Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E12 Greg Mark | Founding Markforged & Backflip.ai
In this fascinating episode of Being an Engineer, our host Aaron Moncur sits down with Greg Mark, a visionary entrepreneur who revolutionized 3D printing with Markforged and is now transforming design workflows with his AI company, Backflip. Greg shares insights into his entrepreneurial journey, technological innovations, and the power of persistence.
Main Topics:
- The origin story of Markforged and carbon fiber 3D printing
- Innovative design principles in manufacturing
- Backflip's AI-driven approach to converting 3D scans to CAD models
- Entrepreneurship, product development, and market strategy
- The importance of reliability and focusing on core product features
About the guest: Greg Mark is a trailblazer in engineering and entrepreneurship, renowned for pioneering innovations that push the boundaries of technology. Currently serving as the Founder and CEO of Backflip, Greg is transforming how we create beautiful, functional objects using AI in a world that is inherently 3D. His latest venture follows a series of impactful contributions to engineering and manufacturing, most notably as the founder of Markforged. There, he invented carbon fiber and mixed metal 3D printing, a technology now deployed globally, including on the International Space Station and by major players like BMW and Tesla.
An MIT-trained engineer with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautics and astronautics, Greg’s journey started with bold ventures such as Aeromotions, a company that brought high-performance aerodynamics to the fastest cars on the track. His leadership at Genasun redefined off-grid solar power with advanced electronics, and as an advisor to startups like Genesis Therapeutics and Rotor Technologies, Greg continues to mentor innovators tackling the toughest challenges in industries from drug discovery to remote flight.
Links:
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
If you're an entrepreneur and you're thinking about doing a business, figure out what is it that will make people love it, and what are the features you can say no to? It's almost more important what you say no to than what you say yes to. You.
Aaron Moncur:Greg,ello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today we have Greg mark, a visionary entrepreneurial innovator and the mastermind behind the invention of carbon fiber printing, currently the founder and CEO of backflip, an AI company revolutionizing how we create 3d objects in the real world. Greg's career spans a series of groundbreaking ventures, from Mark forged, which redefined printing to allow carbon fiber to genocide and aero motions, where his teams worked on Off Grid Solar Power and high performance aerodynamic solutions for sports cars with a background in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. Greg brings a passion for bold ideas, cutting edge technology and empowering people to change the world. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, I first have to start off by talking about Mark forged, because we have used Mark forged machines for many years now. We love them. I'm a fanboy myself, and to be able to speak with you that the founder of BART forged, what a privilege. Just really cool opportunity. Thank you for being here.
Greg Mark:Yeah, no, I'm happy to do it. It's funny because I was talking to a company out of Stanford that I'm mentoring yesterday, and the guys said, I just want to start off by saying I got an Onix one on eBay, and it's for my side hustle, and I've made like 60 grand selling parts off it. I just turn it on and kick it off, and he's like, he's like, you paid. You pay most of my bills. So thanks for that.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I won't make the whole episode about Mark Forge, but one thing that I have loved about those machines is that they're just bulletproof. You know, it's like this gentleman said, you turn it on and they just run. We've had so few failures on them. Whereas other printers we used it, it seems like failures are a little bit more common, but you just turn this thing on, it prints amazing parts, incredible surface finish, great tolerancing and accuracy and and they're robust, you know, just strong, chunky parts that are perfect for what we do fix string and automation, that sort of thing.
Greg Mark:Yeah, you know, you mentioned that. You mentioned that a lot of your audiences, you know, you know, obviously engineers and looking to do machine design things like that. A lot of what Mark forge kind of had a few different secret sauces. But if you actually spend the time to look at the machine, the design decisions we made in making the machine Mark Forge, it's incredibly mechanically robust, and the machines are not over constrained. So if you look at their design decisions, I'll give an example on the top plate of the mark two on its one, the rails. So we designed this for the Marines. Okay, the rails are, instead of being, instead of being aligned with some fixture that you would have in the factory, we built, we built these little dowel pins and that are, so there's del pins, small dowel pins, and then a screw with a four battery head. So when you screw those all down, it recesses the rail, pushes the rail to one side, because the alignment off one side gives you the tolerance to the same thing machine, as opposed if you let it free, float around and bounce off both sides and you don't know where it is. So those so we and we leave the pins in the machine. So if you as a marine or any other user that happens to be anywhere, or you in your garage, if you need to replace a rail, you can back those screws out, pop a new rail in, gently tighten the rails in the screw, then tighten all the dowel pins to recess it to one side, and you'll have it perfectly aligned. Machine again, right? No, I love that. All the tools you need are built into it.
Aaron Moncur:I love it. Now, speaking of repeatability, the build platform, too, I really was impressed with the build platform and how that mounts. There are these three. They're not dowels. They're like conical pins, I guess you could say, and I forget what the repeatability was, the positional repeatability, but it was down in the microns for taking that platform off and putting it back on. Really impressive. So it's called the
Greg Mark:kinematic coupling. And it's like really big in semiconductors. And what you do is this goes into the notion of constraints. So when you you know, when you have an object to constrain it in space, you need six points to constrain it in space, and anything extra is redundant. The problem with this redundant is, let's say you have, if you, if you're not sure what's going to hold it in place, every time you put the plate back in there, it might find a different thing to line it up, right? So what we do is we have basically a sphere, a cylindrical head on the Bono build plate, three of them, right? And then there's kind of a V group, but it's in kind of a channel, an elliptical channel, on each of the three mounting feet that are on the print stage. And what that does is it. Basically it has like two points touch each screw. So you have two points on each screw, six points in total. Your thing is perfectly constrained. And every time you take it in, take it out, it's exactly those points touching. So if you look at like a traditional 3d printer, where you put them a plate on, plate off, it's, you know, any number of different points can be actually with locating it. And so it's not repeatable. It's not precise. So by using kinematic coupling, it's incredibly repeatable. And actually, yeah, I think we spec it to 10 microns, but it's repeatable to five because we always try to, like, under promise, over deliver.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. Thank you for correcting me. Spherical, not conical pins on the bottom there, but a beautiful and simple and elegant mechanism for intense repeatability. So all right, let's just not fight this. We started with Mark Forge. Let's keep going with Mark forge a little bit longer. Tell us. How did you start Mark Forge? What was the story, the nexus of that company?
