Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Building Glowforge: Dan Shapiro's Journey from Personal Crisis to Reinventing an Industry

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Building Glowforge: Dan Shapiro's Journey from Personal Crisis to Reinventing an Industry · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:11
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:14
  adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
• 0:17
  today's guest is Dan Shapiro, CEO and Co founder of Glowforge.
• 0:22
  They create powerful 3D laser cutters, slash engravers that
• 0:26
  help people transform simple materials into amazing products.
• 0:30
  They focus on making the technology accessible to
• 0:32
  educators, entrepreneurs and anyone who loves to create.
• 0:37
  Dan has a history of turning big ideas into successful ventures,
• 0:41
  including developing Robot Turtles, the best selling board
• 0:45
  game in Kickstarter history, and leading projects at tech giants
• 0:50
  like Google and Microsoft. Under Dan's leadership, Glow
• 0:53
  Forge raised a record-breaking crowdfunding amount of nearly
• 0:57
  $28 million. He also holds more than 60
• 1:01
  patents and wrote Hot Seat, the Start Up CEO guidebook, sharing
• 1:06
  his hard earned insights with aspiring leaders.
• 1:09
  Dan's passion for innovation shines through in his mission to
• 1:13
  make design and fabrication available to everyone, inspiring
• 1:17
  a new wave of creators. Now before we get into all that
• 1:20
  good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company,
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• 1:59
  All right, back to our guest today, Founder and CEO of
• 2:02
  Glowforge, Dan Shapiro. Thanks for making time to Share
• 2:05
  your story today. Thank you so much for having me,
• 2:08
  Anthony. So Dan, you founded multiple
• 2:12
  start-ups including Photobucket and Spark Buy, which was
• 2:17
  acquired by Google. I want to hear a little bit more
• 2:21
  about that. But curious what first drew you
• 2:23
  to entrepreneurship initially? Were you just kind of wired from
• 2:27
  this for birth? You know, my parents are both
• 2:30
  professors, so the family business is academia.
• 2:33
  And I was a little bit of the outlier because it was a
• 2:36
  roundabout high school. I started thinking about, oh,
• 2:39
  you know, could I do this to make some money?
• 2:40
  Could I do that to make some money?
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  But things really kind of got started when I was in college,
• 2:46
  and I wound up meeting a friend who had built a laser display.
• 2:52
  So think about like Pink Floyd, the wall at the planetarium type
• 2:54
  thing, like a little one that you could put on your dorm room
• 2:57
  wall. And I said that's pretty neat.
• 2:59
  I bet we could make those and sell them on this newfangled
• 3:03
  Internet thing because this is 1993. 393. 1993.
• 3:09
  How do you even sell on the Internet in 93?
• 3:11
  You post in newsgroups and you say made this thing and, and so
• 3:16
  we would ship them around the country, hand make them.
• 3:18
  And then somebody said, hey, you know, could we pay you $50.00 to
• 3:22
  do one of those laser shows at our party, which turned into,
• 3:26
  since you're here, could you play some music?
• 3:28
  So we had a DJ business and that DJ business ran through most of
• 3:31
  my college years. And it was pretty great because
• 3:34
  it helped pay for college and it kept me out of trouble during
• 3:37
  nights and weekends because I was working.
• 3:39
  So it was a, it was a great part of the college experience to, to
• 3:43
  build that little company. And you know, after school I
• 3:46
  went to Microsoft, I went to a big company, spent five years
• 3:49
  there. I was always fascinated by this
• 3:51
  start up thing and by this idea of entrepreneurship.
• 3:56
  And so tell us a little bit about the entity that Google
• 4:00
  acquired. What was it?
• 4:02
  How did you get it started? Why did they show interest?
• 4:06
  Yeah. So I the first company started
• 4:08
  was was originally named Ontela, then we merged with Photobucket,
• 4:13
  became Photobucket. The company that's called
• 4:14
  Photobucket today is still that company.
• 4:16
  And after four years, when that merger happened, I stepped down
• 4:19
  as CEO and I started playing around with different ideas
• 4:23
  about what to do next. And the one I wound up working
• 4:25
  on was just something that scratched an itch.
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  I'm one of those people who does way too much research before I
• 4:32
  buy things, like way too much. And at the time, I was buying a
• 4:36
  a Windows laptop, and I was unsatisfied with the amount of
• 4:41
  research that I could do. And I wound up hiring people in
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  emerging markets to fill out giant spreadsheets full of data
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  about these laptops so I could find the best value on the
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  market. And you know, they're like
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  probably. Spending more on the the labor
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  than what you were actually going to save on the laptop I.
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  Actually didn't. I kept trying because I was
• 4:59
  curious. I wound up spending only $75 and
• 5:02
  saved about $200 for like a sort of an experiment.
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  I was like, if I was going to decide now, which one would it
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  be? And I, you know, I wrote it down
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  and then I went through this whole process and came this
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  massive spreadsheet and did like a bunch of sorts and filters and
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  I found one that was better that was $200 cheaper.
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  So I'm like, all right, and, and I, I had a bunch of ideas for
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  start-ups. I, I tell this whole story in
• 5:25
  detail in my book because like nobody talks about how companies
• 5:28
  get acquired, but I'll give you the short version was flying
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  down to the Bay Area to go visit with some VCs who I'd met at my
• 5:34
  previous company, talk to them about the different ideas I was
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  thinking about. And on the way back, wound up
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  chatting with a guy in the seat next to me who said that's
• 5:44
  really cool that that the thing you're working on or like that
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  third thing that you told me about is really cool the
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  spreadsheet. If you decide to do that, give
• 5:51
  me a call and gave me his card. I didn't, but I decided to work
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  like I lost the card and didn't think about it again and
• 6:00
  launched the company. But just.
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  Having that conversation was sort of like enough
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  encouragement to be like, oh, I should.
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  Had nothing to do with it had nothing.
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  To do with it in one ear. Out the other totally randomly
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  and three months, four months later when we launched the beta
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  version, I got an e-mail from him and he says, hey, I'm the
• 6:20
  guy from the airplane. It looks like you did that.
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  Can we get coffee? Three months later he worked for
• 6:26
  Google, and three months later Google acquired the company.
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  And OK, so tell in more detail what the product did.
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  So it was basically my spreadsheet with an icy on top
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  of it. It was two different pieces.
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  I see. Why on the back end, it was this
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  huge system for having folks in emerging markets be able to
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  research things, hold each other like a cross check across each
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  other, ensure that you got the right data.
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  You know, like it would be easy to say how much does this laptop
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  weigh? And the answer might come
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  through as being 6 lbs, But actually that's the shipping
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  weight. Because if you go and say like
• 7:01
  on the website, how much is it? They list the shipping weight
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  instead of the weight of the laptop.
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  Or, you know, if you go to Amazon and try try to sort by
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  CPUs at the time, your choices would be like different names of
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  CPUs. And then some of the entries
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  would be like Intel and some of the entries would be like blue.
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  And you're like, that's not ACP. So they'd actually have to go
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  and find like the source of notch.
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  So that was one thing. Then on the other side was a
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  beautiful UI that made it easy to go find what you were looking
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  for. So you could say I want a
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  lightweight fast laptop that's available in silver and it
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  understood what lightweight and fast meant and what silver was
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  and wasn't. So it filtered to silver and
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  then it would take lightweight, make it the first priority fast
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  and make it the second priority and sort everything
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  intelligently based on what you'd said you you wanted.
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  So it was, it was kind of those two pieces and the way things
• 7:53
  happened. I was really excited about
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  building the consumer product, but both Microsoft and Google
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  reached out about wanting the back end and to license the back
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  end data. And I looked and said, you know,
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  the direct like I can now see the future of this company isn't
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  a consumer product, it's a data provider and I'm not that
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  excited about it. So when Google said, can we just
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  acquire it outright, I was like, this sounds like a great outcome
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  because my investors get a return and like a happy ending
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  and I got to try something new working at Google.
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  And if I stay with this, I probably have to pivot in a, in
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  a direction I'm not super excited about in order for it to
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  be successful. So it wound up being kind of the
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  right exit, right place, right time, even though it was very
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  fast, 'cause I, I just sort of had that product discovery
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  experience of the opportunity here isn't what I thought and
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  isn't what I was passionate about.
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  That was why, that was why I said, yes.
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  You asked why they why they why they came, but that that was the
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  reason I I agreed to it. And So what did this product
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  ultimately become inside of Google?
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  So I became the CEO of a wholly owned subsidiary called Google
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  Comparison Inc and we made a series of products that helps
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  basically the same thing except for cars and mortgages and
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  credit cards. And as it turned out, over the
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  course of when I was there, regulations changed in a pretty
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  significant way that made us conclude that that wasn't going
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  to be the right product to continue with.
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  And so like we built it, we launched as a test in a couple
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  of States and then we, we folded it back down and it was a
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  fascinating ride, I have to say, being being inside Google in, in
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  the ads team, which is, you know, where Google makes all its
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  money because that's where my team was housed.
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  It was wild. OK, so were you the developer or
• 9:42
  you sort of kind of like, no, you hired a team of developers.
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  Here's the idea, you don't write code yourself.
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  I am so bad at writing code. I would say, like, it is
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  possible for me to write code, but if I am, something's gone
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  horribly awry. Now that's changed in the last
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  year or two with the advent of generative AI, which is a whole
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  nother story. But at that point, no, I'm the
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  guy who scribbles it on the whiteboard and says, what about
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  this? What about that?
