Embedded - 125: I Like Cheat Codes

Episode Date: November 12, 2015

Dan Shapiro (@danshapiro), CEO of Glowforge (@glowforge), speaks with us about laser cutters and his book, The Hot Seat. If you succumb to the wonder of 3D laser printers, consider using our Glowforge link so you get $100 (and we get $100). Dan's book, the one Elecia gushes about, is The Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook. Some of that information is also found in Dan's blog.  If you are in the Seattle area, Glowforge is hiring! Check out their jobs page. We didn't talk much about Robot Turtles, a game to teach programming principles to preschoolers.(Also on Amazon.) There is another interesting interview with Dan at Tested.com.

Welcome to Embedded FM. I'm Elysia White, here with Christopher White. Our guest is Dan Shapiro, a guy we went to school with, who's making us look like complete slackers with his amazing companies, his book, his 3D laser printer that we just bought from his company. Well, before we get started with him, last week I mentioned giving away a signed copy of the annotated Build It Yourself Science Laboratory. If you are fast, you still have time to enter. The deadline is Friday the 13th. You are to send me an amusing exploit regarding science equipment or science fair entries. The winner will be chosen randomly, so the amusement value is solely for my entertainment. Your entry can be boring if you'd like.

The chance to win is the same. Hi, Dan. Thanks for joining us today. Alicia, Chris, thanks so much for having me. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Well, we started in the same place educationally at Harvey Mudd. And as you guys probably remember, I was kind of nuts about lasers when I was in school. I actually had a DJ business that came about because a friend and I were building laser displays and putting lasers up on walls. And people said, hey, could you bring some music in that laser to a party? But then I went to the dark side.

I started working on software. In fact, I started working at Microsoft and spent the next decade and a half running around the software world and grew to love startups. And so I had a few companies. I sold one to Google, worked at Google for a while. And then I took a leave of absence to write a book about startups and to spend some time with my kids and kind of play around with this game that we'd invented together called Robot Turtles. I put it on Kickstarter to see what would happen, and it wound up becoming the most backed board game in Kickstarter history, which was crazy. So I spent a year manufacturing these things and getting them shipped out. The first time I held one of the final products in my hands, I remembered, I went to school to make things. Not just bits, but things.

There's something really magical about that. In the process of doing Robot Turtles, I rediscovered a technology that's mostly been abandoned, CNC laser cutter engravers. Through a series of comical anecdotes, wound up with an $11,000, 770-pound shipping crate delivered to my garage with a Chinese industrial carbon dioxide cutting laser vented out the wall and spent days figuring out how to use the thing

and sort through the awful software and the even worse hardware. But finally found this core of magic and got to thinking and talked to some friends who were experienced hardware and manufacturing startup experts. And said, what if we could actually make something like this that was wonderful and that was magical. Not just make a cool, beautiful thing, but make a cool, beautiful thing that could help other people make things. And that's how Glowforge was born. We call it the 3D laser printer. But the technology is just the long-term evolution

of this notion of a high-power laser that can cut in a grave that's been around since the 80s, it's just nobody's really updated it with modern sensors and technology and software and manufacturing techniques. So we launched that just about a month ago with a pre-order campaign and have been riding the wave of excitement ever since. You said that laser cutters were not the thing. I mean, that maybe they were going by the wayside. So I'm glad to hear you say that that's what you're making, because a lot of your material says 3D laser printer, which is a little odd. Why that? Why not just call it the term that we all sort of know? Well, you know, when the 3D printer revolution started, it was the additive CNC manufacturing

revolution. But people got a lot more excited when it became the 3D printing revolution and started to understand what it was about. I toured dozens of people through my garage, and I showed them what I was doing and how it was working. And I'd explain that the CNC laser cutter engraver could do this and that, and they'd say, that laser printer is amazing. And I'd say, no, that's not a laser printer. And then later in the conversation, they'd say, your 3D printer is amazing. I'd say, no, that's not a 3D printer. And so early on, we knew that we didn't just want to build something for engineers and

the digitally savvy elite. We wanted to build a tool that creative people could use from all different stripes. And so that meant we needed to communicate to people of all different stripes. Anyone who's familiar with the technology can see from the video at the very top of the page and from the text on there, this is a CNC laser cutter engraver. But we needed a way to describe it like 3D printer that resonated with people. And so we tested out a bunch of different stuff, had brought up a big Amtrak audience and showed people lots of different phrases. And the one that connected with people was they said, this is like a laser printer.

But instead of printing high-resolution grayscale on paper, it prints on dimensional materials, on plywood and on leather. And the results are dimensional products, satchels and lamps. And so that notion of a laser printer but 3D is the one that really stuck with people. And that's why we use the term 3D laser printer as sort of the shorthand to describe what it's capable of. That actually makes a lot of sense. And using the Epilog laser cutter at TechShop, it was not easy. I mean, I can't tell you how many times

I pretty much totally forgot how to use the machine. A month went by and I just whiffed again and trashed all my materials. Well, they made us go through a whole safety thing, which was a couple of hours. Here's how this thing works, and here are the caveats, and here's how this doesn't work, and here's how you have to set up your file just right to get it to work. Oh, and by the way, it probably won't the first time, so cut it on throwaway material. And even then, it was difficult. And I've used the epilogues at Tech Shop San Francisco. I should say for the record,

epilogues are fantastic machines. The ones there, I think they're the 50-watt unit that cost about $40,000 ready to go. And they're workhorses. And you can put those things at the end of an assembly line and crank on them all day long. They'll last, you know, it's six years, you have to refurbish the tube, and then they just keep going some more. But they're miniaturized industrial machines. And using them is like that. They're designed to do the same thing over and over and over again, not to iterate over designs and help you create something from your imagination quickly. And they certainly don't fit on a desk. And so we looked at the technology that's used in the really low-cost machines coming out of China,

and we tried to find the intersection, bringing into it the notion of, hey, what if instead of a ton of switches and calibration and sort of local configuration and code, both in firmware and in hardware, we could pull some of this stuff out, run it from a cloud service, lower the cost of the device, make it more powerful and easier to use, and sort of pull all those together. So one of the things that we use to great effect is image recognition. An easy example of this is on the epilogue, as you probably remember, there's a little red dot that is supposed to go in the top right corner of your work. And if you have a piece of material that has a hole in it or a knot,

