This Week in Startups - E1034: Formlabs CEO & Co-Founder Max Lobovsky shares insights on hitting $100M in revenue as a 3D printing platform, most lucrative use cases, growing organically, best 3D printing examples in science fiction

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

0:54 Jason intros Max Lobovsky 3:21 What is Max's business with Formlabs? What are people printing? Is it hitting scale with consumers yet? 10:52 Where does the majority of their business come from? 15:40 Is coronavirus impacting the supply-side of Formlabs? 20:16 Understanding the most lucrative use cases for 3D printing 21:58 What skill do you need to be a 3D modeler? 31:04 How did Max raise his first round of capital at Formlabs? 36:02 What was his experience at MIT's Media Lab? 39:54 Why did Formlabs raise a $15M Series D at a $1bn valuation? Benefits of building Formlabs organically 50:00 How Formlabs helped a makeup artist win an Oscar & how many customers in Hollywood do they have? Other use cases for 3D printing? 58:08 What is the "Holy Grail" vertical for 3D printing? 1:00:15 Best examples of 3D printing in sci-fi media

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tour and receive your free guide six ways to run a more profitable business at net suite.com slash twist. The technology industry is fickle. Every time we see some great new technology, it takes multiple waves for it to actually stick and become a technology that becomes part of the fabric of industry or consumers' daily lives. Look at electric cars. A hundred years ago, cars started as electric. We then had electric cars 20 years ago.

And it took multiple, multiple waves of founders and entrepreneurs to figure out how to make electric cars actually stick. Look at VR. We had the Game Boy glove and all these different VR headsets over time. We've been talking about it since the 80s. And now Oculus comes out, gets bought by Facebook, and still nobody's using them. We're still waiting for that wave to actually stick with consumers. Technologies there? Consumers are not. Cryptocurrency, another perfect example. In the 90s, we had e-cash as a concept before the term cryptocurrency. Then we had a crypto bubble over the last couple of years, and now everybody's down on it. It's in the trow. And we'll see if anything comes out of the crypto smoking pile of burning garbage. Maybe there's an Amazon in there. Maybe there's not.

Maybe we'll take another 10, 20, 30 years. One of those spaces that we all wondered about was 3D printing. When we saw 3D printing, the ability to make something essentially in the physical real world in 3D, we all thought, wow, this is crazy. It's like the replicator from start track. And we saw a bunch of companies and a bunch of hobbies start using them. And then it kind of fizzled out. You didn't hear about it anymore. Well, one of the leaders of the 3D printing space, Max Loh-Bovsky. Bowsky. Bowsky. Lobovsky. Lobovsky. Lobovsky. Got it. Well, welcome to the pod, Max. You co-founded and you're the CEO of Form Labs. You've been doing this for a decade almost. Eight years, yeah, nine years.

Yeah, getting there. And you're now making over 100 million in revenue making 3D printers. You heard my little preamble there about how hard it is to have a new technology stick. With 100 million in revenues, it's obviously sticking now. But people have forgotten about it. And you live through the hype cycle. Maker bot, I guess, got bought for some large amount of money. Was it a billion dollars?

About 500 million. 500 million. I think that was like a watershed moment. That was a big day in 3D printing. big day and 3D printing, but $100 million cannot be faked. What are people paying you for? The printers, the ink, what? What is your business?

So we sell the printers. We also sell the materials that they use and then some services. But the core of what we deliver is a complete system, a printer that can fit on your tabletop that can basically take any 3D design, any CAD model you might have on your computer. and produce it in a range of different materials, and we supply those materials for you to. She sell the printers. She sell the materials.

And there were supposed to be these other two businesses that would emerge. One of them was like a marketplace, right? Or the other was software or enterprise software. But I guess what I have to ask you is when I first saw this, these were nerds and geeks who were printing Christmas ornaments or little trinkets that had no value in the actual real world other than the fact that they were magically created. and it was fascinating, but they really had no value. Who's buying these printers?

And what are they printing and what value do those things create in the universe? Is it still hobbyist making trinkets and telling you they can make you an ornament for your Christmas tree? There's a hobbyist segment and it emerged about 10 years ago. And that's a lot of what sort of triggered this wave of hype in 3D printing because people thought, okay, now it was used by industry before. now there's some sort of looks like consumer usage and maybe there'll be a mass consumer product. Did that happen? Is there a mass? That didn't happen. Why do you think it didn't happen? It didn't happen because a 3D printer doesn't do enough yet to make sense as a home product. Got it. I think the concept of a 3D printer is it can take, you know, it can create any 3D thing, any physical object you might want.

And the reality of a 3D printer is that it can make a lot of. of different objects, but not any, and it fits in a certain size and made out of certain materials. And then there's also some skills still involved in running them. So all these things sort of put up barriers where the number of things you might want to make with it at home, it's not quite there. So the friction, if I'm unpacking this, is it's still a little bit complicated, a decade or so into this. We're maybe in the second decade? Well, so we're actually closer to four decades into 3D printing. Well, I'm talking about the second decade of consumers playing with it. Like when did consumers start having their first ones? It was the mid-2000s?

Yeah, mid-late 2000s. 2007-8. I guess I could give you the full history. It started in the 80s and for most of the history of 3D printing, it's been $100,000 and up refrigerator-sized piece of capital equipment. Any big company that's doing some kind of product design, whether it's Ford or Boeing or Apple, has been using them since at least the early 90s. And then they kind of got better, industry slowly grew and then getting into the late 2000s people started to make these these desktop home printers and came under 25k under 20k then under 10 well even yeah even thousand dollar kits of parts that people were assembling um the thing that really kicked it off was this

open source project called rep rap rap rap yeah which stands for r i r e p rap rap rep rap yeah and what is I think it's supposed to stand for replicating rapid prototyper or something. The idea was it was a cheap one that would also be able to print all of its own parts so it self-replicate. Yeah, this is basically the sky net of 3D printers, which made geeks go even more insane for this. They were like, oh my God, I can buy a 3D printer and print a 3D printer. It's like inception of printers. It is inception of printers and is an awesome, powerful idea. And I think there's some value to that long term.

but the reality is you can print a small portion of a 3D printer. I want to get back to the friction you mentioned earlier. One is too complicated. So it's much less complicated now. There's a lot of software out there for 3D models. There's a lot of things you can download off the internet. If you wanted a Darth Vader helmet, I'm sure you could go on the dark web somewhere and find a little model,

even though Star Wars maybe didn't license it properly. But somebody's made a 3D model. I want to get into that too as well, like if I'm doing a clay, I might as well get into right now, if I was making like a clay non-commercial, you know, a piece of pottery and I wanted to make a Boba-Fet helmet or something. Like Star Horse is not going to come down on me. But if you made a Boba-Fat. Disney has been fairly aggressive. But yeah, this is what I heard.

