North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring. And as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy? We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders podcast. In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand and host of the North Star Leaders podcast. Let's get to it. Today it is my pleasure to have with us Dan Shapiro. Dan is CEO and co-founder of Glowforge, the iconic 3D laser printer. Before founding Glowforge, he was the CEO of Sparkbuy and he created Robot Turtles, a board game that teaches kids programming. Dan is also author of Hot Seat, the startup CEO guidebook. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Shapiro

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's so good to have you here. To start us off, Dan, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Dan Shapiro

So, I've had the unbelievable experience over the course of my career to get to start four companies and that they were all really different. First company, which is Photobucket was photo sharing and then Sparkbuy, which you mentioned, which is comparison shopping and that got acquired by Google. And then I made a board game and I've done a lot of thinking about why it is that I've been so fortunate and accounting for all the different kinds of privilege that I've had in my life. As a white man, I match the stereotype of people who do those sorts of things and that makes everything easier. I see the impact of that on my life and places where I've had success where other people who've been smarter and better educated and better qualified might have struggled. You know, my parents are both educators and so always had an amazing support for education and knew the value that they're both retired professors now. One in computer science, one in communication.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, oh.

Dan Shapiro

Across them, you get me.

Lindsay Pedersen

Interesting. Yeah, I get it.

Dan Shapiro

And then there was this one thing that stuck in my head. And this is even before I started the company, before I even thought about starting the company, which was ever since I was really young, I had the tools to create things. So, he's tinkering the garage. My parents supported that. I went on my way to take shop class, which was a class that like what unquote the smart kids weren't supposed to take. It was the maybe we'll find you a decent job somehow if you take this thing. And so, I had to like do health class in summer school so that I could take shop class during the year. And everybody thought it was kind of odd and I loved it. And I'm like, why doesn't everybody get to learn to make things? And over the years, every success I've had and every opportunity I've had has been enabled by the fact that I could build things wasn't necessarily very good at it. Like I got an engineering degree, but I wasn't particularly talented at it. I can write software, but if something's usually gone horribly awry, I'm like the last person you want doing it. But I could always take an idea and bring it into the world in some form. And that ability to create things has in every way made me the person I am and given me the opportunities that I've had. And so, getting to create the company that lets everyone create things that gives those creative superpowers to all of us. That's why this feels like my life's work. That is the thing I love most about what I'm doing.

Lindsay Pedersen

I know because I have seen it. You've shown me, but describe for our listeners, Glowforge, describe what you mean by you're enabling people to create things.

