Bamboo Lab is a company most of you have never
heard of, making a product most of you have never
used. But we picked this company anyways because
they happen to be one of the fastest growing
hardware companies on earth. They went from zero
to undisputed market leader and from zero to
multi -billion dollar valuation, both within
the span of five short years. What Bamboo Lab
makes is Desktop 3D printers. Before they released
their first product in 2022, the entire industry
assumed at -home 3D printing was destined to
stay a fringe hobbyist niche. That everyday people
just weren't interested. Bamboo's founders didn't
buy that. They blamed the product instead. They
believed that the hardware itself was broken.
While everyone in the industry, even the users
themselves, accepted that 3D printing would always
be slow and somewhat unreliable, Bamboo saw this
as a massive opportunity. And it turns out they
were absolutely right. They applied precision
robotics to turn 3D printing into a push -button
appliance, offering consumers a combination of
fast printing speeds, zero -friction setup, and
rock -solid reliability. They easily won over
the experienced users while also attracting a
huge number of new buyers, growing the market
far beyond anyone's expectations. The reward
is a total domination of an industry, almost
overnight. In this episode, we're breaking down
who they are, exactly how they did it, but also
the fierce challenges they're now facing as the
new incumbent market leader. I'm Linda. And I'm
Pin. And welcome to another episode of Ascent.
start with who are the founders and how do they
meet each other? All right, on to chapter one.
Before Bamboo Lab is Bamboo Lab. This is always
how we started. So the first person that is of
particular interest, Dr. Tao Ye, or Dr. Tao,
let's just call him that way. Or later on, as
people from DJI would call him, Dr. Turbo. But
let's go back to Dr. Tao. Without Dr. Tao, none
of it would happen. And for some reason, I guess
he probably had his information removed on a
lot of websites, which is why you cannot find
his exact birthday. He entered college at the
age of 16. And somehow I have him on LinkedIn,
though I've never chatted with him officially.
But if you add up the math, he would be born
in 1986 and he was born in the countryside of
China. And rumor has it that the places that
he was growing up in. He had a bamboo forest.
He had a jolly childhood. That is pretty much
it. And at the age of 16, he entered the University
of Science and Technology of China, USTC, to
study astrophysics. And he did a brief exchange
to HKU of Science and Technology in 2005. You
know, in some universities in China, they take
young genius kid as the age of 16. not 18. And
he was one of those young genius kid who started
college at the age of 16. And typically, you
have to have a very strong suit in STEM majors
to be able to qualify to that kind of universities.
And after undergrad, he then received a master's
slash PhD degree in fluid dynamics, which is
astrophysics and more 3D modeling in Jacobs University
Bremen, Germany. where he won an Outstanding
Student Presentation Award from the American
Geophysical Union. And very interesting quick
plug, you know, Jacobs University in Bremen,
which is no longer the name of that school, is
currently called the Constructor University.
A what? Yeah. So it's a STEM kind of mechanical
engineering type of... It is. Well, yes, it is.
It is an international and private and residential
university located in Germany. offers a variety
of subjects, but mostly engineering. It kind
of is the private university that really champions
the sort of the maker society and, you know,
tinker around. And it has a lot of international
students. More than 80 % of the students are
foreign students. That's a lot. That's a lot.
Yeah. Well, it has, it received students from
more than 100 countries. Dr. Tao graduated PhD
there. And at the year 2012, he then went to
DJI to become a sort of a scientist -turned -engineer
because he believes that he is a lifelong maker.
And I try to look for different sources and piecing
together the information to get a sense of, at
the age of, you know, 20 -something, 2012, you're
graduated. How... could you possibly find DJI
at the time? Well, first of all, what is DJI?
DJI is likely the number one consumer -level
drone camera company in the world. In the world.
In the world. We will probably cover the whole
story in a different episode. Dr. Tao didn't
start with Bamboo Lab. He started with... dji
yeah he's actually a late comer to the 3d printing
industry yeah he's a super late comer a bit yeah
but dji will definitely cover this in another
episode but legendary company uh that started
in china not only dominated the industry i think
they actually propelled the industry to what
it is today absolutely so Dr. Tao only ever worked
for two companies his whole life. One is DJI
and the other one is Bamboo Lab. Lucky him. Yeah,
lucky him. 2012 is the time that DJI is still
quite small, less than 100 people. DJI founded
in 2006. And by the time DJI was the only super
well -known hardware company that is taking form
in Shenzhen. So there is a fair possibility that
the founder of DJI, Wang Tao Frank, interviewed...
dr tau himself and both of them have a lot of
sort of tinker maker uh spirit in them hit it
off decided to work together so he joined a promising
startup ish ish like not not a global company
as of today not at all he he joined a a mid -sized
yeah yeah mid -sized company with a lot of potential
but no one really at 2012 saw what dji it is
as today right yes because okay what what he
has done after he had joined dji became a true
milestone for dji and made him who he is today
and also made dji who DJI is today the drone
camera so what what is his trajectory all right
so Dr. Tao entered DJI in 2012 his early strength
was quite directly what he had studied aerodynamics
and motor design so he started off 2012 in DJI
as just an engineer and started working on drones
but drones back then didn't look like the drones
that we have today drone cameras it looked more
like like like this let me show you a mini helicopter
it's not even a mini helicopter it's quite big
to be honest that's the first generation of dji
drone camera as a real shrink -sized helicopter
it's very it's bigger than what we're seeing
today. Right. It doesn't look like it's that
foldable. But it's four -legged. Four -legged.
And it stands. Very different. Yeah. It's more
like a mini helicopter, four -legged, has a platform,
carries a camera. So that's the first generation
of DJI camera that Wen Taoyue joined. So he started
working on drones in 2012 to 2014. DJI had started,
has shipped this one product that's called Phantom
1. which is the four -legged one that we looked
at. As Dr. Tao moved on with the project, he
started to working on something that's more interesting
because he realized that, oh, but this is not
convenient though. How do I make this a, as you
said, one button, one push ready product? And
that is easier for everyone to use. So from 2014
to 2016, he gets put on a different... And that
project is called Mavic. It's still in the market
today. It's still in the market today, yeah.
Maybe it's called Mavic 2 or Mavic Pro. But Mavic
is the one that changed everyone's life. And
Mavic was the camera that got really famous.
And Mavic already looked like this. Which is
kind of what we're seeing in DJI shops today.
Yes, it is a boxy, small pack that... extends
and can fly and can navigate and can take photos
so that was mavic so did did dr tau actually
change the whole product direction of dji and
therefore you can actually attribute him to the
ultimate success of dji let me just quickly walk
through his whole trajectory in dji and then
we'll come back to that 2016 to 2019 because
of project mavic Dr. Tao then immediately get
promoted to senior product manager and gets to
work on Mavic 2. And Mavic 2 was launched later
on with Hasselbalch camera reinforcement. And
then he was then directly promoted to the director
of the whole department. 2019 to 2020, he was
continuously working on the newer generations
of Mavic. That's also the time that he... left
the company. So he left the company at a high
point. He didn't leave the company as, oh, like
DJI is shrinking. Not necessarily that. Dr. Tao
has one specific design logic, I think, answer
the question that you just had, which was the
sort of the King Midas touch of consumer electronics
that turn a four -legged mini helicopter into
a small mainstream product, which is he realized
that average consumer will not try to use a scrappy
product that breaks easily and is not convenient
for repetitive use. That sounds so familiar for
3D printing. The question becomes, as a good
product manager, how can you make any consumer
electronics unbox ready and plug and play, basically?
Of course, that's what consumers want. Right.
So while he was designing Mavic with the rest
of his team, The question was, can this drone
fly right out of your box as you, you know, as
you as you open like literally when you unpack
it, it flies out. So that was as a hardware product
manager. He is really obsessed with, oh, I just
want to make it very convenient for everyone.
If we want to design this, then we need to design
it. We need to really. Think about how do we
make it into a flagship product, not shrinking
the product, not making it cheaper, but to redesign
completely that fits the customer's need. There's
a really good product manager. I think it's a
very simple concept, right? If you're a product
manager, design your product based on consumer
wants and needs. But in reality, there's so much
things to consider. especially in hardware development,
that actually sticking by this rule and making
all the decisions based on this rule is very
hard. Excellent point. That's a really good point.
In DJI, they really champion an idea of if you
want to be one of the best of the best in hardware
product management, then you have to go through
the DJI School of Training because... Is that
an actual phrase? DJI School of Training? They
have the DJI Talent Formula. Should you have
these four skill sets, you will be able to dominate
the hardware market for whatever hardware that
you create. You have to, as a hardware talent,
you have to have the four. And which is why DJI
itself has spun off so many other... hardware
companies, right? The employees of DJ who left.
Exactly. Took these four, what do you call it?
The four... The talent formula for DJ. Talent
formula outside. And people call it, if you were
to be in DJ for one year, it will be the equivalent
of three years somewhere else. Are you just working
overtime every year? That too. But here's a formula.
Let's hear it out. Let's hear it out. Number
one thing is you can't just be a... single subject
matter hardware engineer. You have to be a full
stack hardware engineer, which is kind of a new
idea. With that, you need to understand the science
behind it, the software behind it, the commercial
GTM and supply chain. And you personally will
have to glue everything together. That's number
one. That's only number one. And number two is
you need to be able to build every product in
mind with the full commercialization cycles that
comes after that. Number two. You can't just
build. It's a lot of work already. It's a lot
of work. Number two, if you build something,
it can't sell it. That's a failed product, failed
consumer product, right? Number three is you
need to understand the supply chain. Okay, fun
fact, DJI is started in Shenzhen, which is kind
of the heart of supply chain within China. So
understanding the supply chain is a must. And
last bit, number four, if you want to be a DJI
engineering talent, then you have to be obsessed.
with using upon unboxing. Otherwise, everyday
user will not use your product every day. That's
the most important one. So then if he's so successful
in DJI, why did he leave? In 2020, Mavic has
already proved that it is a sellable product.
It's doing very well. And so of course, as a
maker, also as an excellent engineer, Tao Ye...
proposed in one of the meetings and obviously
this proposal is not just off of his head he
thought about this he had actually been discussing
with other fellow engineers for a while that
maybe 3d printing would be a good idea and this
is one year one year in advance and so they are
starting to pitch in that idea within the company
and he said he claimed in one of the news articles
that i've read said within five minutes of that
ideation pitching and meeting, it was vetoed.
