Glowforge Update?

Well said @Xabbess and @Clone…well said.

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What I would enjoy seeing is an accounting of their finances. At some point they will run out of money and as they stretch delivery their finances must stretch as well.

While I too am interested in their progress, it does seem odd that there isn’t any new news. Which makes the financial disclosures even more important.

Remember if you act early you will get your money back, but if late – nothing.

So, glow forge, lets see those books.

-rick

Is this something that we have the right to see? I would think that financial reports would just be for investors and stock-holders, neither of which describes those of us that pre-ordered the Glowforge.

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I have no interest in anything beyond an occasional, “things are great” type post. Asking to see a private companies finances is like asking to see the bookies working out.

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I’m interested by Dan’s reply because I hadn’t thought about the time taken to respond to all the comments in different media. I’d been figuring that the time eaten by any Official Update was more about having to endlessly parse every. single. word. to make sure that it couldn’t be misinterpreted or gamed or twisted. I’ve seen the discussions about just what the shipping-date statement means, and it’s pretty simple and definitive.

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It bears repeating that this isn’t a standard crowdfunding campaign where all the funds for everything has to come from the sales.
Some basic back-of the napkin calcs:

  • $9mm angel funding - had been stated somewhere long ago that this was expected to pay for their manufacturing setup, as well as staff salaries and operations for up to two years.
  • Dan has stated that one of their mandates is to make a profit, so you have to figure that there is at least some amount of margin on the 10K+ Glowforges we have ordered - even if they are only standing to make $100 a pop, that’s another $1MM to defray any cost overruns, and the ones sold after the initial 30 day pre-order campaign have an extra few hundred of margin built in each too.

With that in mind, and statements that their angel investors are still engaged and happy, I don’t see there being any financial red flags with this delay.

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I agree with this. If there was a big red flag in the financials, the investors would have never agreed to giving away material for free to apologize for the delay.

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Just playing Devils advocate here. And because I’m curious. How do you know their angel investors are happy? I havent heard from one directly since launch and Dan said they were ok with the material coupons during “The Great Delay” :wink: . But I haven’t seen anything otherwise.

This. Assuming for the moment that that’s accurate, that means they don’t even dip into the crowdfunding money until manufacturing starts. Which also explains why they should be happy with the free material: that cost doesn’t happen until the units start shipping. So it reduces the margin, but it gets all the initial buyers into the Proofgrade market ecosystem in a painless way. And that is a not-insignificant revenue stream with (probably) pretty good margins after NRE.

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When the announcement was made about the slip from June 2016 to December 2016 there were several 3rd party blurbs about it and in one of those, I’m pretty sure that one of the investors was quoted as saying that they were OK with the revised plan and had more funds available should GF need it.

Oh, here’s the link:

Hopefully I haven’t paraphrased the article too badly.

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I encourage everyone in the company to post interesting personal projects. Nick’s hard at work, like everyone else here. The only people whose actual job it is to post on the board are @rita, @bailey, and I (and they’re both mostly on other projects because I claimed the most fun job of hanging out with you all), so you shouldn’t expect to see anyone else with any regularity.

I’m the curious sort that way too! But like most private companies, we won’t share that. If that makes you uncomfortable, I understand completely, and would be happy to refund your money.

plenty of that too :wink:

Minor semantic thing - most of the $9M came from venture capitalists, not angel investors, the difference being that angels are individuals who invest their own money and VCs are professionals who invest money on behalf of major institutions.

As @MikeH pointed out, you can see what our lead VC told Geekwire… I wasn’t involved in that conversation so I was pretty tickled by his comments.

I don’t mean to say that nothing bad has come from investor-supported startups, mind you; plenty of investors blow smoke to protect their investments. But ‘maybe our investors will leave us out to dry’ isn’t on my list of worries.

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Reading through the Glowforge staff qualifications made an impression on me, hard to fail with that team - that coupled with Brad’s comments about the team and his ease with the progress to date put my worries to rest; " …he and his team are as strong, clear, transparent, and as capable as they get.”

Surprisingly at ease. If you had told me that I was going to fork over $2000 to someone I never met, and let them sit on it for a year I would have argued with you.

Regarding the position of the “Hot Seat”, reading a biography of Elon Musk, he said “The start-up environment is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.”
I must say, you seem to have held up well, externally anyway.
Like Elon’s, I bet your wife would have some insights on what you have endured.
Thanks for that.

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How about an actual update.
Are the units in manufacturing? Maybe a picture of an assembly line.
Are you adding new software functionality? Give us a Dev Blog.

Overwhelmed by emails of questions? Hire some interns.
Simple transparency stuff that would put a person who bought into a startup’s promises at ease.

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Those are all easy things to say for someone on the outside who doesn’t own the company. I can tell you one thing… As someone developing a new product there is no way that they’re going to show an assembly line or give updates that you’re hoping that are that detailed because quite honestly they need to protect their own company and investment. Best thing to do is become active on the forums and you’ll get a lot of the information that you’re asking not specific things like an assembly line but you’ll get a feel for the company. And while you are at it use the search function and you can find lots of information

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I am absolutely certain that the decision to start production will be announced far and wide as soon as it happens.
I am not holding my breath for any other interim official announcements. That said, I do expect we will see something along the lines of Laser Thursday posts showing off the variable power engrave functionality and to show us pro pass-through usage.

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I have a theory about the manufacturing, and maybe somebody better versed in these things can comment on its likelihood: we know that the manufacturer is an existing US site. It is highly unlikely that it is sitting idle waiting for Glowforge to pull the trigger. To me it seems much more likely that the Glowforge has to compete for time slots with other manufactured items. When their earlier scheduled time window became unviable (is that a word?), they were rescheduled to later in the year (say, October or November). So even if everything is sufficiently developed and tested to go ahead with manufacturing, the manufacturing facility won’t be available until the scheduled time slot. So GF folks are using the time to optimize the software and do additional testing of the hardware.

Of course, I could be all wet here.

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A feel for the company is not proof enough that manufacturing is under way.

6 months till delivery we should be getting updates about printers being
finished.

Have to admit. Been there from day one but figure I’m only good for about another month without significant unambiguous news. The circular crowd generated excitement that keeps everyone else going never affected my interest in the product one way or another.

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An even mediocre assembly line could do hundreds of units a day. They hardly need months.
They could work on various kinds of tweaks right up to production.

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As someone that works in the assembly business. 100s of units a day (packaged, with qc) is a substantial line. And definitely not something that you just throw together. While the mechanics of the assembly are “easy” . It’s the logistics of supporting it that make it more difficult. Don’t forget inventory management, kitting, packaging, quality control, debugging, and shipping all can be bottle necks for your line.

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