I tell a lot of people that

in the Formlabs making story that

a big part of me realized, you know,

deciding to do it and thinking that I could do it

was seeing what you guys did early on.

Thank you.

You guys getting started with nothing, and hearing the story and everything,

it was really cool to see.

One of the things though, is when I see a competitor,

when I see somebody entering this space,

I'm actually curious about what they did differently,

if there's anything they did that pushes it farther.

Like when Form 1 came out, that's a different type of material.

They're using lasers and goo.

And I was like,

"Someone's finally entering that space. That'll be interesting.

I wanna see where that goes."

So I got one. I'm still waiting for it.

[chuckles]

So, we're having some challenges with...

the various CSS buttons and...

[Lobovsky] I mean, it sounds clear to me, like,

we were doing it the wrong way and this is the right way.

I understand its risk, but it's fine.

A lot of times, you're starting a little company.

You're in charge.

There's a lot of testosterone, ego, lots of--

And that's just, I think, gonna be natural, that's gonna happen,

but often that means that you don't listen and you don't hear.

He's definitely...

somewhat socially impaired.

He has such a hard time communicating.

Yes, he gets to the point,

but he doesn't know how to communicate eloquently.

I think it's a much bigger failure

if you and Zach waste several days of time than this thing comes in two days late.

-Sure. -I think that's...

That's the way I see it.

-Okay. -Excellent.

[Cranor] We got funding and it's very exciting,

but what a lot of people...

who are doing start-ups don't think about, who get very excited...

"Yeah, I got, you know, tons of money from people.

I got investors. It's great!

I'm gonna go out and buy stuff for my office.

I got a nice chair and everything like that."

It's like, no, you have to remember,

when people give you money to start a company,

you have to give it back.

Things get way more real

when you're suddenly sitting on more than $1 million of other people's money.

[Lobovsky] Yeah, the Kickstarter was so big, so successful

that it really pushed us

to move the whole company forward more quickly,

hire more people across the company,

commit to more serious manufacturing.

[Ferguson] I wanted to talk to you guys. We wanted to start...

We don't have to go back and change anything,

but we wanted to start installing the lasers...

-Yeah. -...at different orientation.

It's actually pretty frustrating right now...

working with our contract manufacturer.

They're really struggling to meet our demands.

[machinery whirring]

It's a three out of nine, 33% failure rate,

right now at test printing, which is not good.

Okay, so, the big take-away, though, from it all

is they're super-focused on quality.

So, we threw out half the sheet metal while we were there.

We're holding. We're having a...

-Holding court? -[Ferguson] Holding court here.

We threw out over half the sheet metal that came in.

Top and bottom shelves and front plates.

What happened?

[Ferguson] There's just bad marks on them, bite marks, burn marks from anodization.

When we started doing this, it was like,

"Oh, here's my friend who does something similar,

and here's my other friend who does something similar."

The chances that those are the right people to be there

when there's a team of 10 or 20 or something like that,

it's just... you're not likely to get that right.

When you're doing a start-up...

everything feels like it's exploding all the time,

and you have to be able to

take a calm, deep breath and make sure that you're on the right track.

And Max is very good at being confident

in doing what he feels to be the right thing to do is,

and he's usually right.

We really have spent a lot of time in the past year re-branding ourselves

so that we're not that consumer play...

that we're not the hacker.

We're really the prosumer.

You know, we want a professional who needs this on their desktop

to think about MakerBot as the solution.

Do you need to be introduced, or are you able to do this all on your own?

I can do this all on my own.

Thank you.

All right. Ladies and gentlemen.

Our MakerBot press conference announcements

will start... now.

At MakerBot, we're an innovation company.

We're out to fuel the next industrial revolution

by putting the power to manufacture things in your hands.

Here we go.

[imitating bugle]

[vocalizes]

[Pettis talking indistinctly]

[Cranor] Idealism is very important,

and maintaining true to your goals is very important.

But I think MakerBot, when they pivoted,

they went closed source

and I think that that was a pretty dark day for the...

for the Maker open source community.

MakerBot's getting a lot of hate lately because they went closed source...

and so they're not really actively contributing back to the community.

I'm not saying you can't protect some aspects of it.

I'm saying that the way that it was done by MakerBot is particularly shitty

when you have a company mission statement in Wiki

that's all about, "We're open source, blah, blah, blah."

People were very upset because...

while they could appreciate that MakerBot wanted to make a buck,

they felt like, "Oh, I've put thousands of hours

into solving these problems and sharing them.

Did I do that so that...

just to benefit this select group of people

when the mission was to transform humanity?"

I'm making really hard decisions that are personally painful,

but are amazing for the business and are accelerating things.