It wasn't deemed to be a sustainable product
because everyone is rushing to the bottom in
terms of price. And it's very hard to use any
current product in 3D printing at the time. And
this is 2019. That is so wrong if we think about
it. But it is also very true. It reflects the
market at the time, the sentiment at the time.
So his ideas got shut down and he wasn't very
happy. And so that's when he started. He didn't
obviously leave the job, but he... But it got
him thinking. It got him thinking that... oh,
I still do think this is a very good idea and
I really want to be making this. What do I do?
And before, I guess, we move on to the next segment,
I just wanted to point out one thing. Leaving
DJI obviously is not an uncommon thing to do.
You would think that, oh, is Bamboo Lab the first
company that, you know, left DJI? There are actually...
Two dozen. Well, more than one dozen of companies.
That's a very long list. That's a very long list
of companies who have left DJI before. All the
way starting from 2014, there were robotics companies,
there were battery companies, there were different
drone companies. Bamboo Lab was the first 3D
printing company that had spinoffs from DJI.
Very interesting. Because it's not like the spinoffs
are all drone -related. It's actually other consumer
electronics. So you can apply the same principles,
work in Shenzhen with the supply chain, build
any consumer electronics. Exactly. That's exactly
right. And let's talk about the people who have
left the company. He didn't leave alone? No,
he didn't. He actually, he has an army who left
with him. There were four other people who left
DJI with Dr. Turbo. Number one comes Gao Xiufeng.
We'll just call him Gao. The CTO of Bamboo Lab.
PhD in automation, another PhD. He actually graduated
from the same undergrad with Tao Ye. So there
is a chance that they know each other from way
back. And he specialized in embedded software
systems and AI. And to be honest, he is known
as the person who is the largest product manager.
He has the biggest ownership within Dr. Tao's
scope. Oh, he reports to Dr. Tao directly. Yes,
on Mavic projects. So obviously you would take
your number one with you. Yes. Sorry, DJI. It's
a big hit, five people. Yeah. And at DJI, he
was the head of DJI's system engineering department
and leading R &D and technical solution design
across multiple major product lines. He was known
as effectively DJI's biggest internal project
owner in that era. To start in Bamboo Lab, he
famously said one thing. 2020 was an era that
3D printer was essentially a no -brainer. It's
just a motion platform. Users wanted to play
with 3D printing, but ended up spending their
time repairing and babysitting the machine. It's
a pretty good thesis. It's a pretty good summary
of 2020. Second person, Liu Huaiyu, who later
became COO of Bamboo Lab. Software management
background. And he used to work at Marvell Semiconductors.
Oh, actually, Gao Xufeng also had a brief time
working at a semiconductor industry. He was in
Marvell for six years. So the two of them, you
know, shared a working relationship before. And
in DJI, Liu Huaiyu, he was the product manager
for DJI's FPV, First Person View product line.
which is when your drone is flying, you can be
holding a pad that shows where your drone is
going. It's basically the screen monitoring system.
And he later became COO for Bamboo Lab, the operations
lead. Given his FPV and transmission background,
and also this is just me assuming, it is reasonable
to infer that although not confirmed, that his
DJI expertise around real -time video and data
transmission systems could be used to help Bamboo's
camera monitoring and cloud connectivity. That
makes sense. Yeah. The next person is called
Chen Zihan. He's the chief engineer and also
known as the gimbal guy. And gimbal is the handheld
pivot device that stabilizes the camera. And
so he has a lot of deep expertise in motion control.
and active stabilization algorithms. That's it.
And the last person is Wei. He is a senior engineer.
He contributed a lot in DJI's Mavic Air 2. He's
also a software system specialist. All right.
And I think he specializes in LiDAR, which also
is used in bamboo labs. Absolutely. So that's
all five of them. Wow. That's a lot of senior
people that Dr. Tao took with them altogether.
It's like everyone in the entire DJI for Mavic
Pro. And Mavic is their... The MVP product. Exactly.
For DJI. So DJI might have taken a pretty big
hit back then. Huge loss. So when they targeted
3D printing after leaving DJI, what did the 3D
printing landscape look like? Why were they so
convinced that this was the industry to go? Like,
what technologies do they use? Which stage were
their ads? Why did they pick a particular type
of 3D printers that, you know, extrude plastic?
Right. And actually, out of Linda and me, Linda
is actually a 3D printer owner. I'm not. But
out of all that, I did go do some... research
on YouTube and learn the various types of 3D
printing. Please share. I'm only like owner of
one machine. I think we'll rely the history part
with you. It is very interesting to study the
brief commercial history of 3D printing. So let's
start with that. There are three major types
of 3D printing technology. Well, obviously, with
the technological development, there are a lot
more right now. But for the ones that are fully
commercialized and being used in different scenarios,
it has longer histories are three main ones.
And the first one. Well, so my suspicion is,
did it start with military? However, the actual
first ever 3D printer was created in the commercial
space and it was not military. In 1981. A Japanese
researcher, his name is Dr. Hideo Kodama, of
course there's always a Japanese researcher that
started everything in the 80s, the prime time
of Japanese research, published a paper describing
a layer -by -layer rapid prototyping system,
but he never commercialized it. Until someone
whose name is Charles Chuck Hall, he patent filed
in 1984, stereolithography, SLA, and this guy
is still alive. Basically, What SLA is, is curing
liquid polymer resin layer by layer with UV light.
And this technology is created mostly because
of the frustration was real in Detroit's automakers,
you know, prototyping. What's the minimum amount
of time that you could turn a CAD design into
an actual physical prototype part? The fun fact
is, you know, actually in the... early 2000,
I did take a CADIS, computer -aided design class,
working in one of those computer labs. And you
have to hand snap to grid. Then that took a really
long time. Just think about that. And it was
way before that. I cannot possibly imagine how
much time it took them. And SLA was used to fix
that specific problem. It was a competition problem.
Automotive prototyping speed in the 80s. U .S.
automakers were losing ground to the faster -moving
Japanese competitors, partly because turning
a new dashboard bracket design into a physical
test part took weeks, right? And SLA was the
cure to that, and Chuck Hall, he commercialized
that, and he also created a company which is
called 3D System, which is going to come back
later in the story. That company allowed engineers
to print an overnight prototype for the automotive
industry. The pros of it would be high resolution,
a lot of detail, smooth, and you can achieve
very fine features, you know, like the smooth
figures. The con of it would be parts are usually
quite brittle, liquor resin is messy and toxic,
and it's weaker mechanically than the FDM parts
that we're going to talk about later on. Number
two, start it with military funding this time.
As Cold War era defense R &D spending ramped
up, Towards the end, agencies including DARPA,
Office of Naval Research, Air Force, and NASA
funded work on powder bed fusion method of 3D
printing. That sounds very complicated. That
technology, laser, became SLS, Selective Laser
Centering. And it was developed fully in 1986
by Carl Deckard and Joseph Eman at UT Austin.
And later, that eventually became... metal 3D
printing. You can use various powders to consolidate
that final printing product. And the military's
interest specifically was to drive the logistics
down. You're printing spare parts on demand near
the battlefield instead of stockpiling and shipping
them, which makes sense. And also remember, this
goes back to the Cold War era, so that's why
it was needed. And how it works is... laser selectively
fuses or centers it's like heating but not fully
melts the fine powder and It could be plastic.
It could be metal layer by layer inside of a
heated powder bed it's like a heated powder cubic
and Unfused powder around the parts stays in
place and act as sort of a support structure
So it just stays like that and once it's done
you can take it out, but it requires a little
polishing and cleaning It's like if you imagine
anthropologists digging up stuff from dirt and
like brushing it off, that's how you dig up the
SLS prints. Exactly. Oh, that is very accurate.
So the pros of it will be you don't need to have
a support structure. It happens in our strong
powder bed. It's very strong. It's durable. It's
functioning. It's good for complex assembly,
which is why I guess the military developed it
in the first place. But the cons of it is also
very obvious. It is very expensive. And the parts
would have a grainy, a matte surface finish and
requires more cosmetic polishing after everything
if you want to be using it for different purposes.
And powder handling requires equipment and safety
precautions, so it's slower. Not the most consumer
-friendly. Not at all consumer -friendly. And
then the last one is called the FDM. which is
the one that became more widely used later on,
and it was a complete commercial and DIY story.
It happened in a garage, of course. Scott Crump,
an engineer, was trying to make a toy frog for
his daughter, a toy anything. That's so cute.
I know, it's really cute. In 1988, using a hot
glue gun, loaded with a mix of polyethylene and
candle wax, which is plastic materials of sorts,
and extruding it layer by layer to build a shape.
It worked well enough. I can't believe it. I
want a dad that built stuff for me when I was
young. He realized that, oh, this works, that
he saw the commercial potential of it. And in
1989, him and his wife, Lisa, co -founded...
Stratasys and filed a patent for the process
that we just talked about and trademarked it
as fused deposition modeling which is FDM and
later competitors when they develop similar technology
they cannot even call it FDM because they trademarked
it so the competitors have to call it FFF, which
is Fused Filament Fabrication. It's more or less
the same thing. It's just something to prevent
you from getting sued while the patent is still
in place. Exactly. So how it works is exactly
what you think how it works. Thermoplastic filament,
aka mostly plastic, heated to a melting point,
and you extrude the melting plastic through a
nozzle, depositing materials layer by layer onto
a plate. And you're building a precision hot
glue gun printing. And that's how it's invented.
And back in 1992, a 3D modeler, which is Stratis'
first 3D printing commercial machine, was priced
around $130 ,000. That's a lot of money. Would
not buy that. It is more expensive than a computer.
a lot more expensive than a computer in 1992.
Yeah, back then it was not really for consumer
use. Their target market was industrial. Definitely.
The pros of it would be cheap, fast. You cannot
really hurt anybody with cheap plastics and parts
are generally pretty tough and it's easy to operate
and maintain. The cons would be it is the lowest
resolution of 3D printing of all. As you can
tell, there's no precision that comes into that.
It needs support. And historically, for whatever
equipment that you use, that's going to be needing
a lot of manual tuning and babysitting. The end
of the 1980s, mostly three separate technologies
all trying to solve one problem, which is why
does prototyping take so long? And, well, the
situation is most of these technologies were
very... patent locked and industry only. So one
thing on patent. FDM technology was under U .S.
patent. So like most countries, patent grants
an inventor a fixed monopoly period. in exchange
for publicly disclosing exactly how this invention
works so you can patent it you're the only person
who are using it but you you just have to let
everyone know that oh this is how i'm going to
do it which is melting plastic doesn't seem to
like to be like like transparency in exchange
for protection for monopoly protection exactly
and for u .s patent that time in the 90s is 20
years so in that 20 years It's non -negotiable.
