The rise and fall of home-made ideas

Original author: Andrew Zaleski
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MakerBot has made a bold bid that 3D printers will become as popular as microwaves. There is only one problem: all the others did not share her enthusiasm.

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In October 2009, Bre Pettis, with his unique sideburns and rectangular dark-rimmed glasses, took his place on the stage of Ignite NYC , threw up his hands and shouted “Hurray!” Twice. Behind him, a screen with a slide from PowerPoint was lit, on which was a photograph of a hollow wooden box with wires. Bouncing around so that his rich head of graying hair went up and down, Petis began: "I will talk about MakerBot, and the future, and the industrial revolution that we are starting - which has already begun."

Petis, a former art teacher, became a key character in the growing world market in the late 2000s, a world community of hobbyists doing their own hands at workshops, workshops and hackerspaces, as well as at home, and working with classical lathes and modern laser cutters. Petis began his ascent in 2006, recording weekly videos for MAKE magazine — self-made bibles — during which he performed such foolish tasks as connecting a light bulb to a hamster wheel feed. In 2008, he co-founded the NYC Resistor hackerspace in Brooklyn. By the time he was already a star. A year later, he launched a startup with friends Adam Mayer [Adam Mayer] and Zach Smith [Zach Smith] called MakerBot.

“We had a machine that produces three-dimensional objects, and it was awesome,” said Petis from the scene of Ignite NYC. Grabbing technology from the size of large machines worth $ 100,000 to desktop boxes, MakerBot launched a revolution in 3D printing. With the help of a 3D printer, objects developed on a computer were formed physically, in three dimensions, by overlaying the layers of molten plastic on each other. And now any MakerBot owner could design and print their objects.

From the point of view of Petis, the consequences of this were amazing. People printing objects at home could go to the store less often and do whatever they want. He shared a story about “printed happiness”: a certain person needed a ring to make an offer, and he printed it out. For five and a half minutes, Petis praised what he said was the “Industrial Revolution 2,” which MakerBot led.

“You will be a producer for yourself,” he said. And he completed his presentation by asking the listeners to "make their own future."

A year before MakerBot was founded, analysts predicted that the global market for 3D printers would be about $ 1.2 billion., by 2015 will grow twice. By the end of 2012, he almost grew up. MakerBot seemed to be on time: that year the company released its most famous and probably the best device, the Replicator 2. MakerBot predicted that the device would appear in thousands of houses. Wires in October 2012 announced that his release was a “Macintosh moment” for MakerBot, and on the cover there was a self-confident Petiz holding his new child, and the words “This car will change the world”.



“MakerBot is, or at least was similar to, the Kleenex brand for the world of 3D printing. MakerBot has become a synonym for a 3D printer, ”said Matt Stultz, who had been with the company for five months and is now working as a digital publishing editor at MAKE.

Petis has become a cult character. Even before the launch of the company, according to Stalts, "we already watched everything he does, watched the weekly videos and watched his projects." With the release of MakerBot, he became the king of hackers.

But the second industrial revolution, and the times when each -self-self-maker, armed with new ideas and loyal MakerBot, never came. By 2015, Petis, Meier and Smith were engaged in other projects. A new director and a team came to the company, and three waves of layoffs reduced the initial number of employees to 600 people by almost half. This year, the device from a Taiwanese manufacturer has become the most popular desktop 3D printer .

How did MakerBot, the darling of the 3D industry, fall so low and so fast? Petis does not respond to requests for comment, and Smith and Meier declined to be interviewed for this article.

We gathered information from various industry observers, today's MakerBot management, and a dozen former employees of the company. Some introduced themselves, others wanted to remain anonymous.

Over the years, MakerBot needed to make two successful moves. It was necessary to show the wonders of 3D printing to millions of people, and then convince them to pay more than $ 1000 per machine. She also needed to develop a technology that was fast enough for customers to be satisfied. And these tasks were beyond the power of the young company.

“MakerBot made major commitments and tried to meet market demand, which never appeared,” says Ben Rokhold, who worked as an engineer for four years at MakerBot. In search of a dream about how everyone would become a manufacturer, MakerBot tried to produce printers that were both inexpensive and attractive, but they didn’t succeed.

At the TEDx conference in New York in 2012, Petis said, “When you have a MakerBot, you have superpower. You can do everything you need. ”

Years have passed since then, before someone decided to say that this is not true.

* * *

At the very beginning of the MakerBot-based journey, a community rallied around these printers with an affordable architecture that flourished.

