Found this recent interview of Dr. Ye Tao had in China from LatePost.com, from 26 Jan, 2026:
对话拓竹陶冶：我们一群工程师，一起造个朴素的硬核公司
I translated it using AI but verified the translation myself.
A Conversation with Tao Ye of Bambu Lab: We, a Group of Engineers, Built a Simple, Techcore Company Together
A group of engineers who had helped build the world’s top product decided to leave their jobs and start a company. After agonizing for almost a year, they chose a niche project they had originally dismissed in the first five minutes. By the third year after launching the product, the company’s annual revenue had already exceeded 10 billion yuan. This is now the number one company in the 3D printing industry, and this is the entrepreneurial story of Bambu Lab.
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“I know a dramatic story might be more compelling, but in reality, it wasn’t that dramatic,” said Tao Ye (note: in Chinese, family name comes first), Bambu Lab’s founder and CEO, with a smile. This is perhaps not modesty.
Bambu Lab is the result of a group of engineers calculating and executing with precision.
“(The company’s) Growth was exactly according to their plan. Even the deviations in revenue and market share in the first two years after the product launch, were very small,” IDG Capital partner Shao Hui told us after reviewing Bambu Lab’s early investment documents. IDG was the only investor in all three funding rounds, with the only regret being that the company became profitable so quickly that it no longer needed funding after the second round.
Long before Bambu Lab appeared, consumer-grade 3D printers were no longer considered s3xy. The global market was only about 5–6 billion yuan (~<1b usd). The main reason was difficulty of use—the time users spent calibrating the machines exceeded the printing time itself, and failures were frequent.
Bambu Lab was the first to turn the 3D printer into a small robot with basic AI capabilities. They equipped it with cameras, LiDAR, gravity sensors, and other sensors, automating many steps that previously required human intervention. To do this, they redesigned many components and software, produced their own servo motors, and wrote motion-control algorithms so that the print head could maintain micrometer-level precision even during shaking.
As a result, just like drones, action cameras, and even personal computers once were, a niche enthusiast product became easy enough for anyone to use, and 3D printer sales began to explode. The company hired more talent, produced better products, and attracted more users. Engineering breakthroughs fed into a business cycle.
When Bambu Lab was raising funds, they didn’t have a business plan or even a PowerPoint—they just talked through a single sheet of paper, and the funding went through.
“No matter what field they choose, we’d invest,” Shao Hui said. In 2019, he added Tao Ye on a school alumni chat to ask a question about high-speed motor technology, and was impressed by Tao’s clear and precise technical insights. At first, he didn’t even know Tao had been in charge of DJI’s entire consumer drone product line, because Tao’s official title was “Chief Product Engineer.”
The founders of Bambu Lab are all engineers. Tao Ye earned a PhD in physics before joining DJI, where he designed motors and drone propellers, all self-taught—studying mechanical structures, learning CAD, writing test code, visiting factories to inspect manufacturing processes, and making samples as he learned. The two other co-founders, CTO Gao Xiufeng and COO Liu Huaiyu, previously worked at the semiconductor company Marvell and later became head of the system engineering department and the FPV racing drone product line at DJI.
When they decided to start a company, their first goal wasn’t a 3D printer. They wanted to create a company with geek culture—simpler, purer, and giving engineers the chance to grow like they had: doing hard-core engineering, having the opportunities to fail, even at a cost of hundreds of millions of yuan. They wanted contributing employees to become owners of the company, sharing the benefits they earned.
Indeed, the early Bambu Lab team was organized according to the geek culture they envisioned. They started R&D in late 2020 in an 80-square-meter house in Shenzhen. By the time the first-generation product was launched via crowdfunding, out of 150 team members, 120 were engineers, many of whom had worked together before. They built over 700 test machines and used 3 tons of material. Even team-building outings included bringing two engineering machines to tinker with.
After 22 months, the first-generation Bambu Lab X1 launched on Kickstarter, raising nearly 50 million yuan. In five years, Bambu Lab became one of the representatives of the new generation of Chinese consumer hardware startups. They not only perform well, but also embody a new spirit: not relying on low prices, refusing to copy, and willing to tackle technical challenges to meet user needs, no matter how complex.