it's really challenging to get everything lined up just so. Make sure all your pieces wind up on material and not on the hole. And you do this trick where it sort of traces the outline up on material and not on the whole and you you do this trick where it sort of traces the outline of your material and you watch it make sure does this sound familiar did you guys go through this yes well when we were successful we did this when we weren't successful like after we'd forgotten how to use it yeah you have this thing where i can draw on a material with a pen and it will automatically sort itself out and cut out what I drew, right? Yeah. And that takes everything from four-year-olds who are drawing

things and then hitting print and going to, there's a board for the game Settlers of Catan. We worked with Mayfair Games. We came with this amazing, gorgeous board in six different hardwoods that's engraved and cut with a felt back. So it's really lovely to touch and play with. And that was created entirely by an illustrator. And she actually, her full-time job is she creates coloring books for grownups. And she does it without digital tools. She actually does this with pen and ink. And so she designed the Settlers of Catan board with pen and ink, and then was able to transfer that directly to these beautiful materials. And of course, once that's done, you can print it again and again and again. And so it's incredibly powerful, whether it be a child who's creating something, whether it be

an accomplished artist who's creating a masterpiece or what I use it for, which is I would like to get this piece of wood in half. So I draw a line, I put it in there, I hit the button, take it out again. It's handier than a saw. But that must mean you have at least one camera in there. Yeah, we actually have two. So there's one camera in the lid that covers the entire bed, a 12 by 20 inch field of view from only six inches up with a six inch depth of field or a six inch focal distance, which is totally crazy. And it's actually one of the most expensive parts of the Glowforge is the lens for this camera because it's a very unusual and custom-made multi-element glass lens.

And we use that for things like a low-resolution scan and for things like solving that positioning problem. So instead of putting the red dot where you want your thing to be, you pull up your iPad and you just drag your design onto the material. And you can see a live preview of the material and put your drawing in the middle of it. Or it works from any browser.

Fiducials are for wimps. Exactly. And why should you have to put a specific fiducial mark when we can just look for the corners of your board? If you have a rectangular board or a square board, you put it in there, we find the corners, and then you can flip it over and you can cut and engrave both sides and use the corners to register. Of course, you have to flip it along, you know, a particular axis will tell you to flip it on the longitudinal axis or what have you. So we know which corner is which. And we actually

have a second camera. To get that kind of precision, we can't do it from the lid cam. So there's a second camera camera close in, high resolution. It's more closely related to the camera in your optical mouse than a typical camera sensor because it's very high resolution and it's very close up. And so we can use that to do a high-res scan by going back and forth or to go pick up our sort of implied fiducials like the corners of the board and register exactly where those are. So when you flip it over, we use the lid cam to figure out approximately where they are, we send the head cam over to pick them up, and off we go.

So what's interesting to me is you have a device that's a laser cutter, and when you think of a laser cutter, you think laser, right? That's the important part. But it sounds like to me, like the evolution of a lot of these devices is going, well, the business end of this is not the interesting part. I mean, it's, you know, it's well established, we know how to do that. But it's the application of other technologies and software and computing power that we didn't have before at low cost, surrounding all of that to make it a really much more useful device i think that's exactly right i think we're at an era where the collaboration between the hardware and software engineers is what unlocks the magic um you know when i think about the the products

that i really admire like my nest thermostat is amazing not because of the hardware not because of the software but because of the hardware, not because of the software, but because of the way that they work together. And that's what we really aspire to. So we have full stack from electrical engineering to firmware to cloud to client. And we have to think of everything along the way, but by pulling it all together

into a single integrated experience, that's where we can create this beautiful and simple and easy to use experience, which at the same time is powerful enough that you can go in and you can override the speed and you can override the power settings. And you can even override the focus, which is really cool because then you can have, we haven't cooked bacon yet, but I'm pretty sure it's possible. You can actually defocus the lens and heat instead of vaporizing. And so all the knobs are in there for advanced users, but at the same time, you can just put the material in, hit print, and get a beautiful result. So I can lay out all my heat shrink tubing, set it in there, and just

heat shrink it all? I haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty sure you could. Okay, that's an interesting idea. Although I did have a friend who actually, Micah Scott, turned us on to Glowforge. And she asked me to ask you, do you consider your camera system to be part of your magic, to be part of your secret sauce? Or is it something that we might get access to? Because she had a really neat idea for uses of it. It is absolutely the core of what makes Glowforge magical. But I think what you're really asking is, or a part of that is, how do we think about sharing

and how do we think about members of the community have something to contribute working with them? And that's really something we've struggled with because we've seen other companies in the personal fabrication space make promises they couldn't deliver on. And that's really heartbreaking. And I think it's unfair when you promise the world

that you're going to do something and then a couple of years later you say, just kidding, I'm going to take it back. So from the very start, it's been a struggle for us on the one hand as engineers and creators and makers ourselves to say, we want to invite the world to go create on top of this platform. And on the other hand, to say, we don't want to make promises unless we know we can keep them. So the first step we took in that direction was a really basic step, but it was a really, to us, important one, which was the very first day we launched, there was a huge thread on Hacker News.

And by far, the biggest comment was, if you guys disappear, then you've just sold me a very inefficient paperweight. And that doesn't seem fair. And we talked about that, and we agreed. So something that we'd been thinking about doing for a while, we decided to move up. And we said, we committed that we're going to open source the firmware of the device. And actually the more important thing, make sure that there's a path so that you as the owner can flash that firmware. And that solves a very specific problem, which is if something happens to us, you own your machine and you can go take it to do something else other than connect to our cloud.

That's also true if we don't go out of business, although we don't really recommend it because basically when you start mucking with the firmware, you tend to burn out the motors a lot. And so we can't warranty a machine that has a custom firmware. So it's more of an escape hatch rather than the everyday commute. But the notion that it's yours and you should be able to do with it what you want at a very basic level is important to us. And so now we're trying to think about how

can we engage more broadly. I don't want to make promises about we're going to open source everything for all time because we've seen people go down that road and have to backtrack later. But the open source community has been such a tremendous contributor to what we've done. We want to figure out a way to be a great part of that community and what makes sense for us to give back in a way that makes sense for our business. Well, and it's practical because you're marketing partially to the maker community,

which is made up of a bunch of people with very strong opinions about openness. Indeed. Indeed. And so having sort of that right line between being open but also making commitments that we can follow through on is really important. Well, I do hope that you make Micah's plan possible, which involves— You've got to tell me what it is. Now I'm dying to know. Closed-loop digital manufacturing was what she told me. And when I asked for an example, a laser-cut pattern that interacts with or extrapolates from existing wood grain.