With MakerBot, we kind of had a falling out between the founders,

in particular, me and Bre,

and it really kind of came down to differences in opinion

around vision of where we wanted the company to be.

So I wanted to build something

that was kind of this democratized, open-sourced hardware 3D printing company

whereas I think Bre's idea was more of,

"Let's just build really sexy, Apple-style 3D printers.

It's not so important if they're open or closed-source."

But for me, open-source was something that I was very...

that I am very strongly passionate about.

You can't live in the fantasy world and have a business, too, sometimes.

I think Bre handled things really well.

It was incredibly hard on him emotionally.

I think he took some things personally.

I think he internalized some of the stress.

But he owned it. He wasn't...

He was a CEO.

It's interesting taking a company from being a start-up into...

into being a little more mature.

Now we have closed-source. We have secrets.

We have compartmentalized secrets, and that's a really big change.

[Buell] The company has grown so fast.

We came from a small start-up in a garage...

literally a year ago

to now this beautiful office space with 300 people,

and we have free apples and Danishes.

I'm sorry. One second. Did you need me? Did you need them?

[female colleague] No, I heard you were looking for me.

Oh, I wanted to make sure that it was okay that I talk to them.

Well, there's just different rules we have to be careful of.

Things you talk about, things that you say.

I don't know if I should say this on camera,

but this is very, very different.

We're doing briefs

and we have project documents and checklists and departments now.

We have processes and, um... Yeah.

We used to be very, very effective

at getting things done on a very short timeline.

You come up with an idea on Monday.

We could have it out the door on Wednesday.

Now, we have situations where

we pat ourselves on the back that something only took five months...

and that's...

To me, that seems like we lost something.

I actually don't want to

put too much energy into talking about secret stuff,

and I can't really... This is why I don't talk about...

That's why-- Cut, cut, cut.

Thingiverse.com is basically

the public repository of all the cool Maker files...

that you can download and use.

Especially if you're within the MakerBot family.

Every day I go to our website, thingiverse.com, and I get inspired by

people who have MakerBots and are doing amazing things.

We created Thingiverse to be the ultimate place to go and share

downloadable digital designs.

[Wilson] My thought was,

"Okay, well, anything we do, we'll just put up to Thingiverse as well.

That's the place. That's the space."

After we had been in the news for some testing

and then Sandy Hook happened maybe just a few days later.

Bre, MakerBot, right, pulled the files, and they said...

Well, they said, "Well, nothing's changed.

We're just executing on our terms of service."

When somebody gets murdered with a MakerBoted handgun, like...

Then what happens, right?

And I don't want-- That's years away, but I--

It's someday-- It's-- At some point, it's going to happen.

[Wilson] There wasn't a debate about it on Thingiverse, right?

Thingiverse with its mantra is,

"Well, we're all collaborating together and we're a community of equals," right?

But at the end of the day,

you reveal the sovereignty and the power acquired upstairs,

like, there is a class of people who can just take your stuff down.

There's this duality between

the outlaw aesthetic of the Cody Wilsons...

and the start-up entrepreneur pure-hearted capitalist perspective

of the Bre Pettises.

I would see press about how he and--

"It's the open source revolution and Bre Pettis is leading it."

And I was like, "Man, that's a sham."

Especially once those gun files were taken down,

I was like, "What are we going to do?"

I told Haroon. I was like, "Let's do our own."

In the summer of 2012, a group of friends and I

started the project called Defense Distributed.

We wanted to use a 3D printer to print a gun,

and release the files open source.

And when this guy decided that

"radically open" meant not so radical, not so open...

DEFCAD was born.

MakerBot is happy to say, "Well, we're free and open

and it's all about radically open access and it's all about the revolution."

And I say like, "Well, this is just a--

This is advertising. It's meant to sell you a toy."

Can 3D printing be subversive?

If it can, it will be because it allows us to make the important things,

not trinkets, not lawn gnomes,

but the things that institutions and industries

have an interest in keeping from us.

Talk is nice. Platitudes are easy. But a revolution...

means a revolution.

[Stacey over microphone] At this time, I would like to

turn the presentation over to our CEO, Avi Reichental.

Thank you, Stacey.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our Annual Investor Day.

I always have a great deal of respect

and an element of healthy paranoia

about what my competitors

or yet-to-be competitors might come up with

and I think that's important.

We believe that

there is never a good time to make a difficult decision.

So, when difficult decisions need to be made,

we like to make them sooner rather than later.

[phone ringing]

[talking indistinctly]

Luke answered the phone and he thought he was being--

That it was a prank.

Because Avi called the office phone,

and he said "You'll be served."

And that's how it started.

We were flabbergasted because

how can they even know we're doing--

We haven't shipped the machine. There's just the video out there.