But if you make a Boba-Fet helmet and put it on a 3D printing site, they're going to come rain hell on you. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of new or kind of less well-trodden legal territory being uncovered. with the 3D content because, you know, there's certainly laws that govern this kind of IP, but it's not been really as tested or as enforced when it comes to 3D models. And so there's some new ground being broken there. What do the – But the reality is people use 3D printers.

The bulk of the industry is still professionals. Right. And – Was that part of what killed the hobbyist thing? Was that you couldn't really do fun IP on it? Or was like underground? I don't think so. I think it's a successful niche in the hobby market. You know, it's a several hundred million dollars of hobby business.

I would just think that if Disney made one of these printers and said every month, we're going to let you print out a new character from the Star Wars, you buy a subscription for whatever, 20 bucks a month, you can print out the collectibles and we're only going to allow 10,000 to be printed each time. Did anybody ever try that kind of like nonsense? Some companies started going down that path. Macerbot did, I think, get into some of sort of like consumer brand partnerships. But again, I think it, the printers weren't and still aren't producing enough range of things.

Like you can get a coarse plastic model that looks like something. Okay, so that was my follow up to your friction thing. What is it with the materials that limits it today? I'm an investor in a company called Desktop Metal. They do metal, which is really expensive and crazy. But on the consumer side, what is the limitation of the materials now? So, well, in the cons... For the consumer, you mentioned that that was like you could only make certain things

because the printer was only able to print certain materials. It's printing plastic now, right? Yeah. It's a resin or something in little spools of string. That's one type of 3D printing. That's typically called fused deposition modeling where you extrude a little string of plastic. We actually do a different process called stereolithography, which uses liquid resin and lasers to build it apart,

and we can make much higher resolution, much more high detailed parts. But to answer to other materials, we're working in plastics. There's a huge range of plastics. If you look around this room, there's strong and stiff plastics, there's stretchy plastics,

there's temperature-resistant ones, and all that's different. Yeah, and all kinds of different properties there. And the range of plastics that all these things in this room are made out of is huge. There's like hundreds of thousands. of them commercially available. In 3D printing, it's a much smaller set of maybe hundreds, and they're often not quite as good. So you're often trying to like meet something. So that's a

big part of what we do is we're trying to advance materials technology as well, improve the materials properties to get closer to all the things you might want to make. So the hobbyist is 10%, 20% of your business? 50%. Of our business, it's more like 5% or less. What's the other 95%? I'm assuming it's professional. And I always hear about like this, when I would be pitched on 10 years ago. It's an angel investor. I would get pitched like, yeah, you know, BMW's got to print a part and or this person, Tesla's got to build a new dashboard. So they're going to 3D print it. Is that actually the business? It's like prototyping. It's a crazy huge range. So prototyping and product development is one big chunk. That's been part of 3D printing for a while. We've got basically name a Fortune 500 company that makes stuff and they're using our printers. For prototypes. For prototypes. For short run, sort of beta testing. for for jigs and fixtures and tooling. So parts that are made that go into their factory to make the final product. Oh, that's fascinating.

Yeah. So, yeah, they have to make something to make something. Yeah. They use a 3D printer. Yeah. So like Tesla, you know, Elon Musk talks about the machine that makes the machine. Right. Designing the factories that make.

And so for every part that's in the car, there's actually usually several more parts that were designed to make each one of those parts. And that you see a lot of 3D printing and things like that. Got it. So that's like one really big chunk we call kind of engineering and manufacturing. But then it goes all over the place from there. Another next really big chunk for us is dental. I'm sorry.

I thought you said dental. It's my bad ear. Dental. People are 3D printing. People are 3D printing dentures. People are 3D printing crowns. What? People are 3D printing night guards.

Yeah. That's fascinating. So that whole thing where you have to wait three weeks, for them to send that gooey mold that you put your teeth in. Yeah. They're going to be able to print it in their office. Now can be done totally digitally. So whether you're printing it in the office or not, you're at least cutting out that goo step.

And you're using... Oh, and here's a picture of it. We have a picture of model resin. So this is a few of the different dental applications we have. These are models that you use to test fit some other parts. But we'll get to some of the more interesting applications. This is a surgical guide. So that clear part is actually used.

used during a procedure to guide a drill into your jaw. Is that when you're getting like an implant or an implant? Yeah. So normally without a guide, the dentist is actually freehand drilling into your jaw and hopefully getting the hole in the right place. But with a drill guide, it's, it's, you know. So much better. There's a night guard.

How did you, what I want to ask you when we get back to this quick break is, when you started the company, did you even know that this application would emerge or when did you discover that dental could be a big part of this when we get back on this weekend startups. Would you hesitate to go to the doctor if you had a broken arm? Of course not. Well, your mental health deserves the same attention. Better help is the world's largest counseling service for improving your mental health. Better help will help you assess what your needs are, match you with a counselor from their network of licensed, accredited, and board certified therapists, and start your communication with that therapist in under 24 hours. It's not a crisis. It's not a

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All right. Welcome back to this week in Startups. If you love the podcast, just keep listening to it. I'm not going to beg you for reviews or any nonsense. Like, listen, we're a thousand episodes in. If you haven't written a review by now, you're probably not going to write a review on iTunes. So I'm not going to sit here and pander to you and beg you to write one. But if you do write one, that's really nice. Our guest today, Max is the CEO and co-founder of Form Labs. Form Lab started in 2011, doing over 100 million of revenue. You got 500 people working at this company. A lot of them in China?

A few in China. A few in China. Mostly in Boston and then a bunch of other places around the world. You make the machines in China or in the United States? We make the latest generation in China. What's this coronavirus doing to your business? Anything? It's definitely not great.

How so? It's definitely hurt our supply chains and we've got kind of reduced production. And then we've got new products for trying to ramp up in China. China that are also slowed down. So this is a real thing. When you have a business disruption like this, your factories are where? Not in Wuhan. No, in Guangdong, Shenzhen area.

Yeah. So even there, people were told to stay home for some period of time. There's nobody at the factory. So basically production stopped. So you got to sell what's in inventory. And then the state of the art of running a hardware company like this at scale is to have just in time manufacturing. Is that right?

Yeah, you generally don't want to have a huge stock at any time. So you're not usually have, you know, you don't usually have weeks and weeks of printers left in your warehouse at any time. So you can literally just keep a week or two of inventory and know that they're just going to be constantly trickling out from China? We're not usually able to run things that close to the wire, but bigger companies can sometimes do that. Isn't that incredible when you think about it? We're making stuff around the world. And when the iPhone comes out, they're delivering it and packaging it directly in China to go to America. and consumers. In days, yeah. In days. And they get made there, and then they're here in people's hands in the same week.