I love that. I can think of so many things that would be so cool. That is magnificent. Yes. And figuring out a way to enable those sorts of things to create, that's why it's important for us to get this right. And she's an artist and an engineer, so she could totally program things

if you give her access to enough of the parts. I hope that that all works out. But you did mention the cloud and this open source part. Why the cloud? Why can't my Glowforge, which still at this point I don't have, that's another question that's coming,

but why can't my Glowforge work unless it's connected to my Wi-Fi? I can't have USB. I can't have Ethernet. This Wi-Fi. I can't have USB. I can't have Ethernet. This seems very limiting. I can't just... USB is so 2014. As somebody who just had to order all new cables because now I have to support USB-C for all my stuff. So this was something we decided early on. We are right now a 14-person company. We are woefully understaffed.

And in order for us to be able to move quickly and deliver on what we wanted to, we have to do a few things really well. And we've made some pretty dramatic promises that we know we can deliver on, but only if we don't get ahead of ourselves. As somebody who's worked on a lot of platforms in a lot of different directions, the most painful tax you can pay is supporting multiple platforms, local code. Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows XP, and then there's other operating systems. Exactly. And the number of people, artists who have told me,

I never wanted a laser because none of them would run on my Mac, and the cost of every laser involved a Windows computer. And that's a pretty dramatic price to pay. So on this point, we can work with Linux, we can work with your tablet, your phone, Mac, Windows, it doesn't matter, by going through the browser interface. And it means we get to develop once against that. And then it means we get to iterate at the speed of software.

So we're making changes that affect the speed of the lazy. In a positive way, we can actually print things more quickly. We can print things more efficiently. We get higher resolution. And we're able to do this by making changes on the cloud side without having to push down a new firmware. And we're using container management software so we can even do things like, hey, you got that pattern and it works great

with the old pathing software. So you can continue to use that pattern with the old pathing software and the new patterns will use the new pathing software. And so we can play with things like that that just are completely impossible in the DLL hell world of the Windows machine or any sort of local code situation.

So big reason number one is it lets us deliver much more, much more quickly and create a device that gets better with every week that goes by after we shift it. I love this hardware and I'm excited that we're going to be able, I believe, to support and improve it for years and years to come, which is much less true with local code,

right? You push it out the door, and maybe there are updates, but you have to test them everywhere, and there's this huge drag of inertia. So that's one big piece of it. The other big piece of it is the typical architecture is this bucket brigade, where you've got Adobe Illustrator, which hands off to, for example, in the case of the machine you're using this 1950s-era language called G-code, which is poorly defined, and every machine speaks its own dialect and was never designed for lasers. So you have to map spindle speed into laser power, and there's no notion of focus and all this other stuff. And then the machine locally tries to interpret the G-code

to figure out the motion plan, which is actually the ones and zeros that go to the motor and the laser and everything else, and do that on the local firmware. And so because it's all very much non-integrated, the parts don't talk to each other and they're developed separately, you lose all sorts of optimizations and opportunities. Whereas we're doing things like,

we not just create a motion plan directly from your design, we create the cooling plan, we create the exhaust plan because there's fans to move air through, there's cooling for the actual tube itself, and we can actually optimize all those things open loop. And it turns out that, you know, besides some local closed loop safeties, it's all very predictable. You know how much power you're putting into the laser, so you know how much cooling the laser needs, so we can run the fans at the right speed, not have it be too loud. It also means that we get to throw a great deal of resources into a problem for a very short amount of time.

So we can do a traveling salesman problem and figure out the packing of your parts on the surface. We won't be releasing with this, but it's something that we very much want to add and figure out, you know, what's the optimal, how do we pack them? And then what's the optimal path for the laser to travel between the different points? And we can do all that using a great deal of horsepower very quickly and then take that offline while you're actually running it. So we build the cost of operating the cloud on your behalf into the purchase price. So you're not paying for the cloud as a separate thing. It's free to you forever once you buy a Glowforge.

But it means we can deliver some really spectacular computing resources to you for that two seconds between when you hit print and when it starts, instead of having to figure out how to do that either on a local machine or on the firmware of the device. That makes sense. We do apologize, Alicia, because I know you love the firmware of the device. That makes sense. We do apologize, Alicia, because I know you love the firmware of the device.

Well, I actually do. But then you said buy a Glowforge, and some sort of hummingbird just went on to the next thing, which is buying a Glowforge. So you have a discount, and people were sending out links, and Micah and Lane and like all my Twitter friends were buying them. And I thought Christopher was not into it because we just got a house. And I think he thought I was not into it because we really should pay for a furnace. Um, but, uh,

in the end we, we, we did push by, but we did it like hours after your 50% went to 40%. Can you backdate us? Just us. Oh my God. On air, you're asking me? I can't believe you just asked that. We can talk about that afterwards. But we actually don't have any way to offer a price other than the price we offer on the site.

And it's been hard because, as you can imagine, we've got everything from schools to nonprofits. And we've been thinking really hard about how we can be a great partner to folks of all stripes who want to do this. I mean, you asked about the pricing, and I can kind of give you in a nutshell. The very first, very earliest was people who are taking a chance on this, you know, not just before they've read reviews, but before they've even read other people's feedback and sort of the very first out there. And, you know, the price that we did those very first pre-orders at was one that, you know, barely makes sense as a wholesale and is not normally something one could do for individual buyers, but made sense as a part of that first campaign. What we plan is that when we get into full retail distribution, so we've got lots of Glowforge units in inventory and we can ship them to people who want to resell them, those resellers, we're going to sell wholesale at a price very similar to what they're priced at now, and those retailers are going to mark them up.

And so the MSRP, the recommended number, is going to wind up being 40%. This will be a 40% discount from that. So that will be some—I can't math in my head. That will be significantly more than it is now. So before it was 50% discount from MSRP. Now it's 40% discount from MSRP. And I expect that that price is going to continue to trend up as we get closer to retail. That's, you know, I really don't know for sure because it'll be up to retailers to set their prices wherever they see fit.