It's not renewable. It doesn't depend on whether
your invention succeed commercially or not at
all. It's just a physical lock that starts taking
the day the application is filed and runs out
in 20 years. Scott Crump filed FDM patent in
1989. So that put the expiration date on October
30th, 2009. And when the clock ran out, this
patent will be released to... the public domain
and when it released to the public domain a couple
things typically will happen number one more
people will be building this hardware very likely
building and selling these machines because you
couldn't you can build but you can't sell before
the patent expires right there you go number
one number two once the hardware is in place
you therefore must need a software or at least
like an interfacing level that allows people
to contribute more things onto it, firmware designs,
that community will be developed. And number
three, as more people will be building hardware
and having that interface level, there will just
be a lot more people coming into the space and
do things around it. It could be, you know, SMB,
small manufacturers, or it could be hobbyist
kit sellers. Yeah, and that's exactly what happened.
So five years. before the patent expired even
a bit before that a lot of people had their eyes
on this technology and they were literally waiting
for it to expire and like you said they actually
created the terminology FFF to avoid this clash
while they develop based on top of this technology
so one thing that was really notable is a community
group online that popped up in 2004, five years
before the patent expiration. This is attributed
to the growth of FDM as is today. This project
is called the REPREP project, and it stands for
Replicating Rapid Prototyper. It started by a
mechanical engineering lecture at the University
of Bath. His name is Dr. Adrian Boyer. Dr. Boyer's
objective for this project is to produce a 3D
printer that can print a significant portion
of its own replacement part, which is where the
replicating name, REP, in the REPRAP project
starts from. When you can reproduce yourself,
that means you can make 3D printing cheap and
available for everyone. And he wanted to do this
because his university, and he was lucky enough
that he's in the university where the university
contributed to a fund that bought some high -end
3D printers that's worth 40 to 50K in one instance.
And he mentioned that there's one that's actually
a quarter of a million dollars. Yeah, and he
was using this, but he thought it was life -changing.
The first time you come across a 3D printer in
the early 2000s. So he thought it was a massive
breakthrough. He wanted to become cheaper and
make it available for everyone. Super altruistic
on starting this community. And he literally
said it felt like a writer moving from using
an old typewriter to a modern word processor.
So he knew this technology was going to change
the world, and he wanted it to be less expensive.
And he doesn't want it to be in the hands of
only corporate and large institutions. So he
wrote this vision down, posted on University
of Bath this website, and he also applied for
a tiny grant, which is the smallest grant he's
ever received, which is 27 ,000 pounds. And I
think he did this on purpose because he was trying
to prove that the grant that he needs to build
this machine costs less than the cheapest machine.
that he bought or the university bought yeah
and but then he didn't get count he mentioned
he didn't account for the ph student salary that
worked for him but regardless you know it's a
university project but a lot of people gravitated
toward this project hobbyists all over the world
And also because the philosophy was to make 3D
printing available for everyone, he decided that
it made just no sense to patent any of the design
that he published. So he intentionally released
every blueprint under something called the open
source GPL license. So this means anywhere in
the world could download his blueprints, even
modify them, build on top of them. and use, not
only use, but sell their own versions without
loyalties after the patent expires, obviously.
So it was all open source, university -based
project. And that built the foundation of FDM
printing as is today. Because his goal wasn't
to make money. It was just he wanted the conversation.
This type of license can help a project go viral.
Because you're almost supporting conversations,
supporting people building on top of each other.
And it did exactly that. So after he published
his initial design in 2007, which is a printer
called Darwin, and he named it after a famous
English biologist. So only one year after, someone
in the Reparac community used this blueprint
and successfully built his own Darwin. and printed
a working copy of itself. And this is 2008, right,
2008. The community then further developed over
the years. By 2010, Dr. Boyer took some of the
ideas and built the second version, an improved
version of the Darwin. He called it Mendel after
another biologist, the father of modern genetics.
And he picked these names because biology itself
is the study of things that copy themselves.
Cute. Yeah, I really like the name. To replicate
the lineage completely. And so this version,
the Mendo actually became the direct ancestor
of nearly every hobbyist printer that follows.
And among those in this community was a young
Czech contributor. His name is Joseph Prusa.
Oh, that rings a bell, surely. So if you do follow
the 3D printing community. In actually true open
source spirit, Prusa, Joseph Prusa, took Dr.
Boyer's Mendo design and he improved upon it
over several iterations, in fact, and finally
landed on a very popular machine called the Prusa
i3, which he also then open sourced the blueprint
in 2012. So at the start, he wasn't trying to
make money. But because it's so popular among
the community, it's often dubbed the 4 Model
T of 3D printers. For three years followed, he
sold a lot of parts to help others build their
printers. And by this time, the patent that Stratasys
owned have already expired. So also, other companies
or other individuals download his file, which
is for free, and started sourcing materials on
their own. And they could actually, with a very
low cost, create their own product and sell them
on the internet to other hobbyists around the
world. And this gave way to the first group of
3D printing companies, a lot of them based in
Shenzhen. Wow. It's almost like a gray area,
like the tricky time leading up to the patent
expiration. Right? It's tricky because Adrian...
But for the sake of benefiting everyone, open
sourced his project. But it was in a university.
It was non -profit. And as a result, other people
built on top of it. And because of this open
source license, anyone who wants to make a profit
then can come in and make a profit. And more
people came in. Right. Of course, because they
smell money. I mean, you can't blame them. So
a lot of companies were created. And so Joseph
Prusa, who originally created this design, and
he hasn't been monetizing it that much since
he published it, thought, well, if other people
are making money out of my designs. I should
do this, right? He officially and finally decided
to release what's called the original Prusa i3
kit. So he then sourced all the components put
together in a kit and then started selling it
in 2015, which is three years after he released
the design. And it was selling for 750 -ish US
dollars. So he started making these machines
himself. And this is after a lot of people started
selling them on the market already. For sure.
Different versions of it. Yeah, and I remember
his name can be found on YouTube. There were
a lot of 3D printing videos that's related to
Prusa, and it's titled Prusa Research. Yes. Yes,
that's right. Yeah, because when he originally
established Prusa Research, it was more kind
of R &D. We'll publish more blueprints. It's
only after around 2015 that he's really going,
I'm going to commercialize this, and I should
be. Right. So besides the college journey, Prusa
is kind of the OG in the 3D industry. It is,
yeah. Got it. And RepRap actually, there was
a spinoff project called RepRap Pro that wanted
to commercialize the same idea. Never kicked
off as much as Prusa. did in the end but and
today reprap isn't really an active project anymore
as you can imagine but what it actually left
behind is the foundation of this entire desktop
3d printing industry that we still sit on uh
which you know it's open source it's based on
uh the foundation that we want this to be in
the hands of consumers and not a selected few
corporates if you're Listening to the timeline,
Bamboo Lab is not here yet. Bamboo Lab does not
participate at all during this phase. I mean,
2009, Dr. Tao isn't even in DJI yet. Exactly.
So later on, I think Bamboo also goes by a slightly
different philosophy that ultimately, spoiler,
clashed with this community. The second importance,
which is I think less talked about, is the contribution
of this RepRap community to popularizing the
FFF or the FDM technology. Because you mentioned
there are three patents going on at the same
time, all commercializable after expired. Obviously,
the other two had other complications, but I
think RepRap actually contributed a lot in making
FDM, FFF the de facto one for consumer desktop
printers. At this point, if we were to look at
the group of vintage, I guess, can I call them
vintage? Vintage 3D printers, a .k .a. those
who develop in between the time 2009 to 2020.
There are a couple of them who tried, but they
more or less all ran into the same problem. So
at this point, actually, a lot of companies are
trying to commercialize, right, including Prusa,
which we've mentioned, and also RepRap Pro, the
commercial arm of RepRap, and a bunch of Chinese
supplier -turned -printer brands. There's, at
this point, also no patent protections, so why
did it take seven years for Bamboo Lab to pop
up? In reality, actually, a few of these companies
were successful in those day standards. So if
you look at Prusa, right, they sold over 10 ,000
machines per month. And Creality, which is the
Shenzhen -based startup, peaked around 870 ,000
in 2023. So they were selling, you know. Just
nothing at the scale of bamboo because bamboo
last year actually already reached 1 .5 million
units. So surpassing anyone in that era. And
they were making a very good margin. So what
drove this gap? We're talking about 2015 era.
It's really not. for your average consumer at
all. You don't buy a 3D printer expecting it
to work. In fact, you don't even buy printers.
You buy something called the kit and then you
build it yourself. It's like assembling your
own PC. The reliability is super low. There's
actually a lot of factors that can destroy a
print job. So one example, right? If your millimeters...
off on the print bed leveling your melted plastic
is not going to stick to the bed and that destroys
everything right or if that motor that moves
around to eject melted plastic somehow you like
touched it and it's off by a millimeter whole
print destroyed oh boy so there are a lot of
things that destroys prints so you don't actually
send your job like today and come back like 10
hours or five hours later And you see like the
finished product. So if you're interested. I
am. There is a YouTube video. It's actually titled
10 years ago, 3D printing was really hard. Wow.
Straight to the point is by the channel called
Teaching Tech. And there's so many things that
can go wrong. And if you do fail, there's this,
I really like the term. One of the type of failures
is if you don't have anything to extrude on top
of because something moved along the way, but
the 3D printer will continue to move because
it doesn't know something went wrong, right?
Because there's no monitoring system back then.
So then it keeps on printing and it just prints
on air because there's no support anymore. And
so the next day or a few hours later when you
come back, you'll see something called the...
A beautiful mess. A beautiful mess and it's turned
by the community spaghetti monsters. Oh, boy.
Which you can kind of visualize, right? And funny
thing, in China, spaghetti monsters, and we don't
eat spaghetti, obviously, so they're not called
spaghetti monsters. Noodle monsters. Exactly.
They're called chow mein, which is fried noodles.
