Customized jewelry is one of my targets with Bold Machines.
We're on the brink of the next industrial revolution. Instead of buying things, you can make them on a printer. When you have a 3D printer, you can iterate more - what used to take months, now takes hours.
If you want to be a person who buys stuff at the dollar store, you can be that person. If you want to make really cool stuff on your desktop and be the manufacturer, that is a lifestyle.
My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.
My father was a ham radio geek, and I remember the glow of the vacuum tubes from a Hammarlund receiver that became a hand-me-down to me.
We have always moved with this approach of sharing and educating people with what they can unlock with 3D printing.
The self-driving car is coming. And right now, our best supply of organs come from car accidents... Once we have self-driving cars, we can actually reduce the number of accidents, but the next problem then would be organ replacement.
I've watched with amazement as Local Motors has pioneered a co-creation and micro-manufacturing model that has democratized the development and production of complex machines, effectively transforming consumer choice from supply-driven to demand-driven.
Our intention is that people use MakerBots to have a positive impact on the world.
We started MakerBot in 2009 and made a conscious decision to educate people with the possibilities they could do with 3D printing and share with people what is possible.
The people who are getting 3-D printers at home are pioneers, kind of like the people who bought Apple IIs in 1981. Adults are usually the last people to get it. The kids are like, 'Get out of my way, I want at this thing.' They immediately start getting creative.
While at The Evergreen State College, I met Doranne Crable, and she was so dynamic and adventurous that I decided on the spot to take whatever she taught.
I feel like I've lived a life of making mistakes and learning from them and doing my best to only make each mistake once.
You can go from creating the design on your iPad to making the object on your MakerBot.
I like to make things. It's been part of my identity since I was a kid.
We wanted people to 3-D-print anything, not just more 3-D printers.
One of the criticisms we get is, 'Does the world need more plastic crap?' But you have to look beyond the plastic crap, to the design, to the experience, to the empowering nature of the MakerBot and the community.
When people have a MakerBot, they have a different mindset from everybody else who grew up as a consumer. Instead of thinking, 'I need to go buy that,' they first think, 'Do I need to go buy that? I could just MakerBot that.'
When we looked out at the world and saw what 3D scanners could do, we wanted to make something that could make really high quality models that you could create on your MakerBot.
Before I started MakerBot, I was creating cool stuff and sharing it with the Internet. That's how I knew all the folks at BoingBoing, at Engadget and Gizmodo.