And antitrust law has something to say about us doing anything other than recommending a retail price, my friendly neighborhood lawyer tells me. So our goal was really just to try and make it as achievable and available as possible right now for people who could place an order while it was still at the earliest stages. And then we're going to be trickling them out. I know this is getting to the question you alluded to earlier, but we're going to have the first units coming out in December, and it's going to be a relatively small number of units. We have a site. If you go to community.glowforge.com, anybody can read it. Only you guys and other Glowforge owners can post to it. But somebody there had the best line. He said, Dan, please don't give me the first pancake. And as somebody

who loves to make pancakes, I knew exactly what he meant. The first pancakes are coming out in December. And so we're going to put those in high-volume locations. People are going to beat the heck out of them. And that'll help us understand whether we've got something that's ready to go into production or whether there are design changes that we need. And so we have a plan that hopefully we get to start

full manufacturing in the first few months of next year. But we've got room to make a few mistakes and still be able to get into full manufacturing to hit our goal, which is to deliver all the units for our pre-order campaign for the first 30 days in the first half of next year.

And then once we're at full production, we'll very quickly be able to catch up with the orders that came in after that 30-day campaign. So those will probably be August of next year when everybody gets their hardware. So the share link has been really powerful to give people discounts and to, well, convince our friends that they should buy them too. Why, where, how, when did you decide that was the best way to market this? You know, as we were setting out to go do this,

as you well know, I'm an engineer by training and sometimes have to pretend to do marketing and have very little experience there. So I was looking at the giant list of things people do to help get word out about a project. And, you know, cause the worst thing that happens to a project is, is people just not noticing. Um, and, and I was looking at, you know, there's ads and there's promotion and there's this and that. And then I saw this thing, um, Harry's who makes shaving equipment. Yeah. They did this referral program.

And this light bulb went off in my head. And I said, if I could send $100 to an ad network or to a customer, which of those would I rather do? And that was a really easy answer. And so I said, let's see if we can go help the people. It's not open to anybody. You can't just go sign up to be an affiliate and tell people to buy Glowforge because we didn't want that. But we thought it was really exciting for people who plan to get one themselves to be able to say, hey, I'm going to have this. I'm going to be creating designs.

I want you to have one too. I want you to make designs with me. I want to exchange and share and be a part of this community. And so we're not the first people and we won't be the last to say, you know, here's a referral link. Thank you for your order. But I think there's something really special about the people who want to be a part of this. Because a Glowforge isn't just for making things for yourself. This is actually what really surprised me.

I spent a lot of time in Tech Shop San Francisco and in the makerspace in Seattle where we're based. And I spent a lot of time just talking to people about what they did with it and talking to people on the 3D printer. And the thing that surprised me over and over again was on the 3D printer, people were usually either interested in the process, like what can I do with a 3D printer, isn't this cool? Or in a prototype, I'm going to make something that I'm going to use somewhere else. And this is the prototype for it. But on the laser, people are making things that people wanted. They're making gifts and they were making things to sell and they're making objects that they were planning to use every day. And that is so fundamental, I think, to the most exciting part of creation and engineering

and making and design, that notion of sharing with somebody else, that it was really exciting to us to sort of bake that into everything that we do. And so I may be overselling a referral program. No, it did make a big difference. I mean, because we saw it from Micah first, and we read the link, and we talked about it. And Micah just has great tools, and she's got an amazing lab.

And then I saw Lane bought one up at Osh Park, and I thought, well, hmm. It really influenced our decision, because we trust these people. But you said you've been an engineer by training, but you also said iterate at the speed of software, which is a very CEO-y thing to say. So come clean now. Yeah, that's fair. You're CEO now. You have been more than once, right? Sounds like you're accusing him of recidivism.

I'm done. I didn't mean to do it. Yeah, I've often said it's not that I have to be CEO. It's that I haven't found anything else that I'm very good at. I'm an okay engineer, but I was never really terrific at it as my grades would attest but the thing that to me is really exciting is pulling together all the pieces of an organization

and trying to make them work together trying to understand what the finances of a company look like and I have no background in finance trying to understand what makes people excited about a product understand what the product is and then understand how the product works. And I'm down in the weeds of it. I get to play around. And when we're deciding where the laser tube is, and is it vertical? Is it horizontal? Does it move? Is it stationary? And what are all the trade-offs? And what is the beam path? And how does that affect the optics? And I get to spend

many, many hours at a whiteboard with my CTO, sketching that out and doing the research to figure that in our early days. And I love doing that. But I also love sitting around and talking to people and sharing my excitement about it and building a team. And really, as a CEO, building the team and finding the right people to carry things forward is what it's about. As you can probably tell, I really enjoy talking about my company. I mean, I can see why. This one's easy to talk about. It's just all kinds of cool.

And how can you not show up to meetings like wearing the leather jacket that has your, I don't know, turtle embroidered, well, not embroidered, but laser engraved onto it? It would just, yeah, all of my clothes are being modified first, and then probably all of my food. Yes.

You have to get a second one for food. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we have to. We can refer ourselves. There we go. We don't actually know what happens when you put something like acrylic in there, hit it with a laser beam, and then put your chocolate in there. So we have to recommend to use a separate Glowforge if you're going to eat the food that you put in there.

Although there's some cool tricks, like you can laser engrave material and then use that as a mold to do chocolate or other pourable things. So there's some fun ways around that. But if you're going to directly, you know, if you're going to do your creme brulee and caramelize it, defocus it, and then go over and engrave something over the top of it, you want to do that in a machine that's only for that purpose. So are Rice Krispie treats food or material? Depends on whether you eat them. All right. Well, I guess so. So I had some detailed, annoying questions because this is lasers and i've worked on lasers and

i'm curious um i've worked on co2 lasers before particularly for medical applications and for that there was a lot of work we had to do with controlling the energy output and pulses and such i'm just curious uh how much for an industrial device like this is there regulation on how you control it and safety measures and that kind of thing? Is it all just the usual CDRH stuff? I believe that was the acronym. You are spot on. And weirdly, CDRH is a subsidiary of FDA.