Dan Shapiro

So, when I was working on Robot Turtles, this board game that teaches programming to preschoolers in 2012, when this was kind of controversial, like now there's a million STEM games. This was odd and unusual and a little bit upsetting to folks at the time. Like, why are you talking about four-year-olds coding? The product is actually a box of cardboard is a traditional board game. And the idea of teaching kids programming principles wasn't like they're going to sit and write programs. It was teaching them the idea of like, you can try things and if they don't work, you can undo them. And that's how you learn. Whereas most kids learn by being told what to do and then doing it and being corrected. There's a different kind of learning that computers enable where you try something, it doesn't work, you try something else, doesn't work, try something else that works, you learn something. And that has applications throughout life. So, things like that, or things like the idea of putting instructions in order and planning ahead, saying first do this, then do this, then do that. And that's different than if you say first do that, then do this, then do this. So, it was just really simple, basic concepts. And in order to do this, I had to create these physical pieces, cardboard squares. Then we did like a 3D version and it had these towers and it had different shaped tiles and everything else. And so, I started thinking, how do I create these things? First, I was making prototypes and I was making a special edition. It was too many for me to make with any of the tools that I had, like a wood shop. I couldn't make all these by hand. I looked at like injection molding, but that's something where you have to have thousands in order to make it cost effective because it's really expensive to set up. So, I started looking at machines that could help you create things. And back then, 2013, 3D printers were all the rage. I had a friend who was a public-school teacher, a guy named Brie Pettis, and he moved to New York and started working on 3D printers and ultimately created a company called MakerBot, which was taking the world by storm. Not a lot of folks know this, Brie started as like a public-school teacher in Seattle and created this like 3D printing wave from his passion around this .And I got so excited. I'm like, I'm going to 3D print pieces. But what I found was that 3D printers just made like plastic junk slowly and it's all one color and it's like ugly and hairy and it wasn't what I wanted at all. And then I discovered this technology. It came out of a small industry. It wasn't very popular, but it was like magic. CNC laser cutting engraving is the technical term. What happens is you put a piece of raw material in your laser. It can be wood, it can be acrylic, it can be leather, it can be paper or cardboard, it can even be a piece of chocolate. And the laser moves back and forth and with tremendous precision, it cuts and engraves images, shapes. And what comes out is something that you can assemble, that you can put together into whatever the final shape is, if you want something 3D, where you can engrave things like you put in stone and metal and you can engrave images and logos and personalize things. And this was amazing. I could push a button and something beautiful came out in minutes instead of 3D printing, which was like hours and hours to make things that are ugly. Software was terrible, but I said, oh man, that could be fixed. The hardware was excruciatingly expensive, tens of thousands of dollars and up, but that seemed like that could be fixed too. So, we founded the company with the idea that we could make this technology, which was previously only available to folks who had access to factories or mid-range fabrication tools, available in homes and offices everywhere and schools at the push of a button. So, your question was, what is a Glowforge? I took you on the long journey. It’s a laser that anywhere starting at $700 up to $7,000 takes about 20 minutes from the time you get home, 30 minutes for the big one, set it down, connect it to Wi-Fi, open up the web app on your phone or tablet or PC or Mac or Windows or Chromebook, whatever. Put in a piece of raw material and then hold the beautiful, finished result in your hand in minutes later. It's about 30 minutes from the big FedEx box arrives until you're holding your first print. And you can make a limitless number of things. If I just look around me, my leather and cork mouse pad was made on that. A box for a deck of cards that was a gimmick deck of cards of full color print. The band of my watch that's made out of leather. A wallet that's made out of microfine hardwood with tiny cuts to make it flexible. The cover of my lamp. The little bracket that holds the light above my monitor in place. Practical, beautiful, silly, fun. They're things you can make quickly and easily by just putting in a piece of material and pushing a button. And since we've launched the company, we have thousands of designs that are ready to print. There’re millions of free designs on the internet that you can download and experiment with. There’re design tools to make it easy. And most recently, we now have AI tools. You can just describe the thing you want and have it created for you. So it really lets you create almost anything, whether it's for yourself, for a gift, for school, about a third of our units go into schools, over 4,000 public and private schools across the country for gifting or one of the most popular things to start a small business, whether it be like Etsy in a corner store or a full-time company.

Lindsay Pedersen

I was just going to say, I wonder if a lot of the Etsy items that I have purchased have been the result of a Glowforge. It sounds like it would be perfect for something like that. As the CEO, do you have a way of learning about, it's almost like your grandchildren. It's like the thing that you made, the thing that it made, like, do you see, I don't know, the surprising creations that come out of the Glowforge device?

Dan Shapiro

If I'm having one of those mornings, I wake up, and I'm like, ugh, why am I getting out of bed again? My solution is I open up Instagram and I search for hashtag Glowforge, where there's about half a million creations.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh my gosh.

Dan Shapiro

That people have posted that they've made and they are everything you can imagine. The simplest, the most complex, pedestrian, beautiful, functional, aspirational, and every one of those is something where I get to look and say, okay, I'm getting up now to bring more of this into the world.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love the meta of this, that you were born to create things and you have created something that allows other people to create things. That is so cool. I just got these ones. That's so neat.

Dan Shapiro

I never had that feeling like, oh, I know what I was put here to do until starting this company. And then it was like, oh, I was given this gift and I get to collect together a whole group of amazing people who were given the same gift, the gift of creation. And then we get to pay it forward and we get to re-gift it and put it in a beautiful box and present it to people all around the world. So, they get to experience that too.