Greg Mark:So it goes back to the Marines. So, so, you know, we love, we love the war fighters and our friends in uniform. I was at a solar a solar company, off grid solar company, genocide, and we were, we built, we're the world's largest maker of off grid solar for, you know, boats and science, you know, like, we had a huge deployment all over Africa. And Arko, like, really austere situation. And I was like, this is super cool. We should give us the Marines. Like, they should do this. Because use this, because they're they, they work all over the world. It's really harsh. And, you know, they need power, right? So I fly down to Quantico with the solar power controls, and I show this to Marines. And this guy's like, he's like, like, Greg's like, this is really cool. Direct quote. He says, But Marines don't wire shit. We plug it in. He's like, so here I need you to do this. To do. He's like, I want you to make a half for the battery that, like, plugs in the solar panel, and this hat clicks on top of the battery, and the read doesn't have to wire any shit or have any loose wires anywhere, and it just works, right? And I was like, Cool. I will have it for you in a week. All right, this was the first time I actually ever Okay, so my friends had a military company. They make rope ascenders, like, like, Batman, rope climbing things. And they had just gotten strats as a printer, and they were raving about it, and I'd never used one before. And I was like, Hey, can I come use this printer? So, like, you know, I designed the design, the the body's missing in SolidWorks. And then I go to this printer and print it out, okay? And it's like, it's like, amazing, man, like you can do like a zero corner radius, because instead of, like, CNC machining, you're just extruding material out. So we do the whole process. I paint it, pot it, paint it black, of course. Pot it so it's waterproof. Sent the Marines A week later, and they're like, Fuck, this is exactly what you said. It does. And all of a sudden we've got this cool military economy. Cool military contract. While I'm printing this part, I'm sitting there thinking like, man, if this was made out of carbon fiber, instead of being a prototype for the Marines, it would be dumb. They could just use it. They could drive a truck over it, right? So that's where the idea came from. Is basically, hey, look like we can, I can use I had spent a lot of time in composites in the race car company, and actually from a power company in the past, learning about composites. So I realized, hey, look, if we just throw the continuous fiber in depth in that prototype, it goes from a prototype to a production part the Marines can actually deploy. And that's what I did for Mark forge came
Aaron Moncur:from. So Mark forge machines have been used, I think, well, for sure, the Marines, but even up in space, what are some of the coolest, most wild out there applications that you're aware of where Mark forge machines have been used?
Greg Mark:Okay? So my favorite is, we're on the USS New Hampshire, which is a nuclear sub, a US nuclear sub, right? We're the only three printer on the US nuclear sub. And those boys print the hell out of this machine, right, really. So, you know, they're, they print everything with it, which is so fucking cool. And then, of course, there's parts space stations we have, like fighter jet parks, commercial jet parts, kids using for battle boss, which I love, because you're, you know, anytime you have a chance to train the next generation, like, you got to do it right? Because, like, you had, like, you know, you know, we're a snapshot in time, but humanity is, like, 300,000 years old, so we're just, like, the next step in the chain. So any chain, any time you can, like, train the new generation, it's killer. So my favorite thing about Mark Forge, and I'll tell you a funny story, my favorite thing about Mark Forge is the same badass carbonfire printer we came up with Mark Two. Same badass carbon fire printer that NASA used is what high school students were making battles on. So it was totally, totally democratized. It's not like, if you had a million bucks, you had a better printer than somebody who had 10,000 bucks. It's like, you like to save the most the coolest possible tech we could do. We had the mark two out when the first came out. Wasn't a desktop printer, right? And everybody could use it. That was so fucking cool. So the so that the other thing going back to Marines, so they run my stuff everywhere, right? And, you know, I would ask them, like, Hey, how can we make this thing better? And they were like, No, the printer works great, and it's great. Like, cool, but, you know, I'd like to make it work better. Like. Have to make it work better. This guy says to me, says, Craig, and says, you know, I've seen these printers fall out of trucks, fall off of trucks, get run over by. Trucks get rolled around the sand. He's like, I've taken an inch of sand out of the bottom. One of these things stand over the wipe the rails down, throw some WD, 40, and we're printing again. He's like, your printer is great, dude. Don't worry about it, right? So it's like, he's like, he's like, we love him, man, don't worry about it, right? So it's like, it's, it's really cool. It's really cool. The number of people who had great ideas and made their career with it, I'll tell you one last story. There's a major food and beverage company, like, like, major in this country. It's global. But, you know, headquarters here, and they had a person who just graduated school, okay, and they were solving a major problem that they have with their food getting bad on shelves. And this engineer, he was like, Hey, we should just print it on the marks for us. Like, and his boss was like, You're crazy, right? Like, you literally, are crazy. Like, you know, we're this huge company. Like, when you CNC machines where this created, and it's like, just, you know, the kind of shape that we try, right? So that, so he does it, he prints the part. This is a key part, and then they start using it like a test line, and it works better than the CNC machine parts, okay? So then using it more, and using it more, and using it more, all of a sudden they're like, they're now all converts, okay? So now every item this company makes, the final quality step is done with like Mark for three printed parts, because this person, this badass engineer, advocated for it, stood his ground, proved that it worked, converted his boss, then it converted the entire company. So every factory that makes this food uses his parts. Wow, yeah, great story. What do you think that did for his career? Right? Probably good guys. Yeah, he's the guy, yeah, he's the guy
Aaron Moncur:that really resonates with me. We had a similar situation with one of our customers, it's not deployed worldwide, but with our customer, we design a lot of fixtures and things like that. And this company of ours, customer of ours, we came to them and said, We want to start using these smartforged printed parts. And they're like that. We'd rather have, you know, machined aluminum or Delrin or stainless steel or whatever. And we said, well, just let us try it. Right? So we did, and what we were doing was these device holders. So previously, we would spend probably $2,500.03 grand, sending this out to a shop, CNC shop. They'd hog it out of a block of aluminum, a very nice contoured surface that that matched the the contour of these medical devices that we were fixing, holding in this plate, and it would take probably three weeks, right? So now we try the same thing with the mark forged, and now we're printing it in a day, and it costs, like, the cost to our customer anyway, it was like 500 bucks, something like that, right? So like, 20% the cost, and they get it in a fraction of the time. We deliver it. And we're like, okay, here it is, what do you think? And they're like, We love this. This is amazing. We had no idea. They now have multiple Mark forge printers of their own, and pretty much all of their fixtures are made on Mark forged machines. Now
Greg Mark:that that is what happens, like, it's like, you're, you're like, amothello, where you put the pieces down, it flips from one to the other, okay, yeah, when a factor gets it, because you walk in and you see, like, a little bit of everywhere, the shining everywhere. Okay, then when they get the marsh forest printer, when they when they get it, all the fixtures are black. Every you just want everything is like, everything, trade printer garbage, the entire everything. And we're just like, it's all it's matte black. Man, it is like it's the new black.