So it's the food and drug people who control lasers and laser shows and research lasers and everything else. One thing I was scared of when we first thought about doing this was that we were going to be in the position of Uber and kind of like, hey, let's invent our own laws and hope nobody notices. But it's actually very reassuring that there are a ridiculous number of regulations, nationally and internationally, that deal with how to make lasers safe. Because if you crack open a Blu-ray recorder, you're going to find in there a class 3B or class 4 laser emitter, enough that you could actually burn yourself with the diode in there.

Although you have to try pretty hard to burn yourself. It's really easy to blind yourself because, obviously, the blue color goes right to the back of your eye and gets focused by the lens. So Blu-ray players have inside them a very high-power, very dangerous laser, but obviously nobody worries about it because CDRH has spent a long time figuring out how to contain the laser emitter safely. And so the it-is-a-laser-it-can-hurt-your-eye thing is pretty well covered by regulation as a starting point.

And then we go significantly beyond that because we've got, like a microwave or an old-fashioned television, we've got high voltage inside. So there's a whole set of stuff we have to do for that. There's a bunch of RF that comes out of it, so we have to deal with FCC. And then when all's said and done, we go look at it and we say, what can go wrong and how can we additionally protect against that?

Like if you crumple up a ball of paper and put it in there, hit it with a laser, it's going to catch on fire. And so what happens? How does the enclosure restrict that? How do we make sure that that doesn't spread or endanger the people who are using it? So, you know, at the end, it's going to be a lot safer than a table saw. You know, if you look at the typical things in your kitchen, think about it like a microwave where you have to be careful what you put inside and you wouldn't want to be inside it while it was on. Laser tattoos. Yes. That didn't work the way I thought it would. But if you follow the basic safety instructions and don't override the safety interlocks like a microwave.

It's something that can be used inside a home. Yeah, I just remember having long, angry conversations with technical management about whether or not we could just do open-loop control of the CO2 laser we were aiming at people's faces. Yeah, we actually looked at what was out there in terms of power supplies and couldn't find one at a reasonable price that passed UL safety listings. So we wound up hiring a consulting firm that only does power supplies, high-voltage power supplies, does them from scratch. Ava, our senior electrical engineer, also comes from the world of satellite power supplies. So she's got a good sort of double check for what they're doing.

And the power supply is something we feel great about because we really spared no expense in the designing of it. Because, frankly, that's more worrisome than the laser is making sure that the high-voltage power supply is not going to cause problems. Okay, so we detoured into lasers, but I want to get back to the whole CEO recidivism. Oh, yes. You actually wrote a book about it. Yeah. And wow, wow.

It's called The Hot Seat. And it was written by a guy I'd like to have lunch with. It was amusing and information-packed. It was probably most like the cheat codes for Mario. It isn't like I'm patient enough to play that game, but I like having the cheat codes. It was really good. Thank you. You, Alicia, that might be the best thing anybody's ever said about the book, that it's like the cheat codes to Mario. What response have you gotten?

You know, I mean, it's been great. Oh my gosh, I think it's five stars on Amazon and it's just been really gratifying. But it was the book that I wished I had for my first three companies because there's this strange thing about startups. It's not just CEO. That's the experience I have. And that was the people who I interviewed for the book were the CEOs of dozens of startups. But startups in general, you know, there's a great phrase I heard, don't judge your insides by somebody else's outsides. Yeah, I think that goes for Adam Savage, yeah.

Oh, yes, perfect. And in the startup world, it's really hard not to because all you read about startups is their greatest successes and the story of how they got to a billion dollars and the unicorns and everything else. And if you are a normal human, in fact, even if you are the rarest of the rare, if you are on the path to build a multi-billion dollar company,

you don't know that. And your day-to-day looks a lot like the company that just went bankrupt. And knowing that those companies, those even the most ridiculously successful companies, have co-founders who can't get along, make mistakes in their hiring, have arguments, can't figure out how to...

Have to talk to 52 VCs before they get the first money. Yeah. It was, yeah, it took me nine months of fundraising before I got the first check to clear. And at first, every minute, I thought I was going to be successful because everybody told me, this is great. I love it. I want to be a part of this. But nobody ever wrote a check. And then after four or five months of that, I felt like I was failing continuously. And even when I met the investors who were going to invest, I thought I'd failed because they said the same puffery that everybody else said. And knowing that failure and success look exactly the same until the check clears,

I wish somebody had told me that. I wish I'd known that that was normal and that there wasn't something wrong with me or with our company or with our idea. And so I tried to distill all the things that people told me quietly, privately, one-on-one, and share them. And then to find the people who would actually share those stories that firsthand of what happened. So the first two stories in the book are about co-founder disasters. And it took me the whole of the four years I was writing the book to find two people brave enough to share those stories. And for each one of those, there was a dozen people who said, yeah, let me tell you the story of how my co-founder and I couldn't make it work and we shuttered the company, but you can't tell anybody else. And that was one of my rules was no anonymous stories for the book. So it was hard

because people don't want to talk about what goes wrong, but that's the most important thing to learn from in many cases. And you had a lot of, here are the things that went right, and here are the things that went wrong. And this isn't necessarily advice. It's just, you know, so you can kind of see where you are in the world. It was very helpful. Have you gotten any negative, you gave away our secrets, or how can you talk about this without an MBA sort of criticism? No. secrets or how can you talk about this without an MBA sort of criticism? No, I mean, part of it was every single person who's in there I talked to and I told them what I was going to write and made sure because I didn't want to play gotcha journalism. I'm not a reporter. I'm not trying

to out people's secrets. I'm trying to share important stories. And so I think that was important. And then, you know, I talked to some of the great thinkers in this, MBA professors and the like, and showed them this. And the feedback I got was mostly, you know, Dan, you're not sharing anything that is novel or unheard of. But boy, this is a nice way to share it. Yeah, it was easier to read. I mean, it was a lot easier to read than the MBA sorts of books that I sometimes pick up. And I can't stand those. I sometimes read the business books and I just want to beat my head against the wall because I'm simple.

And I think in terms of stories and experiences and not case studies and numbers. And there's no education like getting to sit down with somebody who's really thoughtful. And so, you know, some of my favorite books about how to do things are much more of like, here's some amazing stuff I learned rather than here's the biography of my life and you should do the same. Or, you know, here's the prescription to success. If there's one thing I hate, it's people who say, here's what I did, you should do the same thing. Because wisdom comes from collecting lots of anecdotes and distilling it into knowledge, not from following that blindly. So really that was what the book was about.