The inspiration came from the British professor Adrian Bowyer, who began working on RepRap, a desktop 3D printer in 2005, using layer-by-layer fusion modeling to print objects. Bower wanted to create a printer that could print a copy of himself. One RepRap would spawn another, printing parts, and so on. In New York, three friends, upon learning of this, came up with their own idea. Can they make a machine that prints the parts needed to assemble a RepRap? And the answer was positive. Working at NYC Resistor, Zack Smith, Adam Meyer and Bra Petis created CupCake CNC, a machine that could print spare parts for RepRap on request.


Spare parts for the assembly of MakerBot

“The idea was to make a small number of such printers, thanks to which people can make their own RepRap, and the first batch sold very quickly,” said Stalz, who worked at MakerBot from December 2011 to April 2012.

In January 2009, the trio founded MakerBot , receiving an investment of $ 75,000, of which $ 25,000 was invested by Bower and his wife, Christina. The company had to sell CupCake as a set for self-assembly. By spring, the company was selling CupCake kits for $ 750 each. “We drove out through the MAKE magazine, we were noticed by the media who loved the idea and kept talking about it all the time,” says Rokhold.

CupCake was also an open project. MakerBot released hardware and software to operate the device for free, and those who bought CupCakes made their corrections and additions, which the company included in the next version of printers. The open project gathered people from inside the company and from the outside, and they were all looking for improvements. It also served as a good advertisement, and became the basis and attractive side of MakerBot.

“Openness is the future of production, and we are at the beginning of a sharing era,” said Petis in an interview with MAKE magazine in 2011. “In the future, people will remember enterprises that did not want to share with their customers, and wonder how they could work the other way around.”

MakerBot personified the revolution in the production of things. One CupCake could createalmost exact copies of themselves (with the exception of bolts and other metal parts), as well as copies of countless other objects. This movement was to be transformed from a geek subculture into a transforming force changing society.

The demand for CupCakes was so great that the owners of these devices even helped MakerBot print out the details for sending out new kits. On Google Groups and Reddit, active forums flourished, fans shared their design of objects on Thingiverse, the site launched by the company and stored files under a Creative Commons license.

Some fans themselves made corrections to CupCakes. Christopher Jansen, user named ScribbleJon Thingiverse, figured out how to reduce noise from the machine and improve print quality. Another user, Whosawhatsis ?, has developed a more efficient extruder, a component that extrudes molten plastic.

“Because our project is open source, users know that they have the right to hack code and design,” said Petis in an interview in early 2010. "They also know that if they improve the car, they will be able to share this improvement with others, and everyone will benefit from it."

MakerBot's corporate culture was also open and flexible. The first office in Brooklyn was more like an experimental lab. The staff came late and left late. One day you could pack CupCake kits, next day you could test extruders. Petis answered support questions, dropped in to the MakerBot Operators Google Group for comments, and sometimes helped employees figure out the difficulties of iron by encouraging activities that would have been fired by a more strict company. On one of his first working days, Ethan Hartman wondered if the PLA, the plastic used to create the 3D objects, would catch fire if it stuck to the extruder. He recalls that Petis grabbed the burner, a piece of plastic, and they took turns trying to light it on the floor.

“Nobody worked there to work out the time, and earn a lot of money on the sale,” says Hartman, who worked in the support service, and then as a company manager from April 2010 to August 2012. “People worked there because they liked the idea that open iron can be part of a commercial enterprise. ”

The company has a lot that was allowed. Interested passers-by were not forbidden to go in without warning and watch what was happening. “In the earliest days there was no clear operating structure. We didn’t think we could support the project when it started to grow, and there was no expectation that the company would ever grow very much, ”said Matt Griffin, public relations manager at MakerBot from December 2009 to August 2012.

Employees believed that this was a dream job, and a chance to turn an alternative future into reality - into a world where everyone can become a manufacturer. Hartman says that the fact that MakerBot was an open source company was the most important reason people loved working at it. They even agreed to lower salaries. One person recalls that his salary at MakerBot was $ 22,000 less than at the previous place of work. But work in the company excited. They had to turn the market on their own rules.

In September 2010, MakerBot began selling Thing-O-Matic, their second 3D printer, as a set for $ 1225 (or $ 2500 for the assembled version). By that time, many had already used CupCakes to create various things, such as a device for winding headphones in the shape of an owl.or three-dimensional puzzles. Thing-O-Matic raised rates. In the Texas school, with its help, chess pieces were made that resembled the sights of San Antonio, and then sold them for $ 150. Petiz appeared in The Colbert Report and printed on Thing-O-Matic a bust of Stephen Colbert, which can still be downloaded from Thingiverse . The magazine MAKE compared the appearance of Petis with the “five-minute informational and commercial” and was noisily glad - they say, “who among the viewers will not want to buy the same for themselves?”.

