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S2 Ep5 Cora Liebig: Making the future, any way you'd want
167 Plays2 years ago
You know the old saying, never judge a book by its cover? Meet Cora. Mother of four, appreciator of dad jokes, likes baseball. Oh, and she's completely reinvented three different markets at the same time. Better living through chemistry while giving someone the tools to make a better world? Better listen in.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
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Website: dialitinpodcast.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:24
Speaker
All right.
Host's Solo Introduction and Contest Experience
00:00:25
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Dave is not with me today, so I'm by myself with our guests. Unfortunately, I won't have a lot of funny back and forth and repartee to introduce our guests, but I'm really excited about the guests we have today. Years ago, I was asked by a local company where we live to judge an entrepreneurial
00:00:46
Speaker
contest where a whole lot of different people would come in and they would tell you about their ideas and tell you about whether or not and pitch how they would affect the world. And it was an interesting experience. I got to meet a lot of really interesting people and some of them had really good ideas and I think I helped a fair amount of them
00:01:11
Speaker
through that to kind of realize that having a great idea is fine, but you also have to sell it. And they didn't really have a good idea on how to sell it. But they all had packages and shiny things and charts and this kind of thing. And kind of towards the end of the day, I was shuffled around to a different table and I sat down with this nice middle-aged lady who really didn't have anything and just sort of paid a picture.
Introduction to Dr. Cora Leibig and Chromatic 3D Materials
00:01:39
Speaker
If you can think of like a nice
00:01:41
Speaker
affable soccer mom type. And I think I even asked her like, well, hey, who are you here with? And she's like, no, no, it's just me. And I, oh, okay, great. She had no materials or anything like that. And I said, well, you know, tell me about it. And then after that, my mind sort of was blown because what happened was that she pulled out a hockey puck.
00:02:03
Speaker
that she had made herself that was malleable. And at the time what she would, she had done was thinking that she was going to revolutionize the hockey industry by making a concussion safe hockey. And it was one of those life changing experiences for me because I met somebody who was demonstrably smarter than I am in a completely different way than I'm smart.
00:02:28
Speaker
and created, I think, one of those game-changing products that will change the world. So my guest today is Dr. Cora Leibig. She is the founder and president and CEO and generally the head of a company called Chromatic 3D Materials.
Innovations in 3D Printing with Chromatic
00:02:46
Speaker
Cora has more than 20 years of experience in product development and the commercialization of
00:02:54
Speaker
chemicals and plastics, so we're probably gonna make some graduate jokes. She's working with alchemical, sieges, and she holds degrees from MIT and is an inventor on more than 25 patents. Is that true, 25 patents? Yeah, it got to the point where I don't really even count them anymore, but yeah, 25. So it's like Meryl Streep with the Oscars. Did she throw it on the pile?
00:03:21
Speaker
That's right. Exactly. I'm privileged to call you a friend and I want to talk a lot about your business and how you started and where you've got. So back to where we were at the table, why don't you tell the listeners what you told me then about, what did you invent and what does it do?
00:03:41
Speaker
Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation to speak with you on your podcast. This is great and I'm looking forward to it, looking forward to the discussion. So what we've done at Chromatic
00:03:56
Speaker
is that we've basically been looking at materials that are used all over the place in industrial products and figured out how to print them. A lot of people look at 3D printing and say, wow, the cool technology is going to take over the world. One of the problems with
00:04:16
Speaker
3D printing becoming a major mode of manufacturing is that the materials aren't strong enough because they're kind of making, in many cases, I'll call them stand-ins or fakers from a material perspective. And so what we're doing at Chromatic is taking materials that are very commonplace in industrial systems and we work on the chemistry to make them also printable.
00:04:41
Speaker
We've managed to acquire a number of customers who have very particular materials that are important for their applications. They're like, we know we need 3D printing. The reasons for using 3D printing are a variety of reasons we can get into those later. But they want to be able to make them printable and that's what we do.
00:05:02
Speaker
So some of the first products we have in the market are a class of materials called elastomers. And without getting very technical, all that means is that their materials, you think of them often as a rubber material, soft material, where if you pull it, it comes back.