Fried noodle monsters. Yes. Completely sidetracked,
but the conclusion is nothing kicked off because
it wasn't for the masses. It was for people who...
enjoy tinkering enjoy building and is willing
to sacrifice time and effort to build something
definitely so the reliability issue and for i
think a lot of the old users and even for the
users who wants to be taming 3d printers it can
be very intimidating yeah entry barrier quite
high you can not be able to assemble everything
and then you could have might as well generate
spaghetti monsters exactly for the first batches
and it will be a waste of all of your filaments
which Maybe not cheap. Yeah. So during this time,
actually, most of the headlines in 3D printing
was actually in the industrial and medical use.
If you ever come across news about 3D printing
during this time, it's like we printed 3D prosthetics
to help people with walking, or we printed 3D
cells. We printed even houses. They did concrete
3D printing on a very large scale, or 3D printed
cars. Airbus has a 3D printing arm for rapid
prototyping as well and for replacement parts.
So on the consumer end, all in all, it's not
really in the forefront of 3D printing. There
are actually, though, a couple of companies that
made some headlines. Unfortunately, they eventually
somehow failed, died off. And so one of them
is called MakerBot. the biggest cautionary tale
that everyone can learn from, which is kind of
the poster child of 3D printing in many ways.
Yes. It was founded, and of course, in 2009.
Rode right off of the patent expiration date
and sold 40 ,000 printers before 2013. And Stratis'
incomes acquired MakerBot for, not cheap, $600
million. Stratis' strategy was, if I can't be
the patent holder of FDM anymore, then I'm going
to buy the leader in FDM. So that's why they
acquired MakerBot. And after the acquisition
was made, they had one good year, 2014. It was
the peak before it collapsed again, because MakerBot
has shipped out the so -called smart extruder.
which obviously entailed reliable but ended up
being catastrophically defective. The 3D printers
were unusable for a lot of those who have received
them. And it was so bad there was a single bad
component that triggered this whole series of
nightmare. A class action lawsuit against MakerBot
slash Stratasys was filed in July 2015 alleging
that You companies concealed a known design flaw.
You know this is not working, but you keep selling
it. And as a result, CEO of MakerBot, Brie, or
Brett Pettis, which is a dude who looks incredibly
like Steve Jobs in many ways, and who was also
branded as the Steve Jobs of 3D printing. There
was a video of him. He's kind of the artist -creator
kind of style. He was ousted by the company completely.
And later, his successor, Jenny Lawton, who also
didn't solve this problem, was... else did and
there were mass layoffs and manufacturing was
completely outsourced to china to china and the
closure of makerbot retail stores was also done
at around that time the damage was so big that
caused the parent company which is strategists
having a 938 million quarterly losses just because
of the acquisition of MakerBot. Wow, they not
only paid 600 million for them, they continue
to pay 900 plus every quarter. I know, I know,
yes. So it's not a good acquisition. And so by
October 2015, MakerBot has to continuously lay
off the staff member and then more layoff and
more layoff. So it was proved, at least for Stratasys,
that... This is for the hobbyist market isn't
sustaining. And we tried. We didn't make it.
We're just going to leave it as this. And that
was your losses. Yeah. And then that was MakerBot's
experience. And another field example, we mentioned
3D systems before, right? It was a company filed
by Chuck Hall, which is the SLA patent holder.
He also tried and he launched a. company called
cube within 3d systems in january 2012 and he
did a bunch of things also trying to recruit
will .i .am as the chief creator officer in 2014
however after trying to sell this to hobbyist
and he came to a very sad conclusion which is
this kind of thing well first is the reliability
thing and if you want to solve that and continuously
sell more machines and then when the market isn't
ready There is no way to improve your profitability
out of that. So very quickly, he decided to exit
that business. And then the consumer division
of Cube was proved to be a money loser. And they
dropped that business in total. And then there
were a bunch of business who were like that.
You probably also have a few other examples as
well. Yeah. So, well, I mean, one thing this
whole influx of... people trying to commercialize
on consumer desktop printing actually helped
drove the industry in China. Because you mentioned
how MakerBot ended up getting everything created
and made in China. A lot of these parts are created
in Shenzhen. So the whole, starting from the
rep rep community, then to MakerBot, Cube, everyone
who entered. Imagine where they're getting their
printheads, their print beds, their circuit boards,
their stepper motors. A lot of them will be in
Shenzhen. And so the demand for supply has been
just felt throughout Shenzhen. And some of the
suppliers realize, hey, I can sell you parts
for minimum margin, and then you make the profit.
But then why don't I just slap, put the printer
together, slap my own logo, and then sell it
direct to consumers, make that margin, and I
can sell it for cheaper because I'm closer. to
the suppliers. So there's a bunch that kind of
came up around that era in Shenzhen as well,
and they compete on price, not exactly quality.
And that's how, in general, China manufacturing
in general, that's how it works, right? You start
by copying, start by doing cheaper, and then
slowly you upgrade the quality. And they have
the advantage of not relying heavily on R &D
because of open source, the instruction. and
the blueprints are free to grab online. They
can invest in some R &D to get... a slight competitive
advantage. And that's what some of them did.
And at that time, the VCs in China are actually
more than happy to pay because they also look
at the picture and they see the combination of
a high market ceiling, a recently expired patent,
and cheap parts available in China. So all those
combined, the VCs are like, take my money. Take
my money. So within that period, a company called
Creality was created in 2014, who was... number
one before bamboo got into the market, and they're
currently still number two and recently IPO'd.
Can I just add, to be honest, I think for consumer
electronics, the competitors are never overseas.
It's usually the competitors back home. You always
have to watch out for that. Like, for example,
DJI Acer 360 and so on and so forth. But yes,
so Creality started 2014. Because Chinese manufacturing,
China is the hub of especially consumer electronics.
So it's hard to compete on price, at least. Another
company called Elegoo started in 2015. I hope
I pronounced that right. Another company called
Anycubic also started in 2015. And together,
Creality, Elegoo, Anycubic, and Bamboo are the
top four that dominates the market today. 96
% combined market share. What about that 4 %?
I think Prusa holds some of it. But you're right.
They do need to compete in Shenzhen and not elsewhere.
But even with a head start, you asked, why didn't
something kick off in 2015, 2016 when everyone
got into this? So many money were put into this.
Why did they have to wait for Bamboo Lab in 20...
wait for a bigger competitor to show up exactly
like what happened during this time so next let's
talk about how bamboo did it and why did it take
so long so going back to the beginning of bamboo
lab's own story in 2020 is when the five founders
walked away from dji Well, for the first 22 months
of this company, it isn't all that exciting.
And in fact, it's a little boring. And it also
coincided with the time of COVID. So what's better
than doing R &D during COVID time? Because you
can't leave the house. There's not much of an
option, right? Yeah. So it took in total about
22 months. And they just kept pouring more engineers
on the project. It start with five and it quickly
multiply into at about 100 engineers. And those
100 engineers burn through seven full prototype
iterations by DJI engineering standard. And they
run hundreds of physical tests. And yes, you
guessed it right. They used up three metric tons
of printing materials before anything can be
allowed to ship. That is a lot of plastic. High
standards. High standards. They will not make
something that is not... competable and not i
guess frankly perfect before they can figure
out that this is new flagship of 3d printing
And then comes X1 and X1C. Yeah, so they were
in complete stealth mode, trying to kind of hide
their development from everyone, actually. Fun
fact, it's very easy to hide during COVID time.
Which actually played to their advantage. It's
encouraged. So they finally broke stealth mode
in May 2018. 22 is when they launched the x1
series on kickstarter and kickstarter is actually
the forum where a lot of 3d printing companies
launch their product and so this is an unknown
startup at the time right they were under stealth
mode nobody knew about them And they were promising
super fast printing, high success rate. And they
were using buzzwords on their Kickstarter campaign,
like AI, neural processing unit, automated calibration,
just all those words thrown at users who've been
waiting for someone like this. And when you were
looking at it, you're like, is it really necessary
to throw all of these words into one 3D printer?
Let's see how it goes. But they literally researched
all the pain points and basically used those
pain points to... formulate their Kickstarter
campaign message. And it worked, right? So for
$1 ,000 to $1 ,500, they're selling this machine
that they claim to be revolutionary. And Kickstarter
has seen a dozen of revolutionary 3D printer
campaigns that crashed and burned before. Oh,
definitely. Yeah. So ultimately, what they're
promising sounds so enticing that 5 ,575 backers
rolled the dice that month and paid. The campaign
actually ranked over just about $7 billion during
the span of only one month. And it's only the
third most successful 3D printing hardware campaigns
at the time. So ironically, the second one was
by Anker, another Chinese consumer electric company
producing chargers, and they want to try their
hands at 3D printing. That ultimately failed.
That specific campaign ultimately failed. And
two months later, in August, backers received
their shipments. Two months later. So this is
why you're hypothesizing that this is just a
marketing campaign, because typically how Kickstarter
works is that you. publish something and say
hey we're prototyping we're making it please
support us and then you update on a regular basis
saying that oh here's the newest prototype here's
the updates we're developing it you wait for
a few months before you do the first shipment
so what bamboo did is i developed everything
actually created enough machine for the shipment
then i published it Then I went out of stealth
mode. And then immediately when I got the orders
within that span of a month, I ship those shipments.
So it's all planned, right? And soon enough,
as soon as the backers got their machine starting
from August, An overwhelming amount of gadget
reviews started populating on various places,
mainly YouTube. And it just sent a shockwave
throughout the entire industry. And if you go
back to watch the early YouTube reviewers talking
about X1, there's one thing that they echo over
and over again is probably the main selling point,
which is this machine was fast. It's not marginally
fast. It's like two to three times faster. And
that's a huge pain point for a lot of... yeah
users back then you kind of you wait for five
hours for like something tiny to print or like
a spaghetti yeah or or a spaghetti and then you
wait for another five hours to print another
spaghetti monster it must be really frustrating
to see your 3d printer like spit spaghetti and
then there's no way for you to stop it effectively
and it burns your hand if you try to touch the
nozzle which you have had that experience And
yeah. And so I think when people bought X1 and
have it in their houses, maybe their expectations
were quite low. Oh, if it crashes and burn, I
won't be surprised. Yeah. But it didn't. It didn't
for the most part. I mean, OK, just a caveat.
As a bamboo owner, there's still crash and burn.
But the rate of crash and burn is much lower
than the, you know, earlier 2022. other branded
printers. And the opportunity cost is low because
it prints fast, it feels fast. So anyways, there's
two things I think that actually made the difference
of why they're printing so fast. Remember, you
talked about one of the guys that left with Dr.
