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@@rickys9082 They just need levels adjustment and some pop screens. But yeah. Hearing explicit breath intakes for an hour at 6am is not a top quality experience.
Well said: encasing a complex truth within a larger narrative is pretty instructive to any person in a management position. Perhaps FL could have maintained the small group team dynamic as they grew if that narrative had been maintained.
Holy *expletive*, yes. I started watching because "I want to see more of StuffMadeHere", and it woulda been a very good interview even without the "but really let's talk about the negative side", but... wow, that was one of the most impressive bits of honesty/realism I've seen on YT in a while, and especially coming from a corporate account. I'm very very impressed with this , Max/FormLabs.
Shane’s experience with a startup which reaches past a certain size is a familiar one. Max genuinely taking ownership of how the culture may have changed and trying to improve is a rare sight. Kudos to both for publishing this interview. Many valuable insights here. Good luck to both and FormLabs.
I think companies should have small fully independent teams of highly skilled workers to be able to keep talent such as Shane. When you let HR people to set the rules, no matter how small the limitations, the top employees are going to consider their options. I don't think Bell Labs was ever limited by HR people and they were hugely successful. On the other hand, now that Nokia owns it, it hasn't created anything worth mentioning. I would guess HR people were involved.
29:48 It's impressive that you were so transparent about Shane's leaving the company. I don't think many companies would have the strength to discuss openly about it.
I agree. And for top talent this is the only way you can be successful. If you try to hide your mistakes from public too much, the top talent will see if dishonest and will be looking other options. It's much better to publicly say that we made this kind of mistakes in the past and this is how we have fixed these issues now. Of course, if you don't even try to fix the issues, this doesn't work. But don't expect top talent to stay.
Kudos to Formlabs for a great interview. This conversation had the potential of being awkward in the way that interviewing an ex-boy/girlfriend might be but it ended up being interesting and entertaining. It speaks well for a company to be able to openly own up to its shortcommings and commit to improving them and hopefully more companies will view failures as opportunites for improvement.
Very well said and I agree. Excellent interview and great soul searching from both perspectives. I appreciate Max's courage to ask some tough questions. I also appreciate that he and FormLab's do have exceptionally high standards and are critical of themselves and their products, but it's also equally if not even more important to express gratitude and accolades for hard work and exceptional efforts. the Form 3 printer is exceptional without a doubt. I wished I could afford one, but lets not digress. There's many ways to do this and one of the best ways is for a company to invest in their employees and/or share in the companies success (profits) beyond the regular and far too commonly expected annual bonus and merit increases. Amazon perhaps does this better than most. Amazon has made a lot of millionaires just by doing this very thing. When the company succeeds the employees succeed. Culture is also very important. Sadly today culture in the corporate environment has turned into one big I&D lecture and I'm sorry to say that's NOT culture. It's also not inclusive or diverse, but that's an argument for another day. What corporate culture is quite simply is your employees not only working together, but playing together. Getting to know one another outside of the office. I'm also not talking about team building exercises. Those can be fun, but it's still "work". I know what I'm referring to is challenging from a logistical and economical perspective especially for large companies that are spread out across a nation or the globe, but where there is a will there is a way. It doesn't need to be everyone, it can be limited to a team or perhaps multiple teams who work closely together. Get them together outside the office somehow and let them know they are doing a great job, if its true.
Literally EVERYTHING Shane does is impressive. I run a business, and you will meet a person like this very rarely and you should pay WHATEVER it takes to have them at your company.
@@LuckySlevin7 the Shane’s of the world are not driven by money, they seek an environment that will allow them to realize their ideas. Money will always find the Shane’s of the world.
