Make More Than You Take: A Conversation with Formlabs' Max Lobovsky
Condensed and edited for clarity from a June 2026 conversation in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Most conversations about reshoring American manufacturing start with capital and policy. Max Lobovsky, co-founder and CEO of Formlabs, wants to start somewhere less comfortable: with culture, character, and the unglamorous discipline of running a real factory. Over fifteen years, he has taken Formlabs from a Kickstarter 3D printer to a global company building machines in China, making materials in Ohio, and now standing up Form Now, a print-on-demand service producing parts in Massachusetts. Today the company is profitable, with north of $250 million in revenue, some 700 employees, more than 150,000 printers shipped, and over half a billion parts printed. NextGen's Milo Werner sat down with him to trace that journey — and got, along the way, one of the more contrarian takes on industrial finance we've heard: that the problem isn't too little money. It's too much.
A few things that stuck with us:
Operational excellence is a personality trait, not a hire. Thriftiness plus diligence — and you often can't inject it into a company that doesn't already have it.
Location is the first decision, and the most important one — more than the manufacturing partner. Final assembly is only ~15% of the value; the supply chain around it matters more.
Shenzhen is now the best place in the world not just to build electromechanical products, but to design them. That's the clearest proof of Formlabs' founding thesis: collapse the distance — and the time — between design and manufacturing, and everything gets faster and better. Taken to its limit, you get print-on-demand.
The U.S. can't run a complete modern industrial stack alone. Win on high-design-content categories; partner for the rest.
"The only capital problem is too much capital." Discipline, not dollars, is the scarce resource — and over-funding can actively ruin companies.
Starting at the beginning
Milo Werner: Tell us about your industrialization journey.
Max Lobovsky: It starts at a young age. Both my parents were trained as engineers and worked at big American institutions that made things — my mom at Bell Labs at AT&T, my dad at Allied Signal, which became Honeywell. So I was always into making things, and I was exposed early to these companies that were a huge part of America making things.
The other really important part of my background: my parents are immigrants from Ukraine. I'm not naturally great at the operational-excellence piece myself, but I have part of it — the thriftiness, the efficiency, the valuing of a dollar. I get that directly from my parents. And honestly, many of the people who are key to our operations are immigrants. They carry some culture imported from outside the U.S.
"The thriftiness, the efficiency, the valuing of a dollar — I get that directly from my parents."
When we started Formlabs, we knew we were going to make things — we just didn't know what that would look like. Build our own factory? Use contract manufacturers? Where in the world? That was the first big decision. Form 1 ended up being built in San Diego, Form 2 with a contract manufacturer in Hungary, and Form 3 onward in China. Our materials have been made in the U.S. since the beginning — first with a toll manufacturer, then we acquired that company. And most recently we've been standing up a new, separate business — Form Now — a print-on-demand service where we print parts for people rather than selling them machines. That starts with a factory here in Massachusetts, in Billerica.
So I feel relatively uniquely qualified to talk about manufacturing across a range of industries and regions, because we've had direct experience across all of them.
Milo: What's the mission underneath all of that?
Max Lobovsky: Software has seen this huge explosion of creativity and productivity. Someone goes from an idea to a product used by hundreds of millions of people, billions in revenue, in a few years. We think that could be possible in hardware — the main difference is just the tools. If it didn't take months or years to realize the first version of a physical thing and iterate on it, you'd see that same explosive creativity in hardware.
So our mission is to bring those tools to people. The powerful tools already exist; they're just too expensive and inaccessible, so people don't actually use them. That's what we've done with every printer — take a capability that's out there but underused and solve for accessibility. But if you take that mission to its logical extreme, you keep making the printers cheaper and easier until the final form is no printer at all: you select your content and it appears in a box, quickly and cheaply. That's why Form Now is the next step — it delivers on the mission in an even bigger way.
"Location is the most important question"
Milo: Walk us through the moves — San Diego to Hungary to China. What were the deciding factors?
Max Lobovsky: Lots of thinking, and probably some wrong decisions. For Form 1, the U.S. was probably the right call, but we should have picked a local contract manufacturer. My number-one piece of advice for anyone bringing a new product to market: location is the most important question — more important than the specific manufacturing partner. Location defines the baseline of your costs and the availability of different skills. Even without exactly the right partner, having the facility closer to our engineers in Boston would have been better for Form 1.
"Location is the most important question — more important than the specific manufacturing partner."