Well, and the crazy thing is that to get to that iPhone, you're probably just thinking about that assembly, final assembly, but there's parts in that iPhone that have been in production for six months or more chips and things like that. And they're all kind of coming through the supply chain from all around the world, meeting one place, getting put in product, getting to a store, and in someone's hands. This is what I understand, like Elon and Tesla's, and it's SpaceX is really opposed to in one of his big strengths of those companies is that they make a lot of the stuff. They sort of relying on a supplier, why don't we just get a printer ourselves and make this ourselves?

So we're not reliant on everybody. And so on the second floor, we can have the mount for the iPad in the Tesla Model 3 can just be taken and printed there. Yeah. And we've had to do a lot of similar vertical integration where we make a lot of the specialty optics components. We designed them ourselves, things like lasers and these special electric motors called galvanometers. And that's a lot of how we make our printers 10 times cheaper than what printers used to cost. I'll ask you a candid question. When something like this happens and we start to realize, okay, this could be a new normal like every year or every five years, whatever, you know, could be something that becomes a regular occurrence. And given how expensive China is getting, it's getting more expensive, I understand.

And do you have, have you had a discussion internally or even just yourself considered? I wonder if I should just make these in America like Elon's making rockets and cars in America. Have you thought about insourcing it back here? We definitely constantly think about where to make our printer, also where to make the different components in it. We made our first product actually in the U.S. in California, the second generation in Hungary and in Europe and then the third generation in China. So as things change, it evolves. And I think, and then we actually make the materials that the printers use. We make those in the U.S. in our own facility that we own in Ohio.

Oh, really? In Ohio. Yeah. So we own a chemical plant in Ohio, which is very high on the list of things I had no idea I would do 10 years ago. A chemical plant. Yeah. Did you buy somebody else's chemical plant? Yeah.

We acquired, we were working with a supplier to make our materials and we became a bigger part of the business. and the relationship was really good, so we acquired the... Yeah, why not? Go full stack. Hey, when we left for the break, I wanted to ask you about, and it circles back to the introduction, where I talked about the false starts of new technologies, cutting-in technologies,

obviously 3-D printing starting in the 80s as you educated us with 100,000, six-figure units. And to now, when you started the company, did you have any idea in your mind that dental would become some portion of this? You know, we knew that dental was an important segment for 3D printers and specifically our type of high-resolution printers. You did know that. We knew that, but we didn't.

Were people doing it at the time? They were doing it. But the problem is with those expensive machines with a limited set of materials, it took decades for like any commercial applications to happen. And they were only like a couple companies that had made it work. But since we started, because the printers have become, we've made them far more affordable. They're far more widely available. as well as the software and 3D scanning technology, which other companies provide,

that's developed a lot. So now a lot more stuff is happening in dental. Many, you know, dentist dental labs are making things with it. What skill set is needed to operate in a vertical? What individual do you need? Do you need somebody who's a 3D cat modeler? Do you need somebody who's just, you know, got a basic Photoshop level, you know, knowledge? Actually, you just run a job.

If you've got a model you want to print and you want to send it to the printer, that's quite simple, pretty much any, you know. If you can use Amazon, you can use that. Not quite that good, but it's pretty close. Excel. Most people can take the printer out of the box and start a print in 15, 20 minutes. Got it. What about that next level up when you have to make something custom?

So what most of our customers want to do is that they're making their own design. Right. They're making either a denture for some. or they're making a prototype or product, then you start to want to learn how the printer works to be able to take advantage of its capabilities. What degree or skill do you need to do that? And if you were putting a job description out

for a 3D printer modeler, what would the job description say? The title. It could be a mechanical engineer. Oh, so that's sophisticated, yeah. That would be the most typical thing, but there's so many types of people using. You know, there's, again, dentists who are... Literally dentists are learning how to do CADRON.

Yeah. There's kind of specialized dental CAD that literally lets them move teeth around and do things like that. There's dental CAD? Yeah. What's it called? One company is called Three Shape that makes it. Yeah. Does that go on top of some other software or is like is there some industry standard 3D software that people?

No, it's really fragmented. There's different CAD for every type of market. So there's like mechanical CAD, dental CAD, movie and entertainment industry CAD. You're kidding. I had no idea. We take models from all those different software. for different applications. What is the standard for a model?

Like, what's the PDF or the JPEG of? It's called STL. STL. Yeah. And you just feed it in STL and it makes it. Yeah. We take STLs from all the software and then we have to have a lot of intelligence on our side of software to be able to deal with each one of those types of software kind of doesn't great, you know, output great STLs. So we have to process that.

Yeah. And you also have to know if the person has made something that the printer is capable of printing. Yeah. And that's actually a huge part of our innovation is in the case. innovation is in exactly that. Typically, before we got started, you'd have mechanical engineer type person who's trained on using a printer who looks at what you're trying to print, figures out how to orient it, is it going to print it this way or that way, add support structures that hold up the part

and sort of designs a process for that printer to print that part. Right. You had to automate all of that if we want, because making the printer's cheaper doesn't necessarily make them more accessible if they're just as difficult to use. That was part of what that hobbyist movement sort of missed is. The printers got cheaper, but they were still really difficult to use. So we've also made them more accessible. And that hasn't made them a consumer product yet, but it's gotten them to way more professionals and way more industries.

Here's a stupid question. I've also been pitched on businesses or seen them at like demo days where they say, we make the machine, the cameras that will take this cup, do a bunch of cameras in a circle around. I don't know what they call that. Photogrammetry. Grammetry? Photogrammetry. Photogrammetry.

Yeah, it's when you take a lot of photos and reconstruct a 3D model from it. Got it. Do you make that device as well? Who makes that device? How much does that device cost? There's software you can literally use on your phone to do photogrammetry. You know, you get mixed results, but... So you just literally walk around an object, yeah.

You put it on a pedestal and you walk around it. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, there's like this ecosystem of CAD software, 3D scan. technology and so you know different companies are working in different parts of that and we have to kind of work with all those companies so we're getting to the point where somebody would be able to put a part for you know this is the other one I would get is like you're on a desert

island or you're on Mars and something breaks so instead of bringing you know to your Mars colony 10 different backups of every single part you just bring one 3D printer and then you put the part into the 3D printer if you had to already made a model of it, it just takes a picture of it and makes it. How far away from that? NASA has actually launched a 3D printer to the International Space Station already, and they've done some experiments with that. They've printed some parts out.