00:05:20
Speaker
and that's really how we're making our mark in the 3D printing world because most elastomers in 3D printing other than ours, if you pull them, they don't come back or they have a very limited number of times that they can move. Before we get too deep into this, let's level set a little on the chemistry of this because you're into the seventh inning and we just got to the ballpark. Sorry, that's good. How does a typical 3D printer,
00:05:51
Speaker
So, I mean, now there's, I think, seven or eight different classifications of 3D printers, but essentially what a 3D printer does is that it takes material and it builds it into a shape without the use of a mold. So, what's important there is that you don't have to do all this pre-planning for a mold before you make a part.
00:06:17
Speaker
You know, that whole process can take anywhere from three months to a year. Instead, you say, here's the shape I want. And then you print it. So we're considering this like.
00:06:29
Speaker
10 years ago, if I wanted to make my own chess set, I would have to create a mold for all the chess pieces, and then ostensibly fill it up with plastic, and then pop a bottle of mold, and then I'd have my chess pieces. Exactly. 3D printing then allows me to do that, though, but without the mold. Exactly. Got it. Exactly. And what's the material that all that gets printed on?
00:06:57
Speaker
So our materials are fairly low. Traditional 3D printing to start. Traditional 3D printing, it either is a filament, so it's a piece of plastic that's melted,
00:07:11
Speaker
So you need to be able to spool the plastic. It's almost like a sewing machine, like you feed in a spool of plastic. Other methods, it's a liquid resin where it turns into solid wherever light hits it. So you're limited by where can the light get to. Other systems, it's like a powder that gets fused in very specific locations.
00:07:37
Speaker
Those are the different types. But before you, the entirety of 3D printing was, if I understand this correctly, was that you can make anything you want. However, you are making rigid objects. For the most part. Like a chess pawn.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yes, it might have different sculptural features, but it would be one hard piece of plastic. So you're taking the rolls of plastic and making them into a different world of plastic.
Diverse Applications of Chromatic's Materials
00:08:10
Speaker
Exactly. Here's where it gets fun. Now because of you, how has that changed?
00:08:18
Speaker
So now that plastic that you can form, that plastic piece, can be a rubbery material. And these are pieces that are everywhere. So an example is
00:08:34
Speaker
If you look under the hood of your car or in your car, you have a lot of pieces that need to be able to move with the motion, but then come back that they need to stretch and move like a CB joint or something. That's what we're able to print. The important thing about how our printing is different, and maybe this is what you're getting at,
00:08:55
Speaker
How our printing is different is that instead of bringing a spool of plastic, we actually take materials that are reacting while the printing is happening. And so we're controlling a chemical reaction. Your explanation was a lot more scientific and a lot more thoughtful than mine. In my head, the difference between what you can make and what a traditional 3D printer can make is your stuff is bendy.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yes, it is Bendy. Speaking to an MIT doctoral scientist, Bendy, of course, is a technical term. It's Bendy. I would also add it's stretchy. Bendy and stretchy. Excellent. So what have you made with your materials?
00:09:46
Speaker
Oh gosh, we made all kinds of things and some of them are a little rated R, but we actually haven't, we haven't made the rated R ones. Those were just things that you and I tossed around triggering, but yeah, we're in the market today in hearing aids and we designed a really special material for hearing aids that softens at body temperature. So you want for your hearing aid for the number one reason why people don't wear their hearing aids is because they're uncomfortable.
00:10:15
Speaker
And so we made a more comfortable hearing aid. We partnered with another 3D printing company to make that work. And that's only available in Europe today, so you can't find it here, unfortunately. We're working on fixing that. The other place that people get really excited about is by the end of this year, our material will be replacing underwires in bras. What? I know. I know. It's fantastic.
00:10:45
Speaker
Well, you're doing the Lord's work and I thank you on me.
Dr. Leibig's Professional Journey and Founding Chromatic
00:10:51
Speaker
Just a number of people, but you've made your own flip flops. Yes, I've made my own flip flops. We also have parts riding on trains, so we have a number of parts where if you think about trains,
00:11:07
Speaker
It's not like cars where there's a million cars traveling on I-94 every day. It's something where it's actually really hard to get the parts for trains because it's the smaller fleet. We have parts on trains, parts on buses. Sometimes they're just holding cables. Sometimes it's something that a rod needs to move through or something like that. But yeah, a lot of parts on trains and buses are also things that we've made. What are some of the zaniest things that you've made?