Lindsay Pedersen

That's like magic. I love it. I've heard you talk about how powerful it is to have a polarizing idea for your company. What's useful about being polarizing?

Dan Shapiro

I was just having a conversation about this yesterday with my team. A lot of people think a strategy is the right thing to do. It's like the best thing for your company. But if the opposite of your strategy is like bad, then that's not a strategy. That's just like an obviously good business decision. Strategy is something different. The way I think about it is the opposite of a real strategy is also a real strategy. The opposite of your strategy is a good idea because if it's not, then you're not being strategic. And what that means is when you build your business, if you are being strategic, you are making decisions that a lot of people think are dumb and they have every reason to be right. If everybody looks and says that's dumb and you're like, I don't understand why you're saying that, like you're ignorant, whatever. Okay. You don't really understand the decisions you're making. Interesting decisions are the ones that are not obviously correct. The ones where the opposite also makes sense. So, I'll give you an example. We were just having a conversation about internally when we run ads is our goal to try and understand every step of attribution along the way. Because this is all the rage in marketing, like the full attribution life cycle. They came to the site, and then they left, and then they got pulled back in through an ad, and then a friend told them and emailed it. How do you do that? And we proposed something different. We said, every time that we've gone and chased after this, we've always wound up with a, but we're not there. And we have to spend more money and time to get closer. When we dig in, we're like, not only are we not there, but we think we're being diluted in ways that make us make bad decisions. Like Google will tell you that every single person who bought a Glowforge bought it because they clicked on a Google ad. Facebook will tell you the same thing. I worked at Google. I worked on the ads team. I know why that is that the people who do that were my colleagues. And like their job was to take credit for every piece of transaction that happened on the internet. And they were very good at it. And those are just the least sophisticated, right? Or at least the easiest to do. There’re all sorts of third-party tools. And of course those third-party tools want to say, we will tell you with exact precision, every step that happens and convince you that they're right. But the more and more we looked, more and more, we said, I think this is snake oil and it's wasting our time and resources. What if we just said, look, our ads are going to have two goals. They’re going to take somebody to the site who then takes a meaningful action, which we can track with a hundred percent reliability. That top of funnel ad, that first person who sees something about Glowforge shows up on the site and engages. And we know if that works or the ad takes somebody who is already Glowforge curious and brings them to the site to buy, which we can also measure direct conversion. And we completely set aside any hopes of being able to say, well, here are the interim steps along the way in the ads that helped, but didn't take credit at the front or back or anything else. A lot of people would say that's wrong. It is not marketing best practice. It is not the sort of industry trend. It might be wrong, but after looking at our history, looking at the data, looking at the offerings in front of us, looking at the vendors, we said, actually think that this is probably right for us right here, right now is the best way to improve what we're doing. Because instead of trying to push 20 different balls forward, all of which are fuzzy and uncertain and rolling backwards, we can push two balls forward knowing that those two make a difference. So that is what I think of as polarizing. Like I could tell 10 marketers I was doing that and probably a majority of them would say, are you sure Dan? But that's where great decisions get made. And by the way, the opposite of that is also a polarizing decision that you should go sink your teeth deep into the MarTech stack and develop as a part of your company, a core competency around that. That is also a reasonable polarizing decision. But the mistake, the one that leaves you vulnerable and it's poor decision-making is when you kind of get mealy-mouthed about it. You're like, that didn't work. Maybe we'll try another one. We don't really have anybody who owns it. Somebody just offered to give us a demo. Why don't we try the demo? Maybe that'll work. We're not really committed to proving it or disproving it. We're just kind of playing around and wandering from half-baked solution to half-baked solution without committing to a course of action. So polarizing decisions.