So it's getting there. Yeah. The bigger part that's honestly missing from making something like that happen is you want to design those parts for 3D printing. It's hard to take something you made with a different process and then just translate to 3D printing and get the same result. But if you designed your, you know,

Mars colony with everything designed to be 3D printed, then that's pretty much a reality today. Oh, wow. So are people have,

is there an application on planet Earth that does that? Where you're like, you know what, it's hard to get here. It's the North Pole. You know,

and we're going to build our base station in Antarctica or the Arctic and say everything's 3D printed, send a 3D printer a bunch of spools or whatever, resins. What do you call the resins you do?

We call them resin, yeah. Yeah, resin. Okay. Wow, it's a technical term for resin. But it's not in a spool. It's in a liquid. It's kind of in this black cartridge.

Really? Yeah, show it. I want to see it. I didn't know they were in the goo. So this is sort of like Prometheus, right? The goo from aliens. Yeah. That's what you make in Ohio?

Looks... It does look like the goo from Prometheus. It does look like the goo from Prometheus. I'll show you... And just as a total aside, Max, how great is Prometheus as a science fiction film? It's so underrated, correct? It is great. It is underrated.

I've seen it. I'm going to set the over under at 3.5. You've seen it more than three times or four times. How many times you've seen Prometheus? At least twice. Yeah, maybe three. Yeah. It's so good.

It's like Gladiator or Goodfellas. When you're changing channels and you hit on Prometheus. You're going to watch it to the end. Fastbender as an Android. He's already kind of an... Fossbender's amazing. He's an Android. And so it works perfectly.

Yeah, no. I mean, he's the Android of actors. I'm sure he would appreciate that. Yeah. I'm like Christian Bell. No. Oh, here we go. Look at this printer.

So here's the pinpoint. Look at that lattice work there. That looks like the Eiffel Tower or something. Yeah. You can make really fine structures with this process. So this is what's inside the machine. There's this laser. We call it the LPU light processing unit that scans a laser back and forth.

And then it comes into the bottom of a liquid tank of resin. And the part actually emerges. Right. From that resin. Yeah, T-1000 style. Yeah, T-1,000, right, like a Terminator. And what are your 3D printer start at now? What's the range of cost?

Starts at about 3,500. Cheap? Yeah. And that's for an industrial one, or that's more like consumer? That's our flagship product. That's bought by professionals and all these industries. No, it used to be that the spools were really expensive. If you wanted to build like a hands, let's just call it like a grapefruit size,

object. How much plastic resin? I know it depends on the density, but just ballpark. Is it one to ten dollars to print something in plastic? Or is it 50 bucks to print something in plastic? In, you know, this size part might be ten dollars a resin. We charge 150 dollars per liter. So it depends how, you know, big your part is. Right. And how dense it is, right? Yeah. Typically you're not making like solid, you know, you don't make a sphere. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know what you'd think of these 3D, the large-scale 3D printers, the ones that can print a house or a car frame or something that's that large size. And if you think that those are going to have any

impact on society, because when I look at those 3D printed houses, I see a prison cell, not a house, made out of cement. But I'm wondering if you, since you're so visionary in the space, see a time when, you know, a small shed in your backyard or, you know, a small shed in your backyard or a bicycle or a sled will be printed with a 3D print. We'll get back on the sweet startups. Shipping can be complex. We all know that. And with the uncertainty over cost and deciding which carrier to use,

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get a free 30-day trial when you visit pb.com slash twist pb.com slash twist you'll also receive a free 10-pound scale to help you weigh your packages and accurately calculate the cost of shipping so you'll never overpay. I do that all the time. I'm putting too many stamps on things because I don't have that scale until I went to pb.com slash twist. That's pb.com slash twis-t. Experience the convenience of send pro online for yourself when you sign up for that free 30-day trial. We have it here. We use it. We love it. It works. I send people copies on my book all the time. We save a ton of money, which is important. You're on a budget. You want to make sure you're frugal. Go ahead and go to pb.com slash twist. Okay. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in science fiction. Max is the co-founder and CEO, Form Labs. 500 people work in there. You're based in Boston? Is that what you're based too? You're in Boston? Yeah. Has it always been there? Yeah, we got started there. It was me and two other MIT graduates. And so we kind of started down the street in a little co-working space. Who were the first investors?

How did you get that first seed round done? That's actually a really good story. I'm asking. Whoever they are, they're pretty stoked right now to be investors in this company. I hope they are. We were going through the grueling, pitching dozens and dozens of investors over a period of months, struggling to get any traction. You know, this was especially in 2011, this was not like a hot field.

Yeah, right after the financial crisis. and right after Maker was sold whatever number of years earlier? MakerBot sold several years after that. Oh, sorry, they started a couple years before that. Yeah, they started a couple years before that. But there was very little investment in this sort of hardware company. So we were struggling to get anyone to, everyone, you know, came and saw a demo the printer working. They said, that's awesome.

You guys seem really smart. I have no idea like what this even is or how to invest in it or anything like that. That's the problem with making something new. When it's that new, it gets people excited. But it also scares them from writing a check. Yeah. So what maniac gave you that first check in for how much? So we were like on literally the 50th investor meeting, something like that,

over dinner at legal seafood in Harvard Square. Yeah. And going through the same. Lobster row. Got a little crab louis. Yeah. Clam chowder. Oh, nice.

And probably going through the same pitch. And we got to the end of dinner. We knew, like, we had done this enough time to know this one wasn't going anywhere. and went back to the apartment that me and my co-founder, David Craneer, were living in, and he got an email from a friend of ours with a retweet of an original tweet, with the original tweet from at M. Kaper and clicked on and sell that, oh, that's Mitch Kaper. We vaguely know who he is. And the original tweet says, on the patio at Legal Seafoods in Harvard Square,

overhearing two entrepreneurs pitching 3D printing, anyone interested or something like that. Whoa. This is a great story. And we're like, wow. Mitch Kapor, of course, the founder of Lotus 1-2-3. Yeah, founder of Lotus Software. And I think what's really relevant for the story,

he was part of the PC revolution. He was part of taking mainframe, expensive technology, and making it accessible, part of making killer apps for businesses. So there's actually a lot big parallel. When it was pretty muddy, people were like, oh, we can buy a $5,000 PC. Now what do we do with it? Exactly.

It was the same hobbyist thing. So, you know, I being a pessimistic, skeptical engineer, was just, like, laughed about it and said, okay, you know, whatever. But luckily, David is a much more opportunistic guy, and he said, let's email him. Yeah, slide to the DMs. Let's go. Yeah, and so he found his email address, sent him in the email, and... And Mitch sends you a check.

