design and send it to the machine and it builds it up layer by layer. it starts with a roll of plastic fi filament. you put it here and it goes through this tube. it goes through a teeny, tiny hole and draws a picture. it moves up a little bit and draws a picture on top of a picture. layer by layer, it completes your model. i'm ceo of makerbot and i make things that make things. 3-d printing has been around for 25 years. but until we showed up, it was just for the industrial world or the exclusive academic world. it was really a mainframe size machine, like the size of a refrigerator. and we wanted one. we couldn't afford one. so we made our own. and when it worked, we quit our jobs and started makerbot as a company so everybody could have one. >> he is really the first person