Maxim Lobovsky

I made a 1m wingspan flying wing RC airplane that prints in a single Form 4L build in just a few parts. Print-in-place, flexural control surfaces for improved aerodynamics and reduced assembly. It actually survived 2 flights! 3rd one ended because of an unfortunately placed fence... Is this useful for anything?

Although I didn’t get a lot out of this summer in terms of learning (beyond figuring out I didn’t want to work at NASA or other lethargic engineering organizations), it was amazing for me personally: I met my wife, @nadcheng and early @formlabs employee @ianworld!

This summer marks 20 years since I did an internship with the NASA Robotics academy after my freshman year in college. It is a good time to reflect on the progress of robotics since that time. I’m optimistic about the long-term of all these categories, but anyone working on commercialization should be realistic about the timelines involved. Let’s see what the last 20 years got us: ------- Industrial Robot Arms 2006: ~1M operating worldwide, already 40(!) years into commercialization. 2026: ~5M operating worldwide, a CAGR of only 8%. Costs have dropped for entry level systems and collaborative systems are widely adopted, but they are still used roughly the same way. AGV/AMR 2006: Factories already used fixed-route tuggers, carts, pallet carriers, and automated forklifts—typically guided by embedded wires or magnetic tape. Kiva Systems got its first 30 robot warehouse running 2026: After being acquired by Amazon, Kiva/Amazon Robotics has gone on to install millions in warehouses. Also fairly widely adopted in factories. Home Robots 2006: iRobot was already 4 years into selling Roombas with 2M sold. 2026: ~25M home robots per year, primarily floor cleaning as well as a few other emerging categories like lawn mowing. Autonomous vehicles 2006: 1 year after 5 teams completed a 132-mile course in the DARPA grand challenge 2026 - early stage commercialization by Waymo and others in limited areas. Probably the biggest progress, of any of these areas. Took the full 20 years with ~$100B invested over a number of major efforts. Surgical Robots 2006 - Intuitive had been installing surgical robots for 7 years with >500 installed 2026 - Several other companies have entered the space covering a few procedures. ~2000 total installed per year. Clearly, regulated industries are… slow. Humanoids 2006 - We got to see NASA Robonaut that summer, one of the most advanced systems of that time. Other humanoids had been walking and manipulating objects for some time. 2026 - Incredible demos by a number of organizations and limited commercialization by Unitree largely for… entertainment. --------- The pattern is clear: impressive demos usually precede meaningful commercialization by a decade or more. If you want to build something that scales in the next decade, look for an idea that was demonstrated 10+ years ago.

@TonyWunderbar On call? Making sure the clankers don't rise up and start a revolution?

@MaxLobovsky Bad night to be on-call 😅

In SF for Open Sauce and hosting a meetup for interesting hardware tech people and Formerlings this evening. DM me if you want to come!

@jackwbackes We are focused more on where SLS and SLA materials are and also averages. Working on more data here...

@MaxLobovsky Filament is $20/kg. Bambu’s bulk price is $11.69/kg. Not $50.

People use vastly more stuff when it's cheap. It sounds completely obvious, but seeing the data mapped out across twelve orders of magnitude of volume and cost makes the trend incredibly striking. This is probably as close as you can get to a law in economics or manufacturing.

Blaming people who did reasonable things to advocate for themselves is silly. Focus on fixing the problems. 1. Right-to-work laws that prevent unions from forcing membership on employees. 2. Tort/liability reform to. The US spends more on a % of GDP basis than any other country.

Yep 3D printing can have a much bigger impact and the single biggest thing we can do to drive it is move that purple dot to the left (we focus more on total per part cost, not just material cost, but harder to get good data for that) @Formlabs is currently a low-profile success in this area. Working on some stuff that will turn us into a high-profile success... 😉

3D printing is so obviously the future of so much yet entirely slept on by the current reindustrialization movement because of some high profile failures before the industry reached either a sizable market penetration or technological maturity

@ChurchillWw I don't have hard data for this, but China's economy feels much more competitive than cooperative, compared to Europe

@MaxLobovsky Do you think the same happens in China?

Sort of makes sense that more socialist leaning Europe is better able to handle an economic activity that requires cooperation among single-source providers.

CastleFace returns.

True. We went with @BSchuler in our 2nd round because he bought a Form 1 on Kickstarter and told us how it compared to the other printers he owned (even though he offered a slightly lower valuation than other options we had).

3D AI gone wrong. I was trying to turn a photo of me and some friends into model with @MeshyAI , but I accidentally added a picture of a castle too and got this slop.

just another day at the office

3d printed micro drone to mow down mosquitos.

The custom plastic frame is made out of Tough 1500 v2 on a @formlabs printer. They're basically unbreakable. It's incredible to be able to pull small mods like adding the IR leds in less than an hour.

@CaitlinCloud9 @reindsummit That's the wrong question. x.com/i/status/20669…

“so how big is your factory?” @reindsummit 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

@andrewoetting @reindsummit Now I'm curious to see your talk...

@MaxLobovsky @reindsummit You’re right. For too long us VCs have been too humble about our rev / employee and rev / sqft metrics. That stops tomorrow !

I hear a lot of people at @reindsummit bragging about how many employees or sq ft they have. That's the same as bragging about how much money you are spending. You should be bragging about how much revenue you have and how _few_ employees or sq ft you have. On my way to Formlabs resin plant in Ohio 🇺🇸 that produces >$100M in revenue in ~30,000 sq ft 😎

@DeltaClimbs @reindsummit @grok can you explain what the hell this means?

@MaxLobovsky @reindsummit You know the Groucho Marx joke about the woman he has established as a whore with whom he is negotiating on price? I supposed they do say female intrasexual competition is savage.

@repkord @reindsummit True. We are profitable.

@MaxLobovsky @reindsummit Honest question: Isn't revenue just as much a vanity metric as the others? Profitability is really what matters long term but obviously talking about such things in polite company is kinda faux pas, not to mention handing a bit too much info to competitors perhaps.