That was us to hear anything like. Actually, first, he wrote... back. He wrote back somehow, like in the middle of the night, I guess he was on California time or something like that. And he said... Or he's a winner. Could be. I mean, let's be honest. People who email back quickly and take decisive action are winners. And people who disappear for three or four days, they generally don't win as much. That might be me, so, I don't know. You disappear for four days and don't check your email for opportunities? Oh, I check it, but I can be slow to respond. Yeah. I like to think about things.

Really? Well, see, if you're an investor, you've got to respond quick. You've got to seize the day. I don't think I'd be a good early stage investor. No, no, probably not. So he wrote back right away. He snooze you loose. Actually, he wrote back right away and said, you know, sounds interesting, but I know nothing about this, so I won't invest. So that was his quick response. That's his quick no. Yeah. Now, did you take it as a no or an opportunity to get a yes? Well, he said, let's talk next time I'm in town. And next time he was in Boston to receive his stock. on the Kendall Square, like, tech walk of fame. Oh, is there such a thing? Yes, yeah.

Oh, yeah, they're putting that up for me in Brooklyn. Yeah, down on Sherrude. It's like three famous people from Brooklyn. Yeah. Steven Seagal, me. Ricky Schroeder. So he came by our office and, you know, you listened to the story. And by the end of it, to paraphrase incorrectly, Mitch was like,

You know, this is just like it was when we were inventing the PC and like, I want to get involved. Yep. All of a sudden, you got a Hyundai, 250. He usually puts in a little 250. Yeah, I think there's 300,000 that he put in. I know my investors. And then at about the same time, Joey Ito, who was joining MIT as director of the Media Lab. Right.

Where we came out of. Oh, you were in the Media Lab. Yeah. Tell people what the Media Lab is and why people are so enamored. with it, why you chose it to spend two or three years of your life? The Media Lab is a really interesting, unusual place. Unusual is a good one, yeah. I don't really know any other place like in the world.

So it's kind of a research department at MIT that has 20, 30 professors and like 150 grad students. And what's unusual about it, one super cross-disciplinary research, there's everything from like biotech to like robots making music and like everything in between 3D printing. And another thing that's really unusual about it is a good chunk of the funding comes from this sort of corporate sponsorship model where it's been called a country club for tech companies. They each put a million, two million, five million in, and that's the budget. Yeah.

And then they put it in without a lot of constraints and then the Media Lab sort of distributes it amongst this professor. So there's a lot more flexibility, a lot more open-ended research. A lot. It's generally centered around like human computer interaction, but really broad. Amazing tools, amazing smart people. It's just fun to walk around the lab. I've been there many times where you just walk around, meet students, and they're working on their projects.

And that's what the big Microsofts or Cisco's or whatever's writing checks do. Yeah. They walk around. They get inspiration. They don't have ownership in the projects, but they get to meet you early. Yep. They get to meet you early. They have some kind of IP license, but that's really they just want to be there.

Yeah. So you were working on the 3D printing there? Not really. I was working on... I was in a part of the media lab called the Center for Bits and Adams, which is sort of like a hard tech group there. I'm sure that was Nicholas Negroponte's thing, because his whole book, Being Digital, was the seminal book.

I don't know if you remember this or a little younger, but back in 94 or 5, he wrote a book called Being Digital, and it was basically the book you handed to people who didn't understand what the Internet was or what the possibility was here, and he just explained that Adams were going to be turned into bits. And that music was going to go from a record to being bits. And books would be bits. You know, stuff we take for advantage now.

Photos would be bits. Right. And you could move them. The professor I worked with Neil Gershenfeld. He was kind of one of the early professors in the media lab who had really pushed that. His kind of whole research group is around bits being more like atoms and atoms being more like bits using things we learn from computation to change how we make things. So that's like what 3D printing is. And also vice versa.

Making computation reflect more how we make things. Anyway, interesting topic. But I worked on module. Joey had a fund, so he invested too. Yeah, he invested too. And with those two guys involved, then they told us to go up on Angel List, which was just like, I was like only a year old, I think, at the time. Yeah. I was the first syndicate.

I mean, after Naval, like the internal syndicate. I was the first external syndicate, yeah. Yeah, so we went up there. At that point, it was just basically like a profile page. There was no... Yeah, no function to support investing. And, like, you know, people started rolling in after Mitch and Joey were involved, and we ended up with, I think, 16 different investors. That was mind-blowing at the time.

I guess around here these days, this is nothing special, but to get... 16 investors pretty cool. To do 45, well, to do like a 45 minute call with some guy in Japan and then him wire like a $100,000 check later that, yeah, that I could not believe that that happens. Yeah, pretty bizarre. And you just raised $15 million at a billion dollar valuation, which, I mean, that's not always perfect, but I think that's 1% or so, 1.5%. I thought when you hit that unicorn status, you would raise 150 and dilute 10%. Why raise $15 million? Are you Pegasus?

You're being super frugal. What's even the point of racing 15 when you're at a billion-dollar valuation? We are quite frugal. Profitable or close? We are, most of the money we spend comes from customers. Let's put it like that. So spitting distance. If you want it to be profitable, you could?

If we weren't investing us heavily in R&D, we could. Yeah. So back to the question, why raise 15? You're going to go out and raise money. Why not raise 100? The big reason for that round was actually to get Jeff Imel, the former CEO of GE, involved in Form Labs. So he's a venture partner at NEA and a woman named Dana Grayson at NEA.

Actually, she's starting her own fund now. She led the round and Jeff joined the board. I thought that they were those type of big firms. What you hear on the streets is they need to have 10% ownership. They need to be able to put in $50 million checks or it's not worth it. How do you convince somebody, because NIA has got multiple billions of dollars in their funds? How do you get them to write such a small check and have such a small ownership percentage? Was that an issue?

And why do we hear that issue constantly? Yeah, it's definitely a point you negotiate on. I think they have their business model where they sort of have a target investment, but every company's different, every situation is different. So there's always some flexibility there. And we had just raised $35 million a few months before that. So it's kind of a $50 million around. So it's a little top off at that valuation.

And then how do you look at this business now that you're in your, you know, getting close to that decade, people expect it to go public or have an exit and you're raising at a billion? You know, we just saw Masayoshi-San and SoftBank kind of back off a little bit of like some of these later stage rounds. And people are generally questioning, like, is it a good idea to stay private that long? what kind of advice are you getting in this sort of roller coaster of the industry changing from growth at all costs, go big, stay private, to get profitable? And how do you think about it personally and how you want to live as a founder? We've always been a very disciplined company that's focused on, again, most of the money we spend coming from customers rather than burning lots of investor capital.

We, that's been true since basically like year one. We launched Kickstarter. We got started at end of 2011. And by the end of 2012, we had taken 3 million in pre-orders and with, you know, less than 2 million in equity raised. Wow. So, so we've been selling stuff and trying to build our business, maybe not organically, but trying to build it sort of sustainably from the beginning.

