Unlocking AI Superpowers: Dan Shapiro on Transforming Glowforge
Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge, discusses how the integration of AI has transformed his company, enhancing productivity and innovation. He emphasizes that AI is not merely an add-on but a fundamental component that can redefine workplace efficiency and creativity. Shapiro shares insights on the development of their AI-driven feature, Magic Canvas, which has proved to be a significant revenue driver by allowing users to create optimized images for engraving quickly. The conversation also delves into the challenges and strategies of adopting AI tools internally, including fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement among employees. Ultimately, Shapiro highlights the importance of leadership in guiding organizations through the rapidly evolving landscape of AI technology, ensuring that every employee can leverage these tools to enhance their work.
Dan Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Glowforge, is one of the most inventive and aggressive business users of AI. He walks through how his company safely and creatively uses AI throughout the enterprise.
The inaugural episode of FeedForward's exclusive podcast features an engaging conversation between Adam Davidson and Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge. The discussion unfolds around the transformative impact of artificial intelligence not just on Glowforge's product offerings but also on its internal operations. Shapiro shares how Glowforge, known for its innovative desktop laser cutters, has embraced modern AI technologies to enhance its capabilities and customer experience. Highlighting the launch of their popular subscription feature, Magic Canvas, Shapiro illustrates how generative AI tools have revolutionized the design process, allowing users to create intricate designs without needing artistic skills. This technological leap has not only increased customer satisfaction but also significantly boosted the company's revenue. As the conversation progresses, Shapiro emphasizes the importance of integrating AI within company culture, ensuring that every employee has access to cutting-edge tools to improve productivity and efficiency. By fostering an environment where employees are encouraged to experiment with AI, Glowforge stands at the forefront of innovation in a competitive landscape, illustrating a compelling model for other businesses looking to harness the power of AI.
Takeaways:
- The integration of AI at Glowforge has transformed their operations and product offerings significantly, enhancing efficiency and creativity.
- Dan Shapiro emphasizes the importance of leadership in adopting AI tools across all levels of a company.
- Glowforge's 'Magic Canvas' feature, which uses AI to create optimized images, has become a major profit driver.
- Shapiro discusses the rapid pace of AI advancement and its implications for businesses in the current landscape.
- AI has not only improved customer-facing features but also internal operations, leading to productivity gains.
- Encouraging employees to engage with AI tools has created a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- FeedForward
- Glowforge
- Etsy
- Dall E
- Midjourney
- Stable Diffusion
- Amazon
- Costco
- NPR
Transcript
Hi, this is Adam Davidson, one of the co founders of FeedForward and this is our very first episode of our members only podcast.
Adam Davidson:This will be a regular feature only available to members, in which you'll hear intimate, smart conversations with people using AI at companies, people inventing AI, experts talking about AI.
Adam Davidson:My goal is to make this an extremely engaging and useful podcast for you, our members.
Adam Davidson:Please let me know what you think in the discord and if there are topics or people you think I should talk with.
Adam Davidson:Today's episode is an interview with Dan Shapiro.
Adam Davidson:He is a member of FeedForward and is also the CEO of Glowforge, which we'll hear about shortly.
Adam Davidson:Hey Dan, I'm excited to have you on the podcast.
Dan Shapiro:I'm excited to be here.
Adam Davidson:So the other day you and I were talking and you said, I've got a new superpower and then you made clear that I have a new superpower is a common statement around glowforge.
Adam Davidson:You are CEO of glowforge.
Adam Davidson:Maybe a quick introduction to what glowforge is, but then what we really want to talk about is how you are making glowforge an AI enabled workplace.
Dan Shapiro:I think that's fair.
Dan Shapiro:Glowforge makes a desktop laser cutter that makes it incredibly easy to make beautiful things, and we sell these to schools and small businesses and tons of independent crafters and Etsy entrepreneurs and the like.
Dan Shapiro:We've been around for about a decade and most of that was the time before modern AI.
Dan Shapiro:And so the advent of modern AI a couple of years ago was transformational.
Dan Shapiro:Not automatically, but after a lot of work and thought, it's really changed the way the company operates, it's changed our products, and it's just been a joy to drive that kind of innovation through the organization.
Adam Davidson:What does that mean?
Adam Davidson:It transformed the company.
Dan Shapiro:We're about 80 people and some of our manufacturing happens at our facilities, some of it happens in Mexico, and there's all the operations and logistics that you'd expect.
Dan Shapiro:With that, there's the R and D.
Dan Shapiro:And then our software team is actually one of our secrets to success.
Dan Shapiro:The hardware is beautiful and simple and easy to use, but the software is what makes it magical.
Dan Shapiro:About three, four years ago, we started offering an extra set of features as a subscription.
Dan Shapiro:So in addition to being able to do everything for free, when you buy your product for another $20 a month, you'd have access to fonts and images and extra storage and lots of add ons.
Dan Shapiro:This is where I first saw the tip of the iceberg that the generative image AI Tools, things like Dall E that would let you make beautiful pictures or mid journey Stable Diffusion.