Lindsay Pedersen

So many things come to mind. One is that, and I love the word commitment here and the focus that it enables to choose something that is, it's a different quadrant. It's not throwing 200 balls against the wall, but it's also not throwing no balls against the wall. Like there's a true choice and there's a conviction that's required for that, at least to this focus. It makes me think of like, why wouldn't everybody do that? Or why doesn't everybody embrace a contrarian stance here and be polarizing? And I wonder what you think of this. What comes to mind to me is it doesn't feel safe to go out there on a limb by yourself when everybody else is throwing 20 balls against the wall. That's what it feels, quote unquote, safe to be in that land that might be no man's land because it's not enough to get the benefit of quantity, but it's not focused enough to get the benefit of that laser precision. What do you think? Why wouldn't everybody be polarizing?

Dan Shapiro

I think safety is a part of it. And part of it is companies are social constructs of people who have to work together. And so, you've got three people who are in the area who say, OK, we're going to be focused on top of funnel and bottom of funnel. And then some new brilliant marketer shows up and is like, oh, let's just bring this thing in. That makes sense. That's what we've done everywhere else. Option one is to say, oh, wait, we forgot to go and pitch this and explain the strategy and why it's there. And if we do that, this new person might disagree and they might judge us and there might be conflict or they might feel like we're shutting them down and ignoring their wisdom like, boy, that's a lot of risk. There is zero risk, it seems, in letting them just run the trial, which they want to do. Like, let's support them. Let's empower them to do that. I mean, a strategy is at some level disempowering. It's saying we're going to pre make a bunch of decisions and that can feel OK if you do the work to get people signed off and build alignment around it. But it can feel pretty bad if people don't get there or if you skimp and don't do that work. And a team where people are resentful and feeling like their hands are tied isn't going to be an effective team either. So it is expensive to make a strategic decision like that. You don't want your company like full of hundreds of tiny little, you know, high conviction, contrarian decisions. You'll be wrong sometimes. And then you've got all these decisions to make and unmake and communicate. You want a relatively small number of them. But I mean, I'll give you the sort of when I was writing my book, gosh, eight years ago, one of the things I talked about was contrarian segmentation being polarizing, but deliberately picking the less popular approach for a different reason, which is if it's less popular, there's just more opportunity there. So if you're building an in-person company in a small, non-technical capital in a state that isn't known for it, right, if you're building next to a university in a state that doesn't have a large tech presence, you're making a huge contrarian bet. You're missing out on almost all the talent in the country, but you've got an almost lock on the very best talent in that particular city. Now, is that better or worse than being one of tens of thousands of companies scrambling in the Bay Area or to a lesser extent in Seattle, startup scrambling for talent? Tough to say, but it's a different decision. And it's one that puts you in a world that you control where you have opportunities that others won't. And they have opportunities that you won't. Of course, the big mistake is you locate your company in Kentucky or Minnesota or somewhere off the beaten path of tech companies. And then you say, oh, but we've got to hire these people from the Bay Area. Then you're like, you're not really making a strategic decision. Your kind of in the worst of both worlds, like you're not there to recruit and you're trying to convince people to move and you're really struggling. So, there's ways to make that work. But typically, when you choose the road less traveled, you have less competition for that. And there's a really solid strategic approach to instead of being the ten thousandth AI company, because AI is hot, found a company in a different space instead of being the one thousandth company to say, we only hire from the top five technical schools. And that's how we hire great people to say, ah, we figured out how to find really great talent from lesser-known schools and universities or whatever the case may be. It gives you more opportunity. But back to your point, it feels more dangerous because it's not what everybody else is doing.

Lindsay Pedersen

And that makes me think, and I wonder from your point of view as the CEO, the leader needs to give extra air cover to everybody, given that it can be scary. It can feel like you're out on a limb. You as the CEO and maybe also the head of marketing in this example are in sort of a unique position to give a lot of air cover to the people who feel like this feels uncomfortable to me, to give them the assurance that you've got them. Yes, it's risky and you're putting your neck on the line to be risky. Does it put more pressure on the CEO then when you're making a bold stake like that?

