Thanks 
I don’t know a lot, it’s just a hunch. Has always seemed like Dan’s hands are tied in much the same way (albeit to a much lesser extent) than @jkopel’s are at the moment with what information he can share.
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There’s undoubtedly many people involved behind the scenes that contributed to the delay, but it’s Dan who is falling on his sword with the public. After he ran the compensation by the investors, of course. Talk about a case of people shooting the messenger.
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To be put in those types of position and be able to handle it the way @dan has is pretty remarkable. He seems like a amazing guy to work for.
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sorry, this is the image that I got in my head when you mentioned dan being the messenger
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oh, aye, if I were a smarter and more qualified man, I would apply
Hi Brian,
I will try to answer some of these from things I’ve read in the forums and from some answers from the Q&A. Any answer I have is completely my own opinion/interpretation of the information.
- The 6 month slip was do to them completely redoing the schedule. The new schedule has additional slack built in for risk mitigation, so the schedule can slip to the left instead of to the right.
What that means to people who aren’t familiar with Microsoft Project (or other project management software), a slip right means you are missing a deadline and it is taking longer. A slip to the left means you are ahead of schedule.
So, they are hoping to get it delivered ahead of time, they just aren’t promising it in case there are other issues that pop up.
2&3) 
I don’t know.
I believe they stated that they had a drop dead date of a week or so prior to the delay announcement. When they hit that date, they had to decide on a new course of action and run it by their investors. So, up until that point, they had enough time to do testing and deliver, barring any other issues arising. It seems like they took the direction of delaying a lot up front and (potentially) delivering early instead of (potentially) having a lot of small incremental delays.
Hope that helps. 
I think the proper answer for 3) is that the delay is approximately three months from the anticipated schedule, since they had hoped to have beta units in beta-tester hands around end of December, and that’s only come into place in recent weeks.
Dan has said that when they re-evaluated the timeline, they estimated citing a “very comfortable” six-month delay as part of the new timeline, and further added that if they hit the mark sooner then they will have it out sooner. So to those expecting “June 2016”, it’s now “December 2016” with a strong indicator that it will be sooner. But not sooner than June. 
@takitus and @dhanvinddvs Yes, In my history I have worked for some real jerks but from the sense of humor and the patience of Job(e) I would like to work for him.
Spoiled by 30 years of self employment, I don’t say that lightly.
@mad_macs, I think you nailed it. Plans may not be, but production slots are chisled in stone.
Just bothers me that Dan had to get beatup for doing the right thing. The option would be to ship a hobbled or unreliable product - which would have crushed the company image. He really had no choice.
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Glowforge Gang - thanks for boosting my optimism with your responses to my post #589. I’ll forgo the cancellation and replacing the wait for my Glowforge with a Carvey or other such device that I can get within weeks. I think that with my limited skill set, the Glowforge far exceeds the learning curve of other devices. I do wish we could get our hands on the software interface As Soon As Possible (obviously lacking the ‘Print’ button) to practice our newly acquired skills.
Brian 
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I’m sure they have their reasons as to why not perhaps related to competition, but it would also add work to enable a “Glowforge-less demo mode” just to let people play around. Personally, I’d rather they spent the time on completing their software development targets.
They are sharing some screenshots throughout the forum, however.
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My impression is the interface is pretty simple. Dan likened it to a print preview we have all seen.
Pinch to scale, drag image around, manual settings when necessary, ability to designate vector or raster.
I suspect we will be authorities on it in short order. It’s the power/speed/focus for different materials/operations that I anticipate being a trial and error education. (meant for@bmcgrain)
Glad you reconsidered, for the same reason you jumped in here in the first place.
iphone of lasers!!
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I hope Dan is the one making most of the decisions. And if it’s, somehow, not Dan, I hope there is only one or maybe two people who are “in charge” of making Glowforge (the company) successful. It seems like Dan is good at what he does and a smart investor should recognize that and get out of Dan’s way. Hiring someone to do a job and then second-guessing their methods can be very counterproductive.
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He is the CEO.
My impression that Dan is the front man because of his ease with communicating with others,(the “chatty one” ) but the three founders each contribute their own strengths. There is a fundamental reason there are three of them, None of them could do this alone as effectively. It took a team. I would bet my Glowforge any one of them wouldn’t make a decision that impacted the company without input from the others.
That being said, The command decision rests with the CEO. That’s why there is one.
(That, and to stand on stage and get tomatoes thrown at him!) 
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Be a little careful with the possibility of only a 3 month delay. So, so many things could still go wrong. We don’t want to inadvertently take the company’s cushion out of the schedule. I’m hoping better for the earliest orders but there are a lot of Glowforges to build before December 31st.
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A lot
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While it may be sooner, I think its very important not to make “hopefully sooner” into an expectation of sooner. Plan for December. Though, if you want to have a workspace arranged early, that would be just fine - kind of like having the crib assembled, the diapers bought, and a carseat installed is acceptable behavior before a baby’s due date.
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My wife and I bought the Glowforge as our Christmas 2015 gift to each other. Looks like we actually bought it for Christmas 2016! So, we’re bummed it won’t be arriving sooner but we still feel that we bought into a cool product for a great price. I predict that when we get our Glowforges we’ll all forget about this delay because we’ll all be way too busy making pew! pew! noises as we cut beautiful things out with our new lasers.
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This! 
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Absolutely. The forum will be transformed by our absence. Nngzzztt!!
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The natural thing to do is slip a month when there’s a one month delay, and then keep doing that, acting surprised each time. But we don’t want to do taht. Hardware’s full of delays; not planning for them means making our lack of foresight your problem. So we’ve reset the schedule to one that we believe we can hit, which means baking in time for surprises.
As you can imagine, as we’ve hit challenges, we’ve worked hard to hold to our original schedule, making changes along the way to accelerate things. Manufacturing in the USA was a way we could spend more money to make things go faster.
As I mentioned before, we announced once we hit the point that we ran out of rabbits - when we were sure we were going to miss the date. We’re going to continue the path of focusing on delivering and not being public with our schedule, for the dual reasons that it’s distracting to us and sheds too much information to those who would like to replicate our work.
We’d love to deliver early, but not as much as we’d love for you to be delighted by your Glowforge. We’ll continue to err on the side of quality over schedule, but with this schedule, we think we can hit both.
Great note and my apologies again for letting you, and everyone else here, down.
Fortunately that was just a quick phone call.
Under normal circumstances this would be hard. We are lucky. In our case, it was “Hey, Brad, I screwed up. Here’s what I’m planning to do about it, and here’s how much it will cost.”
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