In this episode of the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast, Dr. Eric Block sits down with Michael Strohecker — co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of LuxCreo, the 3D printing company he started in his Palo Alto garage. Michael is a mechanical engineer and materials scientist by training who spent his early career at McDonnell Douglas on a NASA blended-wing program and then nearly a decade at Space Systems Loral building satellites, including work on Sirius Radio and the XM recovery effort. He has been 3D printing since 1995. When investors from Kleiner Perkins — the original backers of Invisalign — brought him in to evaluate nanotechnology and materials science coming out of Georgia Tech, he saw a real chance to solve problems in dentistry rather than build another me-too printer.

The conversation centers on why hardware alone never solved anything. Accepting a "best 3D printer" award, Michael asked the organizers to delete the category — his single slide read: it takes more than a printer. LuxCreo controls the end-to-end process from materials and hardware through post-processing, CAD/CAM, and one-click print software, and every new hire, dental background or not, has to scan, design, print, and finish an aligner in under three hours. As he puts it, tinkering is a four-letter word. That obsession with repeatability is what makes direct-print aligners and retainers — LuxCreo was first to FDA clearance — practical inside a general practice rather than a science project.

Michael and Dr. Block get into what this actually changes chairside: the "Goldilocks technique" of printing comfort, medium, and tight versions of a splint for about $15 total and letting the patient choose, which drives compliance and referrals; same-visit aligner starts during a hygiene appointment; partial-sale case acceptance that doesn't add another chair visit; and material with active memory that returns to shape in hot water. They also riff on Dr. Block's own concept — ROF, return on fun — which Michael now preaches to his 200-person company. He closes with advice for students and young dentists: roll up your sleeves and learn the digital workflows, because without digital you'll be stuck in the past.

In this episode of the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast, Dr. Eric Block sits down with Dr. Deren Flesher — an Oklahoma dentist and serial dental-software entrepreneur who co-founded Modento and founded Airo Dental. Raised in small-town Oklahoma by two hospital nurses, Deren came to dentistry late, after ending every shadowing session with one revealing question: "If I were your son, would you advise I do what you do?" Nearly every physician said no; every dentist said yes. Three years and "20 failures" later he got into dental school, associated at DSO offices doing thousands of extractions and dentures, then opened a scratch startup in 2015 that has since seen around 12,000 patients.

The conversation digs into why he builds software to solve his own problems. Modento — a patient communication, forms, and consent platform — grew to a couple thousand offices and sold to Dental Intel (now Engagement by Dental Intelligence). His newest company, Airo Dental, centers on "Lane," an AI voice scheduler that answers 100% of scheduling calls in his practice. Deren and Dr. Block unpack the real numbers: the national average is about 65% of calls answered, only about 50% of ready-to-book callers actually get scheduled, and an AI that never misses a call and books roughly 80% of the time can be about twice as effective as a human team — while being honest about what AI still can't do.

They also cover rebuilding the phone tree so patients self-select, the stress it lifts off the front-desk team, and close with candid money advice: after chasing tax-advantaged private deals, Deren came "full circle" to simple, low-cost, diversified index investing — pay your taxes, avoid shortcuts, and put the rest on autopilot so you can focus on dentistry.

In this episode of the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast, Dr. Eric Block sits down with Sergei Azernikov — Senior Vice President of Software Development at Glidewell Laboratories — whose path to dentistry ran through computer vision research at the Technion in Israel, a postdoc at the University of Michigan, and patient-specific device work on hearing aids and orthopedics at Siemens, before he joined Glidewell as the second member of a software team that now numbers around 200.

The conversation traces Glidewell's early and unglamorous bet on artificial intelligence — a 2015–2017 collaboration with UC Berkeley, and founder Jim Glidewell personally reviewing crowns for hours a day to curate the training data — to where the company stands now: 100% of its crown designs are generated by AI, and a model update that once took months now takes about a week. Sergei and Dr. Block dig into the fast scan / fast mill chairside workflow, why crown proposals and margin detection keep improving, and the long-standing vision of a scan-to-seat process that ultimately becomes a single button click.

The episode also looks ahead — to voice interfaces and virtual assistants in the operatory, to robotics and automated prepping (with a Tesla full-self-driving analogy for how trust builds over time), and to Sergei's bigger thesis: dentistry is missing a true software platform, a "Windows moment" or App Store that would let disconnected systems finally plug and play. They close with advice for the next generation — for dentists, "you cannot afford to stay"; for entrepreneurs, a historically underserved market that is wide open for anyone who can build the connective layer.