And I think, I think that's the right way to do it in this industry. They're certainly like, you know, if you're building. a consumer web thing where scale really matters and network effects really matter like maybe it makes sense to lose a billion dollars before you turn on advertising and piss everybody off. And I think one of the really big mistakes

that's happened in venture capital in the last couple of years is that people have assumed that model could be applied to a lot of other industries where it just doesn't work and you end up all that money you burn doesn't actually get you some value that stays. Like it might to help drive some revenue, but not in a very sticky, sustainable way.

Yeah. Investing to have a billion people on Facebook or 100 million people using Snapchat, we pretty much know how the advertising world works. You pretty much model it. But if you're doing something new like Uber or Lyft or DoorDash and Uber Eats or whatever it is, like, yeah, yeah, do we know that losing all this money makes sense or not? And the public market seems to think not. subsidizing rides for years and years and years. It's unclear like what values left today. Whereas for us, when the money that we're losing is primarily going into investing more heavily in R&D. And, you know, after a few years of R&D, we have a very clear thing left over, which is a product that we're selling, which is better than, you know, what exists out there. So I think we're, we try to stay disciplined. We don't try to lose, you know, when we're selling in terms of sales and marketing activities, we make sure we don't lose money there because that just doesn't make sense. And then how do you think about from this point forward? Because that's the big question today. Should you go public?

Should you stay private? And you're kind of at that point where it used to be when you hit $25, $50 million in revenue. When public, you're over $100 million in revenue now. Are you feeling pressure to go public or exit because you've got Boston-based company. Like, they're not used to $100 billion companies. They probably very much would appreciate a quick billion to $5 billion exit. You're right. A lot of Boston investment.

are not used to that sort of thing, which is probably why we have very few Boston investors. No offense to Boston investors, but they are scared. There are a few great ones there. But they're scared. A lot of them are scared. Yeah. All downside protection.

Yeah. And so we have ended up with more Bay Area investors. So how do you think about that? Yeah. I think you're going to just stay private for a lot of? For me, in terms of like my personal goals, and I think also reflect what most of the people at the company are interested in. Going public or staying private is sort of orthogonal to the goal.

The goal is build more awesome stuff and get it to lots of people and make an impact with that and do that at a bigger scale, make more products, get them to more people and keep going there. Do you get the reality of the board pressuring you a bit like, hey, we've got to do something. So the good thing is we do have these really long-term focused investors. There's not a huge pressure there as long as we're growing and, and making progress, then, you know,

they have the ability to wait. And I think board and investors are aligned that, like, you know, going public has to, to make sense for, for the company doing it too early. It's a huge overhead and a huge distraction.

If a company can't show kind of really, uh, regular, predictable, uh, revenue in R&A. You feel you have predictable revenue now? Or is,

is the industry still emerging and you're still figuring it out? I, I think, um, we shouldn't be going public today. Yeah. It goes back to the sort of opening of the show when I was talking about, hey, how predictable is it?

You're still in that point of time. You know, maybe dental's the entire business. Maybe there's an entire business just on dental globally. You know, and like that's a hard decision for you to make as a founder who loves 3D printing, right? Like if you're just going for the IPO, then logic might say, just pick the one vertical that works best and ignore everything else and just be a dental. company. And I think a lot of our success has been actually avoiding that trend. That's a lot of the

advice we've received. A lot of the sort of like classic advice for a B2B company is sort of to like pick one vertical and focus on and specialize in it. And that I think is how a lot of the existing 3D printing companies have been built up. They're not always just focused on one vertical, but they sort of align their products and their go-to-market and everything around that. And they've missed the opportunity to do this broad-based investment in one technology platform where if we actually put, even though we are not one of the bigger companies in the industry, we put more R&D into a single printer model than anyone else. And that's part of how we deliver much more printer per dollar than anyone else.

It's sort of, you know, Apple is kind of the best example of this where they have less skews than companies with far less revenue than them. Yeah. And so they get to invest so much in making every single product they make the best by far. Yeah, when you look at AirPods, it's like there's a hundred knockoffs on Amazon right now. And just in terms of elegance and, you know, what just works. Yeah, the AirPods work the best. But it is interesting, the knockoffs.

When we get back for this final break, I want to talk about winning an Oscar with 3D printing in part. The large printing thing. I forgot to follow up on that one, printing large things in your driveway. And then how do you think about being in a hardware business and everybody, always talks about like you build something great, it gets knocked off in China. And do you have to protect against that? And are you experiencing that when we get back on this weekend startups? What do companies like Rang, Hint and Tukovus have in common? Well, they all use NetSuite to accelerate their growth. Successful companies know that in order to grow faster, you must have the right

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So learn how to be more profitable by going to netsuite.com slash twist. That's netsuite.com slash twist. and thanks for supporting the pod. I really appreciate that. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to this week in startups. Hey, speaking of 3D printing, this is crazy. We're doing our research.

Turns out in this movie about Meg and Kelly, what was that called? Bombshell. Bombshell. I got 15 minutes into it and it was just super boring. I haven't finished it. Have you seen it? I haven't seen it. Yeah.

Anyway. So it turns out that somebody 3D printed. If you're watching the pod on, YouTube.com slash this weekend or if you go to this week

and startups.com you look at the video you can see this 3D printed nose implant that goes inside of Charlize Theron's nose

there's her normal nose which looks perfect absolutely whatever she paid for it's totally worth it and then here is maybe it's natural here's Megan Kelly

on the left No, Megan Kelly on the right. The real Megan Kelly is on the right. It's hard to say which. It is. Her nose is pointing up a little bit. You see more of her nostrils. And I guess they did that to Charlize, Theron.

Charlize. And her nose is pointing up a little bit so you can see her nostrils a little bit. And they did it to 3D printing this. And the person, Kazu, which is Kazu Studios on, I guess, the Instagram, he won. for what, best makeup? Hairstyle and makeup for making her look like that, in part, I think the hair is also, but in part because of this nose implant. And you were wondering if there would be an application.

The application is winning Oscars, people. Yeah, if there's nothing else 3D printers can do, at least they can help win an Oscar. It's hilarious. This was really, really funny because I spotted this tweet like a few weeks before the Oscars, and I looked at the part and saw the At Forum Labs tag and it's just such a kind of ridiculous sounding use of our printer and then a couple weeks later I was watching the Oscars and saw the guy win and they like mentioned specifically the nose piece.

What an advantage. I mean, in a way she kind of cheated. This might be like a doping scandal, right? They're probably going to disallow 3D printing from the makeup award after that. It's too easy to get an Oscar natural. You got too much edge, right? But no, who was it? Marlon Brando used to put cotton in his cheeks.

