Dan is taking a lot of bullets right now. Maybe he deserves them, maybe not. But there is one thing that I am very sure of right now. He is numb to the onslaught of criticism. Responding to the anger and frustration is just part of his job now and nothing more. I am not saying he enjoys it, but he has come to accept it and deals with it just like he does a thousand other things in his day. No more important and no less than anything else.
How do I know this? I work in a profession that is plagued by delay at every turn, all the time, without exception. My clients are among the most frustrated people in Northern California. My job is to get new, high end single family residences approved in the small wealthy hillside communities of Silicon Valley. With the overwhelming regulations and the snail’s pace and hostility of the approving bodies, it can take 2-3 years to get a single family house approved for construction. And these people do not have thousands at risk like Glowforge buyers, it is hundreds of thousands in design costs and fees and millions in construction.
I have to deal with the anger and frustration of my clients and deal with a system that will not produce results as fast as I would like and that is full of ways the whole thing can go sideways. Sound familiar Dan? So I listen to my clients, talk them off the ledge, remain positive and then go and do my job. I am numb as well to that side of the business. My clients, just like the Glowforge buyers, have no idea what it takes to get their project approved or their machine built. The process is a black box to them.
And I will tell you something else. All of us in my profession keep it that way. None of us reveal the secrets of how we get done what we get done. Why would we and then have everyone doing it. Dan is building an advanced machine that has little or no competition right now. It would be death for him to reveal the inner workings of the company and give a competitor an edge. I do the same thing.
So the net result? You separate, as Nate Silver says, the signal from the noise. My clients and Glowforge customers are the noise. My main goal is to keep them just happy enough so that they do not go somewhere else while I try to follow the signal and navigate the bottomless pits and brick walls that are the approval process and in Dan’s case, the manufacturing process.
Do not think for a minute that what Glowforge is doing is easy, like my job it isn’t. Dan doesn’t and can’t care at any level more than trying to keep you as a customer, and he shouldn’t. And that is because he knows one thing absolutely for sure, he reads it every single day on the forum. When people do get their machines they are happy. Not just happy, they are excited, productive, creative, and satisfied. And in time they forget the wait, and the anger, and just enjoy their machine. Just like my clients get on with their lives and love their new homes no matter the delay.
Dan stopped fretting about your anger long ago and rightly so. He has a machine to build and a company to maintain. And if all of the screaming heads want a product of this caliber in this market right now, they are going to wait. Dan knows this, I know this. Dan and I share one thing when it comes to what I do and the Glowforge, if you all could do this yourselves you would, but you can’t, so you hired us.
I care about my clients and I am sure Dan cares about his customers, but in the end you are all just noise and we have a job to do.
Now get back to work Dan and get my damn Glowforge to me!