Money alone cannot keep this kind of talent. If you pay then too little, it's not worth their time. If you pay a lot, they will simply spare most of that money until they can go fully independent on savings alone. The only way is to make the work environment so good that the top talent wants to be there. In practice, if you can get a group of top talents, then you have to manage them like top athletes in any team sport, but with even more independence for the team. And for heaven's sake, keep HR people and bean counters away from that team. As in absolutely zero influence whatsoever. Imagine group of shanes working in a single project with the only target to make that project as perfect as possible. That's the work environment you should be building for top talent. Then every member of that team can feel that they can accomplish way more as a team than any of them going independent. However, that also requires finding tasks that the group considers interesting enough. You cannot get them to put 100% effort into something they don't believe in as an end result. They must feel that their job is meaningful. For any software stuff, you can get top talent interested with building 100% open source software because then the talent will feel that even if company doesn't succeed commercially, their work is not wasted because they still have the software and continue develop it further. Of course, having fully open source product is not the cheap option because any of the skilled employees could simply fork the code and create competing company if you cannot provide environment where they want to be.
The more I interact with FormLabs, the more I can appreciate the power that they have to give to people like Shane. That being said, its clear through interviews like this why he is as successful as he is. To have someone with equal levels of both intelligence and drive is a rarity and I could listen to him explain 'stuff' for hours!
That's actually super true. I don't want this to come off as me trying to make myself look great because I'm certainly more flawed than I am great, but I've always been pretty intelligent I would often get me a lot of opportunity to do some really cool things. But I'm not like Shane.. I don't have the drive he does and as depression has gotten to me, I've achieved less and less. There's something even more humiliating about fading into some sort of mediocrity when you used to be particularly skilled at the things you did.. so that's me. But it does give me an interesting perspective because I think I got to see that my ability to achieve things with this little work is possible both made me Excel and made me become lazier. So when you see someone like Shane who said "look at what I can accomplish in an hour and I've got 24 of them in a day. Let's see what I can achieve by tomorrow" you really should hold on and encourage them as much as you can. Things being easy for someone tends to make them soft but with Shane he just kept going harder instead. He's absolutely astonishing and I'm not sure I've ever seen somebody so skilled in so many areas in my entire life.
Dazzled is right. While some of Shane projects are somewhat dubious in utility, the engineering behind them is pure gold. He is as much a teacher as he is an engineer, and his projects are often the perfect hook to capture the attention of young minds (and old alike as in my case) and inspire a new generation of engineers this country so desperately needs. I thoroughly enjoy watching his videos and being mesmerized by his cleverness and problem solving ability as he sets forth a goal and then works his way through the processes to accomplish that goal.
Shane is a master at blending technical know-how and entertainment. It's quite easy to find creators who are good at one or the other, but rarely together. He's a true gem and I'm thankful I found his channel a while back.
I'll have to admit that I was already an engineering major by the time I came accross this channel, but I can say that his "long term strategy" of getting kids interested in engineering, via RU-vid videos, is true. I am living proof of this theory because I began to tinker and build projects, from the knowledge I gained through watching youtube, while still in middle/high school. Please continue continue doing what you do because I do not know if I would have had the drive or attention span to even pass high school, let alone make it into college, without content like this on Youtuve that was accessable to me at the time.
"Make it so humans can't make mistakes and abstract away tedious work that takes a lot of time." This quote really caught my attention. It's a simplification of the overall purpose of engineering and automation. I've been trying to automate myself out of a job for decades, but I find that all I do is find more time for solving real problems and spend less time on tedium.
Stuff made here was the first RU-vid channel that got me truly interested in the maker scene. Shane’s videos are incredibly fun, enjoyable and insightful and gave me the confidence to try learn new skills such as Arduino. Completely agree 41:21 , an automated circuit building software would open so many more doors, as a mechanical engineer, electrical circuit design is my biggest struggle
Great interview by Max. It was really interesting to learn more about Shane. Big props to Max and Shane for discussing his leaving from FormLabs. I wish more executives were this perceptive around their engineers.
This was fantastic. You guys are the reason I chose to pursue personal manufacturing for parts and products. Followed the Kickstarter back in 2012, ran one successfully the following year, and continue to follow Formlabs and Stuff Made Here. Keep up the great work!