In subsequent years, more serious undertakings have replaced the trinkets, such as a prosthetic arm printed on a 3D printer.. It seemed that the vision of Petis, described by him in 2009, is being realized. People printed the objects they needed. "At first, the common theme was that 'We want to change the world.' Democratization of production - we used this phrase both in the company and outside it, ”says a former employee of the company's web team who worked there since September 2010.

The company supported this spirit. MakerBot was the place where everyone went to meetings, and the staff had a bot at the end of their formal job. Andrew Pelkey ​​was hired in the second week of March 2012 to write posts on blogs, copywriting and control over posts on the social network. But he says he was not a writer, but a “bot” writer (WriterBot).


The then editor-in-chief of The Wire, Chris Anderson and Bra Petis, 2010, New York

In classic startups, this attitude prevails: quickly make mistakes, look for solutions, repeat, quickly create, release a product. Petis called it the " cult of accomplished deeds, " and listed the principles on his blog. One of them: “The error is considered a completed case. Make a mistake.

Petis was proficient in creating a community of online followers. Fans adored him, he was a friendly, admirable man who loved to create something and explore what fans of 3D printers created. In his speech at Ignite NYC, he showed a photo of a working whistle, which was developed by a user from Germany, and printed out by a resident of New York. “We invented teleportation. Show me how to deliver a whistle from Germany to New York without a rocket, ”he joked happily. The audience picked up his laugh.

And over time, it was Petis, not Meyer or Smith, who became the public face of the company. In the 2014 Print The Legend documentary, Print the Legend, Petis recalls a conversation with co-founders when they compared him to another technology wunderkind. “You have to be Steve Jobs,” Petis recalls to the camera, and then says that he himself wanted to be the equivalent of Steve Wozniak.

But Petis did a great job at MakerBot as Jobs, and shoppers sorted out Thing-O-Matic and CupCake, which MakerBot sold in 2011 for Father's Day at a special price of $ 455 . “The typical MakerBot user was a person who recently learned that 3D printers are cool. And when they found out that they could be bought for $ 1,000 or less, it completely dizzy, ”says Hartman.

Now, not only technical journalists wrote about MakerBot. Rolling Stone wrote about Thing-O-Matic. At CBS Evening News, it was speculated whether the widespread distribution of MakerBots would make it possible for us to create anything. In The New York Times printed schemes Thing-O-Matic.

By August 2011, MakerBot had sold 5,200 printers. That month, he received $ 10 million in investments - from Foundry Group, Bezos Expeditions and others - and began to grow, adding another office in Brooklyn. By the fall, 70 people worked at MakerBot.

The excitement grew, but the early employees felt that change was inevitable. “Collecting investments is something that excites people. The attitude has changed to "now we have to show a sharp increase and start expanding the company with great speed," says Hartman.

In a post about investments, Petis wrote that investment and active hiring of employees was necessary to “democratize production and simplify access to 3D printing for everyone!”.

* * *

The company understood that in order to attract people other than hackers, it needed a simpler “plug and play” type printer. “The sets were difficult to assemble. People needed pre-assembled things that simply work, ”says Hartman.

So MakerBot decided to develop and present at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) its new MMM product - Mass Market MakerBot. It was planned that the cost of MMM will be comparable to the cost of a game set-top box - and no self-assembly. Such a device was supposed to appeal to typical Walmart customers and office equipment stores.

The company secretly organized the development of MMM, opening its branch in China - “a crazy top-secret project,” as one of its former employees called it. Zak Smith, an engineering specialist, became the head of the development. He picked up key engineers from Brooklyn and China.

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But in September 2011, Petis decided to change the company's course. He gathered the members of the research and development team, and announced that in three months they should develop, build and test another 3D printer - The Replicator. “The Replicator came to life because Bree came to the meeting, grabbed all the developers of Brooklyn and said: we need a printer for CES, but did not say why,” says Rokhold. Boxes with versions of MMM periodically arrived in Brooklyn, but "the speed of improving the printer was extremely low," says Rokhold.

CES was approaching, and Pettis wanted to see the printed objects for inspection: one the size of a loaf of bread, and the other DeLorean from Back to the Future. Replicator passed the test and became the main company number at CES. Its retail price was $ 1,749.

