Building Glowforge: Dan Shapiro’s Journey from Personal Crisis to Reinventing an Industry | Venture Capital Series

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Dan Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of Glowforge. They create powerful 3D laser cutters slash engravers that help people transform simple materials into amazing products.

They focus on making the technology accessible to educators, entrepreneurs, and anyone who loves to create. Dan has a history of turning big ideas into successful ventures, including developing Robot Turtles, the best-selling board game in Kickstarter history, and leading projects at tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Under Dan’s leadership, GlobeForge raised a record-breaking crowdfunding amount of nearly $28 million.

He also holds more than 60 patents and wrote Hot Seat, the startup CEO guidebook, sharing his hard earned insights with aspiring leaders. Dan’s passion for innovation shines through in his mission to make design and fabrication available to everyone, inspiring a new wave of creators. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits

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contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, founder and CEO of Glowforge, Dan Shapiro. Thanks for making time to share your story today.

Dan Shapiro (02:03)
Thank you so much for having me, Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti (02:05)
So Dan, you

founded multiple startups, including Photo Bucket and Spark By, which was acquired by Google. I want to hear a little bit more about that, but curious what first drew you to entrepreneurship initially? Were you just kind of wired from this from birth?

Dan Shapiro (02:25)
You know, my parents are both professors. So the family business is academia. And I was a little bit of the outlier because it was around about high school. I started thinking about, you know, could I do this to make some money? Could I do that to make some money? But things really kind of got started when I was in college and I wound up ⁓ meeting a friend who had built a laser display. So think about like Pink Floyd, the wall, the planetarium type thing, like a little one that you could put on your dorm room wall.

And said, that’s pretty neat. I bet we could make those and sell them on this newfangled internet thing because this is 1993. so 1993. So I use net. You post in newsgroups and you say made this thing and and so we would ship them around the country and make them. And then somebody said, hey, you know, could we pay you fifty dollars to do one of those laser shows at our party, which turned into

Anthony Codispoti (03:02)
93? How do you even sell on the internet in 93?

Dan Shapiro (03:22)
Since you’re here, could you play some music? So we had a DJ business and that DJ business ran through most of my college years and it was pretty great because it helped pay for college. It kept me out of trouble during nights and weekends because I was working. So it was a great part of the college experience to build that little company. you know, after school, I went to Microsoft. I went to a big company, spent five years there. I was always fascinated by this startup thing and by this idea of entrepreneurship.

Anthony Codispoti (03:52)
And so tell us a little bit about the entity that Google acquired. What was it? How did you get it started? Why did they show interest?

Dan Shapiro (04:02)
Yeah, so I, the first company started was, ⁓ was originally named on tele. Then we merged with photo bucket, became photo bucket. The company that’s called photo bucket today is still that company. And after four years, when that merger happened, I stepped down as CEO and I started playing around with different ideas about what to do next. And the one I wound up working on was just something that scratched an itch. I’m one of those people who does way too much research before I buy things like way too much.

And at the time I was buying a Windows laptop and I was unsatisfied with the amount of research that I could do. And I wound up hiring people in emerging markets to fill out giant spreadsheets full of data about these laptops so could find the best value on the market. And you know, they’re like there wasn’t any structure.

Anthony Codispoti (04:45)
gosh probably spending more

on the labor than what you were actually going to save on the laptop okay okay

Dan Shapiro (04:53)
I actually didn’t. kept track of this because I was curious. I wound up spending

only $75 and saved about $200 versus like a sort of an experiment. was like, if I was going to decide now which one would it be? I wrote it down and then I went through this whole process and came up with this massive spreadsheet and did like a bunch of sorts and filters. And I found one that was better. That was $200 cheaper. So I’m like, all right. And I had a bunch of ideas for startups. I tell this whole story in detail in my book because

Like nobody talks about how companies get acquired, but I’ll give you the short version. Was flying down to the Bay area to go visit with some VCs who I’d met at my previous company. Talked to them about the different ideas I was thinking about. And on the way back wound up chatting with a guy in the seat next to me who said, that’s really cool. That the thing you’re working on or like that third thing that you told me about is really cool. The spreadsheet. If you decide to do that, give me a call and gave me his card. I didn’t.

But I decided to work like I lost the card and didn’t think about it again and ⁓ launched the company and on the.

Anthony Codispoti (05:57)
But just

having that conversation was sort of like enough encouragement to be like, should, no, had nothing to do with it, okay.

Dan Shapiro (06:01)
No, had nothing to do with it. Nope. In one ear

out the other totally randomly. And three months, four months later when we launched ⁓ the beta version, I got an email from him and he says, Hey, I’m the guy from the airplane. It looks like you did that. Can we get coffee? Three months later, he worked for Google and three months later, Google acquired the company.

Anthony Codispoti (06:26)
And OK, so tell in more detail what the product did.

Dan Shapiro (06:29)
So it was basically my spreadsheet with an ICY on top of it. was two different pieces. On the back end, it was this huge ⁓ system for having folks in emerging markets be able to research things, hold each other, ⁓ cross check across each other, ensure that you got the right data. You know, like it would be easy to say, how much does this laptop weigh? And the answer might come through as being six pounds, but actually that’s the shipping weight. Because if you go and say,

Anthony Codispoti (06:35)
I see why.

Dan Shapiro (06:57)
like on the website, how much is it? They list the shipping weight instead of the weight of the laptop. Or, you know, if you go to Amazon and try to sort by CPUs at the time, your choices would be like different names of CPUs. And then some of the entries would be like Intel and some of the entries would be like blue. And you’re like, that’s not a CPU. So they’d actually have to go and find like the source of Notch. So that was one thing. Then on the other side was a beautiful UI that made it easy to go find what you were looking for. So you could say,

on a lightweight fast laptop that’s available in silver. And it understood what lightweight and fast meant and what silver was and wasn’t. So it filtered to silver and then it would take lightweight, make it the first priority, fast and make it the second priority and sort everything intelligently based on what you’d said you wanted. So it was kind of those two pieces. And the way things happened, I was really excited about building the consumer product, but both Microsoft and ⁓

Google reached out about wanting the backend and to license the backend data. And I looked and said, you know, the direct, like I can now see the future of this company isn’t a consumer product. It’s a data provider. And I’m not that excited about it. So when Google said, can we just acquire it outright? I was like, this sounds like a great outcome because my investors get a return and like happy ending and I get to try something new working at Google. And if I stay with this, I’m

probably have to pivot in a direction I’m not super excited about in order for to be successful. So it wound up being kind of the right exit, right place, right time, even though it was very fast. Because I just sort of had that product discovery experience of the opportunity here isn’t what I thought and isn’t what I was passionate about. That was why I said yes. You asked why they came, but that was the reason I agreed to it.

Anthony Codispoti (08:47)
And so what did this product ultimately become inside of Google?