Aaron Moncur:And just to be clear, no one is paying me to say this. I've actually said really positive things about Mark forge for years. I'm online. There are videos of me. I've actually worked with the marketing team at Mark Forge. I never got paid a cent for saying any of this stuff. I just really liked the product. I think it's a great product, and so I tell people about it, that's been my experience,
Greg Mark:yeah. And actually, at this point, I have, I haven't had owned a mark for share in like, three years. So no, and I'm not on anyway. Nobody's paying me to say that's right now I am 100% like 100% third party
Aaron Moncur:nice, yeah, all right. So speaking of not being at Mark forge anymore, you've got a new company called backflip. What can you tell us about backflip? Okay,
Greg Mark:so it's really cool. So when we were at Mark Forge, we did the back half of design, a back half of manufacturing. So you would come, you would design a part, and then you'd want to, you need to make the part, okay? So you can, you know, print it. And as you know, carbon fiber, stainless steel, titanium, copper, you can now you take your pick right and then at back liquid in the front half design. So if you, if you zoom out and you look at you go to the last 50 years, the major innovations have been on the design side. The difference between, like, you know, 2025, Porsche and a 2020, and a 2000 Course, isn't the steel and aluminum stamp out of it's the design, right? And so we said, hey, look, we want, we want to move design faster. We want to be the next, we want to be the next step change in the industrial revolution, if you look at industrial revolution, there's been many that, you know, there was the first beginning, but there's been these additional ones, like the first industrial revolution, then we had electrification, right? Then we had computers, and now we have AI, okay, so we're in like an AI Industrial Revolution. And so, you know, my co founder, David and I, we co founded Mark Forge, and now we co founded back flip. We retired after Mark Forge, because that was a journey, that was a very long slog. But we missed building so much, and we were like, man, we want to like, we want to build, like, the design tools that we always wanted to have. And we were doing work for right? And we had a very unique approach for it. So what? So the first thing that we're doing is there's a scan to CAD. So you take a 3d scan and you get that point cloud of, you know, half a million points. But you can't bring him into a CAD package, or it will choke, right? And then you got to sit there and reverse engineer by hand. You hate your life,
Aaron Moncur:right? So we, and some people, think reverse engineering is this magic button where you push a button and all of a sudden you've got this perfect CAD model. Not the case. Reverse Engineering, even with the semi automated, expensive reverse engineering software, is still a very manual and time consuming process. So please continue. Sorry to interrupt. No,
Greg Mark:no, exactly. Please, please jump in. So that's exactly right. So the so we've trained an AI model to do that step for you. So you scan a part and you create a mesh, or, by the way, somebody sends you an STL, right? They'll take any mesh. You can take an STL. Somebody sends you an STL for whatever reason to further out. You can drop the STL into our AI, and it will convert it into a CAD part, right? So it'll go so there's two, there's two endpoints right now. The first one, which will be beta testing in about two weeks, gives you a STEP file. It'll be online, and it actually you can, we can get you in beta, and you can drop an STL in, and it will give you a step out, which you can then bring it to any cat pack do direct editing on right. And the second version is a SolidWorks plugin which is super cool, and it and it will live in SolidWorks, and it will natively drive SolidWorks and create that exact part in SolidWorks with a SolidWorks feature tree, and it's a first class citizen. So it looks like you cater the part when you sign with your SolidWorks name, right? So this is really cool, because, you know, so it's very important the philosophy of your Back Flip, okay, if you look at CAD, you know, you know, CAD, various CAD companies, over the years, it's always been like a zero sum game, right? You're if when a cat, when they go to a new company, like, Hey, throw out your own tad and use our cat, right? Rich or replace. Okay, we're like what we're like. We love tad. Keep your cat. Okay, keep your CAD. You know it, you use it. You're great at you've got 10,000 hours in it. We don't want to slow you down and millisecond. Okay, we're going to bolt on this turbocharger to the front end of this process. And we're going to get your idea into the CAD as quickly as possible through AI, and then let you richer everything you're already great at. Take your Pikmin, your SolidWorks onshape, CATIA, NX, like PTC, whatever you love to use. We love that you love it. We love that you love it. You know how to use it. You're trained on it. Your IT department signed off on it legal. Sign up. Keep your cat. Okay, we bolt this thing in the front of it, and all of a sudden we get your scan from like a crappy point cloud to a parametric part in a minute, right? And then we're gonna, and that's the first modality. We're gonna keep adding different modalities on top of this model that will help you get your we will be the biggest on rent, into CAD that's ever existed, and then into the why? Okay, go for it. Go for it. I think
Aaron Moncur:that's a super smart model. I saw this AI drawing creation tool just the other day, right? 2d drawing create, you drop a STEP file in. It creates a 2d drawing, all the dimensions, G, D and T. Super cool, right? But I looked at it and I thought, I can't use this, because it takes a step and then it gives me some proprietary output that doesn't play with SolidWorks, and we need to be compatible with SolidWorks. So the fact that you guys are supercharging the existing CAD tool that all of us engineers are already using, whether it's SolidWorks or onshape or NX or whatever, that's a big deal.
