Businessman

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.

We have always moved with this approach of sharing and educating people with what they can unlock with 3D printing.

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.

We raised $10 million in 2011. Our rule was, we wouldn't accept money from anybody we didn't want to have dinner with.

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.

I still have the first bottle opener I made on my MakerBot. Things you fabricate are things you care more about. I think there will always be people who go and buy crap at the dollar store. But I think it is cool when people craft things themselves.

I like to make things. It's been part of my identity since I was a kid.

My personal mission has always been to empower people to be creative. But the Holy Grail of a tinkerer is to make something that makes something.

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.

One of my psychoses is that I feel like I can do anything. Actually, I believe anybody can do and make anything, even things that don't exist. The making isn't the hard part; it's having faith. If you do only reasonable things, you'll never start your own business.

We wanted people to 3-D-print anything, not just more 3-D printers.

Learn how a 3D printer works. Get inspired. Make your own stuff. It is a wonderful time to be innovative. Connect things together. If you're into electronics, get an Arduino.

Most people don't feel empowered to make CAD models. The MakerBot Digitizer solves that problem.

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.

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.'

What I like on Kickstarter is when I see real innovation and I see people building something new. It makes me sad when I see things that are just the same technology; you aren't passing the technology forward.

For me, when you put a MakerBot in a school, you add a manufacturing education to the environment where I think we can really empower the next generation to compete in the global economy.

You learn so much by having customers and figuring out what they want and keeping them satisfied.

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.

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.