Dan Shapiro (08:52)
So I became the CEO of a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Comparison, Inc. And we made a series of products that helped basically the same thing except for cars and mortgages and credit cards. And as it turned out over the course of when I was there, regulations changed in a pretty significant way that made us conclude that that wasn’t going to be the right product to continue with. And so we built it, we launched it as a test in a couple of states, and then we

We folded it back down and it was a fascinating ride. I have to say being being inside Google in the ads team, which is where Google makes all its money because that’s where my team was housed. It was wild.

Anthony Codispoti (09:33)
⁓ Okay, so were you the developer or you’re sort of kind of like, no, you hired a team of developers. Here’s the idea. You don’t write code yourself.

Dan Shapiro (09:41)
No, am so bad at writing code. I

would say like, it is possible for me to write code, but if I am, something’s gone horribly awry. Now that’s changed in the last year or two with the advent of generative AI, which is a whole other story. But at that point, no, I’m the guy who scribbles it on the whiteboard and says, what about this? What about that? And knows just enough to be able to ask the right questions of the developers and say, like, could we do this? The question’s like,

Anthony Codispoti (09:56)
Okay.

Dan Shapiro (10:08)
Would it be easier if we did this? Would it be easier if we did that? Is this sort of thing hard and sort of like to feel out the space of the problem? But my background is product management. So I have an engineering degree, but it was ⁓ I went to Harvey Mudd College, which gives you a general engineering degree. So you’re doing electrical, mechanical, chemical, computer engineering, some of a little of everything with kind of math behind it all and and not computer science specifically.

That said, my dad’s a professor of computer science, so there’s some genetic through line, I think.

Anthony Codispoti (10:41)
Okay, so let’s take sort of a little tangent here and talk about the generative AI piece because I wonder if this ties into sort of this, I don’t know, I’m gonna call it like a strange blip in your resume. I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile and yeah, I’m seeing lots of product stuff, lots of tech related, but then I see this senior research fellow for the last seven months at the Wharton School. How does this kind of fit into the picture? What’s going on?

Dan Shapiro (11:09)
I mean, to be fair, think my whole resume is a series of strange blips because I’ve done one odd unrelated thing after another. this one is something that came up about a year and change ago as the modern generative AI boom started. ⁓ We at Glowforge decided that this was something that was ⁓ a massive threat and opportunity threat if we messed it up opportunity, if we did it right and ⁓ started to move an experiment very quickly across the entire company. So we

⁓ launched some pioneering generative AI features, but we also took Tiger teams internally, started building tools to empower our teams in ways that were, I think really new and exciting and innovative. I wound up reconnecting with an old friend, ⁓ who ran the generative AI lab at Wharton. We’ve gone to science camp together in high school and, and it sort of reconnected through another friend.

and ⁓ talked about what we were working on. He was really excited because the generative AI lab at Wharton is really focused on the business impacts of generative AI, specifically things like how do you empower people in the organization and how do you manage culture change when you have such powerful tools? And so he asked me to join the lab as a research fellow so that we could start working on research about

how some of those technologies worked and how other companies could learn from the approaches we were taking and some of the developments that we came up with to drive AI change within their organization. So we’ve been writing a couple of papers. We’ve got some really exciting ones coming up. And it’s a really interesting side light where I get to take some of the best of what we’ve learned at Glowforge and share it with the world. And I get to see some of the best learnings out of academia and bring them back into the company for us to learn from.

Anthony Codispoti (13:00)
So how is it that you’re using generative AI internally there at Glowforge? Is this coming up with, I don’t know, creative design templates for your customers to use?

Dan Shapiro (13:10)
That’s what we’re doing externally. So we have external generative designs to help customers be more creative, to take their ideas and prototype them, draft them more rapidly. As somebody who just like not being able to write code, I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I have no artistic talent to speak of. When I’m thinking about like, well, I want a box, like I was making a ⁓ gift for a friend, which was going to be a box with poker chips on it. I don’t know the design to put on the poker chips.

I don’t know, like I can’t make the design to go on the box. I can make the box. I’m pretty good at that. But generative AI would actually let me go create these designs that were really from me, really felt like authentic from the heart. I’d create, you know, hundreds of designs, come up with them nowhere near what a professional designer would do. But I didn’t want to bring in a professional designer for something that was for a close personal friend for kind of a joke gift. I could make something that I was proud of. And so that kind of empowerment for our customers has been

incredibly popular. one of the leading features of our optional subscription services, these generative AI art tools. But the real transformation is inside the company, where we are working to put every ⁓ person of the company ⁓ put in their hands the most powerful generative AI in the world. So every single one of our employees, from the executive team to folks working on

the floor in the factory, because we do our own manufacturing in Seattle for our largest products, has access to the most expensive and capable AIs in the world, like Claude, Opus, ⁓ O3 Pro, et cetera. And we do that because internally, we build and host infrastructure so that everybody has access to all those models. We use an open source front end called LibreChat, which gives everybody access to a chat GPT-like experience with all the models, not just

one of them. That’s the first part. And the second part is we have a Tiger team internally of just a couple of developers who are building custom AI tools for each team. So our legal team has a custom built for them AI tool that they use for legal research. Our marketing team has a custom built tool that they use for PR, for example, for researching interesting stories and reporters that they want to reach out to and talk to.

⁓ and on and on throughout the organization, whether it be customer support, finance, we’ve been building quick and simple little tools to help empower them at their jobs in partnership with those folks, which has led to one of the sort of core findings that we’ve seen is that for the first time I’ve seen ever, we’re in a place where two week old software beats two year old software. So we’ll go look at these professional AI products for things like legal research or things like PR outreach.

And then we’ll look at the thing we like knocked together in two weeks. And the thing that we built custom built for our needs using the very latest models and techniques that we knocked together in two weeks will outperform those very expensive products that are being sold that have been refined over the course of months and years, but consequently can’t necessarily keep up with the innovation of the week. And so those internal tools teams combined with the internal tool users.

has really had this amazing multiplicative effect on our team’s ⁓ ability to get great work.

Anthony Codispoti (16:36)
So what’s the benefit of sort of putting your own chat experience over top of multiple models? Why not just give people access to the different models? How does sort of combining these two make a better experience?

Dan Shapiro (16:51)
Yeah, I mean, we looked at it and what we found was if we were going to use, let’s just say, ChatGPT ChatGPT would be $20 per person per month minimum and their enterprise is more and have users are more and everything else. If we did that, we would start saying, well, does this person really need it? Does that person really need it? Can we afford like that’s a big bill. When we go use LibreChat, which uses chat GPT is technology on the back end. We get

things. Well, several things. First, it costs an average of about $2 a month per person instead of $20. So now I can say, yes, everybody in the company can have access to it, which is actually really important to me for reasons I’ll get to in a minute, but it’s low cost so I can give it to everybody. Second, sometimes one of the other AI companies will fall behind and one of them will jump ahead. And so for a while, like, Anthropic Sonnet was the best thing going for probably six months or more.

It was especially good at writing, which is really important for our marketing team who use it to help do drafts and do brainstorming ⁓ and and for some of those other things. Well, we can offer them any and all. And in fact, we give guidance about which models are best. So for that same two dollars, you can use entropic, you can use open AI, you can use Gemini. It serves as a front end to all those. And last.