Greg Mark:Yeah, we so, for us, if you zoom out, like the reason we as humans have nice things is because productivity per human goes up every year. Okay? Before the industrial revolution, we were in the shit. Okay? Like we didn't have nice things. We didn't have. We didn't have food, we were cold, we didn't have electricity, we had no computers, no cars, no airplanes. Oh, they do nothing. Okay? So the key to getting us out of that muck, okay, to have, like, nice things, was to raise that productivity per human. Because before that, for hundreds of years, we were just in the muck. Once productivity per human went up. We were doing great. So we look at the world and we're like, how do we increase productivity per human so we can all have nice things and live in the future, right? Like, that's how we look at it. And it's like, and, and it's like, we don't want to, we don't want to retrain people. I don't want to go in there and build an army and, like, retraining people. I don't want to rebuild cat. I have no desire to rebuild cat, right? We're like, dude, because modern CAD packages, they're great. They work really well. They're like, they're great. We just want to put a blower on that thing and just send everybody. We want to turn, like, a 15 second car into an eight second car, right? And it's just, like, just hold on for dear life. And like, because we want, dude, imagine if your auto, if your car, the design cycle for your car was from seven years to six years to five years to four years to three years, right? It's like, it's like, Dude, we're gonna compress. We go through a time warp. We compress time okay? And the cool shit that would normally have come out 50 years from now, we'll have it in 10 Don't you want a car from 50 years from now? I do. I don't want to drive the car from 10 years. I would drive the car from 50 years. Car from
Aaron Moncur:50 years from now. I love this so much. My personal mission statement is to accelerate the speed of engineering, to improve the human experience. Yeah, you guys are doing exactly that exact line. We're
Greg Mark:one down. This is, like, this is, and, by the way, this is like, you know, if you love people, which I do, like, this is the best thing we can do for each other, right? You take, you lift everybody up. Like, when we where we make, we invent cool things, we lift everybody up. It's so cool, Yep,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. So who is backflip intended for? Is it for engineers, for consumers, for both, for some other category?
Greg Mark:Okay, two, first user groups, okay, immediately obvious. First user group, you're a CAD engineer, already. You want to go faster. Okay, it's you, it's me. That's like, probably half your podcast, maybe all your podcasts, okay, you're a cat engineer. You love CAD. You want to go faster, okay? Or you're on the path to being a cat engineer. You're learning CAD, and we're going to get you there faster, okay? And I'll tell you, I'll click on a second, but then there's a whole other, okay, there's an entire other group of, like, mechanically brilliant people who like and who, who I've got the cigarette to interact with. In my years of workforce, we would do this thing where, you know, you mentioned, uses Mark force for tools and fixtures. Everybody uses marked for tools and fixtures. Okay, that's what the company does. We had this program called Walk the Line. We'd go to a factory, we'd walk down the production line and teach people what parts you can turn, you know, make out of more fortune, what parts you can't right? And in this process, I would meet 1000s of brilliant technicians, and they're like, Yo, I had this idea. And they tell me the idea, and they can describe the idea. They could draw the idea. Dude, these people, they're building race cars. Okay? They're overhauling engines. They're making furniture out of wood that looks like it came out of restoration. Hard. Makes restoration hard, really cheap. Okay, they're mechanically brilliant. They're manufacturing your car. They don't know cat that I just didn't have 10,000 hours during CAD. We're going to take those people and give them a tool to get them into CAD. Okay? So what's going to happen is, like, they're going to be able to scan, draw, describe their idea, and then get it into SolidWorks, get it into NX, get it into CATIA, right? Like, get it into the CAD program record. And we've made a very deliberate design decision. So when we create the file in SolidWorks, we don't just create the file in SolidWorks. We drive SolidWorks in front of you, so you watch how we made it, okay? So you're, you're brand new to CAD. You scan this thing in okay? And it's like it's got to and you're thinking to yourself, how would I design this in CAD, okay, this exact shape, and you've been thinking about it because you've been scanning it in, what is the extrudes? What are the cuts, where the revolt and then the AI will show it, will drive it, teach you in front of it. Here's where the here's where I do the thing sketch. Here's where I showed it, rotated around. Did this cut here, did this remote. And it will literally step it'll speed, run a little fast, but it'll go through and build the entire thing. And you're like, that's how this part was built. So every time you make a part, it's showing you how it made it education, training, uh huh, there's built in training in every time. Okay, so here's the cool thing. So you go, there's a leverage ratio, okay? You own a factory, an automotive factory, and there might be one or two people who have tad and then use CAD, and then 3000 technicians, okay, who are mechanically brilliant. What if we let 50 or 500 of those 3000 technicians get their idea into cat. Okay, you know what happened? The production line would go faster, okay? And when a production line goes faster, company makes more profit, can hire more people, build more cars, having more efficiency, return money, shareholders. Project for Human goes up. And then, by the way, you're this is quote, and I really want. I can find out who it is. But this guy totally said, he said, I've been working at auto factory. He said, For 30 years, have been paying me for my hands, and they could have had my mind for free, right? So it's like, so it's also like, man, it's nice to get your ideas out, right? When you have an idea, a good idea, and you can't get it out, it's, it's almost painful to have that idea, because you know that the world be better if your idea got into the world, right? And so, you know, we're giving people a way to get their idea into the world, and it's and it's not like, Shadow IT. We're not like, Yo, here's this random thing on the side. We're like, no, no. It's in the CAD package. Okay? It goes in your native cat. You can have a design review, you can have a part number, you can, like, go through the entire quality control process. But now, instead of everything having the whole pipe, and now instead of the one or two engineers in the factory starting from zero, there's, like, the technician comes in, like, here's this thing I drew up in CAD right? So it's in your it's in your CAD package. And why don't I pitch it to you? Why don't explain to you? And if you like it, we hit three printers now we have it.