That was a very honest and vulnerable question to ask over RU-vid about why Shane left. I really appreciate hearing the question and Shane’s answer. He was honest and really hit the nail on the head. The company I’m working for is going through similar growing pains and it does get critical many times. I think that this is very valuable information that we could integrate to retain valuable employees/friends within the company. As engineers we’re viewed as very pragmatic and we are often. We often want to know what went wrong to make it better. I think because engineering is often a Darwinian process of development (you mostly notice what went wrong. Good results are viewed as working as they should) the bad results are the focus so that we can fix them. More emphasis could be put on taking a step back and seeing the whole Forrest landscape instead of just pruning the trees.
I think Shane's videos are educational, not as explainers, but the high level solutions of applications. Inspiring as hooks if you want to use them as lessons.
I am very glad to hear Shane say it's not the tool that allows you to make stuff. They make it easier/quicker to make stuff. But if you want to start building/making stuff, you don't need a 8000sq ft shop and all the tools. You just need to start making things. And the more you make the more you'll be able to justify buying a new tool and you'll make more and it's a virtuous circle. I am not an engineer, but I used to dream of having a woodworking workshop for years, watching people on youtube making awesome things. So one day I went to the home improvement store, bought a piece of wood and a jig saw, and made a simple thing that I needed. A few years later I'm still broke but I have a nice little shop full of power tools that I can justify to myself having because I use them all the time.
Computer engineer here, don't get discouraged just look for good sources really what programming truly is about its about creating detailed instructions for a machine, if you want to start somewhere I would recommend for you that after learning the basics you look for automatons, they are very straightforward and incredibly useful to the 99% of anything you will ever do
I actually did a career shift from mech eng into software engineering. I'd avoided programming for years. My work involved a lot of mechanical and electrical stuff, eventually I had to do a bit of programming for proofs of concepts etc and found it wasn't as hard as I thought. Then I had a start-up idea so learnt backend and front end and hacked something crappy together. Didn't go anywhere but I had a lot of fun learning. Eventually I realised I was working 60 hour weeks at work and coming home looking forward to programming so I added a few more portfolio projects and made the switch. If you like problem solving (which engineers really should) then it's quite a natural switch. The best thing to me is the feedback loop is so much shorter. You can iterate in seconds, instead of weeks (waiting for design review, parts to be fabricated/ordered, etc) so you get that dopamine rush of solving a challenge many many times each day. Not having to drive to remote factories and stand around waiting for things is a huge plus too.
In Chile, I Co-founded a Startup, making low cost, high performance Ed tech hardware for rural and poor urban parts of Latin America, our Formlabs Form 2 was crucial in the iteration and mass manufacturing of small complex components. I've been following stuff made for at least a couple years and it really teached us how to think carefully, and how to iterate sistematically! From Santiago, Thanks to both of you!
It's embarrassing to admit but watching Shane do his thing is depressing. I've spent almost almost 10 years being a professional programmer, and I don't have 1% of the skill he has just in coding alone. Let alone all the multitude of other skills he has in mechanics, applied physics and math, electronics, and the skill to join all of those things. You'd need a team of engineers to replace this one guy. He's like a modern Leonardo da Vinci.
I've known a lot of engineers (my dad was an MIT-trained mechanical engineer). But I've known few who actually MAKE stuff. They design stuff. I love that Shane does it all - dreams it up, engineers it, makes the parts, programs the computer - the whole ball of wax. I guarantee there are kids watching who will go down one of those many paths, from math to CNC operator. Heck, I'm 62, a writer, and I've been leaning CNC through Titans of CNC's free courses!