00:11:39
Speaker
There's a great commercial application and I want to get into that too, but I want to start with the fun stuff. The fun stuff? I mean, we're working on moon shoes. Really? Yeah, because everyone wants a personalized pair of moon shoes, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Wow, I definitely want to sign up for that.
00:12:02
Speaker
So you've created this and you've figured out a way to literally disrupt the world and that now these parts don't have to be molded. They don't have to be mass manufactured. They can be done on an individual time. So how do you turn that into deciding I'm going to start my own business and work exclusively on this? Because you've got an extensive resume working with some of the biggest companies in the world.
00:12:30
Speaker
So that's a good question. Some of it is personal taste, and other parts are just knowing the best way to get things done. So I worked many years at Dow. Dow was a great company, and I worked in a lot of new product development. But one of the things that I found dissatisfying about work as a technology developer in a large company is that
00:12:59
Speaker
When a company's got established revenue, yeah, they need new innovations, but do they really? At the end of the day, they're going to keep making products and they really don't want to bring out a new product unless their customers force them to or unless their life depends on it. For too many companies, their life really doesn't depend on it.
00:13:25
Speaker
When I moved to Sagettas, which was a startup, what was fantastic about it was that the life of the company depended on innovation. As an innovative person myself, that's just very satisfying to work in a place where your work makes a difference. But what I found in that company was that
00:13:49
Speaker
Really, Sagettis was ahead of its time because what it was all about was sustainable materials. We really struggled to find customers who would pay for the sustainability. When I started Chromatic, what I was looking for was a market
00:14:04
Speaker
where they really needed materials innovation because I love to do work that matters. That's how I make my life matter. It's not just through my kids, it's through making sure that when I'm working on day in, day out is going to leave a mark or else I'm wasting my time. My kids joke that I've been quoted as saying, work is life. You work so much at your job.
00:14:34
Speaker
if you just say my life, just forget about that eight hours a day I spent at my job, here's what my life is, then that's kind of sad. So I like being where my work matters. And so that drew me to 3D printing because it was obvious to me that 3D printing was starting to take off, but the materials were still lacking and I knew how to do the material side.
00:15:04
Speaker
asked myself, okay, so do I want to join a 3D printing company and spend a lot of time convincing them to follow my ideas or do I want to start my own? And it kind of surveyed the nature of
Challenges in Securing Investment
00:15:20
Speaker
a number of 3D printing companies and decided, you know what, I'll start my own. And because of my experience at Saguettas, I knew a little bit about what that meant. I knew it meant how to deal with legal, how to deal with building a team,
00:15:35
Speaker
And so that's what I did because it's been great. Your background is primarily in chemistry. And when you start a company, you have this idea and this notion of the passion that you're in and this game changing thing you want to do. But how much time in a week you really get to be spending in a lab because you're running the show.
00:15:53
Speaker
I probably have not been active in a lab for 20 years now. It's been much more around leadership and pulling the right team together. I'd be lying if I said I don't get involved in the chemistry. I do get involved in the chemistry, but usually it's contributing an idea or making sure that we're taking care of bottlenecks or anticipating what needs to come. I would say that
00:16:23
Speaker
Even my PhD was mostly computer simulations. My mom finds it shocking that I got a PhD without having to do any lab work, but it's true. My computer is my lab. Wow. Well, that sounds like a mother. Hey, mom, I got a PhD. Well, did you though? Exactly.
00:16:47
Speaker
Exactly. So you decided you'd go your own way and you've been blessed to receive a number of rounds of funding from a number of different sources. I'm curious.
00:16:59
Speaker
how that went down because I think the nature of your product, if you look at it as a finite thing, it's just basically goo. It's a 55 gallon drum of goo, but you can then make anything with it. So how did you approach getting funded and was that a difficult process?
00:17:26
Speaker
It's always difficult. It's always difficult. And it's always a blessing. I always look at an investment as an act of trust. They are trusting you to spend their money in a way that will lead to more money. And so the reason why any given investor invests
00:17:49
Speaker
can come from a variety of different reasons. You know, one of the things that happened with my last round of funding, you know, I kind of pulled the board together and, you know, as part of setting the strategy, I went around and asked everyone, you know, why did you choose to invest in chromatic? And what was what was mind blowing was like literally everyone went around the room and said, because of you. And it's like, whoa, that's
00:18:18
Speaker
That's fantastic, but also a little weighty. How do you convince people to invest? It's because you say, here's where I want to go. Here's what I see in the world that needs fixing, and here's why I think I can do it. Here's why I've got a team of people who can do it. It's as simple as that.