It really gives everybody, it gives us a shared tool that we can iterate and refine. So we’ll build features that our team needs and we’ll add them to the open source and contribute them back to the open source project. So we’re making it better for us and better for anyone else who uses it too. But I touched on something that to me is actually really important and it’s, I’m not going to come out of here with any like your listeners should, except for maybe this one. I’m going say you should buy a product. I’m not going to say you should read a book.

Anthony Codispoti (18:39)
All right, I’m listening.

Dan Shapiro (18:42)
I’m going say you should really think about this. ⁓ As we see the transformation that AI is landing upon the world, I am very concerned for the impact it’s going to have on folks, particularly folks early in their career, but for anybody who does not get comfortable with and deeply understand what this technology can do. And I think it is imperative on us as leaders to give our teams the opportunity to learn.

Not only did I want to give this to all the people who could benefit most from it, I wanted to give this to the folks who working on the line. I wanted to give this to the junior finance team member or the new hire who’s coming out of ⁓ school to work with.

Anthony Codispoti (19:22)
so that you’re setting them

up for long-term success in their career. They can get comfortable with the platform, the technology, how to use it.

Dan Shapiro (19:29)
Exactly. So often in companies, the goals of the company and the benefits of the individual are at odds. And, when it comes to setting salary and when it comes to deciding benefits, it’s the zero sum game. Here’s a place where I can help our business and I can help our team at the same time, because when our team levels up with their skill and use of these products, they’re making our company better. We’re getting more effective and they are making themselves a better

They’re going to be able to get paid more, find jobs more easily. They’re going to be more effective wherever they go. So I think it’s one of those cases where the business and the team come into tight alignment. And it’s really the job of leadership to take that and make those tools available and help support people in their.

Anthony Codispoti (20:18)
So this has been a really interesting sidebar. And I want to get back to sort of the Glowforge story and even talk about robot turtles. But just for a moment, what could we expect to see from these new research papers that you’re working on, which are about to come out? Can you give us kind of a sneak peek?

Dan Shapiro (20:34)
Yeah, ⁓ there’s some really exciting stuff. Some of what we’re working on that you can… So first, Ethan Mullock is the professor who co-leads the lab along with Leelach Mullock, his wife. They do amazing work together. And if you follow them both on Twitter, your already your AI game is going to level up. Generally talking about how do you onboard with AI and become more capable. His book…

Co-intelligence is a great primer on this. ⁓ How you work with AI, how your team can work with AI for the best results. And then some of the research we’re doing specifically is something that I’ve just been fascinated by and brought to the team, which is the ways that these large language models are oddly like people and how when you interact with them, you can take advantage of that to use them better. And so we’re actually doing some research using the

tools from psychology and sociology to understand these weird technical alien mind slash programs that were in our

Anthony Codispoti (21:43)
I talk about like applying human psychology to the interaction with your AI to get so, you know, I don’t know, maybe applying the golden rule, like, so be kind to the AI so that you’re sort of getting better results and a better overall experience. Am I on the right path here?

Dan Shapiro (22:01)
Precisely,

Yep. The effect of different types of interactions, whether it’s being kind or being mean or being persuasive and seeing how in a really sort of measured academic sense, see what the impact of that is. ⁓ By the way, I mentioned that my dad was a professor of computer science. My mom is a professor of speech and communications. So between the two of them, I kind of found a little happy place in this academia side project, researching technology and computers and how they intersect with personality.

Anthony Codispoti (22:28)
You’re quite the love child of those two, aren’t

you? That’s awesome. we might come back to this discussion in a bit, but I want to get sort of back to some of the rest of your story. Before we get into globe forage, I want to hear about this robot turtles thing, a record breaking crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $28 million in 30 days. Yes. I have those numbers. Correct.

Dan Shapiro (22:31)
Yes.

That is

the no sorry. The the amount that it raised was a more modest. I can’t remember low single digit millions. 28 million was glow forage.

Anthony Codispoti (23:04)
Okay.

Okay. Got it. We sort of crossed our wires there. So still millions of dollars ⁓ for a board game. Is that right? And the most successful board game sort of at least in the time in Kickstarter. Okay. What was the idea behind this? How did you pull this off? Like, why was it so successful?

Dan Shapiro (23:14)
Yeah.

the time. Yeah.

Let’s see, the origin story, hold on one second, I’m gonna figure out. Okay, no, sorry. We raised $631,000, which at the time was one of the largest fundraisers, but not the largest. The record we set is one I’m much more proud of, which was we had more backers than any board gaming Kickstarter history. Because this was like, this was a box of cardboard. There’ve been folks who’d raised like a million bucks for

Anthony Codispoti (23:36)
Okay.

Okay.

Dan Shapiro (23:53)
box of miniatures and know sort of like super geek I mean I love that stuff I don’t mean to talk down to it but these very sort of geeky things right

Anthony Codispoti (23:59)
You had a much lower price point, so you weren’t going to

hit the record with that, but you did hit the record in terms of number of people you got excited enough to pull their money out.

Dan Shapiro (24:08)
And to be clear, I was not trying to hit any record. I was excited about this and I was like, OK, if I can find a thousand people to do this, I think it was five hundred people to do this, then I can afford to run like it makes sense. I’m not going to lose too much money and and it’ll be this great experience. I actually was doing this because I invented this game with my kids and I have twins who aren’t who at the time were for a boy and a girl and now are driving because it’s been a minute.

And I was like, I want them to understand some of the most important ideas of coding, not because I want them to be developers, but because whatever they want to be, like restaurateurs, know, ballerinas, I don’t care. I want them to be able to put technology to work for them. I want them to be empowered by technology, not intimidated by it. So we started thinking how at that age could I share some of that. And I started thinking about how I loved board games, but I hated Candyland. And at four, Candyland was kind of the next stop on the board game train.

And I was like, what if you had a game where the idea of the game was that the kids got to boss around grownups like programmers boss around computers. And that right there was one of the things I wanted to teach them. So many people feel like they have to learn computers. Like computers are this like this abstract thing that, you know, they have that controls them and constrains them. Whereas the

The engineering mindset is that computers are the tools and you control the computer to get it to do what you want. You boss around the computer. So like that was lesson number one that I wanted kids to take away from the game. Programming is bossing around computers. In the game it’s bossing around your parents. What could be more fun?

Anthony Codispoti (25:53)
I say what kid doesn’t want to do that?

Dan Shapiro (25:55)
So so it was ⁓ it was something I invented for the kids I decided I wanted to learn about Kickstarter which was kind of a new weird phenomenon and And I figured if I could find 500 people then I could you know do work I think that was the the the minima are shooting for I could get a production run and it would be my degree in Kickstarter ology and it would be a summer well spent this was I’d taken a summer off from Google to do this and I was not expecting it to catch on like it did

It wasn’t supposed to be a big thing that was going to last for a decade or more.

Anthony Codispoti (26:28)
You didn’t have like this

master plan with a giant Facebook ad campaign planned.