Nobody saw the software,

and they asserted some software patent, and it was like--

And Max was immediately, "This is bullshit."

It's a big company with lots of IP and lots of money and it's a shakedown.

[scoffs]

[Reichental] We had to take the action that we took

based on monetizing the 1,200 plus patents that we have.

We have more patents than we have employees in 3D Systems.

I think that the fact that Formlabs got sued by 3D Systems

means that we're doing something right.

Yeah.

No one wants to be in a lawsuit. No sane person wants to be in them.

They're very expensive.

Even if you think you've got the rights of it,

it could cost a fortune to prove it and you may lose.

But it's also not a lawsuit that we think that we're wrong in.

[talking indistinctly]

[Lobovsky] Definitely didn't think that

they're actually accusing us of stealing or whatever.

I think they're just running their business

the way they run their business.

We're gonna run ours the way we run ours.

[Wilson sighing] These boxes are the uPrint SE Plus Printer.

This is as far as I had gotten.

So, for the record, I was trying to print guns with that printer.

They took it away 'cause I was trying to print guns with it.

Just to let you know.

To be honest with you,

I'd prefer to stay away from the whole Cody discussion if that's okay.

Yeah. I can neither confirm nor deny.

[laughs]

Again, I'm late to the 3D printing party, or a marginal character.

I wasn't invited. I've just been out here

waving my hands saying, "Hey, hey, look at this!"

And they hate it.

They really do. Uh, sorry.

And what's happening in two weeks?

Printing-- I'm printing a hand gun.

Hmm.

Fully printed.

[chuckles]

You are printing it or using it?

Huh? No, I'm gonna print it and use it.

We've been testing different components and stuff.

But we'll print the whole thing. We'll probably show it on YouTube,

and then we'll immediately have it up for download.

Testing it by hand is not ideal right now.

But listen, if this thing blows up on me or whatever,

you can use your Google Maps, find a hospital.

[gun fires]

I printed a gun the other day, man. I shot it, right?

That was impossible until, what, yesterday?

What can you do?

Like, "It's gonna be... It's gonna be so super-illegal."

Fine, but listen, you can't stop it.

[keyboard clacking]

You only get to release the printed pistol one time.

So, I don't know, make a decent YouTube video.

Yeah, I think it's been up for maybe two, three minutes now,

and so it's got 120 views.

Not bad, but I need to... I need to tweet it and do some other things

to really get it going.

I don't know, people have accused me of being media-savvy.

That's probably true,

but I think it's only because I get what mass culture is about...

and so when an interviewer is coming to me,

I have only just a few seconds, brief moments to break down,

"All right, how can I get this person to carry my message, carry my water for me?"

I guess that sounds really manipulative,

but I see every one of these exposure opportunities

as just that, a pure opportunity.

I'm not interested in what they're after.

I'm just interested in winning in an engagement.

Cody, I-- [chuckling] You are a--

I don't know if we are friend or foe.

The idea of printing weapons.

And I think about

the lack of definition of this technology in the market

and the need for the media to feed on controversy

and, frankly, the egotism of youth,

and I think you look at the Venn diagram of all those three things

and you get Cody Wilson.

Just come up closer to me where it's-- You just kind of see.

No, me, me. All right.

So, it's been over 24 hours now, but basically when I woke up,

we had done 1.3 million... a little over 1.3 million views.

It was the first trending video at the YouTube Homepage.

[interviewer] Yeah, when I saw those stories, I was like,

"Really? Oh, you can build a gun with a 3D printer. Really?"

-Pretty nuts. Yeah. -Yeah. It's...

Yeah.

Bre, somewhere along the line,

got the advice that nothing good can come from it

and so his iron rule was

"You don't discuss it.

You just simply don't talk about 3D printed guns. Period."

My friends think it's awesome.

I like my Robohand.

[woman] When I saw Dylan's little face light up, your heart just skips a beat.

You're so proud. You're sad. All your emotions, all at once.

It's amazing.

[chuckles]

When we launched the Robohand project and launched the video, I tweeted,

"This is why we do what we do at MakerBot."

So that people can do projects like Robohand.

Once the gun stuff came out, we actually pushed that up a few days.

That was our response to the gun thing.

And we didn't have to say, "This is our response to the gun thing."

It was just, "Hey, look at this."

They are making hands for kids who literally were born without hands,

and you tell me that's a doodad and I will hit you in the face.

The people who have MakerBots are using them to make wonderful things.

It's been really well received. 100,000 views in the first week.

Felt pretty good about that.

Robohand was, in my mind, worth talking about.

Did it get half the pick-up of any of the DEFCAD stuff? No.

