First dedicated medical hire at Formlabs. Built the vertical to a core pillar of a $2B company.

Industrial 3D printing was expensive, enterprise-locked, and slow. Formlabs broke all three.

By 2016, Formlabs had done for desktop SLA what the cost curves on LEDs and lithium-ion had done for off-grid solar five years earlier. Expiring industrial IP, commoditizing hardware, a much better user experience. And the clinical world hadn't caught up yet.

Hospitals were still buying $200,000 industrial printers that needed dedicated technicians. Anatomical models were getting shipped out to service bureaus and coming back days later. Formlabs could put a $3,500 printer at the point of care, with biocompatible materials, a workflow any engineer could run, and turnaround in hours. The piece the company was missing was someone who could translate that into the language of operating rooms and regulatory bodies, rather than makerspaces.

Spent the first months in operating rooms, not selling.

I joined Formlabs as the first dedicated medical hire. Before pitching a single deal, I spent months on the inside. Operating rooms at Mayo Clinic. Radiology suites at UCSF. VA hospital labs. The 3D printing program at Northwell Health. I wasn't selling. I was trying to figure out how surgeons actually made decisions, where a 3D model would actually fit into a clinical workflow, and where regulatory burden was going to kill a deal if we didn't address it up front.

It was the same observe-first method I'd used in Liberian clinics and Kenyan kiosks, applied to American hospitals. What I came back with was a clear picture of a market that wanted this technology but didn't know how to adopt it, didn't fully trust it at the point of care, and didn't see a regulatory path it could explain to its compliance team.

The strategy that came out of those months was about legitimacy. If we wanted hospitals to bring 3D printing into the operating room, we had to meet them where their procurement, regulatory, and clinical trust already lived. That meant partnering with the institutions hospitals already trusted, and getting Formlabs validated in their existing workflows instead of asking them to invent new ones.

Each of these partnerships was a first of its kind for desktop medical 3D printing. Materialise made Formlabs the first desktop SLA 3D printer validated in their FDA-cleared Mimics inPrint workflow. GE Healthcare built an exclusive software-hardware bundle with us for radiologists. STERIS, the world's largest sterilization equipment vendor, partnered exclusively with us on sterilization workflows for 3D-printed medical devices. Vizient, the country's largest healthcare GPO, put Formlabs into its catalog as the first 3D printing company ever listed.

The enterprise product was Form Cell. A fully automated 3D printing workflow that took printers, post-processing hardware, and software orchestration and packaged them for production environments. Priced between $100,000 and $150,000 per deployment depending on configuration. Roughly 30-40x the price of Formlabs' flagship printer. It was the company's first real entry into enterprise-scale customers.

I took Form Cell from early prototype through commercial launch. Market research, value proposition, pricing, sales collateral, qualification tools. I called the leads. I shaped the packages. I closed the first deployments, including the very first sale to Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York State, which Fast Company covered as a "World Changing Idea".

Enterprise healthcare customers don't really buy printers. They buy ecosystems. That framing drove two other product lines I led.

Elastic Resin. A flexible tissue-simulation material we launched in 2018 for surgical planning models and soft-tissue applications. It became the most successful material launch in Formlabs history. The sales volume alone confirmed what we'd been arguing for years internally: healthcare was a distinct customer segment, not an adjacent one.

Enterprise Service Plan. I built and commercialized Formlabs' first Enterprise Service Plan (training, repair, regulatory support, ongoing service), aimed primarily at medical customers. It generated hundreds of thousands in high-margin recurring revenue. More importantly, it gave enterprise procurement teams the confidence to sign in the first place.

By 2023, the medical business had reached a scale we couldn't have imagined when I started in 2017. Formlabs printers were running in 30,000+ healthcare facilities worldwide. The ecosystem we'd built enabled 100,000+ surgeries and millions of clinically-used medical devices across Mayo Clinic, VHA, UCSF, GE Healthcare, and hospitals in lower- and middle-income countries.

Concept to FDA-approved design in 12 days.

In March 2020, Dr. Summer Decker, Director of 3D Clinical Applications at USF Health Radiology, called me. She had been watching the nasopharyngeal swab supply chain collapse in real time. She had Formlabs printers already running in her lab. She wanted to know if we could design, validate, and scale a 3D-printed swab fast enough to matter.

The reason that call worked was that the infrastructure was already there. I'd spent three years building trust with healthcare providers, regulatory bodies, and distribution partners. Decker didn't have to explain what 3D printing was, or negotiate from zero. She could call someone who already spoke the language and had the relationships.

Twelve days later we had a validated design and the first FDA Emergency Use Authorization for any 3D printing company. Our Ohio facility, 250 printers running continuously, was producing up to 150,000 swabs a day. We freely distributed the design file to other institutions worldwide through a validated workflow we built in parallel. At peak, the swab program represented up to 48% of total Formlabs sales.

The swab program earned a USPTO Patent for Humanity and later became a reference model for the White House Digital Stockpile framework, an approach to distributed manufacturing the federal government adopted after the pandemic. In parallel, I hosted a webinar on supply chain resilience with Jeff Immelt (former CEO of GE and GE Healthcare) and Max Lobovsky (CEO of Formlabs). The fact that those two were willing to do it on a Formlabs webinar told me how legitimate medical 3D printing had become.

The mission and the personal motivation were the same bet.

My oldest son was born at 25 weeks, weighed less than a pineapple, and spent his first four months in the NICU. He was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. By the time I was looking at Formlabs, I'd already watched how expensive, slow, and inaccessible the assistive device supply chain was for families like ours. I believed 3D printing at the scale Formlabs was targeting could change that.

That belief showed up concretely in the work. In one of my first months at the company, an email arrived from Matej Vlašič, a father in Slovenia who had engineered his own 3D-printed ankle-foot orthosis for his son Nik (also diagnosed with CP) after 13 prototypes on a Formlabs Form 2. The orthosis cost under $15 in materials. The conventional equivalent would have cost over $5,000. Nik was walking within days.

Matej and I have stayed in touch ever since. Formlabs worked with him on materials (we moved him from Tough to Durable, which better mimics polypropylene), extended the patented workflow into other markets, and funded additional research. I never thought of the personal and the professional as separate threads in this chapter. They were the same thread.

The Formlabs work was a confirmation, not a discovery. Industrial 3D printing wasn't new in 2017. It had been expensive and enterprise-locked for two decades. What was new was the desktop form factor, the biocompatible materials, and the regulatory path. The work was recognizing the moment and moving first, not inventing anything.

The other thing I came away with was a more concrete sense of how much partnerships scale what direct sales can't. GE Healthcare, Materialise, STERIS, Vizient. Each of those relationships put Formlabs in front of markets a direct sales team would have taken years to reach, if at all. First-of-its-kind partnerships are how first-of-its-kind technologies get adopted.