On my first day of work at Markforged in 2015 as their new EVP of Engineering, the then CEO told me that the company would be out of business in 45 days if we could not resolve a production problem with their carbon fiber printing filament (pictured below along with the printer). The original supplier of the carbon fiber had redirected their production to automotive applications and when the company switched to the only other supplier in the world, yield plummeted to near zero. Customers who had been waiting for the material for 9 months were threatening to return their printers and the sales team had lost confidence in any schedule commitments from engineering. The situation was bleak and analogous to trying to sell ink jet printers with an IOU for black ink. During my time with the company, we quickly sorted the carbon fiber problem and introduced a much more reliable second-generation printer that sold like hotcakes. Yesterday, the company started trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a market cap of nearly two billion dollars and the stock I acquired when I left the company is now quite valuable.