Dan Shapiro

I think it does in multiple ways. One is exactly what you said. They're afraid they're going to try it and fail and you have to give them the space to do that. But the flip side of that, the easy takeaway is, oh, this isn't going to work. So, I can do it halfway. And when it doesn't work, I'll be proven that I'm right. So, you say you have to do this thing you don't believe in. And they're like, but don't worry, it's fine if it doesn't work. They go, great, because it's not going to work. And then surprise, it doesn't work because nobody's committed to making it work. So, like, it's a double edged sword. When you say like, oh, no, I'm not going to hold you accountable for this not working. Lifting accountability makes it really easy to say, thank goodness, we can just quickly fail and then move back to the thing that I feel comfortable with. Which is why I sort of go back to the hard work. Why don't you do it? Because it is hard work to bring people along. And if you aren't doing that, what you want is for them to go like, okay, I get it. I'm going to make this work. By the way, if it blows up my face, yeah, I got your back. That's what you want. What you don't want is this isn't going to work. Well, if it doesn't work, don't worry, it'll be fine. Okay, I don't think it's going to work, but I'm glad it'll be fine like that doesn't fly. You've got to have people who believe in it and who are making it happen. And that's hard.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, that intersection is difficult, but magic. I mean, it feels a little bit like parenting in some ways, where not that employees are like children in this, I don't mean to suggest that.

Dan Shapiro

No, but sometimes my children are like employees.

Lindsay Pedersen

That actually is the analogy, right? It's like, there's this both and it can feel like a and you need to show me that I was right to give you that power to give you that responsibility, because otherwise we're not going to have a deal here. Like it's not going to work.

Dan Shapiro

When I think about the crossover between parenting and my job, which I think about a lot, I think about leadership. And I think about parents as trying to be leaders, not managers, but about providing inspiration and examples about sometimes making rules, because you know, at work, sometimes I make rules. And at home, sometimes we make rules. But if the bulk of your time is spent making and enforcing rules, in either case, things aren't going very well. And if the bulk of your time is spent listening, inspiring, maybe gently educating and growing, then you're in really good shape. I have 15-year-old twins. So, time will tell if that if that approach works.

Lindsay Pedersen

With you. Yes.

Dan Shapiro

Yes.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, yeah. I have a 15-year-old too. You've written this awesome book called Hot Seat. And it is absolutely jam packed with useful gems, both tactical and strategic. And here's one gem that I will read to you. You wrote, being the CEO means making good decisions fast. Could you say more about that? What are the tools that make good and fast decisions more likely if that's kind of really what it boils down to as your job is to make good decisions fast? How do you set yourself up to do just that?