Tao, whose name is Chen Zihan. He's the gimbal
guy. So he actually leveraged his knowledge from
DJ on how to stabilize cameras into the desktop
3D printing space. And he did that by using sensors
to measure the mechanical vibration of rapid
movements of the two head. And then he would
then use the motor that's actually already. in
the 3D printer to offset and actively cancel
out that vibration. Ooh, algorithm. So minimize
vibration from the printer by using what you
already have, which is the motor. It optimizes
the output. Right, and what they've done is they
eliminated the printer from shaking so much when
the printhead goes faster, which allowed the
printhead to go faster, which allowed the print
time. to be faster. Whoa. Positively reinforcing.
Good engineer. So taking something from DJI gimbal,
completely turning it, applying it, somehow use
existing parts that's on your machine anyways.
It's just very clever. Yeah. And it's who would
have thought like the one thing that makes a
huge difference in 3D printing was coming from
a gimbal engineer. Right. And there's much more
that they've used. So the second thing that helped
the printer move faster is the clever use of
conveyor belts. So at the time. Pre -bamboo,
the norm for 3D printer is to use three conveyor
belts for each of the XYZ accesses. So that resolved
in a design we often call bed slingers. how it
works is that the printhead is attached to a
horizontal bar that can move the printhead left
and right so that horizontal bar with the conveyor
belt moves it left and right that bar then is
attached to a rectangular frame most of the time
and that rectangular frame then allows the bar
to move up and down so you got the left right
movement the x -axis movement the up -down movement
which is the z or z -axis movement taken care
of But there's no front and back motion for the
print head. And that had to be done by the print
bed, the bottom layer that needs to take care
of the front and back, which is why printers,
the print bed needs to sling front and back back
in those days. And you can imagine when you're
trying to print and your base, your ground moves
front and back. you can't print that fast. You
can't. Yeah, because it shakes. It feels like
a grandma. Don't break. Yeah. And so that's how
it got the name bed slinger because the print
bed slings, right? And bamboo didn't want this
for the X1 because they want the X1 to be flagship
and they want it to be wowing everyone. So it
can't use what everyone else is using in the
industry. and so what they've adopted is something
called the core xy mechanism and i want to note
that they didn't invent this this again like
everything else is open sourced and they just
copy the design and they can copy it because
it's open source and there won't be any infringement
issues so the motor then in this design is now
attached to a much more sophisticated conveyor
belt system so it's just not one way times three
right so if you if you're interested i'm not
going to explain the intricacies if you're interested
this has a much longer conveyor belt system that
allows the printhead to move left right front
back and diagonally so it takes care of all the
x y movements on a flat surface so the the bed
doesn't need to sling front and back, what the
bed only needs to do is go up and down. And if
you think about, just envision how 3D printing
works, the left, right, front, back actually
moves a lot more because in each layer, your
printhead moves, right? The up -down movement,
it's only one per layer and minimum movement
of a few millimeters. the Y movement is then
attributed to the print bed or that significantly
contributed to lower vibration and lower likelihood
of a print bed or printing failure. I hope that
makes sense. If it doesn't, YouTube is there.
So on top of the speed improver, which is huge,
right? They also did a couple of other things.
One is they're practically plug and play. So
going back to the DJI philosophy of I want this
machine to come out of a box and just print.
There's a few setups, but pretty much plug and
play. There's something called the automatic
material system, which you no longer have to
manage changing color halfway manually for a
print. It just feeds the printer automatically
and switch between filaments, which actually
uses a very simple piece of technology called
the RFID. which is you know our batch to go into
the office right yeah it just scans the different
filament and understands which color which texture
it is and then it would automatically pull that
filament into the nozzle yeah interesting nothing
you know super fancy just like core xy you know
it's already there they decided after so many
rounds of testing that this is the best system
the other thing is also DJI adopted slightly.
It's the LiDAR, the micro LiDAR. So in DJI, it's
you're scanning surroundings for your drone.
Here, you're scanning the surface of your first
printed layer to make sure that it's smooth.
And if it isn't, you pause the print. Using LiDAR
was a bit surprising for me because LiDAR in
modern day technology all around us is typically
like geospatial analysis, autonomous driving
and all of that. It is being on such a micro
level on just a plate of 3D printing. Wouldn't
have thought that they're actually applying like
some really high level technology into one piece
of well -designed machine. It's almost like designing
3D printing, but like robotics. Yes. Yeah, it
feels that way. Yeah. And something else they've
added to the printer that's also a technology
that existed. So they added a camera. And printers,
other printers have cameras too, but they added
a camera and embedded kind of AI into it so that
you can monitor your print. And if it doesn't
look like what it should be printing out, also
alerts the system. So a lot of it is actually
software builds as well after they managed to
figure out the hardware. So all in all, it feels
like if we're talking about it in hindsight,
it's... Technology isn't that difficult, right?
And that's why a lot of their competitors actually
copied what they have. But to use that two years
of stealth mode and understanding how they fit
together and putting in a piece of machinery,
they've managed to do what the entire industry
of hundreds of companies wasn't able to figure
out for the past seven, eight years. And that's
what made the difference. Yeah. Stitching everything
effectively and delivering and, you know, 90
% ish ready product to, to the market. And it's
very well designed. People didn't see that. Yeah.
Yeah. And. I want to kind of read a blog post
that Bamboo posted earlier this year when they
sunsetted X1, but for a better version of the
products. So they said in 2022, the desktop 3D
printing was for the patient and the forgiving.
Calibration before every print was a ritual,
not a routine. Very poetic. Hours spent tweaking
parameters. The first layer was an act of faith,
not creation. This is really funny. The market
was dominated by bed slingers. CoreXY existed,
but as an alternative. Multicolor printing was
technically possible, but can stretch into a
week -long project. Enclosed chambers were available,
but only in machines costing thousands of dollars
aimed at professionals. BambooLab hacked all
of this into a single device and priced it in
a way that forced the entire high -end segment
to rethink its strategy. Since X1, CoreXY has
become the industry standard, enclosed chambers
have gone from luxury to expectation, and bamboo
extruder design has been copied by competitors
after competitors. I really like this last sentence,
which is imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
And this 3D printing industry has never flattered
anyone so unanimously. They are obviously publishing
their own blog posts. So a lot of, you know,
lights is put on the X1. In reality, this is
what happened. X1 made a game changer device
within an industry that have already been accustomed
to slow and unreliable printers. And for that,
they get rewarded in terms of market share and
revenue. And customer lifetime value and a lot
of faith. Exactly. So with that momentum, they
didn't stop. They immediately start to build
and release more product to capture even more
of the market. So in November 2022, there is...
right after they shipped the X1 actually, they
announced the P1P. So the P series, which is
open frame high speed printer at a lower price
point. And so the P series stripped out some
things like side panels and color touchscreen,
but it kept the main thing, which is speed. And
quickly after that came around the entry level
A series, which is A1 and A1 mini in September,
2023. So about a year after. was released, the
A1 Mini, which is their starter machine, launched
at $299, which is kind of a genuinely impulse
buy territory for someone who wants to try out
a 3D printer, but isn't really into tinkering,
right? It's cheap enough so that you can be like,
oh, maybe I'll try it out and see what's up.
And that's what I did. So A1 actually, A1 and
A1 Mini is what's been credit for a huge jump
in their company revenue because the X1 targets
OGs, people who have been in this industry and
users and they were trying to wow them and getting
them to post on YouTube. P is somewhat also targeting
people who have used 3D printing before. The
A series is... Going after a completely new set
of customers and therefore expanding the market
to people like me who would otherwise not purchase
a 3D printer. They recently updated the H series,
which is the super luxurious and professional
ones for, I guess, the users if they want to
upgrade or for those who are into professional
use who can just naturally. you know, upgrade
into the H series. Yeah. So before the H series,
they actually paused for a year in product releases.
So you'll notice that in 2024, they didn't release
any new product. It was quite quiet when it comes
to new launches. And H was actually published.
Last year. 2025, yes. Yeah, adding kind of laser
cutting and drag knife cutting kind of capabilities.
So what happened in 2024 is rather than pushing
out more new products, they took a pause and
they opened R &D centers in both Shenzhen and
Shanghai. They also opened international branches
like US, Europe, and Japan. And this is that
year that bamboo just... kind of stopped being
a hot Chinese startup and just became a generally
global company. And it's also that year that
they surpassed Creality to become the number
one 3D printer brand in terms of both market
share by revenue and market share by unit shipped.
Wow, interesting. In the year that you don't...
publish any new product don't ship anything new
you become number one you make the sales you
deliver the sales and i think i suspect there's
a little bit of a manufacturing jam in terms
of productivity or production capacity i'm not
sure if they completely anticipated the level
of demand that they will get with the a1 release
right I guess the only parallel that I can think
of, well, two of them, with the publishing of,
with the shipping of X and P and A and then to
H would be, well, there is Tesla. Tesla did ship
out the Roadster first, which is the flagship
of its kind. And then it tried to strip out of
a few more expensive things and created a, you
know, mass. friendly version, which is the Model
S. And later on, they created the version with
the cheaper battery options, which I guess could
be the parallel of Series A. And I guess that's
also in iPhone. You have the regular iPhone.
Oh, and then you have the iPhone Pro, and then
you have the Pro Max, and you have all of that.
So it's kind of very similar hardware product
design logic that they follow into, and it's
very clear. Yeah. So by the year 2025, they are
the market leader. They're number one. Yeah.
And one thing I want to go back and notice that
something else they did also, I think it's an
amazing play is 2023. They launched something
called Maker World, which is a community that.
people can publish their models and can download,
right? And by now, they claim that MakerWorld
has claimed has crossed 10 million monthly active
users. That's a lot. Yeah. And not only that,
there's an 83 % one -year retention rate. So
for context, that's very unusual. That's very
sticky. For this kind of platform, for most content
communities, you don't expect people to come
back continuously during the first and even the
second year of using it. You expect losing at
least half of your community after a year. So
83 % is nothing short of amazing. They do offer
a lot of incentives that they pay out of their
revenue for people to stay on it. But the amount
of models, which is about 2 .6 million as of
end of last year, year that's been posted on
there for other people like me to download for
free and sometimes we can also click on something
called boost and bamboo will pay the creator
yeah and so that number really jumps out and
that's one of the reasons and i think that's
actually a genuine competitive mode that they've
created because 3D printers can be challenged
and we will see how they are getting challenged
right now. But having the community of 10 million
people, it's hard to rebuild. Right. You're basically
attracting all the capable creators to be on
your platform first and then they will continuously
produce and you'll reward them and they will
attract more people who want to use and download
the models and recreate or just print out of.
their own laptop. And for that, I think the community
itself, it really regenerates. Yeah, it reinforces
the hardware and the hardware reinforces your
community. Yeah. But it is worth remembering
there's over 100 companies in China trying to
get that piece of the pie. So the competition
within China is super fierce. Yes. Even though
bamboo is now the As you can imagine, a lot of
people would have their eyes on the pie. And
remember, bamboo did grow this user base. So
with a growing market and the fact that some
of the technology we talked about is actually
easily replicable. It's only the same village
or the same factories. Imagine someone saying
that, hey, I want a piece of this pie. And one
company I wanted, there's a lot of company targeting
this area, but there's one company that actually
made a bit of a dent last year that I do want
to comment on. They're called Snapmaker. They're
founded in Shenzhen in 2016. So during that era,
which is about four years before Bamboo was even
founded. An older incumbent. Previous incumbent.
