Hacker Cinema
Print the Legend
2014 · Film · documentary · 100 min
Directed by Luis Lopez, J. Clay Tweel
3D printing is changing the world – from printing guns and human organs to dismantling the world’s industrial infrastructure by enabling home manufacturing. The 3D Printing revolution has begun. Who will make it?
7 positive1 mixedfrom 8 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
I heard about this before on a documentary that was recommended on HN, so I'll pass the recommendation on:
Print the Legend, from 2014, on the story of 3d printing. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3557464/
If you haven't seen it, you should watch "Print the Legend", a documentary about a few 3D printer startups like MakerBot, FormLabs, etc. It's on Netflix streaming: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80005444
Print The Legend was a pretty interesting documentary that showed the development of Makerbot and form labs - but it made Makerbot look like a complete disaster and the original CEO seem terrible (along with what I think was Amazons invester arm)
Not surprised things aren't going well. Seems like the vision died long before the sale.
In a somewhat related note, I just finished watching Print the Legend (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3557464/) for the first time last week on Netflix. It's a fascinating documentary on 3D printing—and for someone who hadn't been following the 3D printing industry, the twists and turns in the stories of the main players really surprised me. I highly recommend watching it if you haven't.
That said, it's certainly interesting to see this pop up in the news. I'm curious what the general 3D enthusiasts consider the front players in 3D printing right now?
This leaves out some really important background. Makerbot quietly sold out to Stratasys in 2013. When they did that they lost their soul and their independence. The first sign of that was when they went closed source alienating a huge portion of their customer base. This is just another shoe dropping now that Stratasys owns them they are moving to more tightly integrate Makerbot into the rest of the company. These layoffs are supposedly to remove duplicative positions due to the buyout. There is a good documentary on Netflix about the 3d printing revolution called "Print the Legend" It covers a lot of the history behind Makerbot including the fact that there were really 3 co-founders instead of just the one that gets regularly mentioned in news coverage.
I really, really enjoyed the documentation "Print the Legend" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3557464/ which is available on netflix.
Don't expect to learn anything about 3d printing, but is a great story about startups.
I hope this will be good for Bre. He's a good guy, did a great job bootstrapping an entire 3D printing industry, and made a small fortune in the process.
I still remember him at Gnomedex 5-6 years ago, chatting with a handful of folks about the vision of a crowdsourced manufacturing line of printed objects, when the first MakerBot was still in beta. We're not there yet, but he got pretty close to the vision.
For those interested, strongly recommend watching the documentary Print The Legend [1]. Seems it'll be on Netflix later this year. I watched the premiere at the last sxsw, and it painted a colorful (and somewhat bittersweet) picture of what happened behind the scenes with Bre, MakerBot, and its main competitors. Can't say much more without giving any spoilers.
[1] http://printthefilm.com/
Well worth reading to the end of this article, some very good lessons regarding the realities of scaling, applicable for many startups.
I'm planning to see "Print the Legend" later this week, so this was very interesting. I see the Variety review of the film says "Because Lopez and Tweel are tracking the rise but not the fall, “Print the Legend” doesn’t have the falling-apart-before-your-eyes immediacy of “Startup.com” - but is seems pretty clear from this article that there will be a lot of falling apart happening.
My experience this year was exactly the opposite to yours. I too have been going for several years, and after a couple of "I'm done; not coming back next year", I decided to have change my approach.
This year I established 5 basic principles:
1. Absolutely no panels. Only solo or dual sessions.
2. No marketing sessions (nor sessions by marketing folks)
3. No keynotes (except for Snowden and Assange)
4. Go beyond the headline, and analyze the speaker. At minimum the person must have an interesting personal or professional story, regardless the talk.
5. The more technical or obscure the session, the better.
In the end this strategy paid off nicely. This was one of the best years, and the first to make me want to come back next year. I watched some gems like Philip Rosedale (Second Life, now High Fidelity), Pinterest engineers talking about their dev stack in a candid and informal conversation, Carl Bass from Autodesk, Print the Legend (the movie, and then the discussion with the film directors, plus Max from FormLabs and an ex-MakerBot), NASA, DARPA, nice demos at Startup Accelerator, and a lot more.
I certainly missed a few nice keynotes (like Neil deGrasse Tyson), but hopefully some of the sessions will be posted later.