A few years ago, Steve Hoover was authenticating fine art with computer vision and running a cybersecurity institute named after the woman who got Apollo to the moon. Today he runs a company whose entire premise is that almost everything you think you know about 3D printing is too slow to matter.
Impossible Objects does not make a faster version of the desktop printer you have seen at a maker fair. It makes a different machine entirely. The process is called CBAM, short for composite-based additive manufacturing, and Hoover took the chief executive job in March 2023 to do one stubborn thing: drag composite 3D printing out of the prototype lab and onto the factory floor.
The reason he is the one doing it is hidden in plain sight on his resume. Before composites, there was paper. Before the factory floor, there was a research building in Palo Alto with a reputation most companies would kill for.
01The man who printed faster
Two decades at XeroxHoover joined Xerox in research and advanced technology development, and his first real mark was speed. The company wanted into high-speed printing, and the projects he worked on helped get it there: million-dollar digital presses spitting out 300 pages a minute, and doing it reliably, which is the harder half of that sentence. Reliability at speed would become the through-line of his whole career.
He ran the Xerox research group in Rochester. He took over the software and electronics group. And then he was handed the keys to one of the most storied labs in American technology.
When I was at Xerox, we broke the company into the high-speed printing market, printing 300 pages a minute and doing so reliably.
Steve Hoover02Steering PARC
Where the future got prototypedPARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, is the lab whose alumni effectively invented the graphical computer you are reading this on. Hoover became its CEO and held the role for roughly six years. Under him the work ranged across sensing for autonomous driving, 5G radio-frequency communications, artificial intelligence and computer vision. The frontier, in other words, was not a metaphor.
His job there was not just to invent. It was to make invention pay. He pushed PARC toward open innovation, building strategic partnerships and spinning out technologies the lab had developed instead of letting them gather dust. In 2017 Xerox made him a senior vice president, and he eventually rose to chief technology officer of the entire corporation before leaving in April 2019.
03The detour years
Cybersecurity, then computer visionMost executives leave a CTO role for a board seat and a golf handicap. Hoover went back to school, sort of. From 2019 until March 2022 he served as the Katherine Johnson Endowed Executive Director of the Global Cybersecurity Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology, named for the NASA mathematician of Hidden Figures fame. There he pulled together expertise from across RIT and expanded the institute's industry and government partnerships.
While doing that, he co-founded a startup. Artify.ai uses computer vision to help authenticate and sell fine art, which is to say he spent his interlude teaching machines to tell a real Rothko from a fake one. The man does not sit still.
04Why composites, why now
The Impossible Objects betThen came the call from Northbrook, Illinois. Robert Swartz, the founder and chairman of Impossible Objects, wanted someone who understood both printing and the long, unglamorous road of commercializing hard technology. Hoover, in Swartz's words, was a perfect fit to commercialize a revolutionary 3D printing process.
What makes CBAM different is the material. Conventional additive manufacturing melts plastic or fuses powder. Impossible Objects layers sheets of long-fiber composite, carbon fiber, fiberglass, materials like PEEK, and bonds them into parts that come out stronger, lighter, more heat-tolerant and more durable than what other 3D printers produce. The target customers are the ones who cannot compromise: aerospace, defense, electronics manufacturing and transportation.
We're doing something hard and unusual: bringing a brand new 3D printing technology to market. It's not a variety of FDM or SLS. It's brand new from the ground up.
Steve HooverHoover's diagnosis of the whole industry is refreshingly blunt. The thing keeping 3D printing penned into prototyping, he argues, is speed. Solve speed without giving up part quality, and you stop being a novelty and start being a manufacturing technology. In 2023 the company announced it had broken the 3D printing speed barrier with a new system, and Hoover's public claim has been that the process can run many times faster than established platforms.
05Make the parts first
A contrarian go-to-marketThere is a tidy way to sell a new machine: ship it, train the customer, collect the check. Hoover does not believe in tidy when the technology is this new. His pitch leans on a parts-as-a-service model, and the logic is almost cheeky in its honesty.
The reality is, if you have a new machine and process, the people who designed it can run it more reliably than training somebody else.
Steve HooverIn electronics especially, where board designs change constantly and turnaround time is everything, making the parts yourself gets the customer to value faster. As he puts it, when you are chasing large manufacturing opportunities, you are going to have to make parts first. Sell the output, prove the process, earn the machine sale later. It is the same instinct that drove him to spin technology out of PARC: the lab work only counts when it touches the real world.
Sheets, not melt
Long-fiber composites bonded layer by layer, not melted plastic or fused powder.
High strength-to-weight ratio aimed at aerospace and defense parts.
Built to clear the speed barrier that keeps 3D printing in the prototype lab.
06In his words
On the work, the people, the betI'm thrilled to join Impossible Objects. I am continuously impressed with the technology, material possibilities and most importantly, the people.
Impossible Object's groundbreaking technology solves critical problems in both manufacturing speed and part properties that enable the future of 3D printing.
Electronics is changing all the time, meaning quick turnaround times for new board designs is essential.
From our viewpoint, one area preventing 3D printing from penetrating into more manufacturing applications, is speed.
Strip away the titles and a pattern shows up. Cornell mechanical engineer. Carnegie Mellon master's and doctorate. Xerox researcher, PARC chief, corporate CTO, cybersecurity director, AI co-founder, and now a CEO again. Every chapter is about taking something clever in a lab and forcing it to behave in the messy, demanding, unforgiving world of actual production. He even keeps a foot in the room where standards get set, serving as vice-chair of the Consumer Reports board of directors and on engineering advisory councils at Carnegie Mellon and RIT.
Composite 3D printing has promised a lot for a long time. The question Hoover is paid to answer is whether it can finally deliver at the speed and scale that turns a clever idea into a line item on an aerospace bill of materials. He has spent his entire career on exactly that translation, from the page to the part.
07Watch & read
Go deeperHoover laid out the Impossible Objects thesis on camera at AMUG 2023, walking through why the company thinks its process can challenge established 3D printing platforms.
08Find Steve Hoover
Links & sourcesProfile compiled from public sources, March 2023 onward. Quotes verbatim from press materials and interviews.