00:18:41
Speaker
And some people, they hear the story and literally, our story is from bras to tires. And some people look at that and say,
00:18:52
Speaker
That's just way too big, forget it. And they're not the right investor. And others go- Part of that is, I think because of my experience in the entrepreneurial community, I think a lot of times what companies fail on is saying that, oh, my thing, my special thing, my McGuffin, anybody could use it. And you're literally the only person I've ever met who that's actually true.
00:19:23
Speaker
That's where you convince them by saying, here's the customers I'm lining up and here's why I think that's possible.
00:19:35
Speaker
You joked when we got started about the graduate. I can't remember if this is the intro or before when we were getting ready. But one of my pitches very early on, I actually brought up a picture of Dustin Hoffman with the famous plastics, the way to go. What I did in that pitch was I said, well, I listened to his advice.
00:20:03
Speaker
I know all about plastics. I've spent 25 years in it. I know how everything is made. It's been fantastic from my Dow experience that you get to see where everything goes. Literally, where I lived, sometimes I'd have to wait for the trains to go by when I lived in Texas, the trains to go by on my way to work.
00:20:33
Speaker
And, you know, I think I invited my sister to visit me once at my work in Dow and she, I said, so what do you think? And I'm thinking that she's like, oh, this is really cool stuff, Cora, you know, I'm also wanting to be a chemist, you know, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, now I know where all the trains go.
00:20:51
Speaker
So but literally I would watch the trains go by and I was like up there the two rail cars headed off to make refrigerators and they're the 15 rail cars headed off to make grocery bags and you know, you could basically I mean it's boring sitting and waiting for a train but you could basically say I know where those are all going and so you just learn here's where all the materials go and where there's big opportunity you get a kind of a
00:21:20
Speaker
it's like sitting at the top of a theater where you can see where all raw materials go. I think that's why I was able to get buy-in is that I'm able to say, hey, this application that you as an individual consumer might not understand, I know about why I'm going to go for this and not sneakers or why I'm going to go for
00:21:48
Speaker
bras and not gaskets or whatever the case may be. That's how you get the buy-in and we're bringing it back to how do you convince people to invest, is that you have to give them a reason to trust that you have a good intuition of when you've got the right team and where you're going to go with it and what you're going to do with it. The other thing that I think is important from the investor perspective,
00:22:15
Speaker
is that I think too often entrepreneurs try to come up with something that will appeal to all investors, and that just doesn't exist. When you find the right investor, it's because you are taking them in a direction that meshes with their view of the world as well and how they want to make a difference in the world as well. I view the fundraising process
00:22:41
Speaker
is really a sales process. I mean that not in terms of, hey, you've got to get out there and sell, but more from the perspective of you're trying to shape a value proposition.
Facility Acquisition and Resource Management
00:22:53
Speaker
Your value proposition is around the value of your company and find the customers who really resonate with that value proposition.
00:23:03
Speaker
And I think one of the, because I bought Cora stock a long, long, long time ago. I got ground floor stock in Cora and Prometic. One of the things that I think was a great thing that broke your way was your facility. Because I, you told me once what you pay him on through your facility, and we don't have to go into that, but you have an outstanding facility that you got for
00:23:29
Speaker
a song so how did how did that one little break and well first of all tell us about the facility and then secondly how did because of that lucky break how is that affected you positively oh it's been and i have an update trivia since the last time but yeah so the the way the facility worked is that
00:23:51
Speaker
Essentially, I'm in the same facility that I was at at Sagettis. At Sagettis, we had this great process chemistry lab. More than $15 million had been put into it. It's 15,000 square feet with a fully equipped lab.
00:24:12
Speaker
and Segetus essentially had to close. I was part of the group that sold the facility and its capabilities to the company that picked up the ball and ran with it. What I did was I said, I've helped you get into this facility and get these assets. Do you mind if I just run a little counter space for $1,000 a month and
00:24:42
Speaker
And I'll also help you navigate the facility, know where everything is, what to do. And for them, that was a good sweet deal.