So even as good as MakerBot is at producing awesome content,

controversy sells.

I saw an interview with Elon Musk's wife...

and she was like, "Oh, he's so smart. He's so wonderful.

You can tell when you're talking to him, he's--

His mind, he's thinking about something else."

And she was saying this as if it was a good thing.

I was like, "Oh, my God, that's horrible."

And I don't think it's a good thing, going through it, but I understand,

but yeah.

This is much...

much bigger.

This is awesome though. Really.

Bias aside, I would definitely...

[chuckles]

...want something from here.

I might buy one of those little, like, 25-cent toys.

Well, they're selling, as far as I know, something like...

somewhere over 2,000 a month right now.

Which is a lot.

[Lobovsky] Thank you all for coming.

This is freakin' awesome, and I love this awesome mix of people that we have here.

We have friends and family and investors and lawyers and, uh...

[crowd laughing]

[Ferguson] Uh, we had a party.

Max sort of gave this, you know, an awkward Max speech...

and it was fine and everything,

but then David came up and gave this amazing, rousing speech.

Big guys in the industry are crying tears of blood

'cause they can feel that their grip

on this technology that's been around for a very long time

is beginning to slip,

and Formlabs is leading at the forefront

of busting it open to empower everybody

to be able to get what's in their brain onto the table in front of them,

-and it's kind of amazing. -[guests cheering]

[Cranor] It kind of became clear

that Max and I had very different ways of doing things...

that were probably gonna become a problem

when the company "hopefully" became successful and legit,

as we're growing and we're getting more people.

[Ferguson] I knew that there was always issues behind the scene.

They would do things like...

They would be Skype chatting each other,

obviously across the office.

Then suddenly they would both jump up out of their seats

and walk into the other room.

The company was us for so long.

We were the company.

And the company is growing into this sort of monstrosity

that's bigger than all of us.

Sometimes, there are situations in life that calls for...

very hard action to very close people.

We've really gotten this company going off the ground

ever since we built that original prototype

in the basement of 14 Lopez Street together.

But we've been talking,

and I've decided it's time for me to go on and do something else.

So, I won't be around after this, only in spirit.

[Cranor] I announced my departure from the company

and I think people were...

I don't know, I guess just cut it after the thing.

But, yeah, it's...

Yeah.

[Ferguson] So, it's kind of weird how it all went down

'cause it was very quiet.

David was sort of pushed out of the company

and they were all under agreement to not talk about it.

So it's very hard to express this to anybody.

[Cranor] The Form 1 is like my baby.

Now, whenever I see pictures of it on the Internet and stuff,

it is kind of weird

because it's like seeing a picture of your child

with other people's arms around it.

We needed to have the right people building this company...

and we felt he wasn't the right person to have there,

and we couldn't work that out

and so we had to split, and, um...

[mumbling]

As far as what David did at the company,

this sort of marketing direction,

he's like a real performer,

like in a way that Max definitely doesn't have in him.

And I'm like, "Why did we get rid of this

when this is something that we are so obviously lacking in the company?"

You never would've known anything was going on for Max

the whole time.

He's got his-- This is just what-- It's part of the game.

It's just moving... move through.

This is, for him, just one speed bump

on his path to conquering the 3D printing world.

[clanking]

MakerBot folks, I think you can all step forward five or 10 steps.

Let's pack this thing in.

[all clamoring]

Bre said he wanted to make something to make other things,

and that is a visionary.

That's the difference between those that see what we don't,

-and that is have a vision of the future. -[crowd applauding]

And our future in America and in New York and especially in Brooklyn

depends upon you being one step ahead, if not two steps ahead of everyone else,

being smarter, working harder, in order to achieve

what I know will be a great new industry for this city and this nation,

and that's what this is all about.

So, all I can say is, "Jobs, jobs, jobs, money, money, money,

taxes, taxes, taxes, growth, growth, growth."

The future is right here.

[audience applauding]

The people who run successful, small technology companies...

pretty much have to be crazy,

and they're all crazy in their own ways.

Bre is certainly crazy in his way.

He had some very visionary ideas,

and he had a touch with the press that's arguably one of the best I've ever seen.

The market will tell part of your story for you...

unless you aggressively go out there and tell your story on behalf of yourself.

But all the covers of the magazine focus on you, on MakerBot.

You became a star, right?

Yeah, I mean, I...

Uh...

Okay.

[Curry] As the people around him shifted...

the person he was becoming shifted as well.

So as he stopped spending time around the open source community,

around the engineers,

and started spending more time around the people

who were looking to get the highest value for their dollar,

the person he was started to slowly shift towards them.

[inaudible]

[applause]

It's like he has burrowed down into whatever that character is.