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  And knows just enough to be able to ask the right questions of
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  the developers and say, like, could we do this?
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  Questions like, would it be easier if we did this?
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  Would it be easier if we did that?
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  Is this sort of thing hard? And sort of like to feel out the
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  space of the problem? But my background is product
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  management. So I have an engineering degree,
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  but it was I went to Harvey Mudd College, which gives you a
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  general engineering degree. So you're doing electrical,
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  mechanical, chemical, computer engineering, some of a little of
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  everything with kind of math behind it all and, and not
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  computer science specifically. That said, my dad's a professor
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  of computer science. So, you know, there's some,
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  there's some genetic through line I think.
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  OK, so let's talk, let's take sort of a little tangent here
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  and talk about the generative AI piece because I, I wonder if
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  this ties into sort of this, I don't know, I'm going to call it
• 10:55
  like a strange blip in your resume.
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  I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile and yeah, I'm seeing
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  like lots of product stuff, lots of tech related, but then I see
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  this senior research fellow for the last seven months at the
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  Wharton School. How does this kind of fit into
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  the picture? What's going on there?
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  I mean, to be fair, I think my whole resume is a series of
• 11:15
  strange blips because I've done 1 odd unrelated thing after
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  another, but this one is something that came up about a
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  year and change ago. As the modern generative AI boom
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  started. We at Goforge decided that this
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  was something that was a massive threat and opportunity.
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  Threat if we messed it up, opportunity if we did it right,
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  and started to move an experiment very quickly across
• 11:40
  the entire company. So we launched some pioneering
• 11:44
  generative AI features, but we also took Tiger teams
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  internally, started building tools to empower our teams in
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  ways that were, I, I think, really new and exciting and
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  innovative. I wound up reconnecting with an
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  old friend who ran the generative AI lab at Wharton,
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  who'd gone to science camp together in high school and, and
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  it sort of reconnected through another friend and, and talked
• 12:11
  about what we were working on. He was really excited because
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  the generative AI lab at Wharton is really focused on the
• 12:18
  business impacts of generative AI, specifically things like how
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  do you empower people in the organization and how do you
• 12:25
  manage culture change when you come, when you are, when you
• 12:28
  have such powerful tools. And so he asked me to join the
• 12:31
  lab as as a research fellow so that we could start working on
• 12:36
  research about how some of those technologies worked and how
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  other companies could learn from the the approaches we were
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  taking and some of the developments that we came up
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  with to drive AI change within their organization.
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  So we've been writing a couple of papers.
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  We've got some really exciting ones coming up.
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  And it's a really interesting sidelight where I get to take
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  some of the best of what we've learned at Glowforge and share
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  it with the world. And I get to see some of the
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  best learnings out of academia and bring them back into the
• 13:01
  company for us to learn from. So how is it that you're using
• 13:05
  generative AI internally there at Glowforge?
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  Is this like coming up with, I don't know, creative design
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  templates for your customers to use?
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  That's what we're doing externally.
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  So we have external generative designs to help customers be
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  more creative, to take their ideas and prototype them, draft
• 13:23
  them more rapidly. As somebody who just like not
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  being able to write code, I can't draw, I can't paint, I
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  have no artistic talent to speak of.
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  When I'm thinking about like, well, I want a box.
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  Like I was making a a gift for a friend, which was going to be a
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  box with poker chips on it. I don't know the design to put
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  on the poker chips. I don't know, like I can't make
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  the design to go on the box. I can make the box.
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  I'm pretty good at that. But generative AI would actually
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  let me go create these designs that were really from me, really
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  felt like authentic from the heart.
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  I'd create, you know, hundreds of designs, come up with them.
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  Nowhere near what a professional designer would do.
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  But I didn't want to bring in a professional designer for
• 14:01
  something that was for a close personal friend for kind of a a
• 14:04
  joke gift. I could make something that I
• 14:07
  was proud of. And so that kind of empowerment
• 14:10
  for our customers has been incredibly, incredibly popular.
• 14:14
  It's one of one of the leading features of our our optional
• 14:17
  subscription services, these generative AI arc tools.
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  But the real transformation is inside the company where we are
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  working to put every, every person of the company put in
• 14:31
  their hands the most powerful generative AI in the world.
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  So every single one of our employees from the executive
• 14:38
  team to folks working on the floor in the factory, because we
• 14:43
  do our own manufacturing in Seattle for for our largest
• 14:46
  products has access to the most expensive and capable AIS in the
• 14:51
  world like Claude, Opus, O3 Pro, etcetera.
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  And we do that because internally we build and host
• 14:59
  infrastructure so that everybody has access to all those models.
• 15:02
  We use an open source front end called Libre Chat, which gives
• 15:06
  everybody access to a ChatGPT like experience with all the
• 15:09
  models, not just one of them. That's the first part.
• 15:13
  And the second part is we have a Tiger team internally of just a
• 15:17
  couple of developers. We're building custom AI tools
• 15:20
  for each team. So our legal team has a custom
• 15:24
  built for them, AI tool that they use for legal research.
• 15:27
  Our marketing team has a custom built tool that they use for PR,
• 15:31
  for example, for researching interesting stories and
• 15:34
  reporters that they want to reach out to and talk to and on
• 15:37
  and on throughout the organization, whether it be
• 15:39
  customer support, finance. We've been building quick and
• 15:42
  simple little tools to help empower them at their jobs in
• 15:46
  partnership with those folks, which has led to one of the sort
• 15:49
  of core findings that we've seen is that for the first time I've
• 15:53
  seen ever, we're in a place where two week old software
• 15:57
  beats 2 year old software. So we'll go look at these
• 16:00
  professional AI products for things like legal research or
• 16:04
  things like, you know, PR outreach.
• 16:06
  And then we'll look at the thing we like knocked together in two
• 16:09
  weeks and the thing that we built, custom built for our
• 16:14
  needs using the very latest models and techniques that we
• 16:18
  knock together in two weeks will outperform those very expensive
• 16:21
  products that are being sold that have been refined over the
• 16:24
  course of months and years, but consequently can't necessarily
• 16:27
  keep up with the innovation of the week.
• 16:29
  And so those internal tools teams combined with the internal
• 16:32
  tool users has really had this amazing multiplicative effect on
• 16:36
  our team's ability to get great work done.
• 16:39
  So what's the benefit of sort of putting your own chat experience
• 16:45
  over top of multiple models? Why not just give people access
• 16:50
  to the different models? How does sort of combining these
• 16:53
  two make a better experience? Yeah.
• 16:55
  I mean, we looked at it and what we found was if we were going to
• 16:59
  use, let's just say ChatGPT, ChatGPT would be $20 per person
• 17:04
  per month minimum and their enterprises more and have users
• 17:09
  or more in everything else. If we did that, we would start
• 17:12
  saying, well, does this person really need it?
• 17:14
  Does that person really need it? Can we afford like that's a big
• 17:17
  bill when we go use Libre Chat, which uses chat GP, TS
• 17:22
  technology on the back end, we get two things.
• 17:25
  Well, several things. First, it costs an average of
• 17:28
  about $2.00 a month per person instead of 20.
• 17:32
  So now I can say, yes, everybody in the company can have access
• 17:35
  to it, which is actually really important to me for reasons I'll
• 17:39
  get to in a minute, but it's low cost, so I can give it to
• 17:42
  everybody. Second, sometimes one of the
• 17:44
  other AI companies will fall behind and one of them will jump
• 17:47
  ahead. And so for a while, like
• 17:49
  Anthropic Sonnet was the best thing going for probably six
• 17:53
  months or more. It was especially good at
• 17:55
  writing, which is really important for our marketing team
• 17:58
  who use it to help do drafts and do brainstorming and, and for
• 18:02
  some of those other things, what we can offer them any and all.
• 18:06
  And in fact, we give guidance about which models are best.
• 18:09
  So for that same $2.00, you can use Tropic, you can use Open AI,
• 18:12
  you can use Gemini. It serves as a front end to all
• 18:15
  those. And last, it really gives
• 18:18
  everybody, it gives us a shared tool that we can iterate and
• 18:21
  refine. So we'll build features that our
• 18:23
  team needs and we'll add them to the open source and, and
• 18:26
  contribute them back to the open source project.
• 18:28
  So we're making it better for us and better for anyone else who
• 18:31
  uses it too. But I, I touched on something
• 18:34
  that to me is actually really important and it's I'm not going
• 18:39
  to come out of here with any like your listener should,
• 18:42
  except for maybe this one. I guess they should buy a
• 18:44
  product. I'm not going to say you should
• 18:45
  read a book. I'm going to say you should
• 18:47
  really think about this in as we see the transformation that AI
• 18:52
  is landing upon the world, I am very concerned for the impact
• 18:56
  it's going to have on folks, particularly folks early in
• 18:58
  their career. But for anybody who does not get
• 19:02
  comfortable with and deeply understand what this technology
• 19:04
  can do. And I think it is imperative on
• 19:08
  us as leaders to give our teams the opportunity to learn.
• 19:13
  Not only did I want to give this to all the people who could
• 19:15
  benefit most from it, I wanted to give this to the folks who
• 19:18
  are working on the line. I wanted to give this to the
• 19:21
  junior finance team member or the new hire who's coming out
• 19:25
  of. Out of so that you're setting
• 19:27
  them up for long term success in their career.
• 19:29
  They can get comfortable with the platform, the technology,
• 19:32
  how to use it. Exactly.