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Greg Mark:You were plugging on the side. And it's, you know, it's March forge black, right? So, you know, I like it's my hair color, so plug it inside, and there's two buttons, okay? One button is for import, right? And it'll tell you import STL, objet, like, whatever you want, import it, and you'll bring in your SDL, which could come from, again, a three print file or the output from a scanner, okay? And then we'll shoot it up to the cloud, okay, our GPUs analyze it all right, figure out what does the cat sequence make this part? And then we come down with four options, right? Because AI inherently has some variation, right? So we'll give you four options. What should these four options close to what you want? Right? And you pick that option, you can preview it, okay, and you hit, then you see that. Use a second button. Now, send us all okay, we're, you know, we're third in the screen, right? And it senses all it works. And then literally drive SolidWorks. And like rotation and like builds you your part. And that entire process, including building your part, like, a minute, well, right? Okay. And then once you have your part, you collapse the window, goodbye, backflip, put it in the corner, right? You know, when you need it, it's there. So we take up the smallest amount of real estate we possibly can, because we don't want to waste your space, right? And when you, when you want to bring in an STL and convert it to it to a SolidWorks file, where you want to bring in a scan, converted to file, you click that tiny button, open up this beautiful window, super really, like no training requires simple, super simple interface. And then, like, now you have your software's part, and then again, it's got a feature tree, so you can go in there and edit whatever you want to edit, right? And the cool thing is, the cool thing is the plugin you install, but the AI model gets better every three weeks. Just like, mark for software, just like, just like, okay, so if you, if you just, like, take the summer off, when you come back, okay, your AI convert will be better, right? It just, it gets better every, every few weeks,
Aaron Moncur:I may have missed something here. You said there are two buttons. One is the Import button. What was the other one?
Greg Mark:One is, one is like, basically, uh bring a file into backflip, like, import, and the other is export to SolidWorks. Export windows. One is like, where 1/3 of it is like the back flip side two thirds of SolidWorks side you you import, you bring your STL, it does the analysis. It comes out with a parametric model. And then you hit, basically, export to SolidWorks, the imports on top and the exports the bottom in blue. And. It's like, and then that's what drives SolidWorks, and then makes your thing. Got it, okay? Watching it dry. SolidWorks is so cool.
Aaron Moncur:So that's amazing functionality. Is there a future where, you know how, like with Dolly, right? It's text to image? Is there a future where there's text to CAD model?
Greg Mark:This is, this is a great and unknown question. Okay, so here's what I can tell you, we have an underlying we have a new call it foundational. We have a new AI foundation model, and it's like the words first CAD model, and it's awesome, right? And it gets better every few weeks, right? And there'll be a series of inputs to it. The first input is just scanning, okay? And another input is an STL, I just take an STL, okay. We are going to we're currently exploring a range of inputs. But the question, the major question, is, what is going to help a either technician or CAD user, get their idea into CAD really quickly? Is it text? Is it drawing on the screen? Is it drawing on paper and taking a photo? We're exploring all these different options with the goal of, with the goal, there'll be a series of successive releases. The same way, you know, the successive releases that that help people get their idea into cat, right? So they can make their idea rule, okay? And then the like, which ones are the best ones? Nobody's ever done it yet, so we don't know. Okay, so what I think? So I think, like you can imagine a future where you say, hey, I'll give you example. Let's say you're doing machine design, okay? And you need an XY rail, right? You really shouldn't have to learn that from scratch. You just shouldn't, right? It's kind of crazy. You ought to be able to say, give me an x ray rails, and it should populate it for you, okay. But then there are other things that are, like, really precise, where, if you're like, Hey, okay, like, the print nozzle, the print head for the mark, fourth printer files. Like, give me a 3d print head, it will have no idea how to make a mark for print, right? And then, like, and those, services the tolerance of dimensions they really matter, right? So in that situation, it's really about saving me clicks and getting from my idea into exactly what I want, like precisely, nothing different what I want, as quickly as possible, and work candidly, still figure that interface out, and that's why and the way. So you know what we did at mark for you, do a few things. We then new technology, and then we'll listen to customers. Like that was the secret. Oh, we had the best team. Okay, so it mentioned new technology. Had best team. Listen very much to customers, and I'll give you a tell your story. So Onyx is very popular material. Actually, I don't think ever told the story. Honestly, you're hearing reverse, very popular material. At the time, when we started the company, we had continuous carbon fiber and what's called neat nylon. So nylon with nothing, no fillers in it, okay? And the parts were all clear with carbon fiber in it, and honestly, they look like crap. Okay? Because, like, it's just not a good in carbon fiber and traditional composite called a gel coat. But the gel coating doesn't look good, right? Just doesn't okay. And I can tell you why. It doesn't matter. Okay? So, I was visiting a customer, a German auto manufacturer, because their their mark two had been kicked to Germany from Boston like it had fallen off. The plane had fallen off the truck. They managed to the shipper. And I'm not going to name names, bent the frame, okay, by the way, you've, you know the frame of the spreader. Is it a little bit in your body? Yeah. Two humans, I know that one of them can jump on that frame and not bend you can two humans can jump on not bended. Marines have done horrible that not, I did not know what this company, okay, it's like, it's really, really fell okay. So, so, okay. So we determined that the frame is Ben. There's no way to fix those things because and then the customer is like, you know, Greg, I love your continuous carbon fiber, but there's a lot of times where I can't fit it in. And I'm like, Yeah, I understand, because we have an overhead of plastic inside. He's like, and while I love the strength, my favorite part about it is actually it doesn't bend. And of course it would bend. Carbon fiber has zero coefficient thermal expansion, like, in fact, slightly negative, but basically zero. I'm like, so of course. And then I was like, I was like, he's like, so can you just, like, can you just make it smaller? And I'm like, yes, and no, like, Give me three months, right? And so make it smaller. So can we make a continuous carbon fiber? Tell smaller? No. But what I was like, So, after like, so for the first year of Mark Forge, I was like, we're never doing chopped carbon fibers, wasted time. It's not that much stronger, right? We'll never do it's a waste time, right? And it's gonna destroy, it's gonna eat that. It's gonna destroy the pregnant, like, just horrible. Okay, you know, you throw a glass filled dial through an injection bowl. It tears it up. Okay? So I come back from Germany, and I'm like, All right, boys, it's time to do chop carbon fiber. Come. Only 180 complete. 180 okay, why? Because, while I had originally believed that there was no application for it, as soon as we figured out there was, I'm like, yo, it's like, it's a strong opinion held lightly, right, as soon as we saw the application, I'm like, bro, I was wrong. 180 we're doing that as quickly as possible. We popped out Onyx in like, three or four months. It was crazy. We shipped it over to those guys, and they were like, This is exactly what we wanted. And then as soon as we started pretty with onyx, it's, I thought it's like that 1000 as soon as we started pretty with it, we realized, dude, my co founder, David, and the software team, they were always having to balance, like, too much cooling, too little cooling, parts warping to store on all these different arbitrary shapes, right by the way, doing all those different arbitrary shapes is why David now can make all the 50 million CAD shapes that we had to make to train back flip. But anyway, so these things are bending in the story, and then the Onyx comes out. And I'm like, we're never printing need nylon ever again, just like the whole company went black where I was like, that's it. We will, we will keep the need nylon. There's no more support for it. We are. We're 100 on its company like, and it's and, you know, it's like, if you need a non Mari wear surface, then meat. Nylon is cool. But otherwise, onyx is just better, better material.