Dan Shapiro (26:34)
I didn’t spend a nickel on ads. There was no advertising. There was no paid marketing. I emailed a bunch of people and that was pretty much it. I emailed a bunch of people and said I did this thing. Yeah. I literally just went to everybody in my inbox who I’d ever emailed and said I’m so sorry. I’m never going to do this again. This is the one and only time and email everybody. But there’s this thing. Please delete this email if you don’t care about it. I just launched it. You know I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Anthony Codispoti (26:40)
How did it get out there?

Bunch of people that you knew? Were they media folks? Were they?

Dan Shapiro (27:03)
That was the big push.

Anthony Codispoti (27:06)
And how many emails do you think you sent out? 100,000, couple thousand. Okay, all right. And from there, it caught fire. Some of those people bought, some of those people told their friends and they bought and…

Dan Shapiro (27:09)
a couple thousand? This is literally everybody I’ve ever emailed my entire life. That was the list. It did.

Well,

and the news picked up on it because in 2013, it was not only weird, but controversial to talk about technology education for preschoolers. Like people like, what do mean you’re teaching preschoolers to code? That’s like, that’s not right. And it became like, you know, it was newsworthy at the time. ⁓ And so I wound up with a couple of different like periodicals picked it up and then it started to pick up steam and it just passed around a lot by word of mouth. People would forward it.

Anthony Codispoti (27:39)
Yeah.

Dan Shapiro (27:49)
turned out there was something there was kind of a magic moment that happened that I almost missed. I was talking to a friend who runs a small board game company and ⁓ I was talking to her about the game and I showed her an early idea for it and she said okay just a couple things first should be robot turtles not robot turtle you need to have four players that’s just the standard for board games I was like okay because I had originally designed as one-on-one with getting grown up she’s like yeah that won’t work

And then she said, and just so you know, no board game company would ever pick this up. And I said, ⁓ how come? And she said, well, the idea that you require a parent to be involved sounds well and good. They’ve all tried that and those games bombed because it turns out that what parents say they want is quality time with their kid. But what they really want is to shove the kids in the corner with the board game and get a couple of hours of quiet. And I said, my gosh.

Could you be the villain of my crowdfunding campaign? Not by name. But I want to say a board game executive told me that this will never be published because parents don’t want to play games with their kids. They secretly don’t want to. So the only way this game comes into existence is if you want it to exist. So please help me bring this into the world and show that there’s a place for this in the which is exactly how it came together.

Anthony Codispoti (28:56)
I’m

So you did switch it from one player to four

player, but you ignored the other advice of make.

Dan Shapiro (29:15)
I did switch it one, but that was great advice. No, no, she

was totally right. Her point wasn’t that this won’t work. What she was just saying is big companies have tried this and failed. So if you just took it was it was more of a FYI. She wasn’t trying to steer me away from it. She’s like, just, you know, the big companies, if you pitch them this would not work. So it’s a good thing you’re doing Kickstarter. And I was like, can I use that? Can I use that fact? ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (29:35)
Okay. I like it. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Dan Shapiro (29:40)
And so she’s a dear friend still to this day and thought that was amazing and was so excited that she got to be like, you know, a part of that success. And then ultimately ⁓ a real board game company licensed it and still manufactures and distributes it to this day. It’s ThinkFun, which is a subsidiary of Raffensperger. Big board game company.

Anthony Codispoti (29:58)
Okay. Yeah. Huge,

huge toy company. I think we’ve got a lot of their puzzles in our house. so big name. Yeah. Okay. So the company, the brand still exists. You can still buy the robot turtles game today and

Dan Shapiro (30:03)
yeah, legendary for their puzzles.

Yeah, I mean,

in the heyday, it was in Target nationally. It was in the Museum of Modern Art. It was everywhere. And now they’ve sort of focused back to specialty game stores. like, you know, the export somebody just told me they bought a copy of the Exploratorium in San Francisco and museum stores, things like that.

Anthony Codispoti (30:28)
that’s fun stuff. Okay, so now let’s get to sort of the meat here. Glowforge. How did the idea for this come about?

Dan Shapiro (30:36)
So I was working on robot turtles, great segue. And a friend said, my son loves the turtle so much, you should make a 3D version where he can grab the turtle and shove it in his pocket because he’s shredded the cardboard square because he wants to carry it with him in his sweaty little hands. And I said, OK. He worked at a

Boeing subsidiary that did specialty manufacturing. was like, all right, great. How do I do this? Let’s talk about it. He started took me through a virtual tour of the shop floor and all the different machinery that could make these things and, and talked about 3d printing and CNC machining and plasma cutting water jets. And he’s like, and then there’s the laser cutter. I was like, tell me about the laser cutter. And he’s like, well, it’s kind of in the back, but it’s everybody’s favorite tool, not really for production, but for small batch runs for prototyping.

And I was like, OK, well, that’s interesting. So I went to a local maker space and I said I sort of remembered this, but I didn’t. But my plan was going to be to use 3D printers because 2013, man, they were all the rage. Everybody was going to have a 3D printer at home. So I went to a local maker space and I said, I want to 3D print a turtle. And he said, no, you don’t. This is the owner. I’m like, I’m sorry. He’s like, just you’re going to be sad. Don’t don’t 3D print your turtles. I’m like.

Anthony Codispoti (31:57)
because the quality

wasn’t very good?

Dan Shapiro (31:59)
What

do you mean? And he’s like, well, it was gonna happen. He said what you want to do is laser cut it. I’m like, but he’s like, no, no, no, it’s it’s it’s only five cents a minute, but it’s gonna take like half an hour per turtle. The first three are gonna come out as piles of spaghetti. When it’s done, you’re gonna get this thing that looks like, you know, lumpy plastic. And it’s one color and you’re not gonna be happy with it. And you’re gonna be mad at me. So like, please just use the laser cutter. I’m like, but it’s $4 a minute. He’s like, yeah, but it’s only gonna take you a couple minutes and you won’t be mad at me afterwards.

I thought was kind of I’m like, all right, so I, you know, cobbled together a design for a laser cut turtle and handed it to the person who ran the laser and also 3D printed one. He was right. It was ugly and stringy and, you know, know, 3D prints look kind of like bumpy and the laser cut thing was kind of cool. And I was like, it’s one color. I started thinking about this and I was like, okay, so maybe I got a photo print and I laminated it to acrylic and then I laser cut that so I can get color.

And I started playing around and one thing led to another and I wound up with an industrial carbon dioxide cutting laser imported from manufacturing. It just sort of happened in my garage, installed in the garage.

Anthony Codispoti (33:06)
you ended up with one, meaning you are now the proud owner of one.

You just yada

yada yada’d the acquisition of this really cool tool, but go ahead.

Dan Shapiro (33:20)
There’s a great photo of my very patient wife and I with crowbars uncrating this thing in our garage as the kids stood around and laughed. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (33:27)
And where did you buy

it from? this like from China, from some? Yeah. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Yep.