I don't know where he is anymore.

I don't know who he ever was. I really don't.

For me, he's just a figure. He's like Willy Wonka.

I mean, whatever.

But you can tell he must be under extreme pressure and duress.

What a strange character to try to be in all the time.

He's somewhere in there, right?

[cheering]

I have a question.

Yeah, ask away.

This is the Form 1, Formlabs, right?

We are Formlabs. This is the Form 1.

[man] We ordered a printer from Form 1,

but we still haven't received.

That is true. [chuckling]

We'll be shipping relatively soon.

We're in the last stages of tweaking and finalizing our manufacturing process.

Sorry, what was...

Yeah, so, you might've caught it in our update.

We did run into some production problems with the printers.

[Lobovsky] There's definitely tons of comments

on the web that are being like,

"Why did you deceive us? You didn't tell us...

that this might happen," or something like that.

I've seen some pretty mean things said about us on the Internet.

Some ad hominems against Max.

"Instead of working on printers,

you see Max Lobovsky's mug showing up at all these shows,

re-explaining SLA technology over and over again

instead of actually fulfilling his backers' investments."

[interviewer] Excited? Yeah? [Lobovsky] Yeah, I'm good.

-Tired? You look tired. -I often do.

It's been busy?

-What's the time frame...on that? -On what?

-On the printer. -For shipping?

-Soon. -Fair enough.

[Linder] Max had this panel.

As I walk into the building, I spot Avi.

And then it's like...

you see each other, right? And you see...

You spot each other,

and so, I text Max, "Avi's in the building."

We've tried to move to dismiss the case, and we've made some legal arguments...

about how it wasn't properly brought in the first place.

But the case is in its really very early stages,

and it's likely to go on for quite a while

if it continues at that pace.

People who follow 3D Systems will tell you,

those guys, that's how they do business.

They sue people all over the place. All the time.

[indistinct talking]

[applause]

I'm really excited.

This is certainly one of the ones that I've been looking forward to.

[chuckles]

You guys are all well acquainted with each other, right?

[indistinct]

Most companies, mostly the reshaped organizations,

are pre-wired to...

above all, defend and protect their IP.

That's what got you here. That's the DNA of most companies.

Uh, the new thinking is, "Maybe there is a better way."

"What kind of government restrictions on 3D printing do you envision,

such as protection of IP?"

I think that patent law is antiquated. Copyright law is antiquated.

And it causes companies to act in a very schizophrenic way.

We ourselves are in the midst of struggling

and trying figure out what does it all mean

because some of what we need to do is not congruent with our vision.

The way that we have been thinking about our IP strategy

is no longer relevant,

so it's time to change.

[crowd applauding]

So maybe we should sit down together and talk

and see what's going on,

and that's how that discussion started.

[interviewer] Where you headed off to?

[Lobovsky] We've got an off camera meeting now.

Lawsuit's still going,

but it's on hold right now while we're talking to 3D Systems

and that's public record right now,

and I can't say much about what's going on.

[indistinct talking]

Okay.

-Ready? -Yeah.

Let's go.

So this countdown clock is counting down to CES...

where something might happen,

and the pressure's on here to get everything ready for that.

Ethernet, it's a showstopper. Ethernet needs to be...

This needs to be on the outside.

[woman] 'Cause right now...

Oh, yeah. When it came up, everyone got really pissed.

[interviewer] Really?

No one needs that hanging over their office.

No one needs the glowing red clock counting down, every day, to your doom.

But we have it. Thanks, guys.

Bre read the Steve Jobs biography like everybody did.

And I think that book really did a disservice

to a lot of people in the technology business.

'Cause it gave a lot of people permission to be assholes...

because Steve was.

[Pettis] I think if you look at Steve Jobs,

he was somebody who was pretty messed up, just like all of us.

He was somebody who was driven, like some of us,

and he was somebody willing to

put everything on the line to make things work.

[Osborn] I found there's two things that can happen

when you're put in a power over employees.

You can either say,

"This is a chance to put into practice all the things I know are right

and to treat people the way I always wished I'd been treated."

Or... payback.

For everybody who ever made me bend over and pick up that piece of paper

or any other thing.

So, you take a guy like Bre, when he finally did get power...

he completely went the other way.

Capricious decisions, cruelty,

not listening to anyone else.

Feeling like he could get rid of anybody

who might have any input that would be contrary to something he wanted.

[Griffin] It's weird to me that...

there are parts of my story there

and parts of the story of MakerBot that you just can't talk about.

There are all these strange barriers.

There are legal ones.

There are ones that relate to

trying to protect people that you don't want to get in trouble

because they are instantly fired if they talk about certain things.