Inexpensive printer, he andI didn’t , but I still received the “Best Emerging Tech” award at CES. He had a certain charm - the frame of the printer was made of balsa. And it was sold fully assembled. The hardware and software were still open, and therefore the community could continue to support the project. And besides, the fans themselves could fix possible problems, which made Replicator in their eyes a workhorse.

A few months later, in April 2012, MakerBot completed all operations in China. Zach Smith quit . “In no case was MakerBot China to be mentioned,” says one former employee.

According to Rockhold, people bought the Replicator in batches. But he says that the printer had serious problems: the heating platforms burned out, because the cables did not support the required voltage, and the device itself was very sensitive to static. If a user who had accumulated a static charge inserted an SD card with a file for printing, the machine could make a loud sound — the sound of destroying the printer, or, at best, the sound of expensive repairs.

By that time, MakerBot was not the only printer - and was in danger due to the fact that the company was unable to produce cheaper printers. A month before CES 2012, web developer Brooke Drumm managed to raise $ 831,000 from Kickstarter for Printrbot, which was sold as a set for assembly and cost only $ 549. The Cube, a glossy plastic desktop printer from 3D Systems, a serious company specializing in industrial 3D printing, also debuted at CES 2012 at a price of $ 1,299. A few months later, Solidoodle, founded by former MakerBot COO Sam Cervantes, released a new printer that does not require assembly, for only $ 499.



In the same year, analyst firm Gartner made an important conclusion. On the “Gartner Hype Cycle” chart (“Gartner hype cycle”), tracking emerging technologies that are going through different stages from excessive enthusiasm and getting rid of illusions to sobering realism, 3D printing was placed at the very top of the peak designated as “peak exaggerated expectations. ” In the attached report, Gartner clarified that 3D printing means home use of printers. The idea of ​​a consumer technology market for “independent producers” has reached the peak of hype.

* * *

In May 2012, MakerBot announcedabout moving to the 21st floor of the Brooklyn MetroTech Center business center. It already employed 125 people, and she was preparing to introduce to the world a new printer, the Replicator 2. “There are no signs of a slowdown in demand in the near future,” Petis said at the time. “Until the moment when MakerBot will meet as often as a microwave, it’s not long to wait!”

And then, in August, TangiBot came out.



At Kickstarter, engineer Matt Strong collected $ 500,000 for the mass production of an exact replicator replica. “I want to bring an inexpensive device to the market that is trustworthy users,” said Strong. "Replicator is the best printer and open source project."

In other words, Strong simply made his Replicator under a different name. And then he offered to push the TangiBot printers for much less money, thanks to production in China. Thus, according to Strong, he could sell printers for $ 1,199, which is $ 550 less than the Replicator. And technically he could do it - an open project is not protected by copyright law. Therefore, Strong raised funds on Kickstarter to find a contractor and start production.

The community rallied around MakerBot and announced the campaign to create a TangiBot robbery. And although the campaign failed, this experience forced Petis to reconsider his love for open source projects. “Replicator 2 was already ready to leave, and Bree, seeing the TangiBot, said, 'No, we’ve finished with this business strategy,'” says Rokhold.

When the Replicator 2 came out, the parts of the device were closed. The black metal frame was patented, as was the graphical interface that controlled the printing software on the computer. These changes looked insignificant, but the public suited the company. One former employee said that people were furious. All corrections and improvements that they have made for the project for years, for free, have become closed.

The community was confused by such a move, and the outpouring of emotion hit the company’s operators in the Google Group . Some users have shown cautious sympathy.: “I want to hear that he, like everyone else, has endured this decision, and I hope that he will find a way out. Because if he made this 180-degree turn with no emotion, I would lose respect for Bre and MakerBot. But I doubt that this is the case. I hope that this is not what we will see. ” Others were more specific : "There is no reason to hope that a closed project will protect the design from theft or reverse engineering with subsequent resale. A closed project only harms the community."

“I think they really suffered from us, and felt abandoned,” says Pelky. "Essentially, MakerBot was a club, and people felt like a part of this club."

Employees are also confused, as the project closure alienated the project from the fans, from the community that readily acquired MakerBot printers. “They thought they had already made a name for themselves, and the community was no longer needed. But 3D printing today is not yet able to live without a community, ”says Stalz. "If you get angry with early lovers of 3D printers, they won't say to everyone, 'Buy MakerBot'."

The company turned its back on the original idealism that founded it. The “era of exchange,” which Petis referred to a year ago, has ended.

