You’ve probably noticed that the binder jet market has been rather rocky as of late.Voxeljet was delisted, was not sold, and is now restructuring.Nano Dimension subsidiary Desktop Metal (DM) is bankrupt, taking with it a cheerleader for binder jet.
DM subsidiary ExOne has long served the industrial casting and forging market, and its future is now in doubt.Another Nano Dimension subsidiary, Markforged, owns Digital Metal.It’s looking like the future of binder jet is an uncertain one.
I believe, however, that binder jet has an important role to play in the future of Additive Manufacturing.In this series, I’ll summarize how we got here, before going over binder jet’s chances, talking about the economics of jetting, and then detailing where I think it will be successful.For now, let’s understand how the illusion unfolded before our very eyes and how it continues to confuse us to this very day.
A Swiss Army Knife for all Your Dreams To vaporize a billion dollars, you need to have not just any dream but a beguiling fever dream of an inevitable future foretold.You have to take money and burn it to power a rocket of such uniqueness and force that it seems destined to leave Earth, and any naysayers behind.It’s not enough to beguile them; there has to be real fear of missing out.
In the rarified air beyond the stratosphere, the unicorns frolic amidst clouds and stars.In this dreamscape, anything is possible and nothing is certain; here, power points can turn into yachts.To thrive here, you can’t be a good entrepreneur, accountant, or marketeer.
You have to be a miner of dreams, a rodeo clown for bankers, and an Excel mystic.People amidst the clouds don’t build businesses; they assemble unicorns out of thin air.If that business succeeds, it’s due to the magician and their ability to separate people from other people’s money.
For companies such as Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, the self-fulfilling dream and the selling of this dream powers user growth, adoption, and revenue.Anyone could build the actual technology, but the flock of attention, the endless sea of eyeballs, is what makes it unique.When the Sand Hill Road crowd says that “hardware is hard,” they really mean to say that getting people into spending a few hours looking at scantily clad people is far easier than getting a car company to part with a million dollars.
In this world, we will run out of leads, but there are enough listless schmucks to power many more idle fortunes.Many investors have such a limited understanding of manufacturing that it is laughable.Hardware companies are also not entirely self-reinforcing; success does not automatically lead to more success, and definitely not to faster success.
Success, therefore, in VC-backed unicorn hunts has little to do with the underlying technology.In the rent eyeballs game, ideas chase money, which is burnt to rent eyeballs.Then the business is sold to someone who can get higher revenue per eyeball, has more eyeballs, or has little in the way of eyeball growth.
Having people who do this all day try to make machine tools is never going to work.And if someone just happens to promise that your technology can make everything, it doesn’t actually say much about the technology or its promise.It is not a vote for the technology, nor is their failure a vote against it.
A billion spent badly, therefore, gives us nothing in terms of validating or invalidating binder jet.Or more simply put, if someone buys a lottery ticket to win a Porsche and does not win, it does not mean that Porsche is a bad company, that Porsches don’t work, or that wanting one is somehow wrong.It just tells us that gambling is risky.
No one could reasonably think that buying Porsche lottery tickets is a valid retirement strategy.No matter how many punters try.But if we only listened to the winners in the lottery, our economy would look a lot like what it does today.
And if the only one talking is the guy selling tickets, his voice is going to ring loud.Hardware Isn’t Hard, It’s the VCs That Are Simple Desktop Metal headquarters.Image courtesy of Desktop Metal via Facebook.
None of us truly thinks that any one 3D printing technology bests any other all of the time.Depending on the yield, detail levels, part size, geometry, location, material, and more, lots of technologies compete with one another, even sometimes in polymers versus metals.Depending on how you account for costs, when you make a purchase, whether a staffer is idle, or what post-processing equipment you use, the economics can look very different.
VCs generally don’t care about these kinds of minutiae, whereas they conceal our entire working lives.VCs want to see some sort of internal, protected mechanism that, if spun the right way, will cause a localized infinite money glitch.They don’t want incremental improvements for some types of Inconel tubes with better wall thicknesses.