[indistinct talking]

[Osborn] Matt and Keith, who were two of the marketing guys,

he just flat out up and canned 'em.

It was kind of chilling.

We welcome the people who "graduate" from MakerBot,

and they are traumatized, deeply traumatized and upset...

and maybe they don't even know what triggered the end for them...

or maybe they did something

that would've been encouraged and blogged about...

and celebrated in the early days, has become a fire-able offense.

[indistinct talking]

I had nine bosses fired out from above me.

I was continuously in a state of getting to know

someone new whose whims I had to kind of predict.

I just think that Adam didn't like where things were going

and I think pushing me out really left a bad taste in his mouth...

so my guess is that's why he ended up leaving.

A lot of this stuff is driven by emotions, right?

And whether that emotion is greed or that emotion is fear

or even out of a sense of trying to protect what you perceive is yours...

They needed a full-time person being there two weeks out of the month.

Didn't pull it, didn't make it there, and it was too hard on our relationship,

so... now I'm just happy to help whatever... however I can.

[Feld] I've been involved in a ridiculous number of companies.

There's always conflict.

The fantasy that there's never conflict is just fantasy.

As long as you're the CEO, you get to make the final call.

Not everybody is gonna make the rocket ship

ride all the way to the end

or not everybody's gonna make it to the top of the mountain.

As the CEO, you have to make those tough decisions,

and when I started making those decisions,

that's when it's like, "Okay, now this isn't just a game.

This isn't just a project. This is a company.

We're growing. We're going big."

[Osborn] Watching people get power...

is some scary shit.

It's almost like it makes... What is it?

Power corrupts, you could say, and absolute power...

It's almost like you could make a...

Corrupts...

Really.

[Wilson] Every king is a despot.

Every sovereignty, every asserted power, every superstructure,

political structure ever was built on a fundamental crime,

and for us to say, like,

"Well, we all came together at some point in the past

and we all consented and agreed and this is the way it is."

No, everything's built on

these unjustifiable acts and usurpations of power,

and we intentionally obscure that to ourselves

to pretend that, "Well, it's a system and we're all participating."

No. You're-- [chuckles] That's a slave morality.

You're just trying to justify why you live in an unjust world.

May 8th, the State Department issues me a letter,

and it says, "Look, you might have violated Arms Export Control law."

This is a huge issue in the end. It's a huge First Amendment issue.

Does a police division of the State Department...

have the right to tell you

what data you can not only generate but share with other people?

Finally, we upgraded with villains.

We have almost a worthy nemesis, right? A United States Senator.

Ooh. Ooh.

Part of the boys' club. Okay, yeah.

"This guy has status, power. Oh, he's gonna save us.

"He's gonna save us from the evil anarchists

with their scary printed guns."

Really? Yeah? Okay... um, let's have that fight. Let's do that.

A felon, a terrorist can make a gun in the comfort of their home...

not even leaving their home, and do terrible damage with it,

and so the question is what we do about it.

[Wilson] They go like, "What were you trying to achieve?"

I was like, "Look, no, I can show you that we achieved."

It's this cultural propaganda kind of victory.

I ask you in 2012,

"Have you heard of 3D printing?" You say, "No."

I ask you in 2013, "Have you heard of 3D printing?"

You go, "Yeah!" And then you say,

"I heard you could 3D print a gun."

[laughing] Right?

That was a political victory, all right?

Not only do you know you have access to the means of production,

you know you can make a gun on that thing, and it's not like you would, right?

But this is against an overwhelming cultural force,

trying to prevent that from happening, prevent you from knowing about it,

prevent you from enacting it, right?

But you know you can do it. That's something.

[lively music playing]

-This music's amazing. -Yeah.

[woman] What are you celebrating?

[Ferguson] Uh, we're shipping a product.

-Oh! -3D printer.

All right! That's great.

-You're all set, ready to go. -Thank you very much.

Yeah, we know we've been gearing up to ship.

We had laser issues...

in that we found out all of our lasers were bad.

But we solved it and we're finally shipping now...

or we will be later today.

I sure hope nothing stops us.

It'd be embarrassing if we have to do this again.

This was just sort of a last-minute idea.

It was like, "Well, if we're gonna be shipping tomorrow,

we're gonna be giving them T-shirts, we should probably also have a cake,

and it should have written on the top of it, "Oh, ship."

And also, Craig really likes cake.

I'm pretty excited about this cake.

I'm taking a picture of the first three units that are packed up.

The Formlabs, they were on Kickstarter.

There is some sort of threatened litigation of some sort.

There was a delay in delivering the device,

and all those things just end up serving the buzz

for when the product finally does arrive.

Depending on how well the next couple months go

and how well those first reviews go,

that's going to really make or break

the next phase of our company and the product

and whether people really want it or not.