Pretty quickly we saw we could get much lower costs elsewhere, and our mission depends on driving cost down. We probably should have gone straight to China with Form 2, but I was worried about the distance between engineering and manufacturing, the communication challenges — all of which would have been harder in China. Hungary looked like a middle ground: closer time zones, much more English, and our chief product officer's father runs the largest contract manufacturer there. That violated my location-first rule, but it worked.
The thing we learned with Form 2 is that so many components were coming from China anyway. The shipping cost isn't the big deal — the impact on speed is. If components spend weeks in transit and have a problem, you often only discover it after assembly. The problem could have happened three months earlier at a supplier, and you find it in the finished product. That's enormously wasteful. You want the whole supply chain short in time so you can find a problem and iterate quickly.
What people think of as "manufacturing" — final assembly, test, and packaging, or FATP — is usually only about 15% of the value-add in consumer electronics. FATP in Hungary or the U.S. wouldn't be that bad even if it's a bit more expensive. But it's a small piece of the picture. The rest of the supply chain is where the cost and the speed live, and you want it all close together.
Milo: Once you were in China, how did you keep manufacturing close to engineering?
Max Lobovsky: We hired our first employee in China well before we produced finished products there, just to work with suppliers. For a long time it was a satellite office doing things directed from Boston. In the last few years we decided to really invest — now we have about 70 people in Shenzhen, including hardware product development, and it's been going great.
The Apples and Amazons of the world have thousands of high-level engineers in China working directly with teams in California. That's become part of the "designed in the U.S., made in China" playbook, and it works — because Shenzhen and the Guangdong region around it have become not just the best place in the world to make what I'd call consumer electromechanical products, but the best place to design them. Many of the leading companies in those categories are Shenzhen-based: DJI, BYD, Huawei, and more. If you want to be a global leader, you need the best people in the world, and for a lot of what we do, the best people live in Shenzhen. It's like LLMs — there's no way to lead without being in the Bay Area, because that's where the talent concentrates.
"Shenzhen has become the best place in the world not just to make these products, but to design them."
Milo: That actually proves your founding thesis, doesn't it — that closing the distance between design and creation is the right way to organize?
Max Lobovsky: It does.
Owning the chemistry
Milo: You outsourced materials, then bought the manufacturer. How has the in-house journey gone?
Max Lobovsky: It was a great choice — though we agonized at the time. Running a chemical plant wasn't on my bingo card, and I have a lot of appreciation for what operational excellence takes. We're a design and innovation company first, so I was worried about owning that kind of challenge. But the plant came with a team and leadership that stayed in place for years, which made it much easier, and we had investments we wanted to make — biocompatible materials need a clean room and quality certifications. It's helped us get to market faster and go deeper into the supply chain. Most of what we do there is blending, but we're starting to do real synthesis now — actually making chemicals.
The materials equation is different from devices. Lower labor content, and a much smaller supply chain — the full chemical chain back to petroleum is maybe 20 companies, versus thousands behind a printer. There's a strong American chemical industry, which makes it easier. The single biggest advantage of manufacturing in China, by the way, isn't low-skilled labor — it hasn't been for years. It's the high-skilled labor: manufacturing, tooling, and automation engineers. You can get automation installed there at a fraction of the cost. For our hardware, that's decisive: at the low volumes we run, we can't justify the automation and tooling investment in the U.S. — but in China we can. Materials are different: higher volumes and more standardization make U.S. automation feasible.
We're now redesigning that plant from the ground up with both the local team and Boston. It's like designing a product, except it's this weird one-off — hopefully a two-off or three-off, if we open European and Asian plants down the line.
Building an organization that can industrialize
Milo: Many of the leaders in our community have finished their pilot build and are entering industrialization. How do you think about building the organization for that phase?
Max Lobovsky: Go back to operational excellence and mindset. You need someone who has efficiency and thriftiness in their blood — that's half of it. The other half is diligence: detail-oriented, willing to do a thing repeatedly and continuously. Marry those two and you can run a great factory. If you don't have both, you shouldn't be running a plant. If you don't have at least some of it, you shouldn't be anywhere near that business or even overseeing it. Everything's about people in the end.
"You need efficiency and thriftiness in their blood — and diligence. Marry those two and you can run a great factory."
Milo: Does that mean hiring people who've run industrial facilities before?
Max Lobovsky: I'm a big believer that specific experience isn't that important — this is my first job, after all. You can find those two traits in many different ways. The kid who made money with a lemonade stand, or the modern equivalent building websites in high school for money — that's the efficiency-and-hustle culture showing up early. The diligence piece you can get from other kinds of work too. It's always great if someone has directly relevant experience, but I never think someone needs to have done this exact thing before. I think about innate traits and which ones map to the work we need to do.
