Last month, folks observed that I’ve been a little less responsive as of late. No excuses, of course, but there were a few reasons, and today I get to share one of them.
When our investors offered to double down on their investment in the company, we didn’t hesitate to say yes. As I’ve said before, it’s important to us that we use investor dollars to operate the company so your dollars are reserved for manufacturing the products you paid for. Today ensures that’s true (with a great, great deal of room to spare).
Thanks as always for your support!
PS: if you find those articles boring, here’s two that are a bit more fun from our recent past.
How exciting! Congrats @Dan and @staff ! “The company has developed its Proofgrade materials with a coating which peels” does this mean its not a paper with adhesive like you see others using?
I learned a lot from Bre and the experience at Makerbot. Anyone who knows us both will tell you we’re very different people.
We’re working on all sorts of innovations to make Proofgrade materials amazing - we probably won’t be announcing what the specific formulations of either the coating or the material itself is. Note that we hired @KevinL as full time head of Proofgrade operations who literally does nothing except figure out how to create the very best possible materials to use with the laser. It’s already head and shoulders above anything else we can find, and it’s going to keep getting better!
Congratulations! This makes me very excited! Having access to a solid catalog of materials really alleviates the stress of a newbie learning and then searching all over the place for materials. So looking forward to seeing the catalog.
In the blog by Feld he says that his company and the other one decided between themselves to toss this money at Glowforge without Dan and company even asking. They figured that this is the final stretch, and some obstacles may come up. According to Feld (and paraphrased enough to maybe change the meaning by me) he would rather have Glowforge comfortably capable of throwing money at any problems, rather than trying to cut corners.
As the saying goes… You can choose at most 2 from the list: Cheap, Fast, Good. Feld and friends decided for Glowforge that the first would never even need to be considered.
Dan,
You are 3-5 months behind your promise date and asking your customers which features they think are important. Which means that 3-5 months after your promise date you do not have all of the features that you advertised as being functional actually functioning. I love ya and I think that your vision/company has the ability to disrupt not only the laser cutter market place but parts of the consumer marketplace. I just see no way that you could have thought 10 months ago that you could be ready by the promise date. Which is very disappointing. I wish you nothing but the best and I hope that I can sometime purchase a glowforge from Amazon, but until then…
As a crowdfunder on a Pro unit, I am absolutely thrilled that the Angel Investors have continued to show confidence with what Dan and the Glowforge team are up to (of which I’m certain we are only aware of a small aspect of). And, as a retired finance guy that was expressing my views (and taking a bit of poo hoo’g from some in the community over it) on just how fast you can burn through $9,000,000 of investor money, again I am thrilled! I see we, the crowdfunding community as that much closer to seeing the Glowforge dream realized and us with units in our shops. Well done Dan!