Dan Shapiro:I looked at this and said, huh, this seems like it solves an actual customer problem.
Dan Shapiro:We have certainly one I have.
Dan Shapiro:The one I have is that I have no artistic skills whatsoever.
Dan Shapiro:The more common customer problem is like, you can do that, but it takes time and it's difficult to go through the iterative cycle and test out ideas and come up with personalized things for lots of different customers.
Dan Shapiro:And that AI images could move that forward much more quickly.
Dan Shapiro:I started just dabbling with this in my own time.
Dan Shapiro:So I installed Stable Diffusion and I got a subscription to Midjourney and started making stuff.
Dan Shapiro:Handed it over to the engineering team and I said, I think we can do something here.
Dan Shapiro:And in a matter of months, we launched a feature we call Magic Canvas that actually creates images that are optimized for engraving, right?
Dan Shapiro:Can engrave them with the product and can do it in just seconds.
Dan Shapiro:We put it in our subscription service.
Dan Shapiro:It is now the most popular subscription feature that we have and that's responsible for driving an enormous amount of our company's profits as usage of that continue to grow.
Adam Davidson:And to be clear, what glowforge does, for my wife's birthday, I bought these beautiful wood engravings of the specific locations that represented our life.
Adam Davidson:Where we met, where we fell in love, where we lived, where we live now, and bought it through Etsy.
Adam Davidson:And somebody used glowforge to create these really beautiful wood engravings of maps.
Adam Davidson:But you can create all sorts of things, help us understand what can you make with glowforge?
Dan Shapiro:We could be here all day, but I'll tell you just a few of my favorites.
Dan Shapiro:Because it can cut wood and leather and acrylic and paper and even things like chocolate, you can create beautiful physical products.
Dan Shapiro:You can lay down a sheet of leather, hit a button and 15 minutes later you have all the pieces to make a wallet, including all the holes cut.
Dan Shapiro:Signs are infinitely popular.
Dan Shapiro:Whether it be like little signs for a display or enormous multi feet long signs that go outside a bar, you can engrave just about anything.
Dan Shapiro:You can engrave metal, stone, you can engrave your iPad.
Dan Shapiro:So you can personalize things, which is a big part of where the first AI image engravings came in.
Dan Shapiro:And you can create physical objects with structure, like a gigantic display for cupcakes made out of acrylic.
Dan Shapiro:Pretty much anything that you can imagine that's made out of flat pieces that you put together or that you engrave out of a piece of material, you can create from it.
Dan Shapiro:It's really fast and easy.
Dan Shapiro:Unlike traditional 3D printing, which is like lumpy plastic made slowly.
Dan Shapiro:This is quick and made out of really beautiful materials.
Adam Davidson:Like you, I'm not particularly creative, but I see stuff and I'm like, oh, I would like something like that.
Adam Davidson:So as with so much with AI, the idea that the constraint just becomes my vague imagination.
Adam Davidson:I want to give my son a basketball poster in wood of his favorite player, but I have no idea how to actually generate that original image.
Adam Davidson:I could look around for available images, but the idea that I could create my own from my own direction.
Adam Davidson:So I get that.
Adam Davidson:But AI went beyond just those customer friendly tools, right?
Adam Davidson:It became an internal tool.
Dan Shapiro:As I was thinking about, should glowforge embrace AI?
Dan Shapiro:Do we have to?
Dan Shapiro:Do we want to?
Dan Shapiro:Is it distraction?
Dan Shapiro:Is it something fundamental?
Dan Shapiro:I thought back to the early age of the Internet.
Dan Shapiro:I graduated school in 97 just as the bubble was inflating and got to see the Internet sweep through society from single digit percentages to almost ubiquitous access.
Dan Shapiro:And there are different types of companies in terms of how they're affected by the Internet.
Dan Shapiro:On the one hand you had things like networking companies and technology companies which if they did not jump on the Internet fully and immediately, it's very clear that they were going to be obsoleted.
Dan Shapiro:If you're Microsoft, then you needed to say, oh my gosh, Internet, here we go.
Dan Shapiro:You better be on your game because you're going to be obsoleted.
Dan Shapiro:If you weren't, that was pretty obvious to everybody.
Dan Shapiro:Then there are the companies that did not need to move quickly.
Dan Shapiro:Wasn't clear they needed to move at all like Costco, very late to the game in creating a website.
Dan Shapiro:And that's fine.
Dan Shapiro:Costco's been fine in many completely non technical areas.
Dan Shapiro:You had a decade to react and you could watch and see how things unfold.
Dan Shapiro:And there's a lot in the middle.
Dan Shapiro:If you made phones, okay, you didn't have to get on the Internet right away.
Dan Shapiro:But it was going to rock your world eventually.
Dan Shapiro:And there are the ones that were total surprises.
Dan Shapiro:Like bookstores probably thought that they were in the Costco category.
Dan Shapiro:No rush, right?
Dan Shapiro:Blockbuster was probably like, no, no, no, cool, we got time.