Milo: We've spent 40 years outsourcing industrial capability and not training people to build new capability. How do you build that skill when you can't just hire it?
Max Lobovsky: I worry more about deeper shifts in our society than about whether people have built a plant before. Honestly, I worry more about ZIRP — the zero-interest-rate era. During COVID, people forgot what a dollar means. There was this sense that scarcity didn't exist anymore, that we can just print money and everyone can have everything without working. That mindset is the bigger thing holding the U.S. back from being a great manufacturing economy. I don't know what to do about it — but that's the deeper problem.
What the U.S. should actually win at
Milo: So what wins? What's the future of U.S. manufacturing?
Max Lobovsky: I'm optimistic, because we're still the place where the most talented people in the world concentrate. As long as we keep that going, there's all sorts of amazing things we can do here.
But one fact people miss: you can't maintain an entire modern industrial stack with only 350 million people. A complete stack today involves basically the whole world. We may choose to decouple from China in certain areas for good reasons, but it's not going to happen in the U.S. alone. So the U.S. needs to get strategic — the way China's government is — about what's important to do here and what isn't. For what isn't, have great partnerships with neighbors like Mexico, or with geopolitical friends. Think "made in the West," not just "made in the U.S."
"You can't maintain an entire modern industrial stack with only 350 million people."
I'm also skeptical of building our industrial base on regulated, protected industries like defense. Legislating that we'll pay more because something's made in the U.S. might be right for defense specifically, but companies built in that environment don't become the global leaders and economic drivers we're looking for.
Where we should focus is higher-value, high-design-content manufacturing — semiconductors, batteries, solar. Those come down to a few key manufacturing processes with enormous engineering content. That's exactly the kind of thing worth investing in as strategic industries.
Milo: What about all the energy going into data centers right now?
Max Lobovsky: There isn't much technology in building a data center — it's a special building. The technology is in the components that go inside it. So a lot of the recent announcements — say, putting big money into training people to be data-center builders — feel myopic to me. The interesting part isn't the building.
Milo: And cloud manufacturing — the Form Now vision?
Max Lobovsky: I don't think we're on track to build an American Shenzhen — a place with thousands of suppliers that fast, that efficient, in that close of a physical ecosystem. It's hard to imagine how that happens. But cloud manufacturing could be part of an answer — our version of Shenzhen could be more cloud-based. With fast, cheap, more centralized suppliers and economies of scale, you won't be quite as flexible as a thousand suppliers in one place, but you can get close to those efficiencies and speeds. There's a world where Form Now is a key part of a virtual Shenzhen in America. I love that vision.
The contrarian take: too much money
Milo: A lot of our community is focused on financing — the gap between a working pilot and a real factory. Do you see capital as the thing standing in the way?
Max Lobovsky: If there's any capital problem, it's that we have too much capital. I wouldn't focus there at all — I'd focus on deregulating: right-to-work laws, permitting. That's where the real opportunity is. American companies already have multiples of the capital their Chinese counterparts do — often ten times as much. If it were twenty times, it wouldn't help.
"The only capital problem is too much capital."
Past a point, more money actually hurts. It strips out the discipline that forges good operators — the knowing what a dollar means — and it draws people who are chasing the money rather than the work. Those people are never going to run a great factory, and they crowd out the ones who would. So my recipe is roughly the opposite of what you'd expect: less money, more pain. And then invest in the thing we actually under-invest in — talent.
Milo: Say more on talent.
Max Lobovsky: We have the best talent magnet in history. Empires have come and gone, but I'm not sure any of them had this — where the most valuable resource, talented people, just self-selects to come to you. You don't have to conquer anyone with an army; they just show up. You only need, say, one Elon Musk per few million people, and we should be importing a couple hundred of them — it would fix the talent gap and the demographic problem at once. Restricting that is one of the most self-defeating things we could do. Nothing like this magnet has ever existed, and we're chipping away at it.
Make more than you take
Milo: You've grounded all of this in upbringing and values — thrift, discipline, the immigrant work ethic. Is there a single principle underneath it?
Max Lobovsky: There's one idea I keep coming back to — I first heard Elon Musk put it this way: the most basic value is to make more than you take. I love that. We should instill it deeply — in our companies, in our kids, in everything. We should look down on the company that raised a lot of money, because raising a lot of money is, in a way, taking something from society. And we should look up to the company that delivered a lot. Sometimes you do have to raise a lot before you can deliver — but that's the orientation.
"Make more than you take."