Remembering this two years laterPetis seemed to hint that he always knew that MakerBot could not exist in the open. “We could remain open, but it would destroy the business,” he said in an interview with Politico in August 2014. “So the question was: what is our mission? Do something absurd, utopian, unrealistic? Or 3D printers for everyone? I chose 3D printers for everyone. ”

By releasing a closed product, the company raised the stakes. So far, she has advanced in tandem with dedicated communities that are not very demanding of technical problems. Now, when their printer could not be repaired on their own, and when it had to be suitable for any user, they were required to work perfectly.

* * *

In June 2013, MakerBot bought Stratasys, one of the largest 3D print companies in the world, for $ 403 million, plus $ 201 in bonuses based on performance. MakerBot began large-scale hiring, and CES 2014 showed three new desktop printers. They had new features like WiFi support, LCD displays and the new Smart Extruder.

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But the cost was still too high. The Mini cost $ 1,375. XYZprinting made its debut at the exhibition with a $ 499 machine - that was how much the Mini should cost according to the plans of MakerBot from 2012, which fell into the hands of Backchannel.

“Bre really wanted to achieve this value, but no one could do it,” said Jeff Osborne, vice president of sales and business development from March 2012 to early 2013. “He knew that the market needed a cheaper machine.”

According to one of the former employees, some of the machines shown at CES 2014 did not even work. But still they all received awards. “It was a peak moment of hype, because even at CES they were ready to give awards for cars that could not even demonstrate their work,” he says.

Sales at MakerBot in 2014 went well. The annual report of Stratasys reflects that MakerBot sold 39,356 printers in 2014, which is only 1994 printers fewer than in the entire period from 2009 to 2013. An autograph note was sent with each printer.Petiza, where it was said that this machine "will give you a supernormal ability to do what you can imagine." By the fall , new MakerBot printers were already being sold at Staples and Home Depot .

They again had technical problems - but now the buyers could not help with their solution. More savvy users wrote questions to the MakerBot Operators Google Group. One of the most hostile users said that "after the war that lasted a year, I lost patience." A petition appeared on Change.org demanding that MakerBot withdraw its printers.

One of the sources of user frustration was the Smart Extruder, which was supposed to inform the user that the plastic had run out. In the end, MakerBot and Stratasys were sued , claiming that the company deliberately released a non-working extruder. In July 2016, the case was closed due to lack of evidence.

On Brokelyn.com, a former employee of the company, Isaac Anderson, accusedin the failures of all three machines, the company's decision to get away from an open project. She could not rely on her customer base, which consisted of “skilled and enthusiastic people who gave rich technological feedback and suggestions for improvement”. The new class of buyers, as he wrote, "consisted of inept people, did not give useful feedback, but gave only unrealistic expectations."

Bill Byuel was MakerBot's director of product development, producing three cars, shown at CES 2014. He says that the development of three cars at the same time as the tight deadline was very stressful for teams of engineers. But he also claims that each printer was actively tested, and complied with the company's specifications for a ready-to-sell product.

“I understand why Brae wanted to release all three cars. He wanted an explosive reaction to CES, which was already a habit, ”says Buell. "From an engineer’s point of view, it was a big risk."

The weak points of the printers began to reflect on the company. According to the results of the first quarter of 2015, the directors of Stratasys talked about the slowing down of the market for 3D printers, and mentioned that MakerBot sales were less than expected. In April 2015, Jonathan Yaglom, director of Stratasys, became the CEO of MakerBot, but the fate of some employees was already decided. That month, the company said goodbye to one-fifth of the workers .

In October of that year, MakerBot again dismissed a fifth of its employees. "We do not achieve results, which means financial problems," Yaglom told me then. According to reports, the company sold only 18,673 printers in 2015 - less than half of what it sold in 2014.

Last April, Yagolm announced that MakerBot would close a 16,000 m 2 production facility in Brooklyn, fire more employees, and transfer all production to China while the company celebrated the sale of the 100,000th printer. Analysis of the company's reports showed that in the first three months of 2016, MakerBot sold only 1,421 printers.

“In 2014, the company was confident that the consumer market was ripe. In 2015, we realized that the market was not what we had imagined, ”Yaglom told me on the day MakerBot announced the closure of the factory.

It turned out that 3D printers are not such revolutionary devices, at least for now. Big companies like General Electric and Ford are experimenting with 3D printing and using it to produce parts. This year, GE bought two related companies for $ 1.4 billion. But the technology is still not reliable enough, not fast enough and not cheap enough to replace traditional technologies.

