to school what do you do? You imagine things. At the same time, my daily life was practical. I made things. I was living in both imaginary and practical worlds. Almost anytime I could imagine something nice, I could make it happen. I’m not happy thinking just about a concept. I’m constantly asking: Where will this lead? How can I make this useful? Why would people want this? How could it improve people’s lives?

I have a long attention span, and can visualize things from start to end. It could be my literary background. If you’re trained in literature, you think about designing a complete piece— you think about the reader, the components to put in place, the point you want to make, and the flow you want to achieve. It’s not discrete, single-problem solving. I had the ability to combine conceptual with practical problem-solving from early on, and was able to put it to good use in computer science.

 

at the end of 2000, four years after you founded Geomagic, you faced a financial crisis that you overcame within a year. What challenges do you now face as a growing company with more than 100 employees worldwide?

The challenges are quite different now. In 2000, the challenge was to survive and build a viable company. We survived and have thrived. Now the challenge is to build a company that will not run out of momentum. It seems simple, but the things you think about when your goal is not to run out of money are very different than when your goal is not to run out of momentum.

This stage is much harder. Despite recent events, the concept of not spending more money than you make is not difficult to understand. But to not run out of momentum you have to continue growing at a rapid pace when the risk is higher. That’s a daunting job. Each stage of growth for a company is like climbing a mountain that is 10 times higher than the one you’ve scaled. And, you have to go down before you go up. When you go down, you’re not sure if you’re going to go up again.

Then, there’s the people aspect. How can you educate people in good times to change? It’s easier to moti-

i believe the 21st
century is the century
for customization,
where we’ll see
the end of mass
manufacturing.

vate people in bad times. Nothing I’ve done in the past 10 years is useful for the next 10. I need to continue to learn new things and face the unknown again and again. I also need to bring the whole team along. It is a difficult task to be a leader in unknown territories and to provide clear directions for others to follow.

Many entrepreneurs sell their companies at this stage, typically too early. When you reach this point, the easiest thing to do is to sell and go back to a situation where you know what to do. That’s why there are so many serial entrepreneurs. If you start another company, you know how to do it better than before; you have experience and more money. It’s a lot harder to take a company to the next level: one bad thing happens and you can fail because the monthly burn rate is so high. You can’t put a second mortgage on your house or use your own savings to save the company anymore. It’s a different game. The challenge for Geomagic is to constantly transform itself for sustainable growth.

 

how do you do that? is there some kind of blueprint out there? No, there’s no blueprint. You can’t apply the principles that you have learned and your friends know. You’re going through a no-man’s land, where the company is too large to be small and too small to be large. This is the stage where more companies die than survive, and they die for different reasons. It’s not like start-ups, which typically die because they don’t have a good concept or enough money. This is the stage where you already have a proven concept and are making money. If you continue to thrive, you’ll go on to have a very good

company. But, no one knows why one company dies and one survives.

 

the technologies Geomagic is developing are having a profound effect on the way goods are designed, engineered, and made. how do you see design and manufacturing evolving over the next five to 10 years?

I believe the 21st century is the century for customization, where we’ll see the end of mass manufacturing. We have the technology to do that today. The bigger changes are behavior and process changes, not technology. It will be the ecosystem enabled by technology that will drive change. Technology by itself is overrated. It enables less than 1% of what needs to happen before your vision becomes realized.

Customization in the 21st century will be less about hits and more about fit. In the last century, you could have a massive hit product with little or no customization. Now it’s becoming harder to simply throw things on the wall and see what sticks. We’ll be seeing more variety of customized products, and organizations becoming more decentralized. Conglomerates will downsize, and there will be more small- to medium-sized companies.

 

it sounds a bit like preindustrial Revolution. The difference is that we will have bou-tique-sized companies with global distribution channels enabled by digital technologies. Before the 20th century, there were a lot of handmade, boutique products but no way to disseminate them widely. If you have a boutique business in today’s world you can support it within a huge, worldwide ecosystem. I call it “digitally enabled cottage industry.”

 

What effect will this have on outsourcing? It will completely change the concept of outsourcing. We now outsource for cheap labor. In the future, outsourcing will be a way to infuse products with local culture; to get authentically made products. We’ll not outsource for cost, but for variety, sharing of knowledge, and authenticity.