• 19:34
  So often in companies, the goals of the company and the benefits
• 19:38
  of the individual are at odds. And you know, when it comes to
• 19:42
  setting salary and when it comes to deciding benefits, it's the
• 19:44
  zero sum game. Here's a place where I can help
• 19:48
  our business and I can help our team at the same time.
• 19:52
  Because when our team levels up with their skill and use of
• 19:56
  these products, they're making our company better, We're
• 19:58
  getting more effective and they are making themselves a a
• 20:01
  better. They're going to be able to get
• 20:04
  paid more, find jobs more easily, they're going to be more
• 20:06
  effective. Wherever they go.
• 20:08
  So I think it's one of those cases where the business and the
• 20:11
  team come into tight alignment, and it's really the job of
• 20:14
  leadership to take that and make those tools available and help
• 20:19
  support people in their learning.
• 20:22
  So this has been a really interesting sidebar, and I want
• 20:24
  to get back to sort of the Glowforge story and even talk
• 20:27
  about robot turtles. But just for a moment, what
• 20:31
  could we expect to see from these new research papers that
• 20:35
  you're working on which you're about to come out?
• 20:36
  Can you give us kind of a sneak peek?
• 20:38
  Yeah, there's some really exciting stuff, some of what we
• 20:44
  are, some of what we're working on that you can.
• 20:48
  So first Ethan Mulak is the the professor who Co leads the lab
• 20:53
  along with Lilac Mulak, his wife.
• 20:55
  They do amazing work together. And if you follow them both on
• 20:58
  Twitter, you're, you're already your AI game is going to level
• 21:01
  up generally talking about how do you on board with AI and
• 21:06
  become more capable. His book Co Intelligence is a
• 21:09
  great primer on this, how you work with AI, how your team can
• 21:13
  work with AI for the best results.
• 21:15
  And then some of the research we're doing specifically is
• 21:18
  something that I've just been fascinated by and brought to the
• 21:20
  team, which is the ways that these large language models are
• 21:25
  oddly like people and how when you interact with them, you can
• 21:30
  take advantage of that to use them better.
• 21:33
  And so we're actually doing some research using the tools from
• 21:36
  psychology and sociology, understand these weird technical
• 21:42
  alien mind slash programs that we're interacting with.
• 21:47
  Talking about like applying human psychology to the
• 21:52
  interaction with your AI to get, so, you know, I don't know,
• 21:56
  maybe applying the golden rule like, so be kind to the AI so
• 22:00
  that you're sort of getting better results and a better
• 22:04
  overall experience. Am I on the right path?
• 22:05
  Precisely, Precisely. Yep.
• 22:08
  The effect of different types of interactions, whether it's being
• 22:10
  kind or being mean or being persuasive and seeing how in a
• 22:15
  really sort of measured academic sense, see what the impact of
• 22:18
  that is. By the way, I mentioned that my
• 22:20
  dad was a professor of computer science, my mom is a professor
• 22:23
  of speech and communications. So between the two of them, I
• 22:27
  kind of found a little happy place in this academia side
• 22:30
  project researching technology and you're.
• 22:33
  Quite the love child of those two, aren't you?
• 22:36
  That's awesome. We might come back to to this
• 22:39
  discussion in a bit, but I, I want to get sort of back to some
• 22:43
  of the rest of your story before we get into glow Forge.
• 22:46
  I want to hear about this robot turtles thing.
• 22:51
  A record-breaking crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $28
• 22:56
  million in 30 days. Yes, I have those numbers
• 23:00
  correct. The no sorry, the the amount
• 23:03
  that it raised was a more modest, I can't remember low
• 23:07
  single digit millions. 28 million was Glow Forge.
• 23:09
  OK, Got. We sort of crossed our wires
• 23:12
  there. OK, so still millions of dollars
• 23:15
  for a board game, is that right in the most successful board
• 23:19
  game sort of at least in the time in Kickstarter.
• 23:23
  OK, what was the idea behind this?
• 23:25
  How did you pull this off? Like why was it so successful?
• 23:30
  Let's see the the Origin store. Hold on one second.
• 23:33
  I'm going to figure out, OK, no, sorry, we raised $631,000 OK,
• 23:40
  which at the time was one of the largest fundraisers, but not the
• 23:44
  largest. The record we set is what I'm
• 23:46
  much more proud of, which was we had more backers than any board
• 23:50
  game in Kickstarter history. OK.
• 23:52
  Because this was like, this was a box of cardboard.
• 23:54
  They've been folks who'd raised like 1,000,000 bucks for a box
• 23:57
  of miniatures and you know, sort of like super geek.
• 24:00
  I mean, I love that stuff. I don't mean to talk down to it,
• 24:02
  but these very sort of. You had a much lower price
• 24:05
  point, so you weren't going to hit the record with that, but
• 24:07
  you did hit the record in terms of number of people you got
• 24:10
  excited enough to pull their money.
• 24:11
  Out. And to be clear, I was not
• 24:13
  trying to hit any record. I was excited about this and I
• 24:16
  was like, OK, if I can find 1000 people to do this, I think it
• 24:20
  was 500 people to do this, then I can afford a run.
• 24:24
  Like it makes sense. I'm not going to lose too much
• 24:25
  money and, and it'll be this great experience.
• 24:28
  I, I actually was doing this because I invented this game
• 24:32
  with my kids and I've twins who aren't who at the time were four
• 24:37
  boy and a girl and now are driving because it's been a
• 24:40
  minute. And I was like, I want them to
• 24:44
  understand some of the most important ideas of coding, not
• 24:47
  because I want them to be developers, but because whatever
• 24:50
  they want to be like restauranteurs, you know,
• 24:53
  ballerinas, I don't care. I want them to be able to put
• 24:55
  technology to work for them. I want them to be empowered by
• 24:58
  technology, not intimidated by it.
• 25:01
  So I started thinking, how at that age could I share some of
• 25:04
  that? And I started thinking about how
• 25:05
  I loved board games, but I hated Candyland.
• 25:08
  And at 4, Candyland was kind of the next stop on the board game
• 25:10
  train. And I was like, what if you had
• 25:14
  a game where the the the idea of the game was that the kids got
• 25:21
  to boss around grown-ups, like programmers, boss around
• 25:24
  computers. And that right there was one of
• 25:27
  the things I wanted to teach them.
• 25:28
  So many people feel like they have to learn computers, that
• 25:32
  computers are this like this abstract thing that you know,
• 25:35
  they have that that controls them and constrains them.
• 25:38
  Whereas the the engineering mindset is that computers are
• 25:41
  the tools and you control the computer to get it to do what
• 25:46
  you want. You boss around the computer.
• 25:48
  So like that was lesson number one that I wanted kids to take
• 25:50
  away from the game. Programming is bossing around
• 25:53
  computers or the game is bossing around your parents.
• 25:55
  That could be more fun. I just say, what kid doesn't
• 25:58
  want to do that? So, so it was, it was something
• 26:02
  I invented for the kids. I decided I wanted to learn
• 26:04
  about Kickstarter, which is kind of a new weird phenomenon.
• 26:07
  And, and I figured if I could find 500 people, then I could,
• 26:11
  you know, do I, I think that was the, the, the, the minima I was
• 26:14
  shooting for. I could get a production run and
• 26:17
  it would be my degree in Kickstarter ology and it would
• 26:21
  be a summer well spent. This was I'd taken a summer off
• 26:23
  from Google to do this, and I was not expecting it to catch on
• 26:27
  like it did. It wasn't supposed to be a big
• 26:31
  thing that was going to last for a decade or more.
• 26:33
  And this master plan with a giant Facebook ad campaign
• 26:37
  planned. I didn't spend a nickel on ads.
• 26:41
  There was no advertising. There was no paid marketing.
• 26:43
  How did it get emailed? A bunch of people and that was
• 26:47
  pretty much it. I emailed a bunch of people and
• 26:50
  a bunch. Of people that you knew, were
• 26:51
  were they media folks? Were they?
• 26:53
  Literally just went to everybody in my inbox who I'd ever emailed
• 26:57
  and said, I'm so sorry. I'm never going to do this
• 26:59
  again. This is the one and only time
• 27:01
  and e-mail everybody. But there's this thing.
• 27:02
  Please delete this e-mail if you don't care about it.
• 27:04
  I just launched it. You know, I hope you'll find it
• 27:06
  interesting. That was the big, that was the
• 27:09
  big push. And how many emails do you think
• 27:12
  you sent out? I had like 1000. 1000.
• 27:16
  That is literally everybody I've ever emailed my entire life.
• 27:18
  That was the. That was the.
• 27:19
  List and from there it caught fire.
• 27:21
  Some of those people bought. Some of those people told their
• 27:23
  friends and they bought. And, and the news picked up on
• 27:26
  it because in 2013, it was not only weird, but controversial to
• 27:31
  talk about technology education for preschoolers.
• 27:34
  Like people are like, what do you mean you're teaching
• 27:35
  preschoolers to code? That's like, that's not right.
• 27:39
  And, and it, and it became like, you know, it was, it was
• 27:42
  newsworthy at the time. And so I wound up with a couple
• 27:45
  of different like periodicals, picked it up and then it started
• 27:48
  to pick up steam and, and it just passed around a lot by word
• 27:52
  of mouth. People would forward it.
• 27:53
  It turned out there was something, there was kind of a,
• 27:56
  a magic moment that happened that I, I almost missed.