It's RARE that you have someone like Shane who is tech minded, go from 'near-introvert savant engineer to PUSHING out videos on RU-vid where he is Expressly capturing the audience and driving content and engages in the audience whether through fault or coincidence he's able to persevere. Congrats on the new shop! Super Excited about the shop EXPANSE Shane! Kudos to Shane and FormLabs for addressing issues seen when business or personnel differ. \\ It had been 10 years since I visited Kickstarter launching 3D printers with FormLabs. Congrats on the new shop! Super Excited about the shop EXPANSE Shane! \\
I remember that first Kickstarter for Formlabs and being both excited and disappointed... excited because I had first seen the laser technology earlier in a large company and was fascinated by it, yet also disappointed because the price point was still quite a bit out of my range and the heavy handed use of proprietary tech made it very difficult to justify tying myself so inextricably with a single technology that still had many faults from my viewpoint. Even the latest variants have failed to remove some of those sticking points, even when I *did* have the funds to get one. In some ways I am very similar to Shane in coming up with new ideas and then figuring out how to make it work, but I don't have that tendency to go for the extremes and try to figure out the best ways while remaining cost effective... Even so, I must applaud the fortitude and even a bit of humility for the CEO to go out and talk to a prodigious engineer and humbly accept what fault was due and still be supportive and yet educationally interesting through the interview.
I'd love to use formlabs products but everything is so proprietary, especially the resin containers. If the company goes out of business I could lose access to using my printer.
I just got sucked into this podcast, man it's amazing. I'm a second year student of Computer Science, and things that Shane has made really is inspiring!
I'm guessing that when Shane quit the ceo guy said he wouldn't last a month without that job and Shane bet that he'd make a million in less than 5 years and got it with time to spare, so now ceo guy must publicly be humiliated by the sheer scale of Shane's shop and the kind of stuff he's proven to be able to accomplish for a hobby. Part two is Shane buys formlabs and keeps ceo guy working for him I'm still at 1:33, let's see just exactly how delusional this idea really is, bc i am being entertained by the idea that Shane is low-key forcing ceo guy to be there and ask about how amazing he's doing after he quit. Bc i mean, how is that not ceo guy paying a bet to Shane? Lol
After watching it i think it was spot on tbh Maybe unintentionally, actually.. but that's literally a valid interpretation as to what happened here How precise it is won't be disclosed anywhere, so it may as well be absolutely true(or wrong, and anything in between)
"They tell me they like it", exactly that. So many times workers (in any profession) want to just hear that once in a while. Even though I had a very nice position in science, the only time I really heard that was when I asked for my recommendation letter. :) And I was like "well, if you could have pointed towards those feelings earlier.... who knows...". And with a lot of clever people, they do want to change their goals somewhat regularly, they do want that vibrant tight group of people that are not managed to death. A very smart friend from school I know, years later, told me exactly these things when he left a company after 15 or so years.
The bottom line of why Shane left is not uncommon. I think anyone would prefer the small business culture over large corporate. I've mostly worked for large corporations and I would gladly trade that with a smaller more agile and personable company in a heartbeat.
Funny interview, bc you guys must know eachother well. As for the designing of things. boy o boy, if only i woulda had the tools that exist today. I was born when radios, tvs and so had vacuum tubes. Learned programming in 1975 or 76 (was algol i believe). Machine language a couple of years later. It seems many things wrt electronics, programming, etc have become high end modular. So easy to build things with that. Back then i was trying to save bits even, bc limited amount of memory. Tought me to be very efficient, but it takes a lot of time. If i look at OS-es today and webpages, im horrified by the amount of wasted memory and speed. Thats the downside to modular design. Looking back it is also amazing how fast everything went. I still have lots of things from back then, which were cutting edge tech, but now obsolete and worthless. Same as me i guess.
Shane is as humble as he is gifted. This man is endlessly pushing himself and the quality and complexity of his work is always astonishing. I'm so happy he has shared so much on RU-vid. I can't wait to see what he is working on next.
My watching of Stuff Made Here sent me to this video. I'm not an engineer, but I am a math guy (high school teacher). I just introduced my 10-year old daughter to Stuff Made Here, and she is totally mesmerized by it. It is making an impact.
I'm 18 and from Brazil, I've found his channel back in 2021, when I had decided that design wasn't exactly for me and was looking for other possibilities, I really wanted a career where I could be creative and solve problems. His channel was one of the reasons I've decided to follow mechanical engineering, the fact that you can create basically anything knowing physics and mathematics it's amazing to me, he is definitely making a difference
By the way, neither of these gentlemen, are the friend to which I was referring. God, they think and talk and stuff, these days that is almost like finding a talking raccoon. Movie references, never mind.