It's amazing, though, when you look at actually how finished this is,

'cause what you're talking about

is really something that starts looking like...

what would come out of a much more expensive machine.

[Calore] Yeah.

The resolution... And that's the highest resolution.

The quality is outstanding.

Yeah, you really couldn't get something like this

out of a MakerBot or something like that.

Got the Form 1.

Yeah, I made something...

and it promptly broke trying to get it off the build plate.

I think that... It's not for me.

[Lobovsky] Did you guys see this?

"Form 1: Excellent with room to kvetch!"

Oh! Yeah! Nice!

-Is this Wired from yesterday? -Yes.

Cases like Formlabs

caused me to reflect a great deal

about the actions that companies like us have to take.

We decided that the current intellectual property management is dated,

and so we're going to open parts of our IP to a group of inventors

and start-ups and entrepreneurs that want to co-invent with us.

It doesn't automatically retroactively resolve

conflicts that have to take their own course within the legal system,

but it provides the learning for how to do it differently going forward.

[tapping lightly]

Pretty durable.

In that regard, I'm grateful to Formlabs because had it not happened,

I'm not sure that I would have gotten to my conclusions as fast as I did.

[Curry] All right. [Pelkey] Where are we?

All companies go through this.

It's not weird that we are going through growth.

It's just when it's happening to you,

you experience it as if it's only ever happened to you.

So, we're all kind of--

-It's more traumatic. -Yeah.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to MakerBot.

It's an exciting new day here at MakerBot,

and we're really happy that you could come on such short notice.

The announcement was a little strange. It was like a... a very quiet excitement.

[Curry] It was a lot of anxiety in the office

because nobody knew what was gonna happen.

We just had this mysterious meeting scheduled at 4:30,

and with some of the things in our past,

there was odds on whether or not we were all gonna be fired.

And the announcement that I get to make is that MakerBot,

we're merging with Stratasys and becoming a public company.

This is huge.

This is a dream come true for an entrepreneur.

[all applauding]

The story of the merger is growth.

Growth, growth, growth.

So, this combination creates, or will create after closing,

the number one company in our industry with the broadest offering,

with the most exciting products.

MakerBot's my baby,

and I get to now share this baby with a bunch of other--

I don't know. Maybe there's not a good metaphor here,

but a bunch of babies are getting together for a party now with this merger.

I'm not sure if that really make sense but... yeah, there's a baby party.

We had an amazing year.

You cannot look at how we performed this year

and say anything other than, "That's fucking incredible."

I mean, it's just... No one can say anything but that.

If you wanna have a company that thrives, that survives,

then you have to play the game of the big kids.

You have to play the big company game.

So the fact that he sold out the place for $600 million,

it means he will forever be a guy who succeeded tremendously.

The ends can't always justify the means. They just can't.

[inaudible]

Can you imagine a company

in which some of the employees have just received shares

and they still hate the company

and they still are miserable there and eager to get the fuck out?

That is a weird story.

Something that they don't tell you about working in a start-up

is it takes a physical and emotional toll.

It drains on you. It tears into you.

You believe in every decision. You bleed MakerBot red.

And you can only do that so long before it starts to affect who you are.

At a certain point, you have to evaluate,

"Is this worth what it's taking out of me?"

And finally, at great pains, the answer for me came back as "no."

Who are the early adopters, the people who are tech-savvy,

who need this stuff that we make, who are they gonna root for right now?

The guy who just turned corporate and sold his soul?

Our opportunity now is obviously...

And I'm hearing it from all over, "You guys are it now."

[man] You just kind of... you kind of gotta pound it back. Yeah.

[indistinct talking]

[Ferguson] This is a huge step up. Wow!

It's gonna feel like a little too legit. I don't know if I'll be comfortable.

[man whistling]

[White] Hey! Hey! Shh!

We gotta get started 'cause some people have to go early.

So we're having a little celebration to celebrate lots of things.

New office, shipping printers.

Everyone's done a totally incredible job doing everything all the time.

So this is in honor of that.

We have several surprises.

[Linder] This is a...

really important moment in the story of Formlabs,

because we have, yesterday,

about this time,

completed a Series A fundraise.

[man] Whoo!

Yeah. That's good.

[White laughing]

[applause]

[Lobovsky] We raised 19 million.

It's unprecedented

for most companies, and especially in the 3D print space,

and hardware companies.

You can't really grow much faster or do much better than we did.

Yeah.

[all cheering]

[band playing lively music]

Honestly, I'm a bit concerned about growth...

'cause I hate to look at Formlabs...

[imitating explosion]

You know, that.

If we grow too much, we'll lose it, so...