• 28:00
  I was talking to a friend who runs a small board game company
• 28:04
  And and I was talking to her about the game and and I showed
• 28:08
  her an early idea for it and she said, OK, just a couple things.
• 28:11
  First should be robot turtles, not robot turtle.
• 28:14
  You need to have four players. That's just the standard for
• 28:17
  board games. I was like, OK, because I had
• 28:18
  originally designed this one-on-one with kid and grown
• 28:20
  up. She's like, yeah, that won't
• 28:22
  work. And then she said, and just so
• 28:25
  you know, no board game company would ever pick this up.
• 28:28
  And I said, how come? And she said, well, the idea
• 28:32
  that you require a parent to be involved sounds well and good.
• 28:36
  They've all tried that, and those games bombed because it
• 28:39
  turns out that what parents say they want is quality time with
• 28:43
  their kid, but what they really want is to shove the kids in the
• 28:46
  corner with a board game and get a couple of hours of quiet.
• 28:48
  And I said, Oh my gosh, could you be the villain of my
• 28:52
  crowdfunding campaign? Not by name, but I want to say a
• 28:55
  board game executive told me that this will never be
• 28:59
  published because parents don't want to play games with their
• 29:02
  kids. They secretly don't want to.
• 29:04
  So the only way this game comes into existence is if you want it
• 29:09
  to exist. So please help me bring this
• 29:12
  into the world and show that there's a place for this in the
• 29:16
  Which. So you did switch it from one
• 29:17
  player to 4 player? But you did switch it from 1:00.
• 29:20
  Player. But you ignored the other
• 29:21
  advice, no? No, she was totally right.
• 29:23
  Her point wasn't that this won't work.
• 29:25
  What she was just saying is big companies have tried this and
• 29:29
  failed. So if you just took it was it
• 29:31
  was more of AFYI. She wasn't trying to steer me
• 29:33
  away from it. She's like, just so you know,
• 29:35
  the big companies, if you pitch them, this would would not work.
• 29:37
  So it's a good thing you're doing Kickstarter.
• 29:39
  And I was like, can I use that? Can I use that in fact?
• 29:44
  And so she's a dear friend still, you know, to this day and
• 29:47
  thought that was amazing and was so excited that she got to be
• 29:50
  like, you know, a part of that success.
• 29:52
  And then ultimately a real board game company licensed it and
• 29:56
  still manufacturers and distributes it to this day.
• 29:58
  It's Thinkfun, which is a subsidiary of Raffensberger.
• 30:02
  Yeah, huge, huge toy company. I think we've got a lot of their
• 30:05
  puzzles in our house, so. Legendary for their puzzles.
• 30:09
  Yeah. OK.
• 30:10
  So the company, the the brand still exists.
• 30:13
  You can still buy the Robot Turtles game today.
• 30:16
  Yeah. I mean, in the heyday it was in
• 30:18
  Target nationally, it was in the Museum of Modern Art.
• 30:21
  It was everywhere. And now they've sort of focused
• 30:24
  back to, you know, specialty game stores.
• 30:25
  But like, you know, the somebody just told me they bought a copy
• 30:27
  of the Exploratorium in San Francisco and you know, museum
• 30:30
  stores, things like that. Oh, that's fun stuff.
• 30:33
  OK, so now let's get to sort of the meat here.
• 30:36
  Glowforge how did the idea for this come about?
• 30:40
  So I was working on robot turtles.
• 30:42
  It's a great segue. And a friend said my son loves
• 30:48
  the turtle so much you should make a 3D version where he can
• 30:53
  like grab the turtle and shove in his pocket because he's
• 30:55
  shredded the cardboard square because he wants to carry it
• 30:58
  with him in his sweaty little hands.
• 31:00
  And I said, OK, he worked at a Boeing subsidiary that did
• 31:07
  specialty manufacturing. I was like, all right, great,
• 31:09
  how do I do this? Let's talk about it.
• 31:11
  He sort of took me through a virtual tour of the shop floor
• 31:13
  and all the different machinery that could make these things
• 31:16
  and, and talked about 3D printing and CNC machining and
• 31:20
  plasma cutting water jets. And, and he's like, oh, and then
• 31:24
  there's the laser cutter. I was like, tell me about the
• 31:26
  laser cutter. And he's like, well, it's kind
• 31:28
  of in the back, but it's everybody's favorite tool.
• 31:30
  Not really for production, but for small batch runs for
• 31:32
  prototyping and, and I was like, OK, well, that's interesting.
• 31:36
  So I went to a local makerspace and I said I, I sort of
• 31:40
  remembered this, but I didn't. But my plan was going to be to
• 31:42
  use 3D printers because 2013, man, they were all the rage.
• 31:46
  Everybody was going to have a 3D printer at home.
• 31:49
  So I went to a local makerspace and I said, I want to 3D print a
• 31:53
  turtle. And he said, no, you don't.
• 31:55
  This is the owner. I'm like, I'm sorry.
• 31:58
  He's like, just you're going to be sad.
• 31:59
  Don't don't 3D print your turtles.
• 32:01
  Wait, because the quality wasn't very good?
• 32:03
  What do you mean? And he's like, well, it, which
• 32:05
  is what's going to happen. He said what you want to do is
• 32:07
  laser cut it. And I'm like, but he's like, no,
• 32:09
  no, no, it's, it's, it's only $0.05 a minute, but it's going
• 32:13
  to take like half an hour per turtle.
• 32:14
  The first three are going to come out as piles of spaghetti.
• 32:16
  When it's done, you're going to get this thing that looks like,
• 32:18
  you know, lumpy plastic and it's one color and you're not going
• 32:22
  to be happy with it and you're going to be mad at me.
• 32:24
  So like, please just use the laser cutter.
• 32:26
  I'm like, but it's $4.00 a minute.
• 32:28
  He's like, yeah, but it's only going to take you a couple
• 32:30
  minutes and you won't be mad at me afterwards, which I thought
• 32:32
  was kind of funny. I'm like, all right.
• 32:34
  So I, you know, cobbled together a design for a laser cut turtle
• 32:38
  and handed it to the person who ran the laser and, and also 3D
• 32:42
  printed 1. He was right.
• 32:43
  It was ugly and stringy and you know, you know, 3D prints look
• 32:46
  like kind of like bumpy and, and, and the laser cut thing was
• 32:50
  kind of cool and I was like, all right, but it's one color.
• 32:53
  Started thinking about this and I was like, OK, so maybe I got a
• 32:56
  photo print and I laminate it to acrylic and and then I laser cut
• 33:00
  that so I can get color. And I started playing around
• 33:03
  and, and one thing led to another and I wound up with an
• 33:07
  industrial carbon dioxide cutting laser from
• 33:10
  manufacturing. You ended up with one, meaning
• 33:12
  you are now the proudest. Owner of one in my garage
• 33:16
  installed in the garage. You just, you just yadda, yadda,
• 33:18
  yadda, the acquisition of this really cool tool, but go ahead.
• 33:24
  There's a there's a great photo of my very patient wife and I
• 33:26
  with crowbars on creating this thing in our garage as the kids
• 33:30
  stood around and laughed. And where did you buy it from?
• 33:32
  Is this like from China? From some.
• 33:34
  Yeah, random factory in China. All right, that's a wrecked
• 33:37
  direct how it import from from this this factory and it was
• 33:42
  terrible. It took me weeks to get the
• 33:43
  thing working. It was clunky and I had to like
• 33:46
  bust out all my old mechanical engineering everything and then
• 33:49
  the software was was poorly translated and then there was
• 33:53
  this moment when I push the button and it was magical.
• 33:59
  Something beautiful came out of it.
• 34:02
  So I made my run of, you know, turtles for the game and, and I
• 34:07
  just was playing. So I invited or at this point in
• 34:11
  my career, I'd gotten to know a fair number of investors and
• 34:13
  entrepreneurs. And so I invited people over,
• 34:15
  started making people custom schwag.
• 34:17
  I would like engrave their logo on their laptop or I'd make a
• 34:19
  business card holder with their logo on something like that.
• 34:22
  I just invited people over and everybody had kind of the same
• 34:25
  response. They look at that and say, what
• 34:26
  have you done? What is this beast?
• 34:28
  Why are you? Why am I here?
• 34:30
  And then I'd do the thing and they'd be like, OK, well, that
• 34:32
  was pretty cool. Like that last part where you
• 34:35
  push the button and then it made the cool glowing lights and then
• 34:39
  a product came out a few minutes later.
• 34:40
  That was pretty cool. And what material were I working
• 34:42
  with at this point? I was working with wood and
• 34:45
  acrylic and leather and all sorts of all sorts of different
• 34:48
  materials. So people were enjoying not only
• 34:50
  the output, but sort of the experience of getting to watch
• 34:54
  the sausage being made, so to speak.
• 34:57
  Yeah, it is hypnotic. To this day when I make
• 35:00
  something, which I do at least once a week, my Glowforge is
• 35:04
  right behind me and it is running regularly.
• 35:06
  I I will be like hard pressed not to just sort of stare and
• 35:10
  watch it go because it is it's fast and it's amazing.
• 35:15
  And one of the folks I invited over connected me with the CTO
• 35:21
  of his last company with they'd had a huge successful exit, and
• 35:25
  it turned out that he'd been building a laser cutter in his
• 35:28
  garage. And so we started talking about
• 35:31
  what exactly a business would look like that would take this
• 35:35
  magical technology and make it affordable and easy to use and
• 35:40
  safe across all the different people that we thought could
• 35:44
  benefit from it. Crafters, schools, small
• 35:46
  businesses. OK.