And they actually did gain a pretty good reputation
on Kickstarter. So they're pretty decent. 3D
printing company. 2017, they launched a campaign
on Kickstarter and another one on 2019. These
two campaigns together raised $10 million, which
is actually higher than the $7 million that Bamboo
raised for X1. If I had met Linda way back and
started Ascend in 2019, we would be making an
episode on StatMaker, not Bamboo. That's true.
Because they did $7 million on the second, right?
They had a hiatus after the 2019 release. They
came back to Kickstarter in 2025 of August, so
August of last year, with something called the
U1. And this campaign raised over $20 million.
So $20 million is three times of what Bamboo
X1 pulled in. And so the threat to Bamboo that
U1 created, actually, is that UN managed to solve
a longstanding pain point of bamboo users. So
they kind of looked at the bamboo user forum
and said, what could we solve and improve upon?
And one of the thing is multicolor printing.
So I talked about how bamboo solved the automatic
feeding, right? But at the same time, there's
a lot of material and filament wastage with bamboo's
version of multicolored printing because in bamboo's
machine, there's one nozzle. So when you change
a color, you have to extrude everything from
the first color, cut it, and then fill in the
second color. But then you can't just print immediately
because there's color mixing with a bit of melted
plastic. So you waste some. So depending on what
you're printing, sometimes you can waste more
in terms of grams. on a print than you actually
produce. So a lot of people are complaining about
this. My personal experience is that I gave up
on using bamboo for color printing because of
the wastage. So I just do single color prints
right now. Snapmaker, being super smart, tackled
this problem with four extruders. So each one
of your filaments. It's very intuitive. Right?
Again, a very simple way of solving this, but
the trade -off is your machine needs to fit for
extruders on the side. But because it solved
this big pain point that Bamboo has created for
its users, a lot of people thought that this
is, you know, something I'm willing to contribute
to, and therefore the $20 million raised. And
that... actually send a round of panic within
bamboo and we believe it send a round of panic
because just one week later after the kickstarter
initiated on august 26 bamboo published a blog
post saying that hey you guys wait it's coming
like we're doing this it's coming please wait
it's coming in november um and so they basically
said hey we're releasing our next product it's
called the htc it has the similar different but
similar technology reducing waste so if you're
willing to stick around maybe just don't purchase
that and wait for our product. But it was a defensive
move because they just released something a while
ago. And so the smart way, if StatMaker haven't
released the U1, they would wait for a few months
before the announcement because that kind of
cannibalizes your current product. So they were
kind of caught off guard and they published that
and managed to help a little bit. But at the
same time, U1 is $800, $900. The H2C, which is
a product Bamboo wants to release in the future,
is $2 ,000. The difference is not because of
the wastage part. It's because H2C is actually
the higher -end product. So it does other things
like laser cutting. The additional functions.
It's not a stripped -down version. Right. But
because Snapmaker took a... took this advantage.
They got free publicity through comparisons on
YouTube of creators comparing the U1 and the
H2C when they eventually released it. And all
of the companies that we've mentioned thus far
are 3D printing companies who are in FDM. I think
right now there are companies who will just,
you know, stand up and say, you know what? FDM
seems to be pretty saturated. You guys doing
what you're doing, we're going to do something
else. So there are new companies doing other
printing. So within FDM, all of the incumbents
are likely within the names that we talked about,
right? Yeah. And funny you've mentioned that.
We did not plan this transition at all. But you
talked about resin printing, right? And how it
wasn't so popular because slightly... Toxic.
Toxic. And UV light. UV light. And there wasn't
a resin printing equivalent in RepRap to make
this type of printers more popular back in the
days. Because it wasn't a slicer style. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. It was a little bit more, I guess,
industrial if you look at how the machine is
made. But the technology is friendly for desktop
3D printing. And the quality of resin printing
is very high. True. But one of the downsides
is that no one managed to really crack color
printing. Color resin printing, ooh, that would
be hard. Exactly. If it's liquid or dumped in
one place, then it's liquid in one color. Exactly.
And that's what Formlabs did, which is an MIT
spinoff company that was created out of MIT Media
Lab. But you were going to say someone cracked
that problem. Yes. Oh. And someone is called
Formlabs. And I'm going to, before I mention
this someone. The technology itself is called
inkjet printing or material jetting. Does that
sound familiar? That sounds like HP. Right? And
HP exactly has this printer. So the idea of inkjet
printing, you probably already envisioned this,
which is, you know how we have 2D color printers?
Yeah. So instead of printing in ink, you just
jet out thin layers of resin. Oh, you color the
surface? You color the surface. So it's like
thicker than your 2D prints. Okay. And then you
immediately put UV light on it to harden it.
Doing like a coating layer on a plastic thing.
Well, it doesn't have to be a lot of plastic.
So it can just be a bed. Gotcha. And then you
print a layer of color. The color is just like
maybe a tiny thickness. Immediately harden it.
And then print another layer, print another layer.
So the same idea as FDM in a way, but you do
the inkjet. Wow. And this thing was actually
patented. Obviously, because it's revolutionary.
This thing was patented by a company called Object.
And Object was later acquired by none other than
Stratasys. Of course. Yes. And Stratasys being
the industrial powerhouse in 3D printing, they
actually created and trademarked this technology
under the term PolyJet. And PolyJet is a printer
the size of my bathtub. Wow. Yeah, and it costs
tens and thousands of dollars. And so naturally,
there's no machine really released on the consumer
front. But this patent expired a few years ago,
right around when Bamboo Lab started. And if
someone can make this a consumer -friendly product...
they could probably revolutionize 3D printing
just as how bamboo did it for FDM, right? Absolutely.
Because this thing, you can imagine, is a game
changer. It has color. Yeah. And guess what?
It's not only color in terms of like bamboo for
filaments at a time. It's every color on the
spectrum kind of color. And just last month,
and it's great that we're recording this today,
just last month, a startup called Haygears launched
the desktop version. Yes, on Kickstarter. Kickstarter
is where everyone launches their printer nowadays.
And I checked this morning because the Kickstarter
is still ongoing. And I'm actually sincerely
thinking about getting one of these. Well, yeah,
if you notice that Linda is really like if she's
checking something more than two times, that
means she wants to buy it. I know, I know. But
please stop me. It costs like $3 ,000. There's
still 29 more days to go in the campaign. Now
they have about 3 ,000 backers already. And because
the average price is much higher. It's $12 .5
million generated. Wow. So legit competition,
right? But we don't know. There's a handful of
videos on YouTube of people who have already
received the pre -release version. But there's
not that much kind of reviews about how this
printer is. But I'm feeling positive based on
the reviews, but also knowing that the reviews
are likely paid for by hackers. You know, Bamboo
is a conclusion. Not only have to watch their
back from Creality, Anycubic, and Elegoo. This
is the time we mentioned that Elegoo is now backed
by DJI. It's interesting how your former employer,
which you walked out, now backs your competitor.
Well, there was only one thing that I wanted
to add about Eli Gu and why DJ has to back it.
In 2025, and it was November, so Tao Ye posted
a very long sort of... piece on his WeChat moments,
which is kind of like the Twitter. And then we
all check and talking about his former employer
and criticizing Wang Tao Frank, which is the
founder of DJI. And he was basically explaining
why Eli Guru was competing unfairly because like
in the contract, it has a lot of clauses that
was kind of targeting Bamboo Lab. And he was
saying that this is the right way of competing.
And he was quoting something that Frank Wong
said before Dr. Tao has left DJI. And Frank famously
said that, oh, you can't let your competitor
get the money and compete in the product and
the talent with you. That will be the biggest
trouble. That was when Dr. Tao was still in DJI.
And because... DJ didn't want to start 3D printing,
so that's why he had to leave. And Dr. Tao became
the biggest competitor. And now he's looking
back and saying, well... If you had me working
on this project within DJI, maybe, you know,
like this would have come. You could have had
this, but now you're doing this in the wrong
way. Anyways, so it kind of goes way back. So
these two people probably, you know, have some
beef. A bit of bad blood between the two. A bit
of bad blood, but which kind of makes sense why,
you know, DJI has to go back and fund Eligu.
Yeah, and with DJI Engineering, we shall see
how this competition will turn out. It is still
very fierce, but so far all in the FDM segment.
Right, but also I guess what I was trying to
say earlier is that not only do they have to
defend themselves in FDM, there's kind of raisin
technologies popping up everywhere. So Haygears
is one. Actually, a lot of their Chinese competitors,
their Shenzhen competitors are dual channel.
So they also develop both FDM and resin printing,
3D printers. And Bamboo, because they're so,
maybe they've added R &D effort, but they're
very much concentrated on FDM right now. It's
kind of difficult for us to really conclude that
they've won the market. Because they're just
a market leader during the time when technology
is moving from targeting a small group of people,
niche, to a wider population. And generally it's
kind of uncomfortable because a lot of research
are going on on the side. So if you look up something
called volumetric printing. that's also in the
resin space, still academic paper stage, but
could also fundamentally change how this works
because it basically shines the UV light and
make... everything all at once instead of layer
by layer. So imagine the speed improvement there.
It's basically magic. Pretty much. Shines a UV
light upon everything and it's fine. And then
it's there. Yeah. We're one step close to magic.
That's what we know. Yeah. And this is, you know,
it's always research, patent, commercialization.
Yeah. Well, now I know we also know that the
speed of prototyping is increasingly faster.