It's fascinating how fast things go out of date. I don't agree with Shane about needing to be an engineer to do this stuff, I cut my teeth on mini matrix boards, Don Lancaster's CMOS cookbook and CMOS logic, the ZX81 and then modding the Amstrad CPC664. Teaching myself assembler for the Z80, the HC11, PIC and Atmel.. I did do part of a microprocessor Systems course as an isolated study but what it did mostly for me is cement my resolution to do my own designs rather than make other's designs. It gave me confidence in my own ability and skepticism about following other's design principles and research conclusions. Shane is obviously a great researcher. It took me a month to make an 68HC11 cross assembler in locomotive basic back in around 1993 and I made my own STM32F103VBT based full board, printer design 13 years ago but the 3 day SLA slicer sounds like a big challenge. I'm guessing Shane worked up to it for a while first. Familiarity with slicing algorithms, tweaking open source tool platforms and gaining familiarity with the tools, gaining familiarity with 3D display, GUI design before starting something like that. And then working with packaging and deployment, there's a lot of hours that go into all those processes. Sometimes I wonder what a person with Nicola Tesla or Leonardo Da Vinci's talents would do in our current environment with today's tools. Chat-GPT shows that the obsolescence of human "Computers", human "Cashiers", human "Factory workers" is not stopping, our obsolescence is actually accelerating as a geometric progression. The big questions have been posed by Science Fiction writers already like Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Herbert. My only input is to the relative survival instincts of humans vs a new competitor that can ultimately think faster and smarter but lags significantly in evolutionary ancestral lineage. Of course the optimists among us hope for A.I.s like those of Orson Scot Card but we or our decendants will find out in reality.
In response to the comment Shane made about a CNC machine destroying itself. This has been a safety feature inside many CNC machines for a large number of years. It does take time to setup however. DMG Mori, for instance, allows you to load the 3D models of your tooling into the machine so the it knows the exact geometry for each station on the turret. Doing this takes time to get working properly and is usually skipped. In the 28 years I've been in this business, I consistently have seen people spend more time removing/disabling safety features than actually using them
The thing about Form 3 caught my ear and what Shane said that somethin was perceived as failure. I perceived Form 3 as a failure too - the thing (technology of it) didn't make much sense to me with the price increase and etc.
Been watching Shane's channel for a while. Had no idea he was into mega endurance cycling. RAAM is a bonkers crazy race and a few friends have done it. Totally agree, the mental game is much harder for ultra endurance cycling. For me, endurance cycling isn't really about fun, it's about the journey and discovery.
This was a great video, thanks for sharing! Tremendous respect for Shane, always really enjoyed his videos, which are a mix of really great editing, explanations, and covering interesting engineering topics. He's a very talented engineer and enjoyed him and you talking about why and how he came into Formlabs and his departure.
it's funny him saying the downside to FDM is that you can't print as many materials and prints split, i have found the exact opposite, if you use SLA your parts can crack (i've never had a part crack WHILE printing for FDM they have broken afterwards ie: bad layer adhesion), SLA will stink you out of your house / room / shop / garage FDM not so much unless you're doing something like ABS, but even "odder free" resin smells like an electrical fire. to each his own i guess.
Great interview and I'm always excited when I see shane releases a new video but I remember very well that our maker lab in Belgium bought the Form 1 via kickstarter and we never got it to reliably print something, was it the printer or are we not smart enough?
We had exactly the same problem. We bought a Form 1 back in 2016(?) over incumbents like the Ultimaker (similar price bracket) because of the promises and the technology and the pretty cool test part they send out. It's a really nice machine, it looks beautiful (must have been a loss leader) and for the most part we had no issues with the software. You've done well when your product regularly gets used in movies as a background sci-fi prop. However it was clear that there were big omissions in the user manual. For example very sparse info on cleaning and finishing parts. We figured out that we needed an agitated bath of alcohol and a UV cure station which we cobbled together. With the Form 2 those became standalone products and yeah - you need them to get reliable prints. We had issues with printing generally. It was very difficult to get repeatability and we never knew if it was because our resin was off, or out tank maintenance was poor (in an optics company, so it's not like we were inexperienced there). We had tanks crazing after sitting in storage. Lots of prints delaminated from the bed or were a mess. This all seemed to be significantly improved with the Form 2 and there are fewer complaints. But it seems like lessons were learned and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that perception in the company wasn't great. In hindsight we should have got an FDM and we outsourced a lot of parts for SLS because we could guarantee the performance better.
