Tyler Benster founded Azavi, a crowdsourced 3D printing platform, after realizing the technology already powers mass production. Invisalign has printed 80 million custom aligners. A Northrop Grumman engine part consolidated ten welded components into one printed piece. He sees 3D printing as a democratizing shift where designers, not factory owners, create value.
Chapters
Hey everyone, really excited to be here today. My name is Tyler Benster, and I'll talk a little bit about my background in 3D printing, and then I'd like to share with you 3 things that I've learned that have convinced me to devote my career to 3D printing. So back in 2007, I came across an article in Popular Science, a magazine that I had loved since I was about 12 years old, that talked about rapid prototypers. And this guy Hod Lipson had this device that for a couple thousand dollars he could make almost anything. Chocolates, he could do silicone, crazy things. And so when I was 16, I built a 3D printer and became one of the first 350 people in the world to have a desktop machine in their house. Moving forward to college, I launched a company called Azavi, which is a platform for crowdsourced 3D printing. And that's been an amazing experience. One of the things that I've learned is that the price-quality point for consumer goods isn't quite there for most finished applications, and I'll touch on this a bit later. And I also am one of the organizers for Inside 3D Printing, which has become one of the largest trade shows in the industry. So it's actually been a great little social hack for me to get to meet incredible people in the industry and invite them to speak at a conference. So really learn from the best and identify the best. So one thing I want to emphasize— this is the first thing that I've learned— is that the future is here now. People ask me all the time, so 3D printing is great for prototyping. It's awesome if you want to build this small little replacement part or back of the remote control. But is it used in production today? And I love to point to Invisalign. This has sold 80 million aligners. Products. Invisalign has printed out 80 million unique 3D-printed braces that will go on your teeth, and actually it's the, the bottom, the bottom jaw that's 3D-printed, and then the braces are modeled on it. But that's an example of scale where Invisalign's entire supply chain is predicated upon additive manufacturing and 3D printing. Or this is at a local makerspace, the robotic hand that you can print out on a consumer-level printer. This uses less than— this uses about $5 worth of plastic. And this makerspace one afternoon had a bunch of people in the community come together, bring 3D printers, printed out 8 robotic hands that were then sent over to Africa for people who couldn't afford high-end prosthetic hands now have a functioning device that lets them pick up items. So it's not just on the industrial side. On the consumer side, there's been some great innovation too. And finally, this was— Really cool. I ran into a kid at a talk I was giving at University of Rhode Island who came up to me afterwards and told me that 3D printing had changed his life. And he pulled out this 3D-printed hearing aid that he had. He told me about how hearing aids used to be made with foam inserts that were very uncomfortable. If they got wet, the electronics could be damaged. And they fell out all the time. Whereas this hearing aid is a perfect example of mass customization. A product that is customized just for him, that fits perfectly, and is waterproof. And the second realization I came to was that it's— mass customization is not just about customizing parts for people, but complexity. It's about making things that industry uses today easier to make. So this is a part by Northrop Grumman. So it's not a very romantic part. It's a fan duct system. But you look at all these disparate parts. There's over 10 different parts that had to be welded together, whereas the 3D-printed variety is made in one single pass, one go, with very limited post-processing involved. When 3D printing starts replacing traditional manufacturing for higher-end products, you know that it's going to make inroads as the price continues to drop for industrial machines. And the third realization is one that you may have seen if you read The Economist, which is this is the third industrial revolution. It's a democratization of manufacturing. For centuries, the person who owns a factory decides what gets made. And suddenly we're seeing this giant paradigm shift where the designer themselves are empowered. The design becomes the valuable part in that chain. And the manufacturing itself becomes a commodity that will ultimately reflect market pricing. So I want to talk also a little bit about some of my own experiences running a marketplace and trying to sell 3D-printed goods from consumer machines. So this is our best-selling product. It's a shot glass with Stephen Colbert's face on it. And remember that I'm coming from a college environment, so at Brown this was a hit. There's some concerns where— Technically, this isn't really food safe, so I wouldn't actually recommend taking a shot out of it, but I would argue that the alcohol is probably worse for you than whatever plastic you have. Regardless, the point here is that this is still kind of a niche item, right? This isn't a life-changing shot glass. This is still kind of in the tchotchke category. On Shapeways, this is one of their most popular prints. This is a Strandibees. By Theo Jansen, and this part is fully articulated and printed in one piece. So all these interlocking parts required no assembly. This would be prohibitively expensive to manufacture on any other metric just due to labor costs. And yet once again, it's a, it's a cool desk toy. Or this is one of my favorite products up on our website. It's this iPhone case that has working planetary gears, and yet we've had exactly zero sales of it. Part of that reason is that an iPhone case, again, is a commodity. It's, you know, if you drop this, it's going to break probably the first time you drop it. I'd rather have an impact-resistant iPhone case than a 3D-printed one that I even co-created. You know, I have a phone and I don't walk around with a 3D-printed case, and everyone I know that has a 3D printer also doesn't do that. So the question I kind of want to pose to you is, what is that first 3D-printed good? that is going to break 100 million units in consumer sales. This isn't a question of if, it's a question of when. We already see this in the medical device field, right? We see that upstream that hearing aids are probably going to be a category that, you know, are gonna sell millions and millions of units. And it's not too much of a stretch to think that, oh, earbuds, right? Let's customize those for everyone. This is one of those million, well, billion-dollar questions in the industry right now because We haven't found that consumer-level application that has really resonated with people. And so I think as entrepreneurs, this is the big opportunity, is to understand what is going to be that first mass-adopted, must-have 3D-printed item. Thank you.