Dan Shapiro (33:30)
Yeah, random factory in China, like direct direct pallet

import from from this this factory. And it was terrible. It took me weeks to get the thing working. It was clunky and I had to like bust out all my old mechanical engineering, everything, and then the software was was poorly translated. And then there was this moment when I pushed the button. And it was magical. Something beautiful came out of it. So I made my run of, you know,

turtles for the game. And, um, and I just was playing. So I invited over at this point in my career, I’d gotten to know a fair number of investors and entrepreneurs. And so I invited people over, started making people custom schwag. I would like to engrave their logo on their laptop or I’d make a business card holder with their logo on something like that. I just invited people over and everybody had kind of the same response. They’d look at that and say, what have you done? What is this beast? Why are you, why am I here? And then I do the thing and they’d be like, okay, well, that was pretty cool.

Like that last part where you push the button and then it made the cool glowing lights and then a product came out a few minutes later. That was pretty cool. The rest of it I don’t know about. I was working with wood and acrylic and leather and all sorts of all sorts of different materials.

Anthony Codispoti (34:37)
And what material were you working with at this point?

So people

were enjoying not only the output, but sort of the experience of getting to watch the sausage being made, so to speak.

Dan Shapiro (34:53)
Yeah, it is hypnotic to this day when I make something, which I do at least once a week. I glow forges right behind me and it is running regularly. I will be like hard pressed not to just sort of stare and watch it go because it is it’s fast and it’s amazing. ⁓ And one of the folks I invited over connected me with the CTO of his last company. ⁓ They’d had a huge successful exit.

And it turned out that he’d been building a laser cutter in his garage. And so we started talking about what exactly a business would look like that would take this magical technology and make it affordable and easy to use and safe across all the different people that we thought could benefit from it. Crafters, schools, small businesses.

Anthony Codispoti (35:45)
Okay, so what was the first step beyond that? How did you guys, I mean, did you go back to that factory in China and say, Hey, can you guys, can we work together to refine this or what?

Dan Shapiro (35:55)
We

talked long and in depth about it, whether we wanted to work with an existing manufacturer and do something, do something from scratch. My co-founder, Mark was and is a man of few words. So we talked about this regularly, but you know, I learned quickly with Mark not to say, are you still there on the phone? Because it was very regular that when we’re talking to just be a long period of silence as he thought, like I would, would mentally count to 30 before I would say, still there, Mark.

Anthony Codispoti (36:22)
He’s a deep thinker.

Dan Shapiro (36:23)
Just to give you a little context and would often not mention things that he didn’t think were important, but would be very surprising. One of those things were after talking about this for about three months, he said something about the prototype and I was like, what do mean the prototype? And he’s like, oh, the prototype in my garage. I was like, can I see the prototype in your garage? Oh yeah, sure, of course. And there it was. And by the way, if you saw that and then you looked at a glow forged with all the plastics removed, it would be like 70 % similar.

Anthony Codispoti (36:53)
Okay.

Dan Shapiro (36:53)
He

had come up with these amazing transformational innovations and how to build this at low cost, high reliability and safe ⁓ in his garage over the course of those three months that sort of redefined the field where desktop lasers, every desktop laser now owes ⁓ huge design debt to those original prototypes. And ⁓ and I was like, yeah, no, that’s pretty amazing. And so we we ⁓

packaged it up and we actually applied to be in Y Combinator and got accepted the sort of legendary startup ⁓ incubator decided to decline and not participate. It’s funny, the person who was running Y Combinator at the time is ⁓ Sam Altman who’s now running OpenAI.

Anthony Codispoti (37:31)
Yeah, that’s a big deal.

That is unusual, okay.

Dan Shapiro (37:49)
who I’ve known for two decades because we both had wireless companies at the same time and used to get together and, you know, exchange stories and advice and so on back when we always sort of kept in touch. And so I talked to Sam about it and ultimately we decided like we, didn’t think we’re at a place where that was going to be right for our business, but you know, still fans of what they do. They, they’re very helpful to the companies that participate. but that was the prototype that we like shipped down there and gave a demo and then ultimately said, no, think we’re just going to go for it. So

designed it, found a manufacturer, then launched our crowdfunding campaign.

Anthony Codispoti (38:22)
So the prototypes were made by your business partner in his garage. He was figuring out the engineering, kind of reducing the costs and all the different components that go into it. And then when you felt like you were ready, you found somebody, you found a factory that could kind of take those designs, those ideas that you guys had really been refining in the background, and they would manufacture them for you.

Dan Shapiro (38:46)
Exactly.

We actually ⁓ worked with Flex Tronics, is a Fortune 500 manufacturer who was introduced by somebody I’d kept in touch with, who I met at my first company while I was at the earliest stages of trying to fundraise. And actually, I to just pause for a minute because there’s a subcurrent to what I’m saying that I think should be said out loud. I think too often is left unsaid, which is by the time I was building Glowforge,

I had every kind of privilege in the world. Like starting out as a white man, I’m way more likely to get investment and funding. That’s been an advantage through my entire career. But at this point, I had this network of people who I’d been in touch with over the years. I had investors, had entrepreneurs, and every part of the Glowforge story was one of all the good fortune I’d had along the way. Like pitching it to entrepreneurs who I knew, talking to VCs.

Anthony Codispoti (39:19)
Mmm.

Dan Shapiro (39:41)
first investment round was calling up a bunch of angels and saying, hey, you want in? And I’m going like, sure. I made money on Spark by great. Let’s let’s do it again. Like it was easy mode. And I say that because for my first company, photo bucket, which was born as on tele, it was so brutally hard. And I got so frustrated with the entrepreneurs who I went to for advice, telling me about their life on easy mode. Like, yeah, I just call up the investors who I know. And I just

Anthony Codispoti (39:59)
Hmm.

Dan Shapiro (40:09)
You know, sure, just talk to your network. I’m like, I don’t have a network. Just, you know, just float the idea. But I’m like, I don’t know how to do that. And I don’t know these people. And it was nine months of me pitching everybody I could find who I could corner, who I could like, you know, cold call on email before I raised the first dollar for my first company. It so brutally difficult. And I swore to myself that when I finally cracked the code and figured out how to do it, I wouldn’t be the jerk who just pretended it was easy. I wouldn’t keep the secret to myself.

Anthony Codispoti (40:40)
Is that why you wrote the book?

Dan Shapiro (40:40)
And so

that’s why I wrote the book because because when I talk to people about that, they’re like, how did you do glow forage? And I’m like, please don’t ask me that because that’s not going to be helpful to you. The thing that’s going to be helpful to you is how did you get the first one done? And it was hard. So I talked about this in like grueling detail, but it was the process of just trying everything. And when it finally clicked and I finally broke through,

Anthony Codispoti (40:43)
Tell us more.

Dan Shapiro (41:09)
It was running into somebody in ⁓ Barcelona at a wireless conference who I’d been low key cyber stalking for the previous five months. Not cyber, I just stalked like trying to get meetings, trying to find, trying to meet in person and they kept just sort of blowing me off. And then I sort of ran, I saw them and then I sort of ran into them at the bar, struck up a conversation and it was an event.

