The Gold Rush That Wasn’t
A Look Back at 3D Printing’s Break Out Year and Why it is Still Day One
Manic — could be an understatement in describing the state of 3D printing in 2013.
From MakerBot’s astronomical acquisition to Shapeways massive series C, 3D Printing made headlines this year with both the bulls and the bears, calling the rise and fall of the technology. Competition pitted 3D printing’s giants against nimble upstarts like Formlabs and established players from Microsoft to Staples. With shopping sprees, lawsuits and untraceable guns, 2013 had all the twists and turns of the best dramas.
Metaphors reigned large this year amongst observers and analysts. Across articles and industry reports, territories were drawn out and winners were declared — crowned the “Apple of…” “The Microsoft of…” the “Amazon of 3D Printing”
Mixing Metaphors:
Starting a 3D printing company in 2013, it was hard to resist these metaphors or help defining ourselves within them.
“Can we create a standard like Adobe or build an irreplaceable infrastructure like Intel? Can we develop an ecosystem like Apple or create the killer app like Google?”
We obsessed over history, searching for parallels that best supported our story and then scrambling for new ones when things played out differently than we’d expected.
Looking back, it’s painfully obvious that we weren’t asking the right questions. In modeling ourselves so stringently on the past we bought into a story told by outside observers and overlooked the reality staring us in the face:
That, to borrow a phrase from Jeff Bezos, it’s only Day One…and for 3D printing just barely. Not only is it too early to call winners, we don’t even have a name for the game. In every sense, 3D printing is its infancy and it may be years before it is broadly experienced or widely understood.
Day One:
Despite this, I believe in 3D printing now more than ever. I believe 3D printing, and the digitization of manufacturing, will revolutionize the way we design, distribute and consume nearly everything in our lives. I see a day where every person, in every country, will own something that began its life as a digital model generated especially for them. I believe 3D printing will be a tool of empowerment and efficiency, that it will make us more creative and less wasteful.
All of these things will happen, but it will take time. More importantly, it will require the ingenuity of entrepreneurs asking better questions and stopping at nothing to answer them.
Asking Better Questions:
Having lived through and learned from the hype cycle of 2013, we begin 2014 with a very different outlook, asking a very different set of questions in the hope of creating real value for real people:
Explore, Don’t Conquer: No one knows where 3D printing will gain a foothold or what the industry will look like when fully formed, so it makes a lot more sense to explore new territories than try and consolidate existing ones.
Build Infrastructure as Needed: No one knows how quickly the space will evolve or what will be needed so it seems like the smart move to build infrastructure ad-hoc. Creative applications and use-cases are the bottleneck, so let’s start there.
Meet the Market Where it is Today: It’s easy to imagine where 3D printing might be in 5 or 10 years, but more useful to think about what the market is ready for today. Given the cost, speed and material properties of 3D Printing, it is better suited to certain products than others. While these are certain to change in the future, there’s a lot of value yet to be created in areas where 3D printing is a good fit.
Mistakes We Won’t Make Again:
Mistakes are bound to be made in any nascent industry and while I hope we’ll learn from ours, it’s inevitable that we’ll make entirely new ones in 2014. Looking back at the last year, there’s only one mistake I truly regret and that’s not talking about them more often. Few people outside of the team knew about what was going on behind the scenes and we missed out on a lot of opportunities and information that would have helped us along the way.
In more developed, more competitive industries, a certain amount of secrecy may be warranted, but on Day One of 3D printing we need all the information and exchange we can get. Any ambiguity about what we’re doing ends today with this post and will continue until there’s a 3D printed product in every home, or until we die trying to put one there. I hope 2014 will be a year in which we all learn from each other and bring 3D printing closer to what matters.
A big thanks to everyone who’s been part of our journey and who are pushing 3D printing forward in their own right, in amazing ways. To Robert Schouwenburg, Jason Evanish, David Cranor, Kegan Fisher, Tom Clay, Jim Bredt & Marina Hatsopoulos. May it always be Day One.
Thanks also to Ali Hamed, Emma Tangoren and Sam Smith for proofing this in the middle of the night ☺
