Hardware is Hard – Dan Shapiro

Deep Future

Dan Shapiro with his game Robot Turtles.
Photo by Jonathan H. Liu

I met Dan Shapiro years ago when I went out to fly kites with Elan Lee. What a delightful guy! Dan is an inspiring entrepreneur with boundless energy, always upbeat.

He’s had, I think, four companies that succeeded, maybe three that were venture backed.

Dan did something super cool. He got excited about making a board game that would teach kids how to program called Robot Turtles. He made that game using Kickstarter or something, and in the process really figured out how to succeed at crowdfunding. I think at the time it was one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever for game. But then he took that knowledge and he used it when he started Glowforge.

Glowforge is a desktop laser cutter. This is a tool you can use to cut materials. You draw something on your computer, click print and it’ll literally use a laser to go cut or engrave materials.

You’ve seen this kind of thing. Things engraved in wood that are done this way now, and lots of parts can be made this way for all kinds of projects.

Dan wanted to democratize that. I don’t know if my laser cutter was the first one he ever saw, but one way or another, he ended up with one in his garage and they were like these kind of crummy, chinese laser cutters with print drivers from hell that are used to operate them, and they’re sort of dicey, but it’s still inspiring because what you can do with them.

Dan had one in his garage to make Robot Turtles. So the next company he wanted to make, Glowforge, was to try and take that amazing tool and bring it to everyone. And this was very analogous to what Makerbot had done with 3D printers, which I got to help with a little bit.

In those days, Dan asked me what I thought about it and I got to help him, be a little advisor for Glowforge. They made this thing a very big success, in part by crowdfunding the first version and this was really hard to do. They made the first prototype. Made a very inspiring video about it. They did a crowdfunding campaign and got world record pre-orders for this thing and that’s how they funded starting the company and it’s hard to do that. Hard to keep everybody happy.

All these things, especially hardware projects always take longer than you hope or estimate. I think they probably lost some of their backers along the way for those reasons. But they did ship, which was not true of a lot of other crowdfunding campaigns. I’m a Kickstarter junkie, so I back all kinds of stuff and a good fraction of it never shows up and a good fraction of it shows up and by the time it does, I can’t remember what it was in the first place.

I’ve been wanting to share this conversation with Dan with you guys for a long time. He’s a great entrepreneur. I have a hard time getting him to say anything mean about anybody or anything, he’s so positive. You’ll learn about not only Glowforge and what they’ve done, but also, a little bit about how to think about these technologies and bringing them into the world. Enjoy!

Important Links:

• Glowforge
• Robot Turtles
• Dan Shapiro
• Photobucket
• MakerBot

About Dan Shapiro

Dan Shapiro is a high networth individual based in Seattle, Washington. Dan is a Co-Founder and serves as the CEO of Glowforge. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of Robot Turtles, Google, Sparkbuy, and Ontela. He was also the Founder of Photobucket. He seeks to invest in consumer internet, mobile, finance and education-based companies operating in Seattle and Silicon Valley.

Shapiro is currently investing in private equity, including venture capital fund strategies.

Recorded on May 15, 2024

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