Ali Siblani at the lecture at Lawrence Tech.

SOUTHFIELD — EnvisionTEC CEO Ali Siblani was at Lawrence Tech University last Thursday sharing his experiences on how he successfully up started his company. Siblani graduated from Lawrence Tech in 1990 and went on to create his own products for the rapid prototyping industry which led him to form his own company by 2002, which now manufactures 3D printers that produce consumer products and medical devices.

Among the products the company has created includes PixCera®, a machine that creates three dimensional wax based crowns, The Aureus®, designed to support rapid prototyping and creates three dimensional wax and resin, and the Perfactory®, a desktop digital shell printer. 

But before creating any of those successful products, Siblani talked about his earlier days as a student.

“I never got a chance to spend a lot of time at the university,” Siblani stated. “It was because I was always busy working. I was a foreign student and didn’t have financial aid.” 

He said having to work full time and taking 18 credits every semester helped him build his character. Within two years he had graduated with a 3.95 GPA and with a Bachelors in electrical engineering. He then received his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at Wayne State University. 

Many of the machines EnvisionTEC has created have been a great breakthrough in the medical field. His machines have printed teeth, dental crowns, human body parts and hearing aids. But Siblani says many mistakes major companies make is keeping their eggs in one basket and not expanding into different fields. That’s not the case with EnvisionTEC. 

Case in point, their upcoming project with Sony Motion Pictures. On April 27, the Hollywood studio unveils their 3D animated picture “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists,” with an all star voice cast that includes Hugh Grant and Selma Hayek. The film used EnvisionTEC for help with rapid prototyping, i.e. dealing with the heads and mouths of all of the characters featured in the film along with their skin tones.

The movie “The Pirates!…,” which Envisiontec’s machinery helped create.

The EnvisionTEC product used in the film was the Perfactory® Standard Machine. It was chosen for a number of reasons; with the possibility of over 20,000 mouths needed for the film, planned accuracy was an essential feature of the printing method. The mouths also needed to be interchangeable, all exactly fitting the characters’ heads. The system was capable of running 24/7 and was able to produce hundreds of pieces every day. A total of four Perfactory standard machines were used for the film.  

“As an entrepreneur you have to keep your eyes and ears open. Look for opportunities where you can migrate your product from one industry and into another,” Siblani told the crowd. 

Siblani also gave tips on how to widen an appeal of a product. He says currently they don’t offer any products cheaper than $40,000. But he is aiming at having products that would sell in the $10,000-$20,000 range to broaden his market aim. 

“You need to have a dynamic strategy…products that address consumer’s needs,” he told the crowd. “A lot of people in my field will never have the ego to backtrack and come up with a cheaper product, but it’s important to have dynamic products to adjust to the consumers needs.” 

Siblani also stated that having an American mentality can also give an entrepreneur an advantage over foreigners. He’s observed a couple of differences between the way Americans handle business and the way foreigners handle business after dealing with countries such as Germany, China and Japan.

“One thing that I always liked about Americans is that they are instant. Once they decide they want something, they want it immediately. People from other countries can take weeks to make up their minds. It makes the American Dream all the more reachable.” 

Recently Siblani announced that he will be moving EnvisionTEC’s Michigan Branch location from Ferndale and into a 36,000 sq. ft facility in Dearborn by mid-April.

Read more on the company: //www.envisiontec.com/