The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax,

or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed

at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com

slash disclosures. Hi, welcome to the A16Cd podcast. I'm Sonal from the editorial team, and I'm here

with Corrine, who's the head of marketing at Shapeways, and she's been there for the past three years,

so she's really seen it, she's really seen the 3D printing service and marketplace grow there.

And I'm also here with Tom Reichert, who is a partner in the investing team. And previously,

he's had

gigs at Autodesk and Silicon Graphics. So he knows a lot about this space as well. But the reason

we're talking about this today is because, you know, one thing that we talk about a lot here,

obviously, is the theme of software eating the world. But as software eats the physical world,

I think the question a lot of people have is,

how do you bring our expectations of software-like behavior,

like rapid prototyping and being able to just put things out there quickly

when you're dealing with physical objects?

And I wanted to know if you guys had any thoughts there.

Sure, hi.

And I think maybe to take a step back before we dive in,

let's just get a baseline understanding of 3D printing because it's been a lot of hype in the

market and sometimes, you know, we used to say it's all lasers and magic, which is probably

not very true. 3D printing at its core is a manufacturing technology and it's digital. So it's all

additive and you take some kind of

...