Dan Shapiro

We were talking before about strategy. And strategy is actually the key that enables you to do your job. When you have some core pillars of how you operate, that a lot of day-to-day questions become simple. I mean, I'll give you one that was in my inbox, like five minutes ago, which was somebody said, hey, Dan, can you sign off on big, complicated thing, blah, blah, blah. And I looked at that and I was like, oh, my gosh, this is going to take me forever to read and think about. And I thought, oh, no, this is simple. If finance was expecting it, then I can just say yes. And in fact, next time I probably don't even need to be involved. I was like, oh, that's easy. I have a rule for that. That's not even a strategy. That's just like a rule. But as somebody who loves to get sunk into decisions and read everything and like, think about everything, it's very tempting to approach every project from zero. But when you have a strategic approach, it's much easier when somebody comes in and says, hey, I want to implement a new compensation method for my team. I read about it, et cetera. I have a whole set of strategies that we've signed a company up to around compensation that quickly narrow that decision down. Our strategy is based on the idea of equality, that we want to be sure we pay people fairly for the job they're doing. That means that we compensate people based on third party data. So, we subscribe to a bunch of expensive salary surveys. We get third party data and we pay people based on our best judgment of objective criteria of what the job is. That also means we have to hire people who are really consistently great, because if two people have the same job description and one of theme’s great, the other one's just OK, then the person who's doing great is going to be really resentful. And a whole set of decisions like another example is this person is doing just OK work. They're not doing great work, but I really need somebody in the role. Easy decision. You have to replace them and you have to do it quickly because otherwise everybody else around them is going to be frustrated and resentful that they're getting paid for doing excellent work, but they're only doing OK work and the damage will be profound. So that has to be fixed quickly. Or somebody who comes in and says, I want to try a new compensation strategy. I’m going to be like, it's got to fall in line with our strategy of fair and equitable pay that's based on the most objective possible criteria rather than like manager hunches and all the bias and gender bias and racial bias and ageism that typically comes along with sort of hunch based compensation or negotiation based compensation where people just sort of argue for their salary, which there's a ton of objective research that shows that benefits people who look like me, white men. And so when somebody comes in is like, I have this big proposal, I can kind of quickly check it against our strategy and be like, is this something that is in line or not? And what that means is that the hard decisions are either things that don't align with any piece of the strategy that we know or the ones that are about changing strategy. When somebody shows up and says like our focus, our strategy has always been U.S. first and we'll focus on the domestic market. I think we should look at international markets. Okay, that's a big, hard, slow decision where we go, let's reexamine all the foundational assumptions. Why did we do this? What trade off? Like, let's look at that. That should be a slow decision. And when somebody says like, I think we should add a new product line, that's a strategic change to what we're doing. That should be a slow decision. When somebody says, you know, this customer is having this weird thing that's never happened before. You should be help them. That's an easy decision because we understand what it means to help a customer. And even if what's happened to them has never happened to anybody before, we can be like, okay, we're going to treat them fairly and in line with everybody else. Let’s go. That probably won't even get to me. But that notion of like, have those strategies, have those frameworks, write them down, make sure everybody shares them. It means less decisions get to you and the ones that do get to you, you can make quickly to unblock people. And by the way, part of that book is a reminder to myself because one of my great challenges is not getting lost in those details. It is remembering that my job is to make good decisions quickly, not slightly better decisions slowly.

Lindsay Pedersen

Of course. Well, and there's a couple of things that stand out to me in that. And one is the usefulness of thinking in advance and having a lot of conviction in the principle. Some people might call that a first principles or your values, but having it, doing it before you need it, when you're in the brain space to get to the one that you have the most heart for and the most conviction for. By doing that in advance, that mechanism helps in the future when you're in the heat of the moment. And then the other concept in there that seems so useful is discernment between, is this a five second decision or is this a five-month decision? Sort of like triaging in the ER, bring that discernment so that you're not spending a lot of time adjudicating small decisions so that you have the capacity for those big decisions to spend that time and energy. So, there's this like, do your future self a favor by developing the mechanisms in advance so that you can use them. And then it limits the number of decisions, but then when those ones that do filter through to you, you can discern, can I just do this real quick? Or do I need to have bring in, you know, martial resources to make this decision?

Dan Shapiro

There's a book on negotiation. One of my favorite, I've read a bunch, is a book called bargaining for advantage. And the subtitle is negotiation strategies for reasonable people. And I love it because it's not the like, here's how to negotiate. It's more like here are different approaches and you should figure out what works for you. And one of the things he points out is before you start any negotiation or before you start the practice of practicing negotiation, you want to spend a little time with yourself and figuring out what your ethical framework is for negotiation. And he presents frameworks that range from anywhere from negotiation is just like anything else in life. You need to be honest and forthright, build relationships and treat everybody else the way you want to be treated on one extreme. And to the other extreme, it is negotiation is a game and the rules are laws. And as long as you don't break the laws, anything's fair. Like you can be tricky and slippery and you can break your word. And as long as it's not illegal, it's all fair. Those are the two extremes. And he talks about lots of spots in between. Like I'm going to take the first approach until you show yourself to be untrustworthy. And then I'll take the second approach and like various other things. But the one thing he said is you have to decide before you start is when you're in the middle of it, you're not going to set values that you're going to be proud of or hold to later. You decide first and then you go execute. And that's true of so many things. Strategy values for us, we call them cornerstones, core values, cornerstones of the company are pretty simple. We hire diverse and amazing people. We take care of each other. We delight our customers, present and future. And we build value for ourselves and for our company. We do that in service of a world where anyone can print anything. That's our vision, a world where anyone can print anything. But that set of values works together in really powerful ways.