VCs are like jury members at your beauty pageant, while most of you are more like doctors.Both doctors and pageant juries will have opinions about your body, and you can listen to either, but how they are constructed and what they say is determined as much by the viewer and what they’re looking for as by your body per se.Both are expert opinions that carry a lot of weight.
What’s more, both opinions can really affect your life.But the pageant jury is not terribly concerned with whether you’ll live out the week.And, if your doctor says that you’re hot, it’s probably not a good thing.
Now, of course, all VCs aren’t stupid; they’re just looking at the world through their own lenses.They’re looking for the shiny fur of a unicorn to be, not necessarily anything actually relevant for someone wanting to make a spinal fusion cage.And in the morning, the VCs learn about the cupcake industry, then diet pills, and then an afternoon of AI-powered helicopters.
The right magician can fool them by presenting them with their dream on a platter.And it’s unfair to expect them to know every nuance of an industry.But, in very technical endeavors, expertise matters.
I know that we live in a world where experts are derided and circumvented, but in something as complicated as Additive, it is they who make the difference.With all the feedback loops and different mechanisms at play, a tourist was never going to get it anyway.But the tourists have all the money, and this is why souvenir stores all over the world are pretty much the same.
Everyone always derides the omnipresent kitsch and low-quality souvenir stores, yet they keep buying the souvenirs, or they wouldn’t be so prevalent.There is an ever too simple fallacy at play where we believe that some exceptionally intelligent individuals can learn everything instantly.But, deep in your heart, you may love that “design thinking” course or think that you know where AI is headed, but neither matters.
You simply do not have enough in-depth understanding, knowledge, and true wisdom to truly be a designer or understand the nitty-gritty of AI.But, you’re smart enough to copy and paste and synthesize, and this, for most people, most of the time, is enough.The book report version will suffice; there is no need to read the book.
The Cliff Notes will do just fine, most of the time.But, if I took you on an airplane and told you about my three-hour “pilot thinking” course and my excitement at flying an aircraft for the first time, you would probably not kick back in sublime peace with the in-flight movie.We think we’re knowledgeable enough all the time until it really matters.
The less we know about something, the easier it is to think of ourselves as truly understanding that subject.The less we know about something, the more sure we can be about it.The bigger the lie, the easier it is to tell.
The more you repeat something, the more everyone will believe it, including you.In one corner, we have the war room weary VC, snug in a body warmer, a professional risk pricer, who probably lives on a fault line.She’s trying to spot the holes in a tapestry where she can see the print and Devine the pattern, but she doesn’t understand the thread, machine, or fabric that made it.
She’s bright, experienced, and is looking for a passionate changer of worlds.And it’s a lot easier to convince someone that you’re everything if you don’t know anything and don’t believe anything.A VC, therefore, can be smart and allocate capital to medical companies, maybe making outsized returns.
This could earn them an audience of admirers, but it does not mean that they should take a scalpel to your aorta.Or to put it in other words.DM didn’t fail.
It succeeded beyond almost anyone’s wildest dreams.Apart from the customers, it did not work for them.Apart from the whole 3D printing thing, it was a fantastic company, a fantastic idea.
What was disappointing was that it threaded the needle, sunk a basket, only to somehow magically be puked out again, leaving some whole and some with holes.Through a central bit of overclaim and overestimation, DM did everything just right.DM proclaimed that it could print anything, anytime.
The company claimed that, “For the First Time, Affordable, Safe and Precise Metal 3D Printing for Both Prototyping and Mass Production Will Be a Reality Across Industries – at Speeds 100x Faster.” And things like, “Desktop Metal Is Set to Change How Metal Is Manufactured with the Fastest Metal 3D Printing System in the World,” and the announcement of two new systems, “which mark a fundamental shift in how products will be developed and brought to market.” The X160Pro 3D Printer.Image courtesy of Desktop Metal.“The age of metal 3D manufacturing is here and this strategic partnership with Ford, along with our portfolio of investors, validates our vision to transform the way metal parts will be designed and mass produced.
