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 a software-and-hardware bundle with us for radiologists. STERIS, the world's largest sterilization equipment vendor, partnered 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, shaped the packages, and 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".

For enterprise healthcare customers, the printer is the smallest part of the purchase. What they're really buying is the system around it: materials, service, training, and regulatory support. 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 more than 30,000 healthcare facilities worldwide. The system we'd built enabled over 100,000 surgeries and millions of clinically used medical devices across Mayo Clinic, the VHA, UCSF, GE Healthcare, and hospitals in lower- and middle-income countries.

A phone call to a clinically validated swab in about a week.

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 help 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.

Decker's team at USF Health created the initial design. Over a single week, USF Health, Northwell Health, Tampa General, and Formlabs prototyped it, tested it on patients for safety and comfort, and completed the validation work. The swab cleared FDA Class I Exempt status and matched standard swabs in testing. Formlabs was the manufacturing and regulatory partner, and I drove our side of it. At our Ohio facility, 250 printers ran continuously and produced up to 150,000 swabs a day, and we shared the design file with other institutions worldwide through a validated workflow we built in parallel. More than 100 million were eventually produced across 60-plus countries, and at its peak the swab program reached up to 48% of total Formlabs sales. A few weeks later, Formlabs became the first 3D printing manufacturer to receive an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, for BiPAP-to-ventilator adapters designed by Northwell.

The swab effort earned the team a USPTO Patent for Humanity, and it later became a reference model for the White House digital stockpile framework, an approach to distributed manufacturing the federal government adopted after the pandemic. I also hosted a webinar on supply-chain resilience with Jeff Immelt, former CEO of GE and GE Healthcare, and Max Lobovsky, the 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 early and spent a long stretch in the NICU. He was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. By the time I was looking at Formlabs, I'd already seen up close how expensive, slow, and inaccessible the assistive-device supply chain is 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.

None of this was a discovery. Industrial 3D printing had been around for two decades, expensive and enterprise-locked the whole time. What changed was the desktop form factor, the biocompatible materials, and the regulatory path. The work was recognizing the moment and moving first.

The other thing I came away with was a concrete sense of how much partnerships do that 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.