Aaron Moncur:We love Onyx. I mean, probably 95% of what we print is Onyx. We have a mark two, and so we can do continuous carbon fiber, and it's great for the 5% of time we need it. But, you know, the Onyx is pretty remarkable on its own.
Greg Mark:What I tell people is, it's like a pickup truck. Okay, you're gonna pick up truck. You're not loading the bed all the time, right? The continuous carbon fiber you don't need all the time. When you need it, it's amazing, yeah, right. But like pure what it is is what it is. Now this has been time thinking about this. When you make an aluminum part, most of the time it's over designed. You didn't actually need all that strength, and so as an engineer, before 3d printing, the base material that we kind of thought of was aluminum, because it threads so nicely. It doesn't really feel it thread so nicely, okay? So it's like, well, you make it a plastic with a plastic bend. It's hard to hold device. It's hard to clamp on it. The threads are shitty. Like, you know, you're like, unless you're using, like, all 10, which is a cool plastic. Otherwise you don't want to see anything machine, like a nylon. It's not worth your machine. It might as well be, right? So we just as as a as a machinist, we just all think about aluminum, right? And then once you get used to onyx, you're like, wow, I've been over designing a bunch of stuff. Yeah, right. And that's when you realize you could, like, dial it back.
Aaron Moncur:We had an experience one time where we were delivering a machine, or scheduled to deliver a machine, and a part, I can't remember if the part broke or we didn't, I think we didn't get the part in time, and we were supposed to deliver this thing the next day, so we were up late trying to figure out, you know, what do we do here? And we said, let's just print it on the mark two and stuff it with continuous carbon fiber. It was an aluminum part that we needed, and we really did need it to be very stiff and rigid, and so we stuffed this part with continuous carbon fiber. We had it ready, like 3am right that morning, and we put it on our machine, and, boom, worked perfectly. And that's how we that's how we delivered it to the customer. So it was a pretty awesome solution,
Greg Mark:literally, that is, that is the exact story. It is. It is a, what I call a wartime solution, okay, so when you're there are rules for what you're allowed to field in the military, and there are wartime exemptions, okay? Because they're practical. Okay? There's the same people rose for engineering men. It's like you, you would have been, you would never fit that out a little bit of a chat to, right? You would never shift to and then people try it, it works. And all said, it's this light bulb moment. And we did it ourselves. We were designing these printers, one of our engineers, I was like, he was going to see him, Team machine apart. And I was like, why don't you three print it? And he looks at me, and we're it's late, we're all tired. That's when he goes, because I need it to work, dude. And then he just realized that he told you, he's like, Okay. I was like. I was like, Dude, I'm happy to watch your CNC this thing. But you know, it takes like 30 seconds to get off on the printer. Just try it, see what it does. Okay? So he kicks the print off, and then he's coding the thing. He's sending the pictures. He's done the first stop done with the machine. While he's getting the first stop done to threat part, the three printer. Part finishes. He picks out the printer. It's a spool holder, and he's like, puts in the spoons. Like, wow, it fits. And then he puts, like, the maiden piece into like, oh, it fits too. And he puts on the machine. He's like, he's like, Oh, it holds a load. And I look at his face, and he was like, and it was like, he discovered fire. He was like, holy, and dude, then he three printed everything, right? That's the we as humans. We need to feel. Need to feel it, that intuition, to believe it. We need to believe it can work, because it's all, especially mechanical engineers. Everything is a theory that we don't trust. Until we feel it, we see it for ourselves. Because. Right? Because the world relies on mechanical engineers to build things safely. Okay? We're like, the gatekeeper of safety, like, we're like, caption safety for the entire world, right? So the world needs us to be conservative, because we have, you know, we're the safety people. Like, we make your cars safe, we make your planes safe, make your building safe, like we have to be. We make your bridges safe, right? So mechanic years, it's ingrained in us, like, you know, I have to really feel it and see it and analyze it and stress test it and bend it to believe it. But then once you have that thing, it's this big unlock, and you're like, oh, I can make stuff faster. I can make stuff more effectively. I can, you know, solve problems like superpower
Aaron Moncur:and a funny way. This reminds me that story reminds me of my kids eating my wife's cooking. They're always like, No, I don't want to eat it. It's gross. I don't like this. Blah, blah, blah. And then they eat it, and they're like, Oh, that was actually good. I can eat mom's cooking. Yeah?