The continued support of our investors underscores the power of our metal 3D printing solutions to help engineers and manufacturers, for the first time, apply metal 3D printing for the entire product development lifecycle – from prototyping to mass producing complex, high performance metal parts in a cost-effective way.” In other words, lots of people are buying Porsche lottery tickets; ergo, investing in Porsche lottery tickets is a great idea.In another press release, ¨the first office-friendly metal 3D printing system for rapid prototyping and is 10 times less expensive than existing technology.To manufacture metal 3D printed parts at scale, Desktop Metal also debuted the only 3D printing system for mass production of high resolution metal parts, the Production System.
Using new, proprietary Single Pass Jetting (SPJ) technology, the Production System is 100 times faster than today’s laser-based additive manufacturing systems.¨ A 100 times faster, how exactly? In what way? But does it mean that I get my part faster? Things like proprietary and Single Pass Jetting make it seem likely that they are doing this.All of this sophistry holds three lies by omission and two half-truths.One half truth is so centrally important to the whole house of cards that it is easy to miss.
Jetting is fast, and it can lay down a lot of binder in a very accurate way quickly.Billions have been spent on jetting and inkjet to make heads that are super reliable.Building on that foundation, it’s easy to see how DM could be inevitable.
Clearly, this can be faster, and with enough money, they could and should win; what’s more, they could be unassailable.And that explains the constant reiteration of the speed thing.That, mixed with the proprietary stuff, the full product lineup, and the accessible technology, could make you believe that this air was becoming a unicorn before your very eyes.
It is this half-truth that is essential for the construction of the edifice.The whole thing seems to be great, and of course, conceptually, binder jet is amazing.Just like conceptually, communism is amazing.
It just never works in the end.Let’s call the conceptual amazingness of binder jet the first half-truth.Yes, binder jet is a good idea.
But that doesn’t mean DM will win, or that this amazingness will actually matter to, or change the economics of manufacturing.The second half truth is, of course, the speed thing in and of itself.Is the printing faster? Yes, kind of, depending on how you measure it and against what.
But it could be true that the drawing bit is faster.It’s probably not 100 times, but it’s possible.But, in the end, will that change the economics of manufacturing? Not really, but it depends, because I have to depowder, debind, sinter, and carry around parts.
So in the end, it takes a bit longer to get your part.Also, Lamborghinis are faster than Ford Freightliner trucks.But, UPS will probably not switch to Lamborghini cars as the chassis for their delivery vehicles, even though speed is super important to them.
That example seems silly, but it is exactly what DM did with all our minds.It’s a Jedi Mind Trick that was so obvious as to successfully confuse us.But could such an approach potentially lead to super-low-cost parts? Sure.
The first lie by omission is telling.Even if it were cheaper and faster, it doesn’t mean that binder jet could make all the parts as well as other technologies.Or that people will switch from their stamping or milling machines, which they’ve already bought, to this new technology.
Taking this into account would, of course, severely limit the size of the market and the dream.The bigger lie by omission is damning because binder jet can’t be used for all parts, and it’s also super difficult to get the first unique geometry to work, with process and shrinkage making it impossible to prototype, iterate, and get to your first part right the first time.Essentially, we knew all along it didn’t work, couldn’t work as an all unique parts all the time technology.
And the company seems to have done very little to address this core issue.The third lie by omission is also a whopper.If this is the bees’ knees, what is to stop anyone from trying to do the same? Nothing.
What’s to prevent anyone from doing something similar? Nothing really.And is what DM is doing unique? No.Really? Are they the most mature binder jetting company? No.
Are they the furthest along with the technology? Nope.In fact, Digital Metal has been doing binder jetting for metal since 2003.Desktop Metal launched in 2015; by then, Digital Metal had been making parts for 12 years.
At that point, they had produced hundreds of thousands of parts and were being used at scale in medical devices, industry, and luxury goods.Ah, and that is one thing that we all collectively forgot.Sometimes the most complex illusions are the simplest to pull off.
Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi: “He can go about his business.” Stormtrooper: “You can go about your business.”
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