Thanks to 3D printers. Yeah, so with all of these,
right, actually before Bamboo started asking
for money, so their initial investor, IDG, actually
wanted to invest more, but Bamboo's like, no,
we got cash, we're good. So they stopped getting
new rounds of investment after 2023. But with
this new kind of competition going on and trying
to fend off their incumbent position, there's
rumors, rumors only. that they are partnering
with Tencent and there might be some investment
coming from Tencent. So kind of going back to
what this means, right, in terms of let's give
our audience a flow of the revenue since they've
started. 2022, their first shipment, 5 ,000 on
Kickstarter, probably another 5 ,000 -ish after
Kickstarter. So 10 ,000 units, $15 million. 2023,
the P series and A series shipped, that went
up to $300 million. So multiplies. 2024, didn't
ship anything, but tripled their revenue. I mean,
didn't release anything, but tripled their revenue
to $800 million. Last year, 2025, shipped the
H series and roughly doubled in revenue about
1 .5%. billion dollars equating to 35 to 43 percent
of the market depending on which report you're
looking at shift over 1 .5 million units which
is 150 times the first year which is only like
four years ago We can comfortably say they've
ascended. With that speed of shipping hardware
products and not having any major missed deadlines
or major delays or major complaints about hardware
being put into users' hands. Right. Pretty impressive.
Pretty impressive. And at this point, the valuation
is multi -billion dollars. But there's always
a but. With any company that grows in this speed,
there's bound to be mishaps and controversies.
Oh, a lot of lawsuits. So we do have a section
on that as well. Yeah. They grow so fast and
then they have so many mishaps that we have to
designate an entire chapter onto the mishaps
because that's just the level of conditions that
they're experiencing. All right. So there are
four types of mishaps or issues. Number one would
be, well, once again, reliability issue. A good
design doesn't mean they don't have any reliability
issue. Number two would be IP infringement because,
of course, they always run into that kind of
problems. Number three, fighting with the current,
with the aging incumbent. Stratasys is always
there somehow in the story. And number four.
the dispute on open source. Fighting with the
community. Fighting with the community. So let's
start with the defects, shall we? Let's do that.
So two defects that I managed to dig up, and
I think a lot of... Hardware companies have these
and I think they resolve this pretty well. The
first one is in 2023 So one year after release
the x1 It's basically when you send your job
to a printer and the printer isn't plugged in
properly It doesn't print immediately, right?
But when then when then it receives it it prints
like 10 jobs at once because you kept on sending
the jobs because you thought it didn't print.
So this is exactly what happened to Bamboo. User,
because they use this cloud connectivity, so
when you send a job from your computer, it goes
to Bamboo Cloud, then it goes to your machine,
and it got stuck in the cloud for a while. And
then users are like, what's happening? I'll send
a new job, I'll send a new job. So one day, August
15th, midnight, US time, everything started printing
while you're sleeping. So, I mean, yes, mishap,
like awful, but, you know, not creepy. Yeah,
it's a bit creepy, but not life threatening.
It's still a good machine. People got over it.
Second thing, and I think they managed this pretty
well, which is the A1 recall. So after they released
A1, which is their entry level printer, they
realized the cables that are connecting the printer
to the wall. is not super prune to heat and damage
and they claim that they did a lot of they they
have qa while they're developing the product.
And they did a bunch of tests to make sure it's
safe. But somehow they missed the fact that when
a machine is in transit, there's a lot of damage
done to where you connect the cable. And somehow
they missed this. And because of how people place
their printers at their homes, if it's really
against the wall, it's easy for... the key to
develop and there's a fire hazard so they had
to recall this and they did it it cost the millions
of dollars but they did it in a manner that the
community was like okay like i got my refund
or i got a way of fixing it so everyone was fairly
happy in the end so the defects are yes mishaps
but not life -threatening next one the next one
is the most fun one it is pop mart sued bamboo
lab i know because of labubus because of the
knockoffs and of course labubu 3d models are
being uploaded to make a world and people were
trying to print it out illegally when you print
it out when you create a model just on your own
it's not illegal but when you're trying to distribute
it and that becomes a youtube or a youtube slash
napster problem right you as a platform is responsible
for what your users upload question so it didn't
have to get resolved by trial it was kind of
pull back but the resolution is bamboo basically
pulled all the offending labubu files uh aside
and it was finally settled mid -march 2026 the
policy became if there is any labubu that is
being uploaded to bamboo we're going to pull
it out but it's interesting because i i'm on
maker world a lot these days i don't see labubus
yes But I see Marios, I see Pokemons. I know,
I know. Which is, you know, Labubu isn't the
only IP that was being uploaded. There's Ultraman,
there's Detective Conan. There are a lot of IPs
still being uploaded to that. But it's just,
PopMart had a problem with that because Labubu
was kind of its MVP in the year 2024 and 2025.
It didn't want it to impact sales. And Bamboo
wasn't the only company that have IP infringement
issues. maker roles labubu it's thingy versus
yoda problem it is prusa's lego problem so everyone
every player before had a similar ip problem
but this obviously you can always use at least
your legal policies to say that certain IPs should
be pulled off. If you're not using it for proper
uses or if you're using it for commercial uses,
at least you should get licensed to do that.
But to be very honest, I think some of the Labubu
designs are quite cute. They are really cute.
Yeah, it is a problem. Yeah, but this calls into
a bigger question, right? At some point in the
future, I can imagine where a lot more people
owns a 3D printer. And so if I print at home
a Labubu that I've designed, is that IP infringement?
I'm not the IP infringement expert, but because
you're giving the ability to design, the capability
to design to the masses, these kind of problems
will continue, right? So maybe there is a, on
the firmware that they're able to track it. If
you were to just print one thing, because it
all has to go through Bamboo Connect, right?
If you were to just print out one, they would
know, oh, you printed out one. But if you were
to replicate it, a thousand of them, maybe they
would have a question was, why would you have
to print out so many of the same copy, right?
You know, so it's, so I think that's. probably
why they have to install this level of firmware
to be able to know that what are you actually
using your firmware and and thingiverse and you
know all the previous vintage versions they will
have similar problems yeah it's impossible to
avoid but you know everyone is doing something
is it perfect not it's not yes yeah people will
do will do what they have to do yes okay imagine
how people will be upset if Bamboo Labs closed
down my printer because I was printing out more
labels. But we'll get back to that in a bit.
You will get back to that. The next lawsuit.
The next lawsuit is Shadis' is fighting with
the aging incumbent. In short, Shadis' sued Bamboo
Lab greatly. What is actually being claimed,
10 patents across five different areas, including...
Purge towers, general extrusion -based layer
deposition, two -head forest detection, a bunch
of different technologies. And then there are
two parallel legal tracks. Two things are being
put in place. One is a standard district court
case. That is just seeing financial damages and
seeing an injunction. And usually it takes a
little longer time. It's pretty standard in the
U .S. And the other one is interesting. The other
one is a separate ITC International Trade Commission
complaint under Section 337 of the Tariff Act.
And this is the more consequential one for bamboo.
The ITC has the power to issue an exclusion order
blocking bamboo lab printers from being imported
into the U .S. at all. Yeah, and ITC proceedings
typically moves faster than the U .S. local district
court cases. So this mechanism behind, and then
this is why bamboo labs actually make the headlines
in a lot of the U .S. news, is because of the
ITC suing. So there's a future where you can't
buy a bamboo lab, anything in the U .S.? Well,
you think about this, DJI is on the entity list.
So whether Bamboo Lab can actually make it through
ITC, you have to wait and see. That rhymes. But
you know what? I think 3D printers in general
would share similar risks. So if you were to
ban one, you might as well ban all of them. Yeah,
I think Stratasys just targets bamboo because
it's the biggest. But there's also a scenario
where bamboo kind of, if they, for example, perch
towers, if you can't say, if you say I can't
use it, I'll develop my own. alternative towers
yeah exactly like yeah and and just file a u
.s patent so obviously there are workarounds
but currently i think stratus is wildly unhappy
with the fact that bamboo is you know number
one in terms of commercial sales which is interesting
because strategists kind of left consumer space
well but obviously still wants to get the money
yes we'll wait and see for this one yeah the
final one is actually bamboo against the community
that created 3D printing. This is the messiest
one. It's a bit messy. It's a bit bigger. But
before I go into this issue, I do need to explain
one piece of vocabulary, which is what is a slicer?
In 3D printing, you can't just make a model out
of your AutoCAD software or any of the 3D printing
software and expect the printer to understand
what's going on. There's actually another software
called the slicer, which... translates the shape
of your 3D model into instructions, like where
does the machine need to move, how much to extrude,
how thick each layer is. And that's what is called
a slicer. And it basically slices the model into
horizontal layers and then writes this path for
the prints to follow. And here's why it matters
in our story, because this whole process is fairly
standard today. because and thanks to the open
source community that we talked about earlier.
So in 2011, someone named Alessandro Renalucci
released a slicer software called Slicer with
the three, so C3R instead of CER. And this is
released under the open license AGPL, which means
free to copy, free to modify. You can even sell
it. In 2016, This is when Prusa, after Prusa
released the i3 kit, Prusa actually forked, which
means built on top of the slicer and made it
and published it under Prusa Slicer, the name.
And it's supposed to work better with the Prusa
models. Furthermore, in 2022, Bamboo Lab forked
Prusa Slicer and made it into Bamboo Studio.
So it's like... You know, you have parents and
then you have child, you have grandchilds and
etc. Different generations of slicers forked
on top of the previous one. Exactly. And a lot
of the functionalities are the same. But what
Bamboo Studio built on top of PrusaSlicer is
something called like connectivity network. So
it connects to their cloud. It also recognizes
the RFID. tag of the bamboo filaments so you
kind of build on top of it but fundamentally
it's the same thing right so so in uh 2022 uh
another developer actually fort bamboo studio
who is this person and it's he goes by the named
soft fever we don't know his actual name but
uh he created the orca slicer and orca slicer
works with any printer brand which is why it's
really popular and it allows people who enjoy
tinkering to play around a bit more than the
bamboo studio right so it quickly became very
popular and back then you can send anything from
orca slicer to a bamboo printer without any issues.
But that went on for three years, and Bamboo
decided to change that, which started this whole
mess. Wow. So in January 2025, Bamboo basically
said, we're going to ship a firmware. They didn't
say we're going to cut off OrcaSlicer. They said,
we're going to ship a firmware update, and it
includes authorization control. which blocks
third -party slicers from talking directly to
our cloud and the printer. So remember how it
works is from a slicer software, I have to send
my job to Bamboo Cloud, and then Bamboo Cloud
sends it to my printer. So it's not just computer
to printer, even though they're in the same room.