Greg Mark:That is how that is. You know, people don't. It's like, the green eggs and ham. Man, it's green eggs and ham, right? Perfect.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, all right, let's talk a little bit about entrepreneurship and starting businesses. So you've founded multiple companies at this point. How do you go about evaluating whether an idea is worth putting the time and effort into really building a company around?
Greg Mark:That's a great question. It's funny. So the first thing is, the first question is, imagine that so as an engineer, where the first time the start of company, you get really focused on, can I build it? Right? And there's a trick that you have to learn from venture capitalists, and the trick is they just assume you can build it, because sometimes it causes them giant disasters, okay? But they just so, they just like, Okay, let me assume you can build it. Does anybody care? Okay, there's a Netflix documentary called something ventured. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you got to watch a documentary. It's about that. It's about the history of venture capital, and it's a great documentary. But the things that, the things you want to do, the first question is like, let's say you build a SIG. How big is the market. Does anybody care? Does anybody care? And how much will they pay for it? And can you build a business out? So the thing with building businesses, you've got to be able to fund the business in a scalable way. Okay, what does that mean? Like, it's like, okay, Mark, forge hit break even, or we're doing 30 million of revenue every dollar we made a profit, we pumped back into the business, every dollar, like nobody was there was no like profit distribution at the end of the year, right? And so if your business is profitable and growing quickly, you can invest in R, D. If your business is not profitable and growing quickly, you cannot. That's just it. Okay. So what you want to do is you need to, so this is balance. You need to price it high enough that you can make enough margin that you can actually grow the business, and you price it low enough that the when the customer looks at they're like, I get incredible value, even after having paid that right? And so you want, you got to balance that right. So you want to do something, it's like, you need to make a product that people are going to love. You need to be able to sell it for a high price, low on us that they can afford it, and it makes their life more efficient and better, but high enough that you can get what's called free cash flow to pump back into the business, to fund to hire engineers, hire product managers, hire salespeople, hire the finance person to keep the books, hire the lawyer to make sure you're not getting sued, like you got to pay all these people. And that comes, that comes from the profit, right? So that. So the thing, you know, and there's a funny thing where, 40 years ago, people would build an entire product, the marketing, the package, the entire thing, and they would launch it, right? And then, you know, 20 years ago, people were, like, had this notion of minimum viable product. Like, let me get a product to the market quickly and see if people care. So you spend like, half the time building it, half the cost, whatever. Maybe you do less than that, and then you ship the first thing. Look at Mark one. It wasn't perfect, by the way, neither was the first iPhone. And actually, my favorite stories, the first iPhone didn't have cut copy paste, like a basic feature, a basic gas feature, cut copy paste absent from the first iPhone.
Aaron Moncur:I had forgotten about that, but now that you mentioned it, I remember that, okay, but people loved it,
Greg Mark:okay. And that's the magic. And there was this, there was this, like side of friend working apple. And, you know, because the previous version of the iPhone and they were shipped, they were all ready to ship this thing, and Job was playing with it. He talking to Johnny, and he's like, I don't love it. And Johnny's like, I don't love it either. And Job's like, fix it, man, right? And fix it was a very expensive this is, this is not, this is not a trivial thing. This is like, a really fear inducing thing. It's like, you're tooled up, your factories are ready, your marketing is ready. And Job is like, Nope, you're gonna have to go in another direction, because I just don't love it. Okay? You okay? And the key point here is they got to something that they loved, and we all loved, but it was an imperfect product, so you've got to figure out what can be imperfect about your product, but people love it, okay? So, okay, I'll give you another example. I. Enzo Ferrari, okay, the entire time he lived, the body panels on his cars never lined up. Worth a day, right? And he famously said, someone just complained about this. And he said, I don't care if the body panels line up when the driver steps in the gas, he should shit his pants, right? Okay, so what is Enzo telling you? End of the product manager, he has an intuition. What do you intuition. What are you telling you? He's telling you. He's telling you, I have limited resources. Okay, I have limited resources. I got to put them somewhere. Am I going to put them into hiring people to do the Toyota thing and make everything perfectly lined up? No, I'm going to put all my money to the engine, and my engine is gonna sin, and when you step on the gas, you're gonna shit your pants now. And they're also had great handling, great suspension, but, but he knew there were things that he could get away with, okay, features that like people would want but they don't really need. And if he really focus all of his chips on this other thing, he would have very special car, right? And so you've got to figure out, in the in your chosen profession, in the product you want to build, what is the essence that somebody that's going to make somebody love it and they need that thing, and you want to double down that essence, and what are the things that you can just I'll give you example. One thing to now ship example mark for his printers, print Slow as hell. Okay, they're faster now, okay, but when we started, when we started, everybody asked me to go faster. Okay? Because, you know, it's like watching grass grow. And I was like, No, okay. I was like, we don't have enough people. We're going to focus on reliability. Because if you're part, we're going back to the thing mechanical engineers. We're in charge of safety and repeatability. So I was like, I should tell our engineers every time this came up, like, you know, how fast the world's fastest carbon power three printer prints that fast, right? As fast? Okay, we're the bar. Okay. Now whether or not somebody loves us is not if the part finishes 20 minutes early, okay, if such it works. And way back in the first few years, we'd have part failures. Okay? So you, you know, you print out a part, you go home, you go to sleep, you come back, and you've got a spool of trash of our bird's nest. You're very unhappy. Okay? It took 20 minutes longer. You totally okay with it. The 20 minutes longer cut, copy, paste bird nest. Don't love it, right? Once we got so we, we said we're gonna, oh no, not control, move all the variables where to print this exact same speed and focus all of our effort on reliability. Everything we got, we're going to make it reliable across the entire range of parts. If you haven't get a part that you can't print, you get to get support button, which we have printed for you, right? And then, and then we prefer for you and everybody else, right? Like we update the algorithm. Everybody gets that part. So we really obsessed over getting you really strong parts reliably that you could depend on, right? And then, once we got there, then we started making go faster. Now, then it went twice as fast, in fact, like that was the that was the order of reparations. So when, if you're an entrepreneur and you're thinking about doing business, figure out what is it that will make people love it. And what are the features you can say no to? It's almost more important what you say no to than what you say yes to. Okay, you got to say yes to, like, one or two things and no 10 things. Like, it's like, it's like a 10 to one.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I just found the intro to this episode right there. That was perfect. Incredible insight. Fantastic insight. Thank you so much for sharing that. I have so many more questions that I want to ask you, and we're not going to get to all of them. Let me just end with this last one here. You had a really cool experience as a senior, I think, in high school, getting a job making custom bicycle frames, and it demonstrated your ability to be persistent. So the question here is, first of all, can you share that story briefly, and then what? To what degree has persistence shaped your career as an entrepreneur?