00:24:53
Speaker
So what has happened over the course of the time is that now, just this year, we actually took over the lease. So it's entirely a chromatic facility now. Wow. And yeah, it's
Networking and Community Support
00:25:07
Speaker
great. And so now we have a lot more freedom to configure it the way we really need. And how much of your footage do you have? It's all 15,000 square feet now. It's all dedicated to, and we have like a printer room that's just one printer after another.
00:25:23
Speaker
And so it's been great, but for a startup, what's super about that is that it meant that I could start a chemistry lab without having to buy all the equipment and without having to buy a lot of time. And so it was just really very efficient. We were able to, to learn.
00:25:41
Speaker
Like if we had some experiment we wanted to try, we could try it on a piece of equipment, find out, you know what, we get better results from this one, which was great because it meant we didn't have to invest, you know, $100,000 in that first piece of equipment that didn't really give us the answers we needed. So it was very opportunistic. And, you know, the funny thing is seeing that, you know, we've actually opened a subsidiary in Germany and we're doing exactly the same thing there. So we started out,
00:26:08
Speaker
Bart, who leads our German subsidiary, first rented some space from his dad, literally. So rented just a little counter. Hey, dad, can I just put my computer here and maybe we can set up a printer. Then within a year, we essentially had taken over the facility. We left his dad one room. Then just this year again, there was a grocery store that was open, it was vacant.
00:26:37
Speaker
And so, and we're like, Oh, well, we need a place to assemble some printers. And now, now it's actually our facility in Germany. So we have another, another 5,000 square feet in Germany now. German grocery store on top of everything else. Basically.
00:26:55
Speaker
But it just comes from being opportunistic as you go and say, okay, what can I do right now? And not getting obsessed over what do I need to be in a year? If you need cash effective and grow when you need it, it's just awesome.
00:27:12
Speaker
I think what's remarkable about what you just shared is that the idea of winning was relative when you get started because number one is you were nice and so they they helped you out and then you slowly took over but number two is.
00:27:30
Speaker
I think as a learning point for people who are listening is you're not going to get everything you want right away. You're not going to take over the entire 15,000 square foot facility right away. But if you can get your foot in the door and you're nice and you show up and you're opportunistic, good things happen. It's true. It's true. I'd rather be lucky than smart. It's a little bit of both.
00:28:00
Speaker
It's a little bit of both. And so, yeah, I think definitely not being too greedy about what it needed to be, you know, just has helped us grow and get more than we thought. I mean, but along those lines of being opportunistic, one of the things that I've been just amazed at is just how much people help each other when it comes to starting a business.
00:28:25
Speaker
You know, I would absolutely, you know, so now there's actually someone who's going to start renting a little essentially a counter space in our facility for a thousand bucks a month. And of course, I'm open to that. He's looking for a good place to get. He needs to be able to do some lab work. So sure. Come on in.
00:28:44
Speaker
In the startup community, there's a lot of reaching a handout and helping to pull each other up. For that reason alone, you should be nice to everybody. The amazing thing too is looking at how many people I've been able to reach out to,
00:29:02
Speaker
who I haven't seen in 15 years, maybe it was someone I worked with at Dow, and I'm able to reach out to them, call them, and get some ideas, and vice versa. So some of my first investments came from people who had worked with me 10 years earlier. And so there's
00:29:21
Speaker
It's one of those things where at the time that I was in college and people told me, hey, you got a network.
Expansion to Germany
00:29:27
Speaker
Engineers always sneer at networking. They hate networking. They're like, what do you mean? I have to actually work with people. That's terrible. If I gave myself this advice, I probably wouldn't have listened to it. But the reality is that the people that are in your world, they keep coming back.
00:29:49
Speaker
one way or the other for good or for bad. So you better hope it's for good. I found in my life that
00:30:00
Speaker
being right and being successful are not always the same thing. And I think, as you just described, you make a conscious choice, despite your lengthy academic, which will shame most people, you've chosen to be successful, which I think is really cool. So, why Germany? So, Germany, you know, I believe
00:30:29
Speaker
In my technology development, I'm not someone who just stays in the lab. Well, we just already covered that I'm not really in the lab anyway. But I really believe strongly in the course of technology development that you have to be paying attention to what customers want from you. You have to be ready to change what you are offering to meet those customer needs. That early market feedback, customer feedback is just so critical.