It was, here's a bunch of stories that you might not have heard, here's what I took away from them, and I hope it's helpful. Well, in your own experience, being a CEO and having different exits and different ways of doing things and starting with software

and then doing actual physical things with Robot Turtle and now with Glowforge, it's a different spectrum and it's over a period of time where things have changed. And so you can follow mostly your career along with some other additions and get a number of different stories out of that. There's two types of people I find in their career arc. One person will do the same thing over and over again and get better at it every time. I so envy those people because I have this weird compulsion

to do things that I'm absolutely unqualified for and have no business doing. Whether that's mobile phone software, and then e-commerce, and then a board game, and then laser beams. And none of those things was any but tangentially related to the thing that came after it. But what I lack in expertise I make up for in stupidity and not knowing that I'm not supposed to be doing that. Perseverance and resilience. Perseverance, right. And actually, there's something to that because for every one thing that I've done that I talk about, there's what I think is the best background.

I'm biased, but what I think is the best background for a life of learning, which is a sound grounding in both the humanities and in technology. So as both of you did, two-thirds of my courses, a third was engineering, a third was science and math and so on, and a third was engineering a third was um was science and math and so on and a third was humanities and uh and that's really just helped me to see opportunities all over the place that um that have helped me forward where i think if i didn't have the technical background i wouldn't yeah one of the stories in the book uh involved a co-founder and hypocrisy. Yeah. Yes. Can you relate that?

I found it to be very interesting. I found we were in a very dark spiral in my first company where I would see something that my co-founder had done. It was usually about spending money. And he'd spend a bunch of money on brand spanking new servers that we might not have needed right then. And I'd say, hey, do we really need to get those? Do we really need to spend the money on that? Because money's a little tight. And he would say, well, maybe money's tight because you took three flights last time and you didn't plan them ahead, so you had to pay last minute fees. And we both walk away going, oh, I guess we shouldn't talk about that

because I have no standing. And I reread Neil Stevenson's, which one was it? I think it was Diamond Age. And there's this great line where he has this semi-cult of people who worship the Victorian ethos and they're criticized for being hypocrites. And their response is, yeah, that happens sometimes, but being a hypocrite is a sign of having values.

And while having values and failing is unfortunate, the answer isn't to not have values. And so I came back in and I said, like, what do you think about this? And we talked about it. And we realized that the way that we would make ourselves better is by holding ourselves to our values, not pointing at each other when we failed. And so the new standard became, if we see a place where we can do things better, we would gently and thoughtfully, not gotcha, point it out. And that when we felt defensive because somebody pointed out something where we could have improved, our answer wouldn't be, yeah, well, you did that too. It's, oh, crap, yeah.

And I'm going to try and find opportunities where we can improve that way too. So it's easy to meet your values if you don't have any. It's easy to hit your standards if they're low. And having high standards means that you're going to fail sometimes, and that's okay. But that your experience should be one of supporting each other in reaching for that, rather than one person tells an off-color joke, and so then another person tells an off-color joke, and pretty soon the level of discourse has dropped, rather than the person who told an off-color joke saying, you know what did that but i probably shouldn't have and let's let's not

do that and and holding everybody to an environment that is what everybody wants in the first place matter of not throwing stones if you live in a glass house but occasionally gently chucking a pebble just so you can check to make sure everybody around can hear it. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So I have a question about the book, and it's going to require some lead up. Alicia has read the book and I have not. So my question will eventually be, should I read it?

And the reason is this. I've worked at a bunch of startups, and I've been an early employee at most of them, and never at the management level, sort of high technical level. And most of them have failed, and I've gotten to watch them fail. And I've gotten to sit in frustration in meetings, and sit in frustration as the companies auger in. You were a manager at a couple of those, but not C-level manager. Right, yeah. You know, get a lot of experience in what not to do and the kinds of indecision or poor decisions or just random behavior.

So, I already have kind of an innate level of frustration and bitterness every time I go work somewhere new. That's a good baseline. If I read your book, am I going to have yet more of a store of things to be annoyed about when I go work somewhere else? Or will it calm me down? I hope not. Here's what I hope and what I've heard is that on the one hand, you will be less resentful and angry because you will understand why some of the crazy things happen that happen. On the other hand, you will feel slightly more hopeless because you'll understand why those things happen and that it's not just stupidity, but that there are fundamental forces that oppose rationality. Well, I guarantee you some of it was stupidity. Okay, some of it's stupidity. But I worked at a big company,

and I worked at somebody else's startup before I had my own. And I went from sort of the first level of this is all dumb, and everybody is making stupid decisions everywhere, to, oh, okay. Yeah, actually those decisions were wrong, but a lot of the stuff that I thought was stupid was actually, it was stupid for much more subtle reasons than I first believed. And so trying to understand why, I mean, I'll give you an example. I actually don't think this

is in the book, but why companies will be hiring people right before they have a layoff, which seems utterly asinine. And it is so freaking depressing to finally hire someone and then on their first day say, so I have some news for you. It's just, oh, wow. That is just one of those events that makes you want to quit right away. Yep. And should, because that's terrible. Yeah.

That's never justified, and that's always awful. But when you understand how fundraising works, you can see how a set of dynamics that all sort of make sense each individually can result in that behavior. And it's a failure mode, but it's a failure mode that is understandable in that context, as opposed to just like, what the hell, how could you one day be saying we're trying to grow and the other day say we're trying to shrink? And it comes about because oftentimes you're growing and everything is going very well. And then you hit a point where in order to grow further, you need more resources. And the people who provide those resources say, we don't want you to grow in that way.