I think that's how he did the godfather. Yeah. To have that like, well, wrong. Come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding. Exactly. What if he had 3D printing? If he had 3D printing, they could have just 3D printed some stuff. He wouldn't have to put a bunch of cotton in his.

Yeah. What about this? We actually have a lot of customers in Hollywood. We've got like a list of most of. Most of the major sort of Marvel action movie type of movies are using our printers. Oh, really? In their production. Makes total sense.

If you're building the Iron Man suit, you use Form Labs. One awesome thing on our website. We've got the Demigorgon from Stranger Things, the big monster with a face that opens up. Spoiler alert. Sorry, he just ruined it. No, we know. You haven't seen it by now. The studio that designed that used our printers throughout the process, and they made some amazing models.

So just think what this would have done for horror films in the 80s like all that pinhead stuff and whatever they would have just been 3D modeling all of this stuff What about these large scale ones? Everybody's seen and we can pull one up here 3D printing of houses with cement barely feels like 3D printing to me it feels like Just cement being done in a square How large have your printers gotten and you know we're sitting here at a table that's whatever five by five. You think you're going to have these like five by five, 10 by 10 printers?

Is there demand for those? And we'll be people printing like the next Tesla car in a three, instead of making a clay, just make a giant 3D. Are there giant 3D models being made? There, uh, there are,

uh, 3D printers from like all sizes, uh, you know, from what we make up to, to house size things. Um, I think you can call them 3D printers,

but it's better to think of them in terms of like robotics and industrial automation. Um, because they don't, don't it's not really similar to using our printer it's a sort of a specialized thing that you'll design a house to be made with that process got it um i i'm optimistic for that in general i mean i see robots and automation changing the way we make everything right and i think that that's an amazing positive thing they just so ugly looking like when you watch this getting made it's literally

just like the slurry of cement going in a circle and it looks terrible it's giant and it looks like it takes, this looks like much more effort to build a prison cell than building something actually that people would want to live in. You're certainly not going to build a complete structure just by depositing concrete, but that's part of the process. That could be part of the process. It could be part of the process. Okay, we're going to build huge walls.

Okay, 3D printed the entire way. But that's actually the interesting thing about it is that it just keeps moving and building and moving and building. So there is this concept like, oh, yeah, we just go. to the desert and we have these refugees coming across the border and we can make a thousand houses for them or something. I guess on the inside they, no, it still looks terrible. Nice interior decoration.

It looks like they got some cheap IKEA and threw it in there. And if you put some throw pillows, everything looks better with a couple of good throw pillows. But it still looks like a prison cell with throw pillows. Maybe it would work for like a beach hut or something. There's also other kinds of structures like storage and industrial structures. and things like that. I don't want to nag it too much. The founder who made this,

I still appreciate the technology and the effort you put into it. I just don't want to live in a... It is a little frustrating that 3D printing, everyone kind of tries to apply that word to any sort of new fabrication process because it's a better sounding world

than like house manufacturing. House robot, cement robot, brick layer. And what about this like, you know, hardware is so hard building a hardware company. You need tons more money. You have to sell it for a high price. Everybody undersells like the actual cost of it. And then the big critique from investors is always, isn't it a race to the bottom? You're going to make this thing. And the same factory you build it in is going to build fake ones at night or they're going to steal your IP or

somebody's going to knock it off and reverse engineer it. How do you protect against that issue? Is that why you make the lasers here in America so they don't get reversed engineered? We make the resin here. It's a challenge any type of business has to kind of understand what's its advantage what allows it to charge more money than other people. What is it doing better?

And if you can't, if other people have access to those same abilities then you're going to lose that advantage. It will be a race to the bottom. I think that's great that that happens because that means more great things get produced for everybody. And what that

means for us, if we want to keep having an advantage, we've got to keep moving forward. And we've got to keep investing in new technology and constantly be ahead. Fortunately, it's more than just copying the hardware we have because there's software that drives it. There's the materials that go in it.

Even the hardware we have, there's a sort of a whole set of hardware at the factory that calibrates it and measures it to get it to the performance level it's at. And so there's a lot of pieces to copy there and we're constantly iterating and improving on them. And I think it

frankly, it's tougher to build a profitable, you know, high margin business in this space than it is in a SaaS or, you know, that sort of business. But for me, it's more rewarding. So, yeah. What's the, what's the vertical, the holy grail of 3D printing? Like, is there a vertical where people are dreaming in science fiction, you know, back to Prometheus? Like in Prometheus, they're obviously making weapons technology. that's biology. And it seems far-fetched.

But here we are. People are building heart valves with 3-D printers. I think the heart muscle is pretty easy to replicate. It's not like brain cells or something. And then there's, so people are putting 3-D kind of, not organs, but pieces of organs, I think is the best way to say it. They're also talking about 3-D printing, you know, fish, you know, and meat, steaks. Is any of that going to happen in our lifetime? Is that the holy grail?

I think I don't know if there's like one holy grail because there's so many capabilities. You want to print living tissue. You want to print plastics. You want to print metals. So maybe sort of the general idea of like the holy grail of digital fabrication is getting closer to the point where making hardware is like making software, where you design something digitally. And then, you know, with software, you press compile or you, you know, you build it or publish it. And it's done. That's the working thing with no steps or time involved.

With hardware, there's a lot of work that goes into kind of translating that design to real thing. And the closer we can get to going from an idea in your head to a design on screen to a real thing, that will enable enormous progress and, you know, all over humanity, all, you know, all parts of technology, everything that we want. If we can shorten that, that huge process to go from an idea to a real thing, that is a really powerful. You saw the 3D printing chocolate stuff and what do you think of that like 3D printing steak or something eventually. Is that coming or not? Where would you put that over under? Five, 10, 15 years? Again, there's a lot of things that are like called 3D printing that just like don't have a lot to do. Making food automatically, you know, making artificial meat without animal products. That's awesome. That's great. It's, you could call it 3D printing, but it's like we have nothing to do with each other. of all this was when they were when west world came on and they showed making the and they're like doing it like with string yeah like and it is kind of 3D print that felt like a great interpretation of what this to go i like the way they visualized it it was like a little more in depth and realistic than most most of these visualizations and sci-fi are just like

literally coming out of goo with like no explanation of what's happening but they sort of give you some idea that there might be a technology that could do something like that one day. Yeah. I thought that was the other great interpretation of this from a science film. What's the other great 3D printing from an older science fiction?

Star Trek. The Star Trek replicator? No. Much better. The fifth element. Oh, yeah. Remember the scene where there's only the arm left? Yeah. Go pull that up, Nicky-pooh. That was actually a Westworld. They have these like robots stringing out. Yes. That is one.

was probably the best because it was like all they had left was the arm and they 3D print the entire Fifth Element is one of my all-time favorite movies. It's so good. I mentioned that I've been the Big Lebowski for Halloween. Well, I've also been Lelu for Halloween. Just with tape.