And ⁓ you’re in Seattle. What a coincidence. my gosh, you work in wireless. What a coincidence. We should get we should talk sometime. That was the first check that cleared. And it was really like, you know, how did I break through the wall by banging my head against it for nine months? was that was the

Anthony Codispoti (41:51)
So what’s the

practical advice that somebody is going to find from reading Hot Seat, the startup CEO guidebook? Is it just that this is hard and you’ve to just take a thousand swings or is there some, are there any shortcuts in?

Dan Shapiro (42:07)
So here’s the piece that I’d say was most challenging for me, that I wanted to the greatest gift I got that I wanted to pay forward with a book, which is every time I heard these success stories, they were just so stories. They were like, and then this happened, then that happened, and then the funding happened. Hooray, we’re all really smart. Or I saw this obstacle and I figured out the solution and hooray, everybody’s so smart. Occasionally,

I would see these stories of failure and they would just be stories of abject failure. Like I tried and tried and tried nothing ever worked and it sucks and nothing’s going to happen. And what I didn’t see enough of is how you is how basically success looks like months or years of failure with no steps forward, no glimmers of hope and then suddenly success. Like overnight success 10 years in the making is so common.

in this industry or 10 months in the making or whatever it is. I have a friend who this story unfolded after the book was published, it would have fit right in. He started a company in 2011 or thereabouts and raised an investment round. It was the first investment I ever did. I don’t do many investments, but I love this guy. I think I said he’s too stubborn to lose any money.

And tried to raise another round failed tried to sell the company failed Got profitable grew repeated the process tried to raise money tried to sell the company failed Almost 10 years later called me up and said Dan. I’m so sorry I’m gonna sell the company and you’re only gonna get your money back and I’m like, know, you do apologize to me buddy like Congratulations. I’m so happy for you. Like that’s the way this goes. It’s wonderful that I’m gonna get some I don’t care the money went out when I invested it and anything comes back as a blessing and then he called back and said

The deal fell through and then three months later, COVID hit. And by the way, this was an in-person events company. They made software for in-person events and his revenue went to zero overnight. Everybody canceled. then seven months later, he called me up and said, Dan, I need your address. I said, okay. And he said, I’m going to send you a check. And I’m like, ⁓ that’s great. What happened? And he said, I sold the company.

for a 50x return. Hard pivot to online events, massive overnight growth, overnight success, 10 years in the making.

Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable. That guy bashed his head against the wall until the wall moved.

Anthony Codispoti (44:51)
That’s an incredible story.

Dan Shapiro (44:53)
And so, no, I wish I could tell you, read the book, find the shortcuts. What I can tell you is read the book, see that every single one of the problems you’re facing is of a family that everybody’s faced before. Because you’ll see all these stories of folks working towards it, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure. The approaches they used, because there are some of these common threads, but the threads are things like taking a different approach, taking the creative challenge, being inspired by the approach somebody else took and applying it to your own circumstance.

And knowing that just because it looks like you’re not getting anywhere doesn’t mean that it’s hopeless. And at the same time, entrepreneurship means signing up for a long slog before you get to the other side.

Anthony Codispoti (45:37)
You know, this is probably a fantastic segue into what I call my favorite question of the interview. And I usually save it for a little bit later in the interview because we still haven’t talked about Glowforge in detail in terms of all the cool products now that you guys offer and what they can do and the variety of different price points. And we are going to come back to that. I promise. But you teed that up so perfectly that I

I love to ask a question about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome, personal or professional. Maybe they intertwine how you got through it, what you learn for exactly the reason that you were just talking about Dan. People hear these stories or they see sort of the polished version of kind of the quote unquote finished product. look at, you know, Dan sitting up there on the hill. You know, he’s got a nice house, a nice car, you know, Glowforge great company. It’s booming. Lots of employees, like things just come easy to him.

this has just been a stroll in the park and they don’t know all those times that you bashed your head against a wall, whether it was with Glowforge specifically or something else or a personal event that almost broke you. And so yes, I loved, love, love that story that you just shared about your friend. And now I’m going to invite you to share your own version of that for the benefit of our listeners.

Dan Shapiro (47:00)
Absolutely. And I’m going to start with a disclaimer. And I mentioned this before ⁓ in our country, it is not fair. But being white and being male means it’s on easy mode. ⁓ White male founders are founded disproportionately. I can’t remember what the ratio is, but vastly disproportionately to anyone else. So I already had it about as easy as you can get from the get go. And yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (47:23)
If I could just interrupt for a second because

I want to layer something else on top of that. It’s something that, you know, I feel like I’ve been really fortunate with as well is that I grew up in a household where education was valued and made accessible to me. And ⁓ growing up, I sort of took that for granted because that was the case for a lot of people, you know, that I knew around me, my social circles, I’ve gotten older. I realized that that’s not the case for everybody. And so I just wanted to throw that in there as well.

Dan Shapiro (47:52)
Amen.

Yes, the kid of two professors education was just in the air. And so I see this not as well as me, but as oh my gosh, even for somebody who has all the advantages, it’s still hard. And I had it comparatively easy. But actually, when you talk about when you talk about that, I the other thing I go back to is a straight. I don’t tell that much because it’s it doesn’t have a happy ending. And it’s frankly kind of embarrassing.

When I was working at Microsoft after a couple of years, everybody was starting a company like you couldn’t sneeze and, you know, the three companies startups were getting venture capital because this was the heyday of the Internet boom and the everybody was complaining about how easy it was for people to raise money and how VCs were throwing their money at anything. So I said, why not me? And with a colleague.

put together a business that was a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game. You know, World of Warcraft, I think, had not come out yet. EverQuest was state-of-the-art, so this is like early MMORPG. We know what we’re doing. Like, we’re not game designers. ⁓ Had some software experience from Microsoft. And ⁓ we were young and brash and thought that we knew everything and ⁓ decided we were going to go build. So we built documents and pitch decks and everything else.

and then started trying to pitch the company. And I just was at a total loss. think I found after nine months, ⁓ nine, 12 months of trying, think I found one investor who would take a call and it was like a 30 minute slot cut short to 25 minutes. And then, know, okay, great. Thank you. Never followed up and ghosted me.

Anthony Codispoti (49:42)
So not just one

investor who would give money, one investor who actually would get on a call with you, okay?

Dan Shapiro (49:48)
Yes,

I couldn’t. I like I was so hopeless. I couldn’t find anybody to talk to. I had no idea how to go about it. I was like cold emailing people and calling and asking friends for introductions and like nothing worked. Somewhere along the course of doing this, I talked to a friend who said, have you played EverQuest? Because that’s kind of the state of the art. And I said, and I’ve read a lot about it. It’s like, well,

You have to like actually play it and get the experience that you know, you know what the state of the art is, which is like, here’s the thing about me, a personal weakness, I have a terrible addictive personality when it comes to video games. Like I will be lost in a hole when a new video game comes around. And this was like going up to an addict with a needle. And this sounds like a joke. I wound up abandoning all hope of pursuing that.