We want you to grow in another way. So your options are to run out of resources and hit a wall or to change your approach to things, which means changing your things, which means changing your staffing, which is a euphemism for firing people. And it's awful and it does mean failure. And it doesn't necessarily make you feel like the right things happened. But when you understand how that dynamic happens, at least you can see where the mistakes are. And they're not quite as obvious as printed on the tin in the first place. And so I try to explain where some of those decisions get made so at least the insanity has a

root cause analysis attached to it, even if it doesn't mean it makes sense. Well, and Dan sensibly went from big company to startup to his own startups. Chris and I went from big company to startups, to startups, to startups, to startups. And yeah, it was around the third time when you saw the same stupid mistakes, and not for the rational reasons that Dan actually gave in his book, but for all kinds of, if only they'd read his book,

maybe they wouldn't have done those things, stupidities that burnt us out on startups. It's hard, but when you make a decision to join a company, I talk to folks who are thinking about joining us about this. It's weird because you're being asked to make a decision as an engineer or whatever role you have that the very best people in the world get wrong most of the time. As a potential startup employee, the compensation you get, the experience you're going to have, every aspect of that depends

almost entirely on the trajectory of the company. Do you have ethical, forthright management? Do you have the pieces you need in place to be successful? Is it a product that people are going to love? Is it a market that's going to support you? And then stuff like, can your management team negotiate reasonable terms for everybody? Because even something as simple and small as that can cause the difference between a great experience and a terrible experience for people who work there. And you're being asked to decide all that as a potential employee, when in fact they're venture capitalists whose full-time job it is to make that call, who are still right only one time in three. The basic rule of thumb is that only one in three VC-backed companies is successful.

Only one in 10 is tremendously successful. So how weird is that, that as a potential employee at a startup, you're being called on to make that decision that even professionals can't consistently get right. And not even close to it, or mostly get wrong. And yet that is the way of it, that when you go to join a startup, what you are fundamentally doing is you're making a bet on that company, on the product, on the team, on the leadership, on the investors, on the market, on the economy, on everything that goes along with it. And most startups don't succeed. And so from that,

you can draw that you should be really good at making those decisions, or you could deduce that the thing you need to get from your startup can't depend on the startup's success. There has to be some level of personal fulfillment that you get, even if it's not successful. And I think that's different for everybody. Some people are chasing the winner and go to startups that look like they're going to be a big success. And some people are chasing the experience. And they go to the startups that have a team that will give them the ability to do great work and make a wonderful impact. And even if the company isn't ultimately successful, they can say they've had a great experience.

The really rare opportunities are those that combine them. So I've been lucky to be a part of some of those, and maybe the book can help nudge a couple companies from one to the other, help take some of those rookie mistakes and help the leadership avoid them, or help the people who are going to work there see them and either see that there's a problem happening

so they can get out of the way, or give a little nudge and say, hey, maybe there's another way to go solve this problem our company's facing. This does bring up something that I didn't see covered in your book as much as I've seen covered in a few other stranger places. How much of this is just pure luck? Sitting next to the right guy on the airplane, getting into the right cab,

all this just two weeks earlier, two weeks later, the VC might've had the money for you, but right now they don't and you ran out. How much is just statistical probability working for against you? That's a great question. And I would say to a first approximation, 100%. So it starts out as a crapshoot. And then you get to tilt things a little bit. So I talked about how I sort of think the role of CEO is serendipity creator-in-chief, and that a big part of the role of the CEO is scouting for opportunities and grabbing them when they come across. I think I mentioned this in the book, but at my first startup, I ran into somebody from HP who had a really interesting division, and he was interested in what we were doing and

wanted to talk. And my reaction was internally, well, we have a plan for how we're going to go about building this company, and you're not on it. And my job is to pursue the plan, not chase after random things that pop up along the way, like that would be off strategy. So I didn't follow up. My goal was to have the right strategy and execute on that strategy, which was about the dumbest thing I possibly could have done. Because it turns out that strategies are rarely, if ever, correct. And that the guy sitting next to you on the airplane is actually the person who acquires your company on behalf of Google,

which is actually what happened in aires your company on behalf of Google, which is actually what happened in a story I talk about in the book. And that there's this delicate balance between having a true north and saying, that's a really cool thing over there by the side of the highway. I'm going to stop in and see what that's about. That is many parts luck, but some part experience. And then again, a lot more luck that is ultimately what happens to many successful companies. Even those companies that don't have the, I just met somebody are often quite fortunate in that of, you know, dozens of equally good seeming ideas. Theirs was the one for which the world was ready. And so, you know, at some level, you pick a team that you're

going to love working with. You pick a team that seems like it has what it takes to take advantage of the opportunities in front of it. You take a team that's working on a problem that you love and you're passionate and you care about, and that's the best that you can do when you're deciding where you want to spend your every waking moment. Yeah, and to go back to something, I think you touched... Not every waking moment. Yeah, hopefully not. Like your work days, yes.

To go back to something you touched upon earlier, and to make myself sound less bitter and old, I think after my first startup experience was a big failure, you know, I was cured of that payout kind of uh enthusiasm and the next ones were more about learning stuff and i found that and the teams yeah and the teams but you know i came out of a year 18 months two years at some of those startups having learned a tremendous amount because and i think we talked a bit about this off the air. When you're at a startup, it's a small company, and you're kind of required to do the work of a whole bunch of people. And in order to do the work of a whole bunch of people,

you have to learn a lot of things very quickly. That's fun. And that's the fun part, and that launches you into the next thing. So, yeah, treating it as a lottery is not going to end well for anybody, I think. And, you know, what got me into startups in the first place was my entire time at my first job. I spent five years at Microsoft out of school. And my entire time there, I tried to optimize for things learned per day and, you know, moving to different teams and trying different jobs. And once I felt like that curve was dropping, that's when I went to a startup because I wanted to try something new. And oh my gosh, there's no reward of things learned per day

like a startup. If you're at any sort of reasonable company, and when I say reasonable, I mean that you have management who supports you in your growth and that the company has opportunities in front of it. Because if you're there and you're working on something and you say, hey, that thing looks like it needs doing, there's nobody there to do it but you. And that means you get to do it. So I have one more question about the book, and then I think we're almost out of time. And maybe I shouldn't even ask. I guess my question first is, should I ask about the pronouns? Oh, the pronouns. It was funny. I wrote the book using the female pronouns as the default. So I talked about the CEO.