It is also a rather complicated process. To print the necessary object, you need to know how 3D design is created, which, of course, has become much easier to do thanks to such online programs as TinkerCAD. But the extruder head may become blocked during printing. Substrate may warp. The result can be crooked, because of which it will be necessary to rotate the part next time. “It takes a lot of work. This is not the case when you can press a button and get what you imagined, ”says Rokhold.

On the dizzying days of 3D printing, there were no questions to ignore, or tasks to put off until later. What is happening now Yaglom calls the “quieting down of the hype” in the industry, when the perception of its society finally begins to coincide with reality. Stratasys stock valuestumbled and fell from a record $ 136 in January 2014 to $ 25 in October 2015, when MakerBot announced the second wave of layoffs.

“People want everything to happen quickly, we live in the world of speed, but the entry of a new thing on the market takes time,” says Jenny Lawton, who joined MakerBot in 2011 and worked as an acting member. CEO from late 2014 to early 2015. “3D printing is still in progress. She looks like an awkward teenager. ”

Other 3D printing companies also suffered . Suspended Solidoodle last spring . Electroloom, which created the print of fabrics, closed in August, partly because of a “poorly defined market opportunity.” The main competitor of Stratasys, 3D Systems, in the fall of 2015 announced the closure of a factory in Massachusetts, which employed from 80 to 120 people. At the end of that year, the company decided to stop selling Cube printers. Like MakerBot, it hardly competed with small startups that had less overhead and cheaper printers. Today, Taiwanese XYZprinting has dropped MakerBot from first place , becoming the global market leader for desktop 3D printers.

This year's Wohlers Report, the annual report on the 3D printer market seems to be saying the opposite: last year, 270,000 desktop printers were sold. But mostly these machines are bought by commercial organizations and schools, and not by private individuals.

“The plan followed by MakerBot, 3D systems and others is an illusion — one in which the average home user has one or more of these machines — there is simply no market for them,” says Terry Wahlers, president of the consulting company publishing the report. "Perhaps it was in this that MakerBot was initially mistaken, considering that there is such a market."

* * *

On a sunny morning in September, Jonathan Yaglom welcomed journalists, business leaders in Brooklyn and MakerBot employees gathered at the MetroTech Center. The company had good news. She released the sixth generation of desktop printers, Replicator + and Mini Replicator +.

During the hour-long presentation, staff talked about enlarged frames for printing larger objects, improving software and hardware. The new application from MakerBot even allows the novice to go from the beginning to the end of the printing process. New printers are much quieter than the previous ones. They can finally work on the table without distracting people. “We’ve completely redesigned them,” said Mark Palmer, head of user experience development at MakerBot, to the audience.

Yaglom described changes in company policy. In the past, MakerBot "created products and hoped to find consumers." Now the company has changed: it asked the users what they need, and developed products for their requests. This was done with an eye on the two markets for which, according to Yaglom , MakerBot would be best suited: professional engineers with designers, and teachers. Today, more than 5,000 schools in the US are MakerBot printers.

Petiz resigned as head of MakerBot in September 2014, and was about to head an “innovation workshop” at Stratasys called Bold Machines. The goal of the project is to prove that 3D printing can be used in serious projects , and not only in the manufacture of knick-knacks. In June 2015, Bold Machinesspun off into a separate company. Today, Petis runs a Bre & Co. startup . making “gifts of the family jewelery level”, the first of which was a watch worth $ 5800. Petis avoids publicity. But many former employees express admiration for his assertiveness, dedication and visionaryism. “Without Bret, the company would not be a milestone in the history of 3D printing,” said one of them.

In retrospect, it is easy to criticize MakerBot for incorrectly assessing a potential market. Even icons of innovation are not always able to invent the future. “MakerBot, this was the first time people knew that there was a 3D print,” says Hartman, one of the very first employees. “It seems to me that this is the essence of success, and at the same time that which led to defeat. She promised a future that is yet to come. ”

In October, Popis appeared in Syracuse University (USA). In Hendrix's chapel, a place for public events at the university, Petis, still with sideburns and rectangular dark-rimmed glasses, told the audiencethat successful people are those who "show what they can do and do cool things." He quoted his sharpened book of life rules. These people are members of their own club, he said, and the only requirement for joining there is “to try to do something amazing.”

“If you do something absolutely stupid, absurd, strange, you will almost always find some kind of innovation that corresponds to this in the normal world,” he said from the stage.

The first slide that appeared behind him was a frame with the words “First steps with the Future”.

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