• 35:49
  So what was the first step beyond that?
• 35:52
  How did you guys, I mean, did you go back to that factory in
• 35:55
  China and say, hey, can you guys, can we work together to
• 35:58
  refine this or we? Talked long and in a depth about
• 36:02
  it, whether we wanted to work with an existing manufacturer
• 36:05
  and do something, do something from scratch.
• 36:07
  My Co founder Mark was and is a man of few words.
• 36:11
  So we talked about this regularly.
• 36:13
  But you know, I, I learned quickly with Mark, not to say,
• 36:16
  are you still there on the phone?
• 36:17
  Because it was very regular that when we're talking, there'd just
• 36:20
  be a long period of silence, as he thought like I would, I
• 36:22
  would. I would mentally count to 30
• 36:24
  before I would say still there, Mark.
• 36:26
  He's a deep thinker. Just just to give you a little
• 36:28
  context And, and, and would often like not mention things
• 36:33
  that he didn't think were important but would be very
• 36:36
  surprising. One of those things where after
• 36:38
  talking about this for about 3 months, he said something about
• 36:40
  the prototype. And I was like, what do you mean
• 36:41
  the prototype? And he's like, oh, the prototype
• 36:43
  in my garage. I was like, then I see the
• 36:45
  prototype in your garage. Oh yeah, sure, of course.
• 36:47
  And there it was. And by the way, if you saw that
• 36:52
  and then you looked at a Glowforge with all the plastics
• 36:54
  removed, it would be like 70% similar.
• 36:57
  He had come up with these amazing transformational
• 37:00
  innovations and how to build this at low cost, high
• 37:03
  reliability and safe in his garage.
• 37:07
  Over the course of those three months, that sort of redefined a
• 37:10
  field where desktop lasers, every desktop laser now owes,
• 37:14
  you know, a huge design debt to those original prototypes.
• 37:17
  And and I was like, Oh yeah, no, that's pretty amazing.
• 37:23
  And so we, we packaged it up and we actually applied to be in Y
• 37:30
  Combinator and got accepted the sort of, you know, legendary
• 37:34
  startup. That's a big deal.
• 37:38
  Yes, Startup incubator decided to decline and not participate.
• 37:44
  That is unusual, OK. It's, it's funny, the person who
• 37:48
  was running Y Combinator at the time is now is Sam Altman, who's
• 37:52
  now running Open AI, who I've known for two decades.
• 37:55
  Because we both had wireless companies at the same time and
• 37:57
  used to get together and, you know, exchange stories and
• 38:00
  advice and so on back when we always sort of kept in touch.
• 38:03
  And so I talked to Sam about it. And ultimately we decided like
• 38:06
  we, we didn't think we're at a place where that was going to be
• 38:08
  right for our business. But you know, still fans of what
• 38:11
  they do. They, they're, they're very
• 38:12
  helpful to the companies that participate.
• 38:15
  But that was the prototype that we like, shipped down there and
• 38:17
  gave a demo and then ultimately said, no, we think we're just
• 38:20
  going to go for it. So designed it, found a
• 38:22
  manufacturer and then launched our crowdfunding campaign.
• 38:26
  So the prototypes were made by your business partner in his
• 38:29
  garage. He was figuring out the
• 38:32
  engineering, kind of reducing the cost and all the different
• 38:34
  components that go into it. And then when you felt like you
• 38:38
  were ready, you found somebody, you found a factory that could
• 38:41
  kind of take those designs, those ideas that you guys had
• 38:45
  really been refining in in the background and they they would
• 38:48
  manufacture them for you. Exactly.
• 38:51
  We actually worked with Flextronics, which is a, you
• 38:54
  know, a Fortune 500 manufacturer who was introduced by, by
• 39:00
  somebody I'd kept in touch with who I met at my first company
• 39:04
  while I was at the earliest stages of trying to fundraise.
• 39:07
  And actually, I'm going to just pause for a minute because
• 39:09
  there's a sub current to what I'm saying that I think should
• 39:13
  be said out loud. I think too often is left
• 39:15
  unsaid, which is by the time I was building Glow Forge, I had
• 39:20
  every kind of privilege in the world.
• 39:23
  Like starting out as a white man, I'm way more likely to get
• 39:27
  investment funding. That's been an advantage through
• 39:29
  my entire career. But at this point, I had this
• 39:31
  network of people who I've been in touch with over the years.
• 39:34
  I had investors, I had entrepreneurs and every part of
• 39:37
  the globe forge story was one of all the good fortune I'd had
• 39:40
  along the way. Like pitching it to
• 39:42
  entrepreneurs who I knew talking to VCs first investment round
• 39:46
  was calling up a bunch of angels and saying, Hey, you want in And
• 39:48
  I'm going like, sure, I made money on spark buy great, let's
• 39:51
  let's do it again. Like it was easy mode.
• 39:54
  And I say that because for my first company, photo Bucket,
• 39:59
  just born as Antella, it was so brutally hard.
• 40:04
  And I got so frustrated with the entrepreneurs who I went to for
• 40:07
  advice telling me about their life on easy mode.
• 40:11
  Like, yeah, you just call up the investors who I know.
• 40:13
  And I just. You know, sure.
• 40:14
  Just talk to your network. I'm like, I don't have any
• 40:16
  network. Just, you know, just float the
• 40:19
  idea. But I'm like, I don't know how
• 40:20
  to do that. And I don't know these people.
• 40:21
  And it was nine months of me pitching everybody I could find
• 40:27
  who I could corner, who I could like, you know, cold call on
• 40:30
  e-mail before I raised the first dollar for my first company.
• 40:34
  It was so brutally difficult. And I swore to myself that when
• 40:37
  I finally cracked the code and figured out how to do it, I
• 40:39
  wouldn't be the jerk who just pretended it was easy.
• 40:41
  I wouldn't keep the secret to myself.
• 40:44
  That's why I wrote the book. That's why I wrote the book.
• 40:47
  Because. When I talk to people about
• 40:50
  that, they're like, how did you do Glowforge?
• 40:51
  And I'm like, please don't ask me that because that's not gonna
• 40:54
  be helpful to you. The thing that's gonna be
• 40:56
  helpful to you is how did you, like, how did you get the first
• 40:58
  one done? And it was hard.
• 41:01
  So I, I talked about this in like grueling detail, but it was
• 41:06
  the process of just trying everything.
• 41:09
  And when it finally clicked and I finally broke through, it was
• 41:14
  running into somebody in, in a, in Barcelona at a wireless
• 41:20
  conference who I'd been, you know, low key cyber stalking for
• 41:24
  the previous five months. Not cyber.
• 41:26
  I just stuck like trying to get meetings, trying to find, trying
• 41:29
  to meet in person. And they kept just sort of
• 41:31
  blowing me off. And then I sort of ran, I saw
• 41:33
  them and then I sort of ran into them at the bar, struck up a
• 41:37
  conversation and it was an event.
• 41:40
  And oh, you're in Seattle. Oh, what a coincidence.
• 41:42
  Oh my gosh, You work in wireless.
• 41:43
  What a coincidence. We should get, we should talk
• 41:46
  sometime. That was the first check that
• 41:47
  cleared. And it was really like, you
• 41:50
  know, how did I breakthrough the wall?
• 41:51
  By banging my head against it for nine months, that was.
• 41:55
  So what's the? Practical advice that somebody
• 41:58
  is going to find from reading Hot Seat, the start up CEO
• 42:02
  guidebook. Is it just that this is hard and
• 42:05
  you got to just take 1000 swings or or is there some?
• 42:09
  Are there any shortcuts in there?
• 42:11
  So here's the piece that that I'd say was most challenging for
• 42:16
  me that I wanted to the the greatest gift I got that I that
• 42:20
  I wanted to pay forward with the book, which is every time I
• 42:24
  heard these success stories, they were just so stories.
• 42:28
  They were like, and then this happened and that happened.
• 42:30
  And then the funny happened. Hooray, we're all really smart.
• 42:33
  Or I saw this obstacle and I figured out the solution and
• 42:36
  Hooray, everybody's so smart. Occasionally I would see these
• 42:39
  stories of failure and they would just be stories of abject
• 42:42
  failure. Like I tried and tried and
• 42:44
  tried. Nothing ever worked and it sucks
• 42:45
  and nothing's going to happen. And what I didn't see enough of
• 42:49
  is how you is how basically success looks like months or
• 42:56
  years of failure with no steps forward, no glimmers of hope,
• 43:01
  and then suddenly success like overnight success 10 years in
• 43:06
  the making is so common in this industry.
• 43:10
  Or 10 months in the making or whatever it is.
• 43:13
  I have a friend who this story unfolded after the book was
• 43:18
  published. But but it would have fit right
• 43:20
  in. He he started a company in 2020,
• 43:25
  eleven or thereabouts and raised an investment round.
• 43:28
  It was the first investment I ever did.
• 43:30
  I don't do many investments, but I love this guy.
• 43:33
  And and you know, I think I said he's too stubborn to lose, lose
• 43:36
  any money and tried to raise another round, failed.
• 43:39
  Tried to sell the company, failed.
• 43:42
  Got profitable, grew, repeated the process, tried to raise
• 43:45
  money, tried to sell the company, failed.
• 43:49
  Almost 10 years later, called me up and said, Dan, I'm so sorry.