She did this. And O'Reilly wrote back, the publishers, they're wonderful. And they said, why don't you alternate pronouns between men and women? And I said, well, every business book I've ever read was men, so I'm going to alternate and use a woman. I'm going to alternate per book, okay? Right. From my perspective, look, I can be confusing and alternate,

or I can pick one and stick with it. If I'm going to pick one and stick with it, then I might as well pick the one that recognizes the biggest opportunity for startup CEOs in our future rather than the way things used to be, which is that it was this completely male-dominated industry. I'm really fortunate to have this amazing network of CEOs of all stripes, but a lot of really great women tech CEOs whose stories I think have been less told than others. While there's a big mix, I was really happy to get to include stories from a whole bunch of different perspectives. And since I had to pick one, flip a coin, I thought it was better to go with the female pronoun than the male pronoun for

the CEOs I was talking about. I sort of appreciated it, so thank you. Absolutely. I don't think my gender needs any more reinforcement. We do pretty well on our own. Pretty well. We've taken a disproportionate share of the executive roles, and so anything to do on the other side is important. I'll also say that for this company, Glowforge, we know that the people who make things in their home and in their community are disproportionately women. And if we build the stereotypical male-dominated company, we're going to design ourselves right into a blind alley. So it is not just the right thing, but actually an existential risk if we hire a team of people who look just like me as the CEO. And so it's something that we consider as a business imperative to create an environment that's welcoming to women, to minorities,

and to people of all sorts so that we can build a product with people who look like our customers. And that actually brings me to a thing I wanted to ask about. You are hiring, and not just for diversity, but all sorts of things. Absolutely. We are across software, and that's web, and that's mobile, native apps, that's server infrastructure, that's IT, that's firmware. Alicia, that's... Listeners. Yes. And then mechanical. We have non-technical positions, which your listeners won't care about. But we're at the stage where we're a 50-person company that's 40% understaffed.

We had the ridiculous privilege of being the most back crowdfunding campaign ever, raised $27.9 million in 30 days. And we have some really big promises to deliver on, and now we have the resources to do that in a really fantastic way. And we want to over-deliver on that. So we're hiring great talent wherever we can find it. And people can see some of those openings at glowforge.com slash jobs. Everything from sort of new, fresh out of school, all the way to folks with lots of experience who can teach us a lot.

Well, I have quite enjoyed speaking with you and I would be happy to do it again whenever you're available. But Christopher, do you have any last questions before we sign off? Sure, I see one here that I'm going to steal. Dallas Bethune was in your class, right? Yeah, DreamHost founder, right?

So he started DreamHost. My question is, what is it with you guys? Because our class doesn't seem to have founded much. And so I'm wondering why we're the slackers and you guys are not. That's very kind. I think I graduated at a time when everybody was starting things

and felt like a total loser for going to Microsoft for five years because everybody and their sister was founding a startup. No, our guy who went to Microsoft is still there from our class. Who are you thinking of? Dan Snyder. was founding a startup. No, our guy who went to Microsoft is still there. From our class. Who are you thinking of? Dan Snyder.

Oh, Dan's great. But yeah, there's been something of a generational shift. In the one year that separates us. Well, no, I was going to say, and it's been ongoing where now people come out of school and they're like, let's go do it. And that's seen as normal. And these grizzled venture capitalists are saying, let's go fund them. And that seems like a perfectly rational thing. And so I think that's just been an ever-growing trend.

And there's some fundamental truth to it. I started a company after eight years out of school, and it was already really painful because of the risks that that entailed. There's something to be said for you. You come out of school, and you don't have as much depending on you. You can take a bigger chance. But personally, I'm a big fan of startups that are being created by people who have the experience, who know what they're doing, who've done their jobs before, even if it's not the exact job that they're taking, and can create a more mature company from the very outset. So, you know, it's really neat to see that both very experienced people and very junior people starting things.

But, you know, it's not for everyone. And there's a movement, you know, everyone should be an entrepreneur, anyone can do a startup. I don't think that's right. When I wrote the book, one big goal was for people to know what they were getting into. I actually, O'Reilly called me up

and they were at the blurb on the back and they said, hey Dan, that blurb is kind of dark. I said, yeah, did you read the book? It is kind of dark. There are said, yeah, did you read the book? It is kind of dark. I mean, there are some really high highs, but there's some really deep lows. And I don't want to put it on myself to say what's right for people. I just want to say, you know, understand what you're getting into. And if that roller coaster is exciting, then by all means do. But there's a lot of other ways to get fulfillment

from your job and from your experience. So it's not for everybody. And my goal is to help people understand if it's right for them, and if so, how to make the most of it. I don't want to sell my experience to anybody who isn't excited about it themselves. This is the point where I usually ask,

do you have any final thoughts you'd like to leave us with? But I'm afraid you just said it. Yeah. Any others? That's pretty much it. I guess, you know, wearing my CEO hat, I should say that you can go to glowforge.com and you can find that pre-order.

You can learn all about the hardware. You can see the jobs listing. And it's a secret if you're a secret if you haven't ordered already, but you can go to community.glowforge.com and dive into some really detailed conversations about the hardware and what people are doing with it and the materials that you can use and compatibility and specs. Because that's where anybody who's pre-ordered one

can post their questions. And our customers are amazing and have asked me just about every single thing it is possible to ask. And I'm in there answering questions every day. But love to see your listeners in there. Or Dan Shapiro on Twitter, another great way to connect. And I'm excited to talk to you.

Let's talk again when you guys have your Glowforge. Cool. I look forward to it. My guest has been Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge. Cool. I look forward to it. My guest has been Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge, author of The Hot Seat, The Startup CEO Guide, and creator of the Robot Turtles game, a programming for preschoolers board game that we didn't even get to talk about. So we mentioned earlier, Glowforge has this friend's discount. And Chris and I dithered over getting one, each thinking the other thought we shouldn't, until the 50% discount ran out.

So, any of you thinking about getting one, please use our discount link. It's in the show notes. It means that you get to buy your Glowforge for 40% off the MSRP. And even better for us, we get a kickback. That's why we want you to use our link so we get the kickback. And then everybody will be happy, okay? Thank you for that. And thank you for listening.

Thank you also to Christopher for producing, co-hosting, and letting me buy gadgets that don't involve home improvement. Though maybe we should have gotten the furnace fixed first. If you'd like to say hello, request that Glowforge link or enter the contest for a copy of the annotated Build It Yourself Science Laboratory. Hit the contact link on embedded.fm or email us show at embedded.fm. Final thought, I'm going to cheat and use Dan's book for a final thought. So this is from Dan Shapiro about being a CEO. That's your job, to make something out of nothing, to pull together all the disparate threats,

recruiting with no money, fundraising with no reputation, and delivering joy with no product. You must fabricate the chicken and the egg simultaneously. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.