Basically neglecting my job and for nearly a year spending about as much time Playing everquest as I did on my job I was a bump on a log deeply depressed this had fallen apart unhappy with the work I was doing and This got so bad that my then girlfriend now wife Staged an actual intervention and said you are destroying your life and you have to fix this no ifs ands or buts

And I had to quit this game called Turkey, which again sounds like a joke, but was one of the more, one of the more challenging things I’ve had, I’ve had to do. And it was sort of the last, like in this sort of giant mound of failure, was the last like, no, even this thing that I sort of pivoted my head. Like I always was playing it thinking like, but I’m, I’m really sort of doing research for this thing that I long since abandoned and done, but it was like this more.

I had to acknowledge that it was all just a hill of failure at the end of this and it was really difficult. I sunk my energy back into my job at Microsoft, spent another two years there. Same friend, ironically, reached out and said, I’m doing this startup, had nothing to do with games, doing this startup ⁓ that’s cell phone named for teenagers. We need a product manager and left to get my first taste of what it was really like working at a startup.

made my first connections in the startup world, met my first investors, folks who ultimately did not invest or were helpful, but helped me understand what I needed to look like and what the shape of the problem was and built up some skills that would pay off in a big way later on. man, like what an awful, like I look back and I’m like, what an awful way to spend a year and a half, two years of my life. And also probably part of what made me who I am today.

Anthony Codispoti (52:38)
So up to that point, maybe since then, Dan, have you noticed that you have addictive tendencies for other things outside of video games, or was this sort of the one place where that showed up?

Dan Shapiro (52:51)
Thank heavens no. I find Blackjack and Most Gambling boring and I don’t come within a mile of any sort of recreational substances because I don’t want to test that one out. And for some reason I’m just really wired to love video games which is funny because I have a bunch of friends now in the video game industry who tell me about their games and I’m like I’m very happy for you and I’m not going to try it. Nope I won’t touch it. Zero.

Anthony Codispoti (53:13)
You can’t go there. So you don’t play video games at all anymore?

Okay.

Dan Shapiro (53:20)
And I have a son who loves them and wants to play them all the time and is honestly like I’ve been torn about it. He’s a little mournful. He’s like, dad, it’d be really fun to play games together. And I’m like, we’re going to play board games together and we’re going to do like Dungeons and Dragons together and we will do all sorts of other things. And you can tell me all about your games and I will live them vicariously through you. But for my own health and safety, I cannot go there.

Anthony Codispoti (53:46)
So when this intervention was staged, and did you have an immediate recognition of, yes, you’re right, I need to do this, or was there still some resistance from you at this point?

Dan Shapiro (54:02)
I was so, I had so much self shame about it that I knew immediately that it was true. And, and because it came from, you know, somebody who I love deeply, I was, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t fight back about it. But I definitely said, okay, I’m gonna have to think about this and went off and thought about it. There was just no reasonable way that I could say that that was wrong. And I kind of had a little talk with myself and I’m like, you know, this is one of the biggest problems in my life right now.

And simultaneously the hardest and easiest to fix. All I have to do is hit the delete button. And, you know, the way these things work, if you spend huge amounts of time invested in this thing and it feels like a big investment and everything else, I was like, you know, I’m two clicks away from making this decision and I can’t really justify to myself why I shouldn’t do that. So I did.

Anthony Codispoti (54:56)
So you did, and then what? Was it an immediate sort of like relief, a release of that shame? Were you able to kind of come out of the death spiral at that point?

Dan Shapiro (55:05)
no, it was.

No, it was, you know, the sort of depression had been filling itself with this artificial bubble, and now I had to grapple with the depression and with the the shame and the feelings about because I didn’t have this thing to occupy my mind in time. So I focused back on work and I threw myself into the work I was doing and and I was puttering around a little with electronics. And so I spent more time on that.

I had been before this started, I spent a little more time with that. I spent more time with friends who I’d been neglecting, and I basically just sort of went on an aggressive fill up the empty void with things that I wasn’t going to feel shame about and got myself back to a place where I felt like the old me.

Anthony Codispoti (55:51)
Were there other things that kind of helped you through this process? Was there therapy or medications, ⁓ meditation, exercise?

Dan Shapiro (55:58)
I am a huge proponent

of therapy, I had not like was not at the time I had not seen the light ⁓ and no have never been one for ⁓ for ⁓ meditation. I’m terrible about exercising. ⁓ And yeah, no, it was all just working through it. I have a therapist now who’s wonderful. And like I like to think that if I had one then I would have made it through there faster and with fewer bumps. ⁓ But ⁓

But no, just kind of had to, given the place where I was, I just had to figure it out for myself. And thank goodness with the loving support of my partner.

Anthony Codispoti (56:38)
And you said earlier that you look back and you recognize that you are where you are now in part because of what you went through. What do mean by that?

Dan Shapiro (56:48)
I mean, ⁓ that was the thing that it taught me some significant humility, which is a, you know, sometimes in the startup world is in rare, rare supply taught me that it was going to be hard. So I went to go do it myself. I felt like there was a reason that I beat my head against the wall for nine months without giving up. ⁓ There’s a thing, you know, in sales, you, ⁓ you build a funnel and you’re like, we’re going to

talk to as many people and move this many people to this stage and this many people to the stage, et cetera. And my experience with trying to raise money as an early stage company is there’s no funnel. There’s no progress that’s measurable. could have, ⁓ you could have ⁓ a dozen meetings with an investor that lead to nothing. And one meeting with an investor that leads to a check. Like by the time I actually sort of broke through, what I found was that there was no meaningful

process that would predict success. ⁓ And it’s an odd sort of thing where many investors ⁓ don’t have an incentive to say no, but they have every incentive to keep the conversation going because if you have some progress, if something bumps, if they see some sign that they like, they have an option. If they say no, then they lose the option. And so it’s led to this terrible ⁓ habit where investors tend to just string along or go quiet or whatever else.

A friend of mine, James Cham, who’s an investor with Bloomberg, one of the good ones, has a note that I think he got from some other investor that he said is on a whiteboard of his favorite quotes that says, you have to tell the entrepreneur that you passed. You can’t just whisper it into your pillow. And every entrepreneur I know who’s raised money from VCs says, yep, every VC needs to hear that because that is a ⁓

major problem you just don’t know you don’t get the feedback or you get only positive feedback but no checks. so understanding just how difficult that was going into it it let me let me handle it right. I actually set a budget both sort of literally metaphorically.

with my then girlfriend, now wife, for how much we could afford to pursue this dream. And so it was like I was going to have a year to go after this. And after a year, I was going to give up. That was really important because there’s a lot of ideas that don’t work. And there’s a lot of people who cannot raise investment. And you don’t know if you’re one of them until you your head against that wall for a while. In fact, you never know if you’re one of them because maybe one more thwack with your forehead would get through the other side. So you have to decide what your risk tolerance is.

The stories that that give me the cold shivers and the ones where people mortgage their home and run up the credit card debt and do everything humanly possible to make the ideas work because you only hear the ones where they worked. You don’t hear the ones about people who launched themselves into bankruptcy and failure and worse. ⁓ Either because they were unlucky, which is a very real possibility, or because the idea of entrepreneur whatever weren’t the right combination and

Anthony Codispoti (59:46)
It drove him into bankruptcy.