Yeah, yeah, that one. I want to go as the guy, when she wears just the bands of tape. That's when she Wait, Lilu is the... Lidu is the lady. Yeah, the orange hair. Yeah, and she has this like orange V-strap Yeah. Is that on the internet that picture? No. It won't do. It's not on the internet. It never will be. I hope not. That is an inspired choice. I want to go as the guy who's like, it's so green. It's so great. It's so great. What's his name? Ruby Rod. Yeah. It's so green. I love that Ruby Rod character. Corbin Dallas, my man. What is they? Corbin Dallas, my man. We're here on the outer rim. Wherever they were. It's such a great film.

Who is the director of that? Luke Bisson. He killed it. I mean, look at this, 3D printing. This was so well done. Here comes the goose lorry from Ohio. Here is a hand that was controlling like either a weapon or like the speed. And it's building the bone first.

What's nice about this is they're showing multiple processes coming together. This is really how complex things are made by people today. It's not just like one machine that finishes the thing. Yeah. Yeah, one for the brain, one for the bone, material. so well done and here comes the the meat puller

the meat puller which pulls and shrapes the meat onto the body for those of you listening if you haven't seen the scene from the fifth element's great oh there she is oh that yeah maybe that's a she's nude there

so that would be a first for this weekend startup so we're going to go ahead and say edit that out and he's about to press the button to destroy it because they can't believe that it's a human form And then the straps come. Here's your straps for your outfit.

I wear a different one. Oh, it was the orange ones when she wears orange. Yeah. Such a great scene from it. It's amazing the world we live in now. Like we literally live in the future. We're so close with this stuff. Getting there.

What do you think? How old are you? You're 30? 35. 32. What do you think? 50 years from now, you're 82 and you're like the guy, Anthony Hopkins from your Anthony Hopkins or your wagon.

Why am I, your wagon, wagon? What's the guy from Prometheus? Wagon. Oh, yes. Wylan. Wylan. Wayland. Whalen?

Whalen? You're like the whaling guy given the TED speech, but then at the end of Prometheus, he's like 90 years old and he wants to meet his maker. Yeah. When you're that age, you're Anthony Hopkins in Westworld, you're Wylan, end of your career, 82. What will 3D printing look like?

Take a minute to think that through. What will we be 3D printing in 50-effing years? 60 effing years. I think it's so hard to. predict at that time. I know that's why it's so interesting. We're here in 2020. Remember, 50 years would be 1970, 60 years would be 1960.

What did computers do in 60? What are they doing now in our pockets? I think most of what we're imagining is really there, like printing, you know, living tissue and, you know, creating organs. That's definitely happening. Multimaterial printers or assembling parts automatically to get to like completely finished products straight from digital designs. and automation of all these processes.

So humans can focus on the most interesting part, which is designing, creating, you know, coming up with the idea. I'm going to just go ahead and advise us your counsel here. You do not need to go find the engineers. Nothing good will come from finding the engineers. Because the engineers were made by somebody. That's what I really wanted to see in the Prometheus follow-up. They did the Aliens resurrection or something.

It was terrible because he wanted to make like the Prometheus follow-up. that would be a science not about the aliens, and they forced them to make it into this hybrid. And it was like, you saw it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't as good. It wasn't as good. They should have just gone fully about who made the engineers.

The engineers made the aliens. Who made the engineers? But there were two fast benders, though, so that might. Double the fast bender is never bad. Yeah. I mean, he's not getting an Oscar, but, you know, just a little robotic, that performance, we'll be honest. So apologies to Fassbender and to Ben Horowitz,

who we couldn't get to today. Hey, Max, continued success. You're hiring. Yep. Yeah, we are looking for the engineers, actually. You're looking for the engineers. Yeah. Yeah, the nine foot tall ones that are just albino. I mean, if they're really good engineers, any size and shape, yeah, color. They can work remote. So whatever galaxy they're in, we have Zoom, we have Slack, you could work remote, like the engineers were working. Jobs at Formlabs.com. Please send us a message from whichever planet you're on. Absolutely. And as we were talking before, that opening sequence, of Prometheus such a good scene

where the engineers are drinking that biological device and the body breaks down and he falls into water sacrificing themselves to create life on earth such an incredible metaphor I mean this is why really Scott's a genius Blade Runner

Gladiator Black Hawk down and Prometheus look at the scene where there's a giant waterfall and there's no life on earth and what people didn't under people don't understand this movie because people are dumb they're paying attention but you watch these engineers walk to the edge of the cliff and he takes out his little glass of you know goo which is kind of like a cup of tea his nanogoo it's like nanogoo right

he's got his little cup and then it's kind of living it's like oh boy this is the end for me i'm going to drink it i don't know what the story is with that guy if i don't know what the story is with that guy He's like a real guy. And then the ship leaves, and he is sacrificing his life. His body starts to break down almost immediately. Violently. You've never seen this, Nick? Producer Nick hasn't seen Prometheus.

Look at his laughs on this guy. Dude, he's diesel. Well, the reason you have to think that is because he was also made. The engineer was also engineered by somebody. And then through his veins, you can see the goo is turning into life. And then all the DNA strands break down and reconfigure. in the ocean at Earth. And they have to think maybe they already engineered Earth a little bit.

I guess on the 50-year time frame, the way life makes things by building things bottom-up at the molecular level, that's something that humans are not even close to do. Building from the, yeah, like 3D printing molecules. Yeah, and making something that is designed the way we want it down to individual molecules. I don't know if that's happening on a 50-year time frame, but I hope so. That'd be incredible. We would literally be able to just print a new liver or a brain. God forbid, you get Alzheimer's or dementia, like one of these horrible things. Can you imagine a brain transplant?

Or you drink the goo or they shoot the goo in your brain and it rebuild your brain like over time and transfers your memories from your old dying brain into the new refreshed brain? Sounds like the plot of the next movie. Promithias. That's actually a really good one. If you could build a second brain and it would rescalfold your brain and make it like 100 times more powerful. you know, I've got something to work on. Go raise more money.

You shouldn't raise more than $15 million. You could be working on this already. That's true. I better get back to Boston and get to work. Get back to Boston. All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for doing the pod.

It's fascinating stuff and keep grinding it out. If you need a job, jobs at Formelabs.com. I mean, it's a rocket chip. It's going to go 100x from here. You heard it from me first. And congrats to Mitch Kepoor and Freight of Capeor Capital on another huge win. It's another unicorn on their belts. We'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.