• 43:51
  I'm going to sell the company and you're only going to get
• 43:53
  your money back. And I'm like, you don't need to
• 43:56
  apologize to me, buddy. Like congratulations.
• 43:58
  I'm so happy to be like, that's the way this goes.
• 44:00
  It's wonderful that I'm going to get some.
• 44:02
  I don't care. The money went out when I
• 44:04
  invested it and anything comes back as a blessing.
• 44:06
  And then he called back and said the deal fell through.
• 44:08
  And then three months later, COVID hit.
• 44:11
  And by the way, this was an in person events company.
• 44:15
  I mean, software for in person events.
• 44:17
  And his revenue went to zero overnight.
• 44:19
  Everybody cancelled. And then seven months later, he
• 44:24
  called me up and said, Dan, I need your address.
• 44:27
  Said OK. And he said, I'm going to send
• 44:29
  you a check. And I'm like, oh, that's great,
• 44:32
  what happened? And he said I sold the company
• 44:35
  for A50X return hard pivot to online events, massive overnight
• 44:43
  growth, overnight success, 10 years in the making.
• 44:49
  Unbelievable, Utterly unbelievable.
• 44:51
  That guy bashed his head against the wall until the wall moved.
• 44:55
  That's an incredible story. And so, no, I wish I could tell
• 44:58
  you, read the book, find the shortcuts.
• 45:01
  What I can tell you is read the book, see that every single one
• 45:05
  of the problems you're facing is of a family that everybody's
• 45:07
  faced before. Because you'll see all these
• 45:09
  stories of folks working towards it, sometimes with success,
• 45:13
  sometimes with failure, the approaches they used.
• 45:16
  Because there are some of these common threads, but the threads
• 45:19
  are things like taking a different approach, taking the
• 45:22
  creative challenge, being inspired by the approach
• 45:24
  somebody else took, and applying it to your own circumstance.
• 45:27
  And knowing that just because it looks like you're not getting
• 45:30
  anywhere doesn't mean that it's hopeless.
• 45:34
  And at the same time, entrepreneurship means signing
• 45:37
  up for a long slog before you get to the other side.
• 45:41
  You know, this is probably a a fantastic segue into what I call
• 45:46
  my favorite question of the interview.
• 45:48
  And I usually save it for a little bit later in the
• 45:51
  interview because we still haven't talked about Glow Forge
• 45:55
  in detail in terms of all the cool products now that you guys
• 45:58
  offer and what they can do and the variety of different price
• 46:00
  points. And we are going to come back to
• 46:02
  that, I promise. But you teed that up so
• 46:06
  perfectly. I I love to ask a question about
• 46:10
  a serious challenge that you've overcome, personal or
• 46:13
  professional. They maybe they intertwine how
• 46:15
  you got through it, what you learned for exactly the reason
• 46:18
  that you were just talking about Dan.
• 46:20
  People hear these stories or they see sort of the polished
• 46:24
  version of kind of the quote UN quote finished product.
• 46:27
  Oh, look at, you know, Dan sitting up there on the hill.
• 46:30
  You know, he's got a nice house, a nice car, like, you know, glow
• 46:33
  forge, great company, it's booming.
• 46:35
  Lots of employees like, things just come easy to him.
• 46:38
  Like this has just been a stroll in the park and they don't know
• 46:42
  all those times that you bashed your head against a wall,
• 46:46
  whether it was with Gloforge specifically or something else
• 46:49
  or a personal event that almost broke you.
• 46:51
  And so yes, I, I loved, loved, loved that story that you just
• 46:56
  shared about your friend. And now I'm going to invite you
• 46:59
  to share your own version of that for the benefit of our
• 47:03
  listeners. Absolutely.
• 47:05
  And I'm going to start with the disclaimer and I mentioned this
• 47:07
  before in in our country it is not fair.
• 47:11
  But being white and being male means it's on easy mode.
• 47:15
  White male founders are are funded disproportionately.
• 47:19
  I can't remember what the ratio is, but vastly
• 47:22
  disproportionately to anyone else.
• 47:23
  So I already had it about as easy as as you can get from.
• 47:27
  If I could just interrupt for a second because I, I want to
• 47:31
  layer something else on top of that.
• 47:33
  It's something that, you know, I feel like I've been really
• 47:35
  fortunate with as well, is that I grew up in a household where
• 47:38
  education was valued and made accessible to me.
• 47:43
  And growing up, I sort of took that for granted because that
• 47:47
  was the case for a lot of people, you know, that I knew
• 47:49
  around me, my social circles. I've gotten older, I realized
• 47:52
  that that's not the case for everybody.
• 47:54
  And so I just wanted to throw that in there as well.
• 47:57
  Yeah, as the kid of two professors, education was just
• 48:00
  in the air. And so I see this not as woe as
• 48:03
  me, but as, Oh my gosh, even for somebody who has all the
• 48:07
  advantages, it's still hard. And I had it comparatively easy.
• 48:11
  But actually, when you talk about when you talk about that,
• 48:14
  I the other thing I go back to is the story.
• 48:16
  I don't tell that much because it's, it doesn't have a happy
• 48:21
  ending. And it's frankly kind of
• 48:22
  embarrassing. When I was working at Microsoft,
• 48:26
  after a couple of years, everybody was starting a
• 48:29
  company. Like you couldn't sneeze.
• 48:31
  And, you know, the three company start-ups were getting venture
• 48:35
  capital because this was the heyday of the Internet boom.
• 48:39
  And the everybody was complaining about how easy it
• 48:43
  was for people to raise money and how VCs were throwing their
• 48:46
  money at anything. So I said, why not me and with a
• 48:52
  colleague put together a business that was a new
• 48:56
  massively multiplayer online role-playing game deserve, you
• 48:59
  know, World of Warcraft. I think it had not come out yet.
• 49:01
  EverQuest was state-of-the-art. So this is like early MMORPG, we
• 49:06
  know what we're doing. Like we're not game designers.
• 49:10
  Had some software experience from Microsoft and we were young
• 49:14
  and brash and thought that, you know, we knew everything and
• 49:18
  decided we were going to go. So we built documents and
• 49:20
  pitched decks and everything else and then started trying to
• 49:24
  pitch the company. And I just was at a total loss.
• 49:30
  I I think I found after, you know, nine months, 912 months of
• 49:35
  trying, I think I found one investor who would take a call
• 49:38
  and it was like a 30 minute slot cut short to 25 minutes.
• 49:42
  And then, you know, OK, great. Thank you.
• 49:45
  Never followed up and ghosted me.
• 49:46
  So not just one investor who would give money, one investor
• 49:49
  who actually would get on a call with you, OK.
• 49:52
  Yes, I couldn't. I'm like, I was so hopeless.
• 49:56
  I like couldn't find anybody to talk to.
• 49:59
  I had no idea how to go about it.
• 50:01
  I was like cold emailing people and calling and asking friends
• 50:04
  for introductions and like nothing worked.
• 50:08
  Somewhere along the course of doing this, I talked to a friend
• 50:12
  who who said, have you played EverQuest?
• 50:15
  Because that's kind of the state-of-the-art.
• 50:17
  And I said, and I've read a lot about it.
• 50:19
  It's like, well, you have to like actually play it and get
• 50:21
  the experience that you, you know, you know what the
• 50:23
  state-of-the-art is, which is like, here's the thing about me,
• 50:28
  a personal weakness. I have a terrible addictive
• 50:31
  personality when it comes to video games.
• 50:33
  Like I will be lost in a hole when a new video game comes
• 50:37
  around, and this was like going up to an addict with a needle
• 50:41
  and this sounds like a joke. I wound up abandoning all hope
• 50:46
  of pursuing that, basically neglecting my job and for nearly
• 50:51
  a year, spending about as much time playing EverQuest as I did
• 50:57
  on my job. I was a bump on a log, deeply
• 51:00
  depressed. This had fallen apart unhappy
• 51:02
  with the work I was doing and this got so bad that my then
• 51:07
  girlfriend now wife staged an actual intervention and said you
• 51:12
  are destroying your life and you have to fix this no ifs ands or
• 51:16
  buts. And I had to quit this game cold
• 51:19
  Turkey. Which again sounds like a joke
• 51:21
  but was one of the more one of the more challenging things I've
• 51:26
  I had I've had to do. And it was sort of the last like
• 51:32
  in this sort of giant mound of failure.
• 51:35
  It was the last like, Nope. Even this thing that I sort of
• 51:38
  pivoted my head like I always was playing it thinking like,
• 51:40
  but I'm, I'm really sort of doing research for this thing
• 51:42
  that I long since abandoned and done.
• 51:45
  But it was like this more. I had to acknowledge that it was
• 51:47
  all just a hill of failure at the end of this.
• 51:51
  And it was really difficult. I sunk my energy back into my
• 51:57
  job at Microsoft. Spent another two years there.
• 52:01
  The same friend ironically reached out and said I'm doing
• 52:03
  this start up. Had nothing to do with games.
• 52:05
  Doing this start up, that's a cell phone name for teenagers.
• 52:09
  We need a product manager and left to get my first taste of
• 52:13
  what it was really like working at a start up.
• 52:16
  Made my first connections in the start up world.
• 52:18
  Not my first investors, folks who ultimately did not invest or
• 52:23
  were helpful, but helped me understand what I needed to look
• 52:25
  like and what the shape of the problem was and built up some
• 52:28
  skills that would pay off in a big way later on.
