The Process of Creating a Successful Company

Ping Fu, author of "Bend, Not Break", founder and CEO of Geomagic, and incoming chief strategy officer at 3D Systems (NYSE:DDD), tells the incredible story of her struggles as a child.

The transcript below is lightly edited:

Brendan: It's still quite a leap, though, to go from knowing you want to do it and actually creating a successful company. What was the process in that?

Ping: When I knew what I wanted to do, which is very important and you know who you are and why you want to do what you want to do that's the first step. Then building a company has a lot of elements. You need to hire people, you need to build products, you need to do sales and marketing, you need to cultivate customers and solve customer problems. And certainly all of those elements are similar to most companies. No company and service should exist if there is no problem to solve.

What I've seen is a gap between data capturing and manufacturing. There is a lot of software like Cad Cam, which is computer edit and design manufacturing software already exists. But what they do is they start with a blank screen. What I want to do is like Adobe and I want to capture real people and take that and turn it into a digital model that you can use for design. It was a gap that there was no technology that existed for it at the time.