00:31:00
Speaker
What I found was happening was that I would go to US conferences and mostly pick up German leads. Essentially, I was getting to the point where most of my interested customers were German customers. The other thing that I know, and this was the group I led at Dow was an international group. I think one-third of my team was over in Switzerland.
00:31:29
Speaker
The other thing I was realizing was that for a lot of our German customers, part of our sale,
00:31:35
Speaker
entailed convincing other German engineers or German technicians or plant operators that our technology would solve their problems. A lot of those German operators, their path to their job is much more like a VOTEC kind of job career path, so their English isn't necessarily very good. It became really clear that to really make progress with a number of our German customers, we had to be doing business in German.
00:32:05
Speaker
And so what happened was that I had a really good friend here in the US who was German who had to go back to Germany for family and visa reasons.
00:32:17
Speaker
And he's like, Corey, can I help you out? It's like, heck yeah. So he consulted for us for about a year and helped make some progress at some of our customers. And we decided to start a German subsidiary because even, you know, a lot of our, a lot of our sales process involves smaller transactions, moving to larger transactions. And German companies did not want to bother to do an international wire transfer for a, um,
00:32:43
Speaker
small $1,000 or $2,000 transaction. So we're in Germany mostly because the customers took us there. If I step back and say, well, why Germany? Why is this happening? While the US lost a lot of manufacturing capability in the last 30 years,
00:33:02
Speaker
Germany really hasn't. Germany has been protecting their industrial base, and they have a lot of specialty manufacturing there. And specialty manufacturing is an especially good business case for 3D printing because 3D printing usually does well
00:33:19
Speaker
when there's not necessarily a mass production situation and where you need custom machinery and things like that. So there's a lot of very good specialty manufacturing capabilities in Germany and they want our products. So that's why I'm in Germany. Which I think is another great illustrative teaching point is that, like you said, that you went where the customers were.
00:33:44
Speaker
and continually trying to redefine the market or tinker with your marketing because you have to have it the way you want it and sell to the people that you think you should be selling to.
3D Printing and Supply Chain Simplification
00:33:58
Speaker
That's one choice. The other choice, that's being right, like we just talked about. Being successful is okay for some reason where people in Germany love us.
00:34:11
Speaker
It's koran. David has okay, so Let's go to germany. So exactly and the funny thing is that my name is german So I actually have a lot of german say oh, well, you must be german. It's like well, actually it's my my husband's name
00:34:29
Speaker
I think that's where people start talking to me in Norwegian and like, oh, okay, thank you. Thank you. Exactly. Now, the other interesting thing is that we're actually picking up much more traction in the US.
00:34:42
Speaker
I think part of it is because of our success in Germany, because we're able to say to Americans, hey, this is passing the German engineers, so how about we can help you too? There's a lot of credibility from getting the stamp of approval in Germany. The other thing that we're finding is that for the very same reasons that
00:35:06
Speaker
Germans have been building up their manufacturing in the US now that we're trying to bring a lot of manufacturing back. There are a lot of things that Americans need to source from Germany in other locations. We can say, well, you can bring in local manufacturing, make your parts where you need them instead of sourcing them from German suppliers, and you can do that using chromatic technology. That is our second wave now as it's coming into America.
00:35:31
Speaker
We've had some fun talking about flip-flops and bras, but it seems like the most direct commercial application of the product is creation of gaskets. Yeah. That's the easiest thing to do is instead of waiting a week for a gasket, you could ostensibly 3D print your own. Right. Exactly. The stories on gaskets are amazing. A lot of people say, hey, 3D printing can't possibly be fast enough.
00:36:01
Speaker
And I like to joke, we're not competing against an injection molding machine. We're competing against a boat that's traveling across the Atlantic or across the Pacific. And we can beat that, for sure. So a lot of our customers, they have like eight week, 12 week wait times for their parts.
00:36:21
Speaker
And we're able to say you could print it here and have it in two days. What the use case is that you told me back in the day is if you're in an isolated area and you only get a certain amount of supplies dropped every week, but then you're also dealing with like an army Humvee that's been manufactured by eight different people.
00:36:41
Speaker
Your ability to get parts is almost non-existent, but this gives you an opportunity to literally, in an isolated area, make what you need, when you need it. Right. And what we're finding more and more is that that isolated area could just as well be Minneapolis. Yes. For the Siberian desert. It's still continuing to be tremendously goofy.