• 52:31
  But man, like what an awful, like I look back and I'm like,
• 52:34
  what an awful way to spend a year and a half, two years of my
• 52:37
  life. And also probably part of what
• 52:40
  made me who I am today. So up to that point or maybe
• 52:44
  since then, Dan, have you noticed that you have addictive
• 52:47
  tendencies for other things outside of video games?
• 52:50
  Or was this sort of the one place where that showed up?
• 52:55
  Thank heavens, no. I find blackjack and most
• 52:58
  gambling boring and I don't come within a mile of any sort of
• 53:01
  recreational substances because I don't want to test that one
• 53:03
  out. And and for some reason I'm just
• 53:07
  really wired to love video games.
• 53:09
  Which is funny because I have a bunch of friends now in the
• 53:12
  video game industry who tell me about their games.
• 53:14
  And I'm like, I'm very happy for you and I'm not going to try it.
• 53:17
  You can't go there. Nope.
• 53:20
  So you don't play video games at all anymore?
• 53:22
  0. OK.
• 53:24
  And, and I have a son who loves them and wants to play them all
• 53:27
  the time and is honestly like, I've, I've been torn about it.
• 53:30
  He's a little mournful. He's like, they had to be really
• 53:32
  fun to play games together. And I'm like, we're going to
• 53:34
  play board games together and we're going to do like Dungeons
• 53:37
  and Dragons together. And we will do all sorts of
• 53:40
  other things. And you can tell me all about
• 53:42
  your games and I will live them vicariously through you.
• 53:45
  But for my own health and safety, I I cannot go there.
• 53:50
  So when this intervention was staged and did you have an
• 53:57
  immediate recognition of, yes, you're right, I need to do this
• 54:01
  or was there still some resistance from you at this
• 54:04
  point? I was so I had so much self
• 54:09
  shame about it that I knew immediately that it was true.
• 54:12
  And and because it came from, you know, somebody who I love
• 54:17
  deeply, I was, you know, I didn't, I didn't fight back
• 54:19
  about it, but I definitely said, OK, I'm going to have to think
• 54:23
  about this and went off and thought about there was just no
• 54:26
  reasonable way that I could say that that was wrong.
• 54:29
  And I kind of had a little talk with myself and I'm like, you
• 54:32
  know, this is one of the biggest problems in my life right now
• 54:35
  and simultaneously the hardest and easiest to fix.
• 54:39
  All I have to do is hit the delete button.
• 54:43
  And you know, the way these things work, if, you know, you
• 54:45
  spend huge amounts of time invested in this thing and it
• 54:48
  feels like a big investment and everything else, I was like, you
• 54:51
  know, I'm two clicks away from making this decision and I can't
• 54:56
  really justify to myself I shouldn't do that, so I did.
• 54:59
  So you did and then what? Like, was it in an immediate
• 55:04
  sort of like relief, a release of that shame?
• 55:08
  Like, were you able to come out of the death spiral at that
• 55:11
  point? No, it was, you know, the, the
• 55:13
  sort of depression had been filling itself with this
• 55:16
  artificial bubble. And now I had to grapple with
• 55:19
  the depression and with the like the shame and the feelings about
• 55:23
  because I didn't have this thing to occupy my mind in time.
• 55:26
  So I focused back on work and I threw myself into the work I was
• 55:31
  doing and, and I was puttering around a little with
• 55:34
  electronics. And so I spent more time on that
• 55:37
  I, or I had been before this started.
• 55:38
  So I spent a little more time with that.
• 55:40
  I like spent more time with friends who I've been
• 55:42
  neglecting. And I basically just sort of
• 55:44
  want an aggressive fill up the empty void with things that I
• 55:47
  wasn't going to feel shame about and and got myself back to a
• 55:51
  place where I I felt like the old me.
• 55:55
  Were there other things that kind of helped you through this
• 55:58
  process? Was there therapy or
• 56:00
  medications? Meditation.
• 56:02
  Extra proponent of therapy, but I had not like was not at the
• 56:07
  time, I had not seen the light. And no, I've never been one for
• 56:12
  for meditation. I'm terrible about exercising.
• 56:18
  And yeah, no, it was all just working through it.
• 56:22
  I have a therapist now who's wonderful.
• 56:24
  And I like, I like to think that if I had one, then I would have
• 56:27
  made it through there faster and with fewer bumps.
• 56:31
  But but no, I just kind of had to given the place where I was.
• 56:35
  I just had to figure it out for myself.
• 56:38
  And thank goodness, with the loving support of my partner.
• 56:42
  And you said earlier that you look back and you recognize that
• 56:47
  you are where you are now in part because of what you went
• 56:50
  through. What do you mean by that?
• 56:52
  I mean, that was the thing that it taught me some significant
• 56:58
  humility, which is, you know, sometimes in the start up world
• 57:02
  is in rare, rare supply taught me that it was going to be hard.
• 57:06
  So I went to go do it myself. I felt like there was a reason
• 57:10
  that I beat my head against the wall for nine months without
• 57:12
  giving up. There's the thing, you know, in
• 57:14
  sales, you, you build a funnel and you're like, we're going to
• 57:18
  talk to this many people and move this many people to this
• 57:20
  stage and this many people to this stage, etcetera.
• 57:23
  And my experience with trying to raise money as an early stage
• 57:26
  company is there's no funnel, there's no progress that's
• 57:29
  measurable. You could have, you could have a
• 57:34
  dozen meetings with an investor that lead to nothing and one
• 57:39
  meeting with an investor that leads to a check.
• 57:42
  By the time I actually sort of broke through, what I found was
• 57:45
  that there was no meaningful process that would predict
• 57:48
  success. And it's, it's an odd sort of
• 57:51
  thing where many investors don't have an incentive to say no, but
• 57:56
  they have every, they have every incentive to keep the
• 57:58
  conversation going. Because if you have some
• 58:00
  progress, if something bumps, if they see some sign that they
• 58:02
  like, you know, they, they have an option.
• 58:05
  If they say no, then they lose the option.
• 58:08
  And so it's led to this terrible habit where investors tend to
• 58:13
  just string along or go quiet or whatever else.
• 58:16
  A friend of mine, James Cham, who's an investor with
• 58:20
  Bloomberg, one of the good ones, has a note that I think he got
• 58:23
  from some other investor that that he said is on a whiteboard
• 58:28
  of his favorite quotes that says you have to tell the
• 58:32
  entrepreneur that you passed. You can't just whisper it into
• 58:35
  your pillow. And every entrepreneur I know
• 58:37
  who's raised money from VCs says, Yup, every VC needs to
• 58:41
  hear that because that is a, a, a major problem.
• 58:46
  You just don't know. You don't get the feedback or
• 58:49
  you get only positive feedback, but no checks.
• 58:52
  And so understanding just how difficult that was going into
• 58:56
  it, it let me let me handle it, right.
• 58:58
  I'd actually set a budget both sort of literally and
• 59:01
  metaphorically with my then girlfriend, now wife, for how
• 59:07
  much we could afford to pursue this dream.
• 59:10
  And so it was like I was going to have a year to go after this,
• 59:13
  and after a year I was going to give up.
• 59:16
  That was really important because there's a lot of ideas
• 59:19
  that don't work and there's a lot of people who cannot raise
• 59:22
  investment, and you don't know if you're one of them until you
• 59:24
  beat your head against that wall for a while.
• 59:26
  In fact, you never know if you're one of them because maybe
• 59:28
  one more Flack with your forehead would would get through
• 59:31
  the other side. So you have to decide what your
• 59:33
  risk tolerance is. The stories that that give me
• 59:37
  the cold shivers, The ones where people mortgage their home and
• 59:40
  run up the credit card debt and do everything humanly possible
• 59:44
  to make the ideas work 'cause you only hear the ones where
• 59:46
  they worked. You don't hear the ones about
• 59:48
  people who who launched themselves into bankruptcy and
• 59:51
  failure and, and worse, either because they were unlucky, which
• 59:57
  is a very real possibility, or because the idea entrepreneur,
• 1:00:02
  whatever weren't the right combination.
• 1:00:03
  And you know, it was never going to work.
• 1:00:06
  And there's no way to know the difference between those.
• 1:00:08
  So you have to, as I learned, you have to decide what it is
• 1:00:12
  that you're willing to risk. And the answer probably
• 1:00:14
  shouldn't be everything. The answer probably needs to be
• 1:00:18
  something that you can afford to risk.
• 1:00:21
  And that might mean giving up too soon.
• 1:00:24
  You know, entrepreneurship lore celebrates those who didn't give
• 1:00:27
  up ever for any circumstance. And you don't find me there.
• 1:00:30
  I'm not the guy who says everyone should start a company.
• 1:00:32
  I'm not the guy who says never give up.
• 1:00:33
  I'm not the guy who says, you know, trust your trust your
• 1:00:37
  dreams. That always leads you in the
• 1:00:38
  right direction. I'm the guy who says, look, I
• 1:00:40
  had a lot of privilege that I got to that I got to try this
• 1:00:43
  and not everybody does. And if you get to, that's
• 1:00:45
  amazing. You have the passion and
• 1:00:47
  commitment to want to put yourself up to that sort of that
• 1:00:51
  sort of potential difficulty and misery and abuse.
• 1:00:54
  That's awesome. Know your limits because it
• 1:00:57
  doesn't work for everybody and it's just one, just one course
• 1:01:01
  that you can go. That's super helpful.
• 1:01:04
  I appreciate you opening up and sharing that, Dan.