So Bamboo blocked the cloud access, which prevents
cloud from sending the job to printer. And you
can imagine how angry people are because they've
lived on open source this entire time. The whole
philosophy was built on what Dr. Boyer builds
with RepRap. And so Bamboo was like, okay, we
did this for your security and for our security.
And they cited that roughly 30 million unauthorized
server requests. They're saying a lot of people
are trying to attack their cloud in that sense.
That's why I have to block it. Attack the cloud.
Like try to send jobs. Using your cloud to link
your cloud to something else that they actually
use to print the job. Yeah, so they're saying
that we did this to prevent other people from
hacking our cloud to print on your printer, which
is... I don't know. There's so many ways to protect
people from accessing your cloud, like an API
key. People didn't buy into that reason, let's
just say. But to their credit, Bamboo didn't
really shut the door. They offered two workarounds.
So the first one is developer mode. So you can
actually turn on developer mode on your printer
that bypasses the cloud. So I can send directly
in my room laptop to printer. But then that...
Bypasses the cloud, meaning all the cloud functionalities
are gone, which means I can't monitor live what
my printing is doing. Well, just basic. Some
basic stuff. But there's some grumbles with the
users that bought their machines, but it didn't
turn into a life -altering decision. They didn't
burn their... bamboo products because of this
so uh in on youtube a lot of people posted workarounds
they also offered orcaslicers to probably change
their program to then enable them to send to
bamboo cloud yeah orcaslicer declined because
they didn't want to do that so that all went
well until april 2026 when a developer named
paul jarzak released a new fork of orcaslicer
And this new fork did one thing, which is restoring
cloud access to Bamboo. And he did this because
he kind of hacked what Bamboo published in their
Bamboo Studio slicer. Remember, Bamboo Studio,
the slicer program from Bamboo, is open source
because they got it from PrusaSlicer, which is
also open source. They had to publish it. which
gave all the developer access to their code.
So if you read the code carefully enough, you'll
figure out a way to hack it. And so he figured
out a way, this developer, Jarzak. He figured
out a way, published it as he should with open
source licensing. So he gave everyone this. new
orca slicer that restored access. And it could
have all ended here, but Bamboo decided to call
their lawyers. Bamboo sent him a cease and desist,
and they alleged that he was trying to impersonate
their app and illegally reverse engineering their
app. So Yarzak, being an independent developer,
actually took the code down. but he didn't do
it really quietly. He defended by publishing
his own case on GitHub. And I know, I mean, you
can't expect him. And then the fire starts to
burn. And that's when everything started to burn
because he claims that Bamboo Studio is licensed
under AGPL, right? Which inherits from Prusa.
And that requires that when you build something
on top of it, you release everything. And he
claims that Bamboo Studio didn't release anything
because when Bamboo published Bamboo Studio,
there's this plugin that connects to the cloud.
They didn't release the plugin code. Wow. So
he counterattacked, saying that Bamboo should
have released this cloud connector in the first
place. But you did not do your duty in the open
source community. Exactly. You failed. And that
upset it. in everyone who participated in that
open source community and it brought awareness
to people who are fighting for open source for
the consumers namely gamers nexus which is a
major respective hardware outlet they published
a piece literally titled and i'm sorry for swearing
bamboo lab and they re -hosted yarzak's code
because yarzak didn't actually want this whole
lawsuit to fall upon him he took down the code
and they not only re -hosted the code they pledged
ten thousand dollars in legal defense fund if
bamboo gets sued for this another guy whose name
is lewis rotman uh he's on youtube right to repair
advocate pledged another ten thousand and I've
seen already three videos of him attacking bamboo
based on this. Right. So this made a lot of news.
Interestingly, remember Snapmaker? You won. Yeah.
They send Jarzak their hardware to support him.
It's like taking a bite out of your competitor
while you can. So a few days later, this got
even more pumped up because the... nonprofit
that published the AGPL licensing. It's called
Software Freedom Conservancy, SFC. They decided
that it's time that they stepped in and opened
an investigation on Bamboo. And they ruled pretty
decisively. Yarzak did nothing wrong. Bamboo,
you've been out of compliance for four years,
ever since you published Bamboo Studio. You shouldn't
have bundled something closed source, which is
your network plugin, into an otherwise open source
software that you got from Prusa. And so this
is where we stand now. And not only did Software
Freedom Conservancy said, Bamboo, you're wrong.
They actually decided to launch a fundraiser
targeting $250 ,000. To hire legal counsel. That's
the Baotoubu project, right? Yes. Yes. And so
this project ended up raising more than this
amount that they set out. And they're going to
do a couple of things. One is they'll hire legal
counsel to probably sue Bamboo Labs in the future.
And guard the open source community. Exactly.
And guard the freedom for people who buy machines
to own their machinery. they also put together
a team to crack that closed piece of software.
So they're going to reverse engineer, they hired
engineers to reverse engineering the network
plugin because rather than going through legal
battles, which we know can be very time consuming,
if we just open source your closed source software
and published out there and really just screw
you, it's much easier. We'll just open source
you whether you like it or not. Yes. I don't
know who thought of this. It's crazy. Yeah, and
Jarzak was part of that committee. He's been
asked to join the committee to hold not only
Bamboo Lab, but the 3D printing industry in general
on... Accountable. Accountable. For open source,
for truly being open source. Exactly. And that's
where... bamboo slabs right the bamboo lab stands
right now they're complicated waters to navigate
through right now yeah this comes with you know
growing so big so quickly yeah i'm sure they
would have expected it well now they have to
put a lot of attention on it yeah it's just ironic
they could have stopped it by not issuing the
season to assist wrong move but regardless i
mean they're still Number one in the world. Still
very impressive. Still in pretty excellent company
in hardware making. Yeah. And we both liked that
it was definitely started by a group of makers,
hardcore engineers who wanted to start something
else, who wanted to like build something from
scratch, not just doing the repetitive engineering
work. And I think that brings us to the last
segment of why do you think they've ascended?
Yeah, there's so many things, but I think the
main thing is just listen to the consumers and
trying to tackle problems and having the faith
that they can. I saw an interview from the team
where they said, are there any instances where
you think this could fail? And they said, no,
because when we looked at 3D printing, Back when
we started this project, it was pretty clear
to us that the hardware can be improved to the
extent that consumers will end up adopting and
liking it. When I did the research on DJI and
understanding the hardware business, a couple
metrics really stood out to me. And well, obviously,
number one being your growth and your skill,
like being sustainable as a consumer electronics.
profitability and efficiency once again if you're
consumer electronics you may not be the most
efficient because your need is varying all the
time consumers always have new demand and the
next one is ecosystem and platform health yes
and specifically there is a rate that is called
attach rate which is the consumables or the accessories
revenue per hardware unit sold Ooh, they've done
pretty well in that. Oh, really? Yeah, they're
the attach rate and platform engagement, the
MAU and DAU, the software bit, the community
bit of every hardware sales. And I think for
Western companies like Whoop or even Garmin,
the model that they pick is usually a software
subscription bit. But in China, you know, people
don't usually pay for a software subscription.
They like the free software, the free community,
but they will pay for the thing that they get
in their hand. So I think that... really made
it what Bamboo Lab is today. And finally, if
you have done all three things above right, it
should manifest in your capital and valuation.
And it did. You should grow fast. And yeah, so
to be honest, in terms of every single bit of
the metrics that we've just talked about, profitability
and efficiency, the ecosystem, health, valuation,
you just... tackled everything and on top of
that um there is the you know like the brief
discussion on the flagship product right there
are the better flagships and there are the terrible
flagships or the product that they've created
the good flagships would really understand the
current users problems and try to solve that
that's exactly what they did that's all you have
to do it's not necessarily a cheaper one and
it's not necessarily a oh creating a problem
out of nowhere and just pretend that's the most
important problem that's not it don't just don't
be arrogant yeah be very down to earth do do
your research and understanding where people
are actually stuck on these days so that's exactly
what they have done yeah and i think the success
of their first kickstarter and x1 is what ultimately
brought them everything that followed. So imagine
if they didn't do that correctly, then whatever
that's followed might not be here today. Yeah.
It is being very humble, right? And actually
made an excellent product with DJI level of engineering
and the obsession of, oh, I just really want
to make the consumer take it out within one second,
plug it in and start to use it. So that philosophy
worked once again. Yeah. And I think lastly,
also on my end, despite the controversies we
talked about, right? They're actually really
good product builders in the end. For sure. And
so regardless of what ultimately happens with
all the controversies, if they manage to continue
to develop good products, we see how they've
managed to use the A1 to expand their user base.
The people that are upsetting today are the older
users who adopted bamboo or who adopted 3D printing
when it was predominantly open sourced. I personally,
I'm a newer adopter that came into the scenes
because bamboo has made it cheap enough for me
to buy something. And there's going to be users
after me that decided to try only because bamboo
has made it feasible. And so they didn't quite,
I'm not the target audience for Orca Slicer.
I don't have the capabilities to do that. And
so I think for them, yes, it's not ideal when
you're fighting against the community that has
kind of enabled you in the first place. But commercially,
I actually don't see. that much of a damage if
they manage to continue to churn out good products
because they've decided on the Apple closed source
system path. Well, also think about this. If
there is any company in the 3D printing in general
that is going to, you know, offense and someone
has to take one for the team. And that someone,
100%, is going to be a Chinese company. It is
going to be the company that heads up everything.
Exactly. So there you go. Whoever is more capable
will be the first one who will take the hit and
will have to solve it. So I'm sure... They will
face more problems in the future. They will face
more problems in the future. If you grow the
fastest, you also have to solve the problems
first. So we shall see. Well, once again, this
is a... rapidly changing industry a couple years
ago it was snap maker right and then it was creality
and now it is bamboo lab so who knows in two
three years who will be the leader in this game
all right okay so i'm looking forward to reviewing
this in our maybe december special series to
see how much things have changed in six months
yes we will see how it all goes in the next couple
of months and I wish them the best of luck and
then I honestly see them having a better relationship
with the open source community yeah thank you
everyone for listening last bit an apology for
recording this episode so late and as you can
hear my voice is not in the best shape and I've
been sick for a while now so sorry guys for up
dating very late and linda and i we have both
put in a lot of effort in this so but i think
in the next episode i shall be fully recovered
thank you again