00:37:06
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, it was wild to see what happened with the pandemic, the supply chain, because when I started Chromatic, it was 2016, 2017, before all the supply chain mayhem. And what's interesting, and I've had a couple investors point this out, like, Cora, you knew about this, is that what I could tell from being in a raw material supplier is,
00:37:33
Speaker
all of the, I call it molecular tourism that materials go through. I mean, your plastic before it gets to you probably traveled the world. It's insane. It's totally stupid. That was why I had conviction around 3D printing and why when I saw what 3D printing could do, why I was like, holy cow, this can really solve this problem that I've seen ever since I started in the materials industry.
00:38:02
Speaker
The only reason why it's kept going is because we've been able to do it so cheaply because gas is cheap. But what we learned with the pandemic is it's a stack of cards. If you take the card out at the bottom, the whole building collapses and we're surprisingly unprepared for that situation.
Inspiring Creative Use of Chromatic's Materials
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things, and I sort of may mention this earlier, is you sort of have in the industrial application of Legos is that if you look at what you're offering and selling, unless you're a chemist, it's ectoplasm. But what you can do with it, the possibilities are endless, much like Legos. So how do you inspire customers to create?
00:38:53
Speaker
It's really a challenge, honestly. What we've been working on is anticipating some of their application requirements and application needs so that we can say, hey, here's an example of exactly what you can do. We've been working on demos that can help people understand.
00:39:17
Speaker
An example of the demos is like in 3D printing, people just start by assuming your materials are fragile.
00:39:25
Speaker
And so we had to start by saying, you know, I think one of my first demos, I'd say, you know, are you stronger than elastomer and call, call people up to the front of the room and get them the kind of like, please try to break this because mostly when people hand you a 3d printed part, people treat it like it's fragile. And we shouldn't, you know, if, if your part is really good for manufacturing, you shouldn't treat it that way. You should treat it like the stuff you throw on your backpack.
00:39:53
Speaker
So we've really been working on demos that can help make that happen. It's very interesting to see how much you can try to describe an opportunity, but then you just have to make it. So the bra opportunity is an interesting one because really what we're doing is saving a lot of assembly steps. Because if you think about the underwire, they have to make the wire, then they have to seem it in and encase it,
00:40:23
Speaker
And what we're able to do instead is just print directly on fabric. And our material is sort of part glue, part structured part. And I'm realizing this is a podcast, so I'm like so tempted to just show you this part right here. It's a demo. It's really neat. It looks like a mouse pad, but also a mattress, I guess. I don't know. What is that?
00:40:49
Speaker
What this is, it's just a piece of T-shirt material that we printed a structure on it, and we can show that the structure that we've printed just moves with the T-shirt. But it's through demos like that that we can help inspire people to change their designs to something that's printable. This other part that I have sitting here,
00:41:15
Speaker
also this video, but maybe I'll send you photos you can show on with the podcast. So, you know, this is an example part where we take something that's a simple bellow. You know, so if you think about a bellow, sort of like the bellow on an accordion, you know, that's this sort of important shape for buffering vibrations and things like that.
00:41:37
Speaker
And so what we're able to do is that we can print hard material, transition to a soft material and go back to a hard material. And what's interesting about that is that if you think about almost every bellow you work with, you might have to have like a steel clamp to bolt it down to whatever you're trying to connect it to. But if you have like a hard going to soft and then hard again, then kind of that fixture becomes a lot easier and you can make it so it's only moving where you want it to move.
00:42:06
Speaker
That's an example where we just have to come up with the concepts and share it with people because trying to inspire the creativity process in your customers is not easy. It's not easy. We have to inspire, we have to have examples, we have to guess what's important to them in their applications. I have another customer where
00:42:37
Speaker
We had been talking to them about how we had this chemistry capability. We could make the product they had with some of the materials that they needed to use. They didn't really get it until we said, okay, we know that you have a problem where that part you've been printing shatters when you set it on a shelf. We can fix that. We just really had to walk in their shoes a little ways,
00:43:06
Speaker
and say that we can fix it and here's how we're going to fix it. They're like, really? Even though we've been telling them, hey, tell us what we could do for you. Finally, we said, okay, we're going to tell you what we can do for you and we'll get you there. You really need to
00:43:25
Speaker
walking their shoes away, do the examples, walk around in flip-flops at a conference for people to really understand that, no, this is really different.