Dan Shapiro

That informs the way that we manage our employees and informs the way that we make strategic decisions at a company level. And the whole point of those values is that it gives us a framework to operate in where we know the decisions that are easy. So, when it came time, when we started looking at, you know, the start of the pandemic and do we send people home? It was pretty easy, like take care of each other. Yes, if there's any risk for us all being together in person, we're going to err on the side of safety and taking care of each other. But the hard decisions are where they come into conflict and they come into conflict all the time, like taking care of each other versus building value for us and our company. There's lots of tension there. One of the sorts of classic examples is customer support. Well, take care of each other. We’d really like customer support team members to be able to take holidays off, delight our customers. Well, guess when the number one time to print stuff is over the holidays. So how do you build value for the company as those things are in tension? And then we have to make hard and interesting decisions. As an example, one of those is we have floating holidays for the whole company. So, we don't give people we don't tell people you're going to take Christmas off, but you have to work on Rosh Hashanah. We tell people you get this many holidays, work with your manager to figure out when they are. We'll do our best to accommodate. And so, people can pick the holidays that work for them, which helps us in our goal of hiring diverse and amazing people and makes us more resilient to be able to deal with those sorts of challenges.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that example of two values that on the surface, they do create tension and that tension leads to a more fruitful value creating route that you wouldn't have had if you didn't have that tension in the first place. Like it's actually just better for everything, but it requires that tension to get to that place, that generative place. This has been such a fun conversation. I have a few rapid-fire questions for you as we wrap up. Are you ready for some kind of like one word answer fun questions?

Dan Shapiro

Okay.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Dan Shapiro

I make banana chocolate ice cream and our ninja creamy at least twice a week. And it's my favorite thing. It's just like bananas and cocoa powder and vanilla extract.

Lindsay Pedersen

That was worthy of all of the words that you just brought to bear. I love that. What is your pet peeve?

Dan Shapiro

Oh, myself. Oh, all the little things I do to get my own way. That's just a pet peeve, right? It’s not like I, I'm angry or furious, but like what annoys me little habits and foibles, you know?

Lindsay Pedersen

That's the most endearing answer I've ever heard to that. What is the book that you have recommended most influenced the psychology of persuasion?

Dan Shapiro

Robert Cialdini. I’ve learned a ton from him. Um, my mom professor of speech and communications was the one who turned me onto that.

Lindsay Pedersen

No kidding. Um, okay. Would you rather be an Olympic gold medalist or an astronaut?

Dan Shapiro

Astronaut? I cannot imagine doing the initial workout without injuring myself beyond all hope of repair, but floating in space. I know it's actually a friend who's an astronaut and they're unbelievable physical condition yet still that seems somehow more achievable.

Lindsay Pedersen

Somehow more transcendent. Okay. And our last rapid fire question is what is your favorite salty snack?

Dan Shapiro

Doritos forbidden treasure.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's like the ultimate no, no food. I love Doritos. Do you like the regular or the cool ranch?

Dan Shapiro

Just the original.

Lindsay Pedersen

Doritos and spicy. Love it. Well, this has been so great, Dan. Thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you to learn more about you and Glowforge online?

Dan Shapiro

I'm, um, you know, LinkedIn in Dan Shapiro or Dan Shapiro on Twitter slash X, whatever, although I don't hang out there so much anymore. And the big thing is glowforge.com and you can learn all about the amazing stuff we're creating.

Lindsay Pedersen

This is wonderful. Thank you so much.

Dan Shapiro

Thanks so much for having me.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thanks for listening to this episode of North star leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star Leader, whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.