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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This, I think, is something that should receive a bit of a highlight. It sounds like an answer to several people’s quesiton. Thanks!
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eh, I was close 
20 people, one person, same difference. In Other news, “Hi, Brad!”
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I would love to be a beta tester. 
Thank you for your clarity and commitment. I’m super excited to have my 'forge and I will be excited when it gets here, even if I have to wait longer.
<3
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Same here! My husband and I bought the Glowforge as our Christmas Present for 2015! Let’s hope we get to open our gifts this December! Maybe for 2016 Christmas present - we will get materials! LOL 
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That’s reassuring. Nobody really likes an open ended answer… it leaves too much for interpretation.
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“and sheds too much information to those who would like to replicate our work.”
I can definitely understand this concern.
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I think it’s better for everybody if Glowforge does price designs high rather than low (and I say this despite being fully aware that doing us a “favour” by charging more is very convenient for Glowforge )
Apple made a mistake with the iOS store by allowing people to release $0.99 apps. The market ended up flooded with near-useless apps that nobody could make a living from or compete with.
If Glowforge restrict their store to high quality designs and sell them for a good price, then we’ll end up with a store that a) isn’t full of rubbish, and b) can actually generate money for talented artists (unlike the talented iOS developers who struggled along on <$0.50 per sale and generally didn’t even make enough to cover costs)
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I think if you purchase materials with a glowforge design, that design should be discounted/free.
I would like them to be separate. Designs have worth. And, If they start wrapping them together, the cost will either be added to the material or eaten up somewhere else (cost of the GF or other designs). I would prefer to be able to get material at the minimum cost and then decide what to do with it.
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Oh I agree they have worth, I never insinuated they didnt, however I think it is beneficial for multiple reasons to have a discounted price:
- It would make GF more money. It incentivizes purchasers of glowforge designs to use GF materials which is a win for GF
- It would make users happy. Weve already invested in their machine, it would be nice to give us a perk if we are also buying their materials AND designs
- It would work really nicely with the project kit concept
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I agree but I also agree with @nick07lee I think it would work if GF could eat the small difference as you don’t want to “punish” a designer if materials are also bought from GF.
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