Since its founding, Bambu Lab has pursued to remain stealthy, strictly confidential, avoiding media interviews—until it became too big to ignore. 3D printing has again become a hot field for entrepreneurs, corporations, and investors, and competition is emerging. For this company and the industry, a new era is beginning.
2025 Christmas Eve, Bambu Lab Headquarters, Shenzhen
We interviewed Tao Ye about how a group of engineers founded a company for engineers.
Q: You wrote in a blog before that you started a company because you were “tired of complaining at work,” and because you were at an age where if you wanted to do something big, you had to act quickly. What specifically made you decide to leave (DJI) and start your own company?
Tao Ye: It started as a seed. There were moments when I felt frustrated and wanted to quit, then after a while it was fine—this repeated many times. I agonized over it for more than a year. I didn’t want to get stuck in internal competition anymore. We had already made great products and experienced the thrill of being at the top, but opportunities like that were decreasing, and constantly fiddling in the harbor was mentally exhausting.
Q: From the outside, drones were still producing amazing new products.
Tao Ye: Undeniably, but how much that related to me was another question.
Q: What preparations did you make for entrepreneurship?
Tao Ye: Two main things: deciding what product to make and what kind of company to build.
In the first year, we weren’t sure what product to make. We analyzed many industries, considering resources, capabilities, challenges, uncertainties, and opportunities. Most of the projects we initially considered had high risks and many uncontrollable factors. However, choosing the right direction is the job of a few (leading) people—if you pick wrong, even if the team works hard, the leader could be the embarrasment of everyone.
And the other thing is what the kind of company to build. Would you end up with the repeated path of other companies that you complained about? How relationships like employee-employer, fresh hands vs experienced employees, leadership vs investors, or the company and its users… should work. And how to break the cycle of frustration. We thought about these questions a lot.
Using coding as an analogy, if there’s a big GitHub project that you’re not happy with, and you want to rewrite it with a fork—you need to figure out what to keep, what to tweak, what to rebuild from scratch.
Q: What was most important?
Tao Ye: The relationship with employees. Most directly, it’s how profits are shared. We wrote a document to make employees with a sense of ownership actual owners of the company. If they feel like they don’t own it, the huge contrast and disappointment would definitely make them leave.
Q: But a company has its own goals. How do you make everyone feel like an owner?
Tao Ye: Employees treat the company as theirs, so when sharing profits, they get a share, not just seen as workers but also the respect and profits.
So circling back to the previous question, if everybody is a owner of the company, how do you align the targets? When you have lots of great minds this is a huge trap. In the document we wrote, we also declared that our company is not a colony of individual craftsmen.
Goals must be unified under a framework, where everyone contributes actively but follows the same objectives.
Choosing 3D Printing
Q: How did you settle on 3D printing? You once said you enjoyed your early experience as a maker.
Tao Ye: That was a later thought. Initially, we had three principles:
- There’s a clear path to being world number one.
- The market ceiling is high—market size could be small for now, but potential is huge.When I just joined DJI, revenue of DJI was very little too. But at that time we thought that the ceiling of drones should be very high. A good company needs real talents. You need a huge vista to attract the talents. We predicted that we would attract many former colleagues to join. They were already doing things that were No.1 in the world, so it’s impossible for you to produce something indistinguishable with your competitors and yet try to invite those talents to join.
No.1 in the world, high market ceiling, is the hard requirement of attracting talents. No bargain here.
- There must be barriers to entry; otherwise, it’s quickly a red ocean. Making a kettle, even if innovative, copycats would follow up within 6 months. If you can’t have enough time to gather talents and funding before the industry falls into the red ocean, then it’s difficult to chase your goals in the blue ocean. Falling into the red ocean is inevitable, however, with a technical barrier, we can defer the day as much as we could.
We initially scanned projects and dismissed 3D printing in 5 minutes 
(to be continued)