Dan Shapiro (1:00:00)
You know, it was never going to work and there’s no way to know the difference between those So you have to as I learned you have to decide what it is that you’re willing to risk and the answer probably shouldn’t be everything the answer probably needs to be something that you can afford to risk and That might mean giving up too soon You know entrepreneurship lore celebrates those who didn’t give up ever for any circumstance and you don’t find me there I’m not the guy who says everyone should start a company. I’m not the guy who says never give up

not the guy who says, you know, trust your trust your dreams, they always lead you in the right direction. And the guy who says, look, I had a lot of privilege that I got to that I got to try this and not everybody does. And if you get to that’s amazing. You have the passion and commitment to want to put yourself up to that sort of that sort of potential difficulty and misery and abuse. That’s awesome. Know your limits because it doesn’t work for everybody. And that’s just one just one course that you can go.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:59)
That’s super helpful. appreciate you opening up and sharing that, Dan. Okay, so I’d be remiss to all the listeners if we didn’t get back to Glowforge and kind of paint the picture of where is the company today?

Dan Shapiro (1:01:11)
It has been so through all my life I’ve noticed that of all the privileges that I’ve had, one of the ones that I didn’t really account for so much, I didn’t realize is that I always was somebody who knew how to make things. I was always tinkering in the garage. I was always taking things apart. I was always putting things together. I learned just enough coding to be dangerous so I could build a rough prototype idea of something.

And almost everything, almost every opportunity that I had came in some way from the empowerment of feeling like I could make things in this world. So building a company that empowers other people to make things very much feels like my calling. Very much like I’m going to take this gift I’ve been given, package it up and give it to as many people as I can. So what we do is we take

the ability to be an amateur woodworker, an amateur leather crafter, an amateur paper cutter, and we put it in a box. When you get a Glowforge, you get a tool that instantly catapults you to the point where you can make beautiful projects that you are proud of in any one of dozens of materials. I made a wallet when I got my laser. It one of the first projects I did. I made it from leather. It was a great wallet.

I compliments on I have like generation three of said wallet in my pocket right now. Would you if you looked at it would you say this was made by a professional leather crafter you know to Dan by this or making himself know you’d say oh wow this is really cool that you made this yourself. It’s like amateur you’re good at it. You’re not great at it but you’re good at it and it’s something that you can be proud of and you get there immediately and then it’s the tool that scales with you.

so that as you grow your skills, as you become more capable, it lets you work more quickly and with more sophistication. So we have master leather crafters who use their Glowforge to do all the basic work so they can focus on the little bits of polish and shine that make it truly sublime. But it means that kids as young as kindergarten can go design things that they’re proud of, that are useful, that are physical objects that interact with the world. I mean,

I’ll give you a stupid example. I went to a friend’s house ⁓ who was a big fan of wine and that’s not something I know a lot about, but I got what I thought was a nice bottle of wine. put some work into it. And he’d sent me earlier a picture of his family crest, which he had just found. And so I grabbed a couple of slate coasters that cost like 99 cents each, threw them in the glow forging, engraved the family crest on them. I was almost a little niffed when he basically ignored the bottle of wine.

and just flipped out about the coasters. The next time we went to their house for dinner, the coasters were on display on the mantle because he was so excited about the coasters. Because creating something that’s truly unique and personal is just different. It’s different if you’re a business. It’s different if you’re a crafter, if you’re a gifting, if you’re making things for your family. It’s different if you’re an educator and empowering your kids with it. It is a kind of superpower.

not enough people in this world possess. And if I can get a little like, you know, crazy wild-eyed founder on you, we are all humans, homo sapiens. We are defined by being tool users. And it is a weird quirk of recent history that we don’t make things for ourselves anymore, right? Like a couple hundred years ago for all of human history, if you wanted something, you made it or you traded it for something that you made. But

know, assembly lines and factories being what they are, technology took that away from us to the point where it’s now quirky and odd to make things yourself. And I think we should have that back. It’s like we were in a world where people didn’t have kitchens and would only buy pre-made meals. No, no, no, we should be able to make things for ourselves. And that’s what I love about Glowforge. It lets people do that.

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:18)
So when people go to globeforge.com and what will they, all your equipment is manufactured here now in the US, is that right? Okay.

Dan Shapiro (1:05:27)
Now we have two main product lines. We have

⁓ our performance series, which are the larger 40 and 45 watt lasers that are amazing for businesses and for schools and anywhere where they’re going to get heavy use, where they’re going to work faster, where you want to work through thicker materials. And we have our craft series, which are smaller and use a diode laser that’s about six watts. And so those are great for home crafting and personal creativity and for getting started in the world of lasers.

And sorry, and the it’s the performance ones that are made in the US. The craft series are made in Mexico, where it’s just a larger scale assembly line and where we can get the sort of scale that we need there.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:08)
And so what will people find in terms of price ranges on these devices when they go to glowforge.com?

Dan Shapiro (1:06:15)
You can, ⁓ anywhere from at the top end $7,000 for a machine that you can build a business around or run all day, you know, students through nonstop, all the way down to $700 for the Glowforge Spark, which is a small personal machine that you can put in your office and run while you’re working.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:34)
That’s pretty cool. Dan, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First, I’m going to invite everyone listening to pause just for a second. Hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app. We’ve had a great conversation here today with Dan Shapiro from Glowforge. I want you to continue to get more wonderful interviews like this in your feed. Dan, I also want to let people know either the best way to get in touch with you directly or to follow your story or continue following that of Glowforge. What would that be?

Dan Shapiro (1:07:03)
Yeah, if you want to learn more about Glowforge, you can just go to Glowforge.com. There’s a little form at the bottom and ask what you’re interested in ⁓ and what you’re curious about with your Glowforge. can fill that out and you can find me on the site formerly known as Twitter under Dan Shapiro or on LinkedIn as Dan Shapiro.

Anthony Codispoti (1:07:23)
Love it. And we’ll find links for all those and put them in the show notes for folks. last question for you, Dan, you and I reconnect in a year and you are super excited. You are celebrating something. What is that thing that you’re celebrating a year from now?

Dan Shapiro (1:07:38)
I mean, the thing I’m going to be most excited about is that the folks who own a Glowforge, so side note, Glowforge use a cloud service. We improve it constantly. There’s a free service that’s free for life. It’s all you need to get started and we’re always adding new features to it. There’s a paid service for $20 a month where you can get access to millions of projects and fonts and designs and these incredible AI art tools that help you realize and bring your ideas into life.

We’re launching new ones and enhancing the ones we have all the time. The thing in a year that I’m going be most excited about is that our customers say, this year I can make something that I did not think was possible last year. The tools you’re giving me are enabling me to create change in the world around me. Things that I love and that I’m proud of that I thought were beyond me that I didn’t think I could do. That’s what gets me excited. Giving people those creative superpowers.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:34)
Dan Shapiro from GlobeForge, I wanna be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dan Shapiro (1:08:40)
Thank you so much for having me, Anthony. It’s been a pleasure.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:43)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.