Inflection Points in the Startup Journey with Dan Shapiro

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. I am here today with my friend Dan Shapiro. Dan is the founder and CEO of Glowforge, which is one of the coolest companies that I have run across in the last many years. Dan, it's great to have you on The Daily Bolster.

Dan Shapiro: Thank you so much for having me, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So first, tell everyone real quickly is Glowforge? What's your product?

Dan Shapiro: Yeah. We make the flagship Glowforge 3D laser printer that makes it possible to make amazing things like this mouse pad with the city of Seattle on it, or watches, signage, you name it, out of wood, plastic, cardboard, fabric, even chocolate.

Matt Blumberg: Even chocolate. I love that. So I will explain this to people because it took me a minute to get my head around this. It's not 3D printing, which is additive; it's 3D laser, which is subtractive, but it's physical material.

Dan Shapiro: Exactly. You can put a sheet of almost anything in there and it will sculpt the surface. It'll cut it, it'll engrave it, it'll carve it away to produce almost anything you can imagine. And it's one of the most rewarding businesses I've ever been a part of because we're empowering people to create real things, including businesses, in their own world.

Matt Blumberg: Amazing. I will have you back on another time to talk more about that and why it's great to empower makers. But today, you have a question.

Dan Shapiro: Yeah. We started Glowforge, my co- founder and I, about eight years ago now. This is startup number four for me. Longest lived one prior was about four and a half years. And this is wild, uncharted territory. But Matt, you led a company for two decades. Your time at Return Path stretched this amazing arc. I would love to know about the inflection points along the way. And I'm not talking about we got funded, we launched a product. But a 20 year old startup, that's really different from new and shiny. I'd love to hear a little bit about how that evolved over time and how as a startup seasons, it's a different beast than one that's even just a few years old.

Matt Blumberg: It's a totally different beast. And as I always say to people, I had the same business card for 20 years, but I had about 10 jobs along the way. The CEO of Return Path at day one was completely different than the CEO of Return Path at year 20. And it's interesting. I guess what I would start with is I think there's one thing that didn't change, which to me was very important, which was the company's values and culture. I'm sure those things evolved, or the embodiments of those things evolved, a little bit as the company got bigger, as we got global, as time marched on and the norms in the world around us marched on. But I feel pretty strongly that the values and culture of the company did not change very much over the years. And I think that's a pretty important thing. To me, that's so foundational to the DNA of an organization. Usually the culture and values are kind of DNA of the founder as well, so it's kind of hard to change. But that's one thing where I never felt like there was a lot of inflection point. As you said, there were some sharp inflection points of financing and M& A opportunity, et cetera. But as I was thinking about your question, the hardest thing about running a company for 20 years was actually that a lot of times there weren't inflection points, but things needed to change anyway. So when you have a heart attack, you go to the hospital. When you're not feeling well in your tummy, you might not go to the hospital, but you might need something. And if I think about the arc of the 20 years, probably the hardest thing we ran into and the biggest pivot point was a non pivot point, which was that very slowly over the course of time, our product market fit changed. And it didn't change because one day a competitor came in and changed the landscape or one day there was some change to email technology or email protocols that changed the business. It's just that very slowly our product market fit kind of eroded. And I mean, slowly, over the course of five years, six, seven years. So one of the things that was really challenging about the 20 year journey was you have to be a student of plate tectonics, and plate tectonics are really hard because they don't move much. But being able to see when the plate moves an inch or two inches or three inches, that actually there's a volcano that's about to erupt somewhere under the ocean, is important. And I'm not sure it's a skill that's really easy to acquire or learn. So that was one thing that stands out when I think about your question. I think another one was learning how to operate at scale or at different levels of scale. And same thing. There are companies that go from 10 employees to 1, 000 employees overnight. One in 10, 000 companies, they have lightning in a bottle and you don't have a choice. You must scale in a hurry and you got to scramble and figure out how to do that. But for most mortal companies, you're going from 10 employees to 20 to 50 to 100 to 200 and there's-

Dan Shapiro: And then maybe back down to 150.

Matt Blumberg: Back down to 100, and then back up. Done that too. And there isn't necessarily a big inflection point of, oh, now everything must be different tomorrow. But at the same point, you have to recognize when there's been enough of an accumulation of change or there's a pending accumulation of change that causes you to need to reset your operating system. And there was a moment where I had an aha around that at Return Path, and I was somewhere halfway through, ish, seven to 10 years in, where I realized that my job had become much more about leading leaders than leading everybody, and managing managers, and in particular, about training leaders. I had a wonderful, wonderful head of HR. I had several wonderful heads of HR. But my first kind of scaled phenomenal head of HR, this woman Angela, and I realized that at some point our job was about training leaders and we spent months architecting a leadership development program. And to this day, one of the favorite activities that I undertook at Return Path was not only building that program, but then delivering it and delivering it over and over and over again every quarter, new modules, new leaders. And to me, that's one of the most important things a scaled CEO can do is sort of not just train leaders, but sort of stamp them with the mold of the company and the culture and the values of the company.

Dan Shapiro: And as I recall, that's one of Andy Grove's greatest takeaways from his book was you grow up to be a teacher.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. And I loved doing that. That was really a lot of fun. I mean, look, it's fun now running a small company again and being more of an individual contributor again and driving growth at the micro level. But if I really think back over the arc of the 20 years, that's one of the best things that we did was train leaders. And look, that company has produced over a dozen CEOs that were people on our team at different points that are-

Dan Shapiro: What a legacy.

Matt Blumberg: They're running their own companies, which is great to see. So I'm not sure if I exactly answered your question, but when I think about the 20 year journey, those are a couple of things that stand out.

Dan Shapiro: That's incredible, Matt. Thank you.

Matt Blumberg: Dan, thank you for being on The Daily Bolster. I would love to have you back to tell us more about makers and Glowforge.

Dan Shapiro: You bet. Looking forward to it.