Thank you very much for sharing this amazing interview. We need "from model to model" supports with the ultra light touch tips all the time. The current way the support generation works is very limiting for small details. Apart from support beams touching parts sometimes, I would highly appreciate if the internal model supports generate this tree structure: | | ^ instead of an elongated capsule that ruins support spots Thank you so much for making these awesome tools. They enabled me and millions of others unimaginable possibilities!
Good interview with a brilliant guy. Thanks! One comment for future interviews, regarding the audio quality: the sibilants are super loud and strident. I don’t know if it’s the mics or mic placement, or whether it can be fixed in post, but they are quite unpleasant. I suggest watching some Curtis Judd videos for tips on how to improve that.
Nice to know FormLabs has a leader who takes responsibility for mistakes made. That speaks to a company that can adapt and improve the culture to keep talent. Perhaps they will be able to keep their current and future Shanes with this approach.
I love the Form 3. I have many MSLA printers, and I'm constantly replacing FEP sheets. I can always count on the Form 3 to give me a print without a failure. Ultimate product would be the speed of the MSLA but with the low force of the Form 3 print bed. Flood illumination with masking, with low force removal print bed. Peal on a single direction swipe of the head to cut down time.
I am a mechanical engineer and am constantly impressed by the depth and range of Shane's knowledge. Can't wait to see the new shop. I have a small shop in my basement with a cnc router. It has been fun building it and setting it up the way I want. Great interview
It's interesting how Max is apparently more keen on having Shane divulge the details of his dissatisfaction than Shane is to do the divulging (Shane is likely conflict-averse). Max's persistence indicates to me that he wants him and his company to be held accountable for their flaws. I feel like if it were just a public relations tactic, he wouldn't persist with an explanation, and would be happy with a gentle, deflected explanation (i.e. RU-vid is better, as opposed to Formlabs being a primary motivator). If so, that is something I can respect. What (likely) remains is to incorporate this feedback into actual change and improvement. Good luck to all parties.
This conversation took guts. I watched several tier one R&D labs--DuPont CR&D, GE Research--collapse and disappear because management was completely unwilling to honestly discuss and address anything negative about the organization.
I'm 25. If there had been channels as amazing as Stuff Made Here or Mark Rober when I was in my teens, I wouldn't have hesitated to go into engineering. Heck, I still consider doing so after watching such wonderful projects and satisfying processes!
Love this! Sorta makes me feel like I missed out, currently studying industrial design but have always been more of an engineer at heart, but can't really see myself studying the way engineers do either xD. Dammit!
Love the transparency. As some said before: Talking openly about the reasons why one would leave your company and addressing the problems for everyone to see is a sign of really reflected leadership. Keep it up.
Amazing guy. So very intelligent and striving to always do better, to achieve more. I wish i had a fraction of his intelligence and drive. I look forward to seeing Shanes future.
What an amazing discussion/video. 2 smart people listening to each other and explaining intelligently. Can’t help thinking that this is the model your leaders in Washington and in my case Canberra could benefit from …
"ENGINEERING IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKE SOCIETY ADVANCED AND GREAT" I would like to see you workout the pyramid problem. Until then Advanced is a stretch. I don't mean this in any harm just curios as to how you think they did it, you are the most intuitive person i've ever seen. Also If You like extreme then build your self a boulder... Its like workout chess.
I've always been impressed by Shane's videos, and how well thought out and constructed his videos are, as well as his talent for actually building stuff and coding it, but damn I didn't know how much of a badass he is, and I'm only half way through the interview!
