Jonathan Jaglom Talks Breaking the Mold in AM and 3D Printing Lenses With flō

Though often thought of as a relatively new technology, especially as compared to traditional methods, additive manufacturing has been around for quite some time now. The technologies have evolved far beyond the first iterations in the 80s to the constantly improving and innovative processes that we see today. And of course, the key to that are people, including those who have been in the industry for a long time. Among these we can count Jonathan Jaglom, a true veteran in the sector who recently also launched a new company dedicated to additive manufacturing for ophthalmic applications with a fascinating new process. We sat down with him to learn more about his experience, flō, and moving out of a box-mindset to truly advance in new AM applications.

3DN: Could you introduce yourself and your background in 3D printing?

My name is Jonathan Jaglom. I have been a veteran in 3D printing for the last +/- 20 years. I started at Objet Geometries (later to become Stratasys) in 2005 as a Sales Manager and helped build our presence in Europe. Next, I was briefly the Marketing Director of Europe before becoming Business Manager Customer Support. Come 2009, I was Application Director of Objet (later to become VP Sales Operations). In 2012, I was Team Lead in the integration of Stratasys and Objet on matters of Sales Readiness. Towards the end of 2012, I moved to Hong Kong and led the Asia Pacific Operation (General Manager APJ). I was P&L owner of this distribution unit (DU), carrying some 200+ staff and close to $150M at the time. In 2015, I became the CEO of MakerBot (initially +600 staff) and helped in its PMI (post merge integration) process into Stratasys. I left Stratasys in 2017.

Jonathan Jaglom, the CEO of flō is well-established in the AM industry

My career at Stratasys gave me tremendous exposure in how operations run, as I was able to lead most activities existing in S&M (Sales & Marketing). Of course, many positions required a lot of work with Finance, R&D, Operations and HR, so again a lot of know-how was gained. When I left Stratasys after my 12-year tenure, it was clear to me that I wanted to take what I had learned from the operational arena and seek the next opportunity in Additive, but not in the form of a box-mindset AM solution. What I mean by that is in finding a use case and building a platform around it, rather than building a platform to then seek the use case (the latter regretfully happens all too often in AM).