I think everyone's a bit sensitive to that.

[Linder] So, if you guys can help me make Max speak, that would be nice.

[woman] Speech! [Linder] All right.

So now you got to do it.

[crowd cheering]

I was thinking about as we were all hanging out last night

and setting up the space,

we were looking around and we're thinking about all the things we're gonna do here.

These models of growth, and everything goes financially good,

how do you deal with it?

Then you need a strong ethical or ideological backbone

to see how to manage it

'cause you need to be strong if it's not going good

and you need to be strong when it's going good.

Investors and people in business like to talk a lot about,

"What's your competitive advantage?"

And if you're really building a company on a really long scale,

the only advantage you can have on that scale is

the culture, whatever it is that's intrinsic to this organization.

That, in some sense, is the most important thing.

Having people trust him and him trust people

and them working together for this one thing...

I think, has opened him up a lot

because he feels in a place where he belongs.

We're moving to the next step

and... I'm really excited.

I'm really happy to be doing this with you guys.

So, Formlings...

thanks for being family.

-All right! Cheers! -[all cheering]

[Reches] I think, at the beginning, it was...

it was a lot of ego involved, like,

"Yeah, I'll make that. That solution is mine.

We should stick to my solution."

This has faded away and I think this is very much...

a huge step that he took.

[inaudible]

The important thing is personal relationships.

That's the important thing in life.

And so preserving those contributes to happiness for everybody,

and even though I'm gone,

the seeds of things that I planted have still come out and been amazing.

And working all that stuff out,

we were able to really know each other and who we are as people.

This all sounds very froofy but it's true.

[Lobovsky] I'm sure I've learned and changed a lot in the last two years,

and I've definitely...

I think I've got a lot further to go,

but definitely matured and become more...

I don't know.

It's important to step back and see the whole picture.

[indistinct talking]

[Pettis] One of the questions you're asking is to do some self-reflection

on some of the challenges and all that kind of things...

and it's hard because I actually haven't had time to do much self-reflection.

So in terms of being able to look back,

I'm still on the rocket ship and the pedal is to the metal,

and we're burning as hard as we can. We're going as hard as we can.

[indistinct talking]

When people talk about start-ups and young companies,

they get excited by "accelerator to the floorboard,"

like, "full speed ahead" thing.

It's seen as very sexy, attractive.

That's what you want. A fast company, right?

But when you keep going in that way for a really long time,

I don't know where you end up.

You often hear, especially successful entrepreneurs or CEOs say,

"We sacrificed so much to get to this point."

And if you're not them or if you've never seen it done,

you tend to believe that they're talking about,

"Oh, we worked long nights,"

or, "We didn't see our families," or, "It was really hard."

When you hear someone say that after you've been through a successful start-up,

you start to realize that those aren't the sacrifices they're talking about.

They're talking about having sacrificed who they are.

They're talking about having to have made compromises

with their most deep-seated beliefs,

about having to cross lines

that they promised themselves they'd never have to cross.

[audience applauding]

[Pettis] There's really no excuses.

It's not, "Are you going to get a 3D printer?"

It's, "Which MakerBot 3D printer are you going to get?"

Thank you very much.

[all applauding]

This is the true American dream.

This is someone who started from making a product,

to develop a great company.

This is what America's all about.

[inaudible]

[Pettis] Yeah, when we were done, it was funny.

Hiawatha Bray, who's with The Boston Globe,

came up and was like,

"That was the best presentation I've seen since Steve Jobs gave keynotes."

And he said, "Except you're not an asshole."

I was like, "Print that." [chuckles]

People are different.

People have different hopes and dreams and goals and priorities

and ways of dealing with things and stuff,

and a start-up can be a pressure cooker

that just brings all those little grains of sand out.

Well, I definitely need to work on...

being more, obviously, passionate and excited when I talk.

I should actually take some classes or something in that

'cause I'm not good at it and...

I don't think I'll ever be amazing, but I could definitely be a lot better.

I put the potentiality of the gun on the goddamn Internet.

Even if it's a very weak gun, right,

it's a template for how this will always go into eternity.

There's no way to aggressively go root that out.

In fact, in chasing it, right, you spread it even further.

The rest, as they say in Yiddish, is narishkeit.

-You know what that is? -[interviewer] No.

The piddly little crap that gets in the way of progress.

I wish we were ultra-ultra-pure

and could live in a world where there was no money and no competition

and no greed and all of that and IP wasn't an issue. It is.

So we have to live in that world,

and we live in the world in the best way we possibly can

with the most integrity and the most sharing that we possibly can.

One way to look at a legend is a legend is always...

a carefully curated, distilled version of the truth.

Whose truth is debatable.