Scalability and Cost-Efficiency of 3D Printing
00:43:37
Speaker
And here's some examples of what that can mean for you. I have two final questions. So how long does it take to 3D print a flip-flop? Because I think everybody understands what a flip-flop is compared to a bella. Yeah.
00:43:55
Speaker
How long did it take to 3D print a flip-flop? Like I was wearing a 13 shoe. Yeah. We haven't tried recently. I think I 3D printed that flip-flop maybe four years ago with our current tech. I think we could probably 3D print a flip-flop in about two hours. The thing that we've been showing from a printing speed perspective is that
00:44:23
Speaker
our printers are low enough cost that if you were to look at the cost of the machine for making a million flip flops, that machine costs a million dollars, at least, and we can set up, you know, 50 printers for that cost or more. Yeah. You know, so the question's not
00:44:43
Speaker
how long does it take for a single printer to print that part, but rather how many flip-flops can 50 printers churn out? That's how we're trying to change the equation. I think it's one of the things that's been a struggle in the industry is that because most of the 3D printing industry is focused on selling machines, they put a lot of features into the machines that make those machines expensive, and then the speed of the machine matters. But if you keep your machine fairly stripped down,
00:45:12
Speaker
And our approach right now, probably last time you spoke, Trigby, we were not selling machines. We sell machines today. And essentially what we do is we have this base skeleton, and then we add features based on what we know a customer needs. And so they're only getting the features they really need. And we're able to keep the cost of the printer fairly low. And if you think about this question of how long does it take to make a flip-flop,
00:45:36
Speaker
If you're a flip-flop company and you're thinking, oh, right now I make all my flip-flops in China, but all my customers are in Latin America and Florida and Spain or something like that, you can instead take that $1 million machine and split it up three ways with 15 printers in every location that you need and you're no longer putting flip-flops on a boat.
Building Trust and Authenticity
00:46:03
Speaker
I want to sort of end by reminding of the people person that I talked about in the beginning when back at that conference, five or six or seven, many years ago. Now, God, we're getting old.
00:46:15
Speaker
It's just so fascinating to think of all those people with all of their charts and graphs and the one person from that who's so wildly successful is the one who had the game changing thing and didn't need to make a big deal out of it. My favorite Simpsons character is a character called Disco Stu.
00:46:34
Speaker
because it was the joke of it was that home it was a yard sale episode and Homer was He tried to make a jean jacket a bejeweled jean jacket that said disco stud, but he ran out of room and So the joke was is he was selling that jacket and this guy in the disco outfit walks up and somebody says well Stu you should get that and the answer was no man disco stew doesn't advertise and
00:47:00
Speaker
That's how I think about you. If you're that level of awesome, it will come out. Eventually, there's no need to flaunt it. A little bit of flash is not a bad thing. But I think the other fight, if I look at the success I've had in fundraising, coming back, people are investing in me. I think part of the appeal has been that I come across as a genuine person.
00:47:28
Speaker
I definitely could use more improvement on marketing and flash because I think that if you think about that room full of people, it wouldn't be a bad thing for people to know what I was doing and what we're up to earlier rather than later. I take that as room for improvement, but the authenticity is important. I think you're wrong, honestly, because as you said, all those people around there, they bought into you and then they bought
00:47:59
Speaker
That's just more important than anything. Cora, how can people find you online if they want to learn more about your product and learn more about Chromatic 3D materials? Our website, www.c3dm.com. Also, we have a very active LinkedIn presence. If you like or follow Chromatic 3D materials on LinkedIn, you'll get a lot of information about us. Also, feel free to connect with me personally on LinkedIn and
00:48:28
Speaker
You know, I'm happy to share contact information or what have you, but happy to help future entrepreneurs and people just want to learn more. Yeah, I think one of the things that's most disappointing about you is as we've gotten older together is that your kids aren't at home, so your husband is not doing gag jokes on the lunch bag.
00:48:46
Speaker
I know. I know. That's on Facebook. If you search on Facebook for dad jokes on a bag, you'll get a very sweet man who thinks he's funny. All right, so thank you, Cora. Walter White's good cousin, Glenda. Cora Leibig, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Trippie.