A few months ago, Bre Pettis decided to leave his position as CEO of MakerBot, the 3D printing company that he founded, to head up a skunkworks division within MakerBot’s parent company Stratasys. This division—named Bold Machines—is focused on partnering with innovators in order to push forward the frontiers of 3D printing.

I met Bre in Iceland in June of this year. Last September, I won the Glazed Hackathon, sponsored by the Icelandic cloud computing services company GreenQloud, and the prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to Iceland. I also happened to go while the Startup Iceland conference was happening, and GreenQloud gave me free tickets to attend that as well. It was at the dinner the night before the conference where I had a chance to really chat with Bre and find out that he was the founder of MakerBot. I had a few other chats with him the rest of the week I was in Iceland, and he invited me to come hang out with him the next time I was in New York.

The red brick building housing Bold Machines sits in a nondescript location in Brooklyn, sharing the block with a number of houses and a few other commercial buildings. Upon entering, I was greeted by a stark white brick room with vaulted ceilings and a small kitchen in the back. To my right stood an art project that was created by giving out the same object to a number of artists, who painted the object in their own unique style.

Couches filled the center of the main section of the office space, while the perimeter was littered with MakerBots. They had 10 of the new MakerBot Z18 3D printers cranking out all sorts of parts.

Tables full of prints for an upcoming full-length feature film also took up a fair amount of area.

A DeLorean, painted with the MakerBot logo and owned by Bre, was parked in the building’s garage. Yes, you heard that right; there is a MakerBot DeLorean. And it’s awesome!

After the brief tour, we had a chat in Bre’s office about many topics. I told him about my travel plans, and he told me a bit about his past. Bre had lived in a number of different places in the world. In his early 20’s, he lived in Japan, eventually found his way to a brief stint in Prague, and even managed a few years in Berlin. Back at home in the US, he had a job as an art teacher with a continuously shrinking budget. Eventually, he landed some work at MAKE Magazine before he decided that the time was right to go all-in on building a commercial 3D printer, and MakerBot was born.

We also had a long chat about our mutual fondness of mechanical watches and a few other things related to watches in general, before moving on to chatting about cameras. I showed him my Sony RX100 III, which I take all the photos on my blog with, and he asked me if I could grab some shots of him with a new jacket he’d designed for Betabrand. I agreed, so we took some photos all around the office.

Overall, I had a great time catching up with Bre and I’m excited to see what he’ll be coming up with in the near future.