• 1:01:06
  OK. So I'd be remiss to all the
• 1:01:09
  listeners if we didn't get back to Glowforge and kind of paint
• 1:01:12
  the picture of where is the company today.
• 1:01:15
  It has been so through all my life.
• 1:01:19
  I've noticed that of all the privileges that I've had, one of
• 1:01:23
  the ones that that I didn't really account for so much I
• 1:01:28
  didn't realize is that I always was somebody who knew how to
• 1:01:33
  make things. I was always tinkering in the
• 1:01:35
  garage. I was always taking things
• 1:01:37
  apart. I was always putting things
• 1:01:38
  together. I learned just enough coding to
• 1:01:40
  be dangerous so I could build a, you know, rough prototype idea
• 1:01:43
  of something. And almost everything, almost
• 1:01:46
  every opportunity that I had came in some way from the
• 1:01:50
  empowerment of feeling like I could make things in this world.
• 1:01:55
  So building a company empowers other people to make things very
• 1:02:00
  much feels like my calling, very much like I'm going to take this
• 1:02:04
  gift I've been given, package it up and give it to as many people
• 1:02:08
  as I can. So what we do is we take the
• 1:02:13
  ability to be an amateur woodworker, an amateur leather
• 1:02:19
  craft or an amateur paper cutter and we put it in a box.
• 1:02:23
  When you get a glow for it, you get a tool that instantly
• 1:02:26
  catapults you to the point where you can make beautiful projects
• 1:02:29
  that you are proud of in anyone of dozens of materials.
• 1:02:33
  Now, I made, I made a wallet when I when I got my lasers, one
• 1:02:38
  of the first projects I did, I made it from leather.
• 1:02:41
  It was a great wallet. I got compliments and I've like
• 1:02:44
  generation 3 of said wallet in my pocket right now.
• 1:02:48
  Would you, if you looked at it, would you say this was made by a
• 1:02:52
  professional leather crafter, you know, to Dan by this or
• 1:02:54
  making himself? No, you'd say, oh, wow, this is
• 1:02:56
  really cool that you made this yourself.
• 1:02:58
  It's like amateur. You're good at it.
• 1:03:01
  You're not great at it, but you're good at it.
• 1:03:03
  And it's something that you can be proud of.
• 1:03:06
  And you get there immediately. And then it's the tool that
• 1:03:10
  scales with you so that as you grow your skills, as you become
• 1:03:14
  more capable, it lets you work more quickly and with more
• 1:03:17
  sophistication. So we have master leather
• 1:03:20
  crafters who use their Glowforge to do all the basic work so they
• 1:03:23
  can focus on the little bits of Polish and shine that make it
• 1:03:27
  truly sublime. But it means that kids as young
• 1:03:32
  as kindergarten can go design things that they're proud of
• 1:03:35
  that are useful. They're physical objects that
• 1:03:39
  interact with the world. I mean, I'll give you a stupid
• 1:03:41
  example. I went to a friend's house who
• 1:03:44
  who was a big fan of wine, and that's not something I know a
• 1:03:48
  lot about, but I got what I thought was a nice bottle of
• 1:03:50
  wine. I put some work into it and he'd
• 1:03:52
  sent me earlier a picture of his family Crest, which he just
• 1:03:56
  found. And so I grabbed a couple of
• 1:03:59
  slate coasters that cost like $0.99 each, threw them in the
• 1:04:02
  globe forge and engraved the family Crest on them.
• 1:04:05
  I was almost a little miffed when he basically ignored the
• 1:04:08
  bottle of wine and just flipped out about the coasters.
• 1:04:12
  The next time we went to the house for dinner, the coasters
• 1:04:14
  were on display on the mantle because he was so excited about
• 1:04:18
  the coasters. Because creating something
• 1:04:21
  that's truly unique and personal is just different.
• 1:04:26
  It's different if you're a business.
• 1:04:27
  It's different if you're if you're a a crafter, if you're
• 1:04:30
  gifting for making things for your family.
• 1:04:32
  It's different if you're an educator and empowering your
• 1:04:34
  kids with it. It is a kind of superpower that
• 1:04:38
  not enough people in this world possess.
• 1:04:41
  And if I can get a little like, you know, crazy wild eyed
• 1:04:43
  founder on you, we are all humans, homo sapiens.
• 1:04:47
  We are defined by being tool users.
• 1:04:49
  And it is a weird quirk of recent history that we don't
• 1:04:54
  make things for ourselves anymore, right?
• 1:04:55
  Like a couple 100 years ago, for all of human history, if you
• 1:04:58
  wanted something, you made it or you traded it for something that
• 1:05:01
  you made. But you know, assembly lines and
• 1:05:04
  factories being what they are, technology took that away from
• 1:05:06
  us to the point where it's now quirky and odd to make things
• 1:05:09
  yourself. And I think we should have that
• 1:05:11
  back. It's like we were in a world
• 1:05:14
  where people didn't have kitchens and would only buy pre
• 1:05:16
  made meals. No, no, no, we should be able to
• 1:05:18
  make things for ourselves. And that's what I love about
• 1:05:20
  Glowforge. It lets people do that.
• 1:05:22
  So when people go to glowforge.com and what will they
• 1:05:26
  all your all your your equipment is manufactured here now in the
• 1:05:30
  US is that right now we have. 2 main product lines.
• 1:05:33
  We have our our our performance series, which are the larger 40
• 1:05:39
  and 45 Watt lasers that are amazing for businesses and for
• 1:05:42
  schools and anywhere where they're going to get heavy use,
• 1:05:44
  where they're going to work faster when you want to work
• 1:05:47
  through thicker materials. And we have our craft series
• 1:05:49
  which are smaller and use a diode laser that's about 6
• 1:05:52
  watts. And so those are great for home
• 1:05:55
  crafting and personal creativity and for getting started in the
• 1:05:58
  world of lasers. And sorry and the it's the
• 1:06:02
  performance ones that are made in the US The craft series are
• 1:06:05
  made in Mexico where it's just a larger scale assembly line and
• 1:06:09
  where we can get the sort of scale that we need there.
• 1:06:12
  And So what will people find in terms of price ranges on these
• 1:06:17
  devices when they go to glowforce.com?
• 1:06:19
  You can anywhere from at the top end $7000 for a machine that you
• 1:06:24
  can build a business around or run all day.
• 1:06:26
  You know, students through non-stop all the way down to
• 1:06:29
  $700.00 for the Glowforge Spark, which is a small personal
• 1:06:32
  machine that you can put in your office and and run while you're
• 1:06:36
  working. That's pretty cool.
• 1:06:39
  Diane, I've just got one more question for you.
• 1:06:42
  But before I ask you, I want to do 2 things.
• 1:06:43
  First, I'm going to invite everyone listening to pause just
• 1:06:46
  for a second. Hit the follow button on your
• 1:06:48
  favorite podcast app. Had a great conversation here
• 1:06:51
  today with Dan Shapiro from Glowforge.
• 1:06:53
  I want you to continue to get more wonderful interviews like
• 1:06:55
  this in your feed. Dan, I also want to let people
• 1:06:58
  know either the best way to get in touch with you directly or to
• 1:07:02
  follow your story or continue following that of Glowforges.
• 1:07:06
  What would that be? Yeah, if if you want to learn
• 1:07:09
  more about Glowforge, you can just go to glowforge.com.
• 1:07:12
  There's a little form at the bottom and I what you're
• 1:07:14
  interested in and, and what you're curious about with your
• 1:07:18
  Glowforge, you can fill that out.
• 1:07:19
  And you can find me on the site formally known as Twitter under
• 1:07:24
  Dan Shapiro, or on LinkedIn is Dan Shapiro.
• 1:07:27
  Love it. And we'll find links for all
• 1:07:29
  those and put them in the show notes for folks.
• 1:07:31
  But last question for you, Dan, you and I reconnect in a year
• 1:07:35
  and you are super excited you are celebrating something.
• 1:07:38
  What is that thing that you're celebrating a year from now?
• 1:07:42
  I mean, the thing I'm going to be most excited about is that
• 1:07:45
  the folks who own a Glowforge, So side note, Glowforge use a
• 1:07:49
  cloud service. We improve it constantly.
• 1:07:52
  There's a free service that's free for life.
• 1:07:54
  It's all you need to get started and we're always adding new
• 1:07:56
  features to it. There's a paid service for
• 1:07:58
  $20.00 a month where you can get access to millions of projects
• 1:08:02
  and fonts and designs and these incredible AIR tools that help
• 1:08:06
  you realize and bring your ideas into life.
• 1:08:09
  We're launching new ones and enhancing the ones we have all
• 1:08:11
  the time. The thing in a year that would
• 1:08:13
  be most excited about is that our customers say this year I
• 1:08:17
  can make something that I did not think was possible last
• 1:08:20
  year. The tools you're giving me are
• 1:08:22
  enabling me to create change in the world around me.
• 1:08:26
  Great things that I love and that I'm proud of, that I
• 1:08:29
  thought were beyond me, that I didn't think I could do.
• 1:08:33
  That's what gets me excited, giving people those creative
• 1:08:36
  superpowers. Dan Shapiro from Glow Forge, I
• 1:08:39
  want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time
• 1:08:42
  and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.
• 1:08:44
  Thank you so much for having me, Anthony.
• 1:08:46
  It's been a pleasure. Folks, that's a wrap on another
• 1:08:49
  episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
• 1:08:51
  Thanks for learning with us today.