Greg Mark:Oh, man, my mentor once said, in our society, persistence is heavily rewarded, not in all societies, but in our society. Okay, so I was a bicycle mechanic at the time, and I wanted to make this custom bicycle frames, and I had signed up at my school to take two periods off to go do this internship. Okay, assuming that I would get it, having never talked to people who actually had to say yes. And so, you know, you know, because you know how it goes. So school starts, and I show up, and I'm like, hey, I want to do an internship. I hear you this thing. And the guy goes, Dave Ross is the main really good guy, great guy. And he says, Dave says, we only take, like, college grads, maybe a college you're not a high school kid, right? And I'm like, No man. Like, you know, I'm gonna work really hard. I would fix bicycles. I'm good at fixing bicycles. I'm, you know, like, like, you don't have to pay me, dude, I'll be free. Like, you know, like, you know, like, I'm negotiating against myself. I'm like, I'm free, man, you had to pay me. I'll hit the floor. I'll dig on the trash. And he's like, No, dude, no, okay, okay. So I'm like, fuck. So I get in the car and I go home, and. And I'm like, I'm really fucked right now. And then, like, my school teacher is like, is like, you know, hey, I need you to your internship advisor, sign this thing. And I'm like, so I didn't have a choice, man, so I gotta go back. I go back the next day, and I show my company's like, Wait, Judy, I'm like, do I really this job? I don't know about you, but, like, I don't know about you, but like, I need to work here, right? I just, I need to be here, right? I was like, man, like, okay, so then he, like, so he, he, he lets me try. Okay, let me try. My first day, I've never fucked up so much in my life. Okay? My first day, I'm sweeping the floor. I'm doing stuff. This is fine. I'm working there for, like, supposed to be two hour internship there for five hours every day, okay, so, like, maybe more. And then I've got to drill this water bottle hole. Okay, so this is a fixture, the first picture ever use. And it's got, like, little Bucha into fixture. You drill it, okay, when you rotate it, you slide it down. So the water bottles can be, you know, offset from each other on the on the downtube, okay, well, I drill the hole, I slide it over, and don't index it down. So I drill the hole exactly opposite from each other. And it's like, and, you know, I got a fucking hole in a bicycle the wrong place. And they like, and they've got a weld. Fill in that hole grow. And the time I don't weld and weld it, fill it in, dry it down, and, you know, re heat treat the bike. Okay? So it's like, Fuck man, okay, that. And then I fucked up a serial number. Like, I just, I mean, like, Dude, I think because I was stressed, because I fucked the whole up this, like, again, this never happens to me, okay? And like, and then Dave to the kindness of his heart, like, you had a bad day. And, like, I had a really bad day, and he's like, I'll give you one more chance. And he did, right? It was a great guy about it. And then, then I became a great employee for him. I, like, I kicked ass, I worked hard, I was cheap. Like, you know what? Did a bunch of stuff, and it was, it was a great relationship for all parties. So, like, it's great guy, but I would, but I would tell you is, man, it takes a lot of nos to get to yes. And by the way, you know because you're in your podcast as being an engineer, is, you know, engineers have a love hate relationship with salespeople, okay, but if there's one thing that engineers should really learn from salespeople, a good salesperson knows that there's 10 no's forever, yes, okay? And you cannot let the no stop you. Okay? You get a no. Customer says no. You do like, I hope this is a no for now and not forever. And you come back if you know hope is a no for now and not forever, okay? And if you, if you have a good product, it's a good product, and you're a good person, often that will turn into a Yes, fantastic.
Aaron Moncur:Such great advice. You said something else at the beginning of that story that that struck me as being an important mindset for an entrepreneur. You said that you didn't even have this job, this internship with the bike company, when you told your school that I need two periods off so I can go do this. And I think that is entrepreneurs. I think that we often just assume that we can do this thing, like other people assume we can't do that because of A and B and C. But entrepreneurs often have the mindset that I don't know how to do this, but I assume I can figure it out. I assume I can make this work, and then we just move forward and we figure it
Greg Mark:out, yes, and I think it's like the words are suspend disbelief. Okay, so, so an entrepreneur shares a lot, you know, if you look at the Venn diagram of entrepreneur and crazy person, there's a fair amount of overlap, okay, does entrepreneur believe in a future that does not exist yet that is incredibly hard to achieve, okay? And they live in this reality where they think that's gonna happen, like this crazy thing is gonna happen, okay? And you just have to, you just have to suspend disbelief. And if you this is crazy, drops quote, he says, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do
Aaron Moncur:Amen, brother. I love that. Greg. Thank you so much. This has been a phenomenal hour. Thank you for sharing your time with us and your wisdom and your insights. I think a lot of people are really going to enjoy this episode and benefit from it. Is there anything else we haven't touched on that you'd like to leave us with as we close out this conversation?
Greg Mark:I think this was great. I think you asked great questions and like, I'm glad you're happy with your printer, and I hope you get to I'd love to hear feedback on backflip, and I think you're gonna love it. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you, Greg, it was a pleasure. Man. Do us do it again sometime.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. This. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