Dan Shapiro:And then boom, gone.
Dan Shapiro:So you don't really know where you are on that spectrum.
Dan Shapiro:You probably know if you're on the your toast end, if you're on the run immediately end.
Dan Shapiro:But you don't necessarily know if you're on the.
Dan Shapiro:You have a decade or somebody's going to mess you up right away by eating your lunch online.
Dan Shapiro:And with AI, that decade happens in a year.
Dan Shapiro:Because the reason you had a decade was because it took a decade for enough people to get the Internet for it to matter.
Dan Shapiro:The benefits of the Internet required everybody to have it or most people to have it.
Dan Shapiro:But guess what?
Dan Shapiro:If you're getting the benefits of AI, you get those benefits and you get to give those benefits to your customers immediately.
Dan Shapiro:The day that we turn on our feature, every single glowforge customer had access to it.
Dan Shapiro:So if your competitor figures out a way to leverage AI, they're not just reaching the 10% of people who have Internet access after the first year.
Dan Shapiro:They're able to deliver that to everyone.
Dan Shapiro:So we're not in the position of companies that are obviously rocked by AI, like Google and Facebook and the like, right?
Dan Shapiro:We're in that big unwashed middle of maybe we could ignore it for a long time.
Dan Shapiro:The analogy in terms of internal versus external is lots of companies had internal email systems right away and got some efficiency.
Dan Shapiro:Lots of companies put it off and waited and that was all fine.
Dan Shapiro:I'm scared and I think everybody should be scared.
Dan Shapiro:It's the kind of excited scared because there's opportunity to be had.
Dan Shapiro:But I don't think anybody can say, no, no, no, we're Costco.
Dan Shapiro:I think we're all very much in danger of being Barnes and Noble.
Adam Davidson:That makes a lot of intuitive sense, I should say.
Adam Davidson:I worked for many years with your brother, Ari Shapiro, the fabulous host of All Things Considered and an all around great guy.
Adam Davidson:You also have a great radio voice.
Adam Davidson:NPR took forever to come up with a digital strategy.
Adam Davidson: I Remember conversations in: Adam Davidson:I was an early adopter of podcasting, but it was lonely, I think.
Adam Davidson: cast app didn't come out till: Adam Davidson:LLMs have been around in this new way for a couple years and Google just upended the podcast industry completely with their Google LM podcast creator.
Adam Davidson:My sense is they weren't thinking it was going to be a big thing.
Adam Davidson:It was like a nice little toy that some product managers just did on the side.
Dan Shapiro:That's chatgpt too.
Dan Shapiro:It was an internal project.
Dan Shapiro:It almost got killed.
Dan Shapiro:It was under resourced.
Dan Shapiro:It was okay.
Dan Shapiro:We trained our predictive text engine to be able to chat.
Dan Shapiro:Maybe that's a cool demo.
Dan Shapiro:Even internally, it seems like they did not realize the complete disruption it was going to have and the degree to which that small shift in the application of technology could rock entire world.
Dan Shapiro:If I'm a company leader, I've watched a dozen of these things come and go over the last decade.
Dan Shapiro:The Internet was real, but everybody saw crypto come up and be like, crypto, is this going to rock my world?
Dan Shapiro:If I'm a finance institution, is my whole world turned upside down by crypto?
Dan Shapiro:Do retailers need to be on crypto?
Dan Shapiro:Should we be taking bitcoin?
Dan Shapiro:That whole wave of, is this a real thing or is this a complete fad like NFTs were?
Dan Shapiro:Or is this.
Dan Shapiro:It's there and it's a piece of the puzzle, but it turns out it's not such a big deal.
Dan Shapiro:It is hard to separate those out.
Dan Shapiro:And so any leader should be cautious when a bunch of technical evangelists show up and say, hallelujah, it's the second third forthcoming.
Dan Shapiro:Everybody put all your resources on this.
Dan Shapiro:I'm bringing you the most important thing.
Dan Shapiro:Yeah, everybody should be skeptical.
Dan Shapiro:And also, this one's real.
Dan Shapiro:This really is that level of disruptive change.
Adam Davidson:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Adam Davidson:Since I bring everything back to public radio, they did jump in pretty big to satellite radio that was gonna transform public radio in the late 90s and didn't really have the impact that we expected.
Adam Davidson:So walk me through that thought process at glowforge.
Adam Davidson:How does AI kill glowforge?
Adam Davidson:If you decide not to get involved, to say, I'm going to sit this out, I'll wait till there's really safe enterprise tools.
Dan Shapiro:I don't think we're in the category where a competitor with AI would kill us, because brilliant, simple software that's easy to use and beautiful, robust hardware that's affordable and powerful is what makes the day.
Dan Shapiro:And AI can make all those things better.
Dan Shapiro:But it's not the transformative difference of the way MP3s killed CDs because the actual product is so much better, or the way that Amazon killed the booksellers because the actual product delivery experience was so different.
Dan Shapiro:I think about it as, how do we outperform in a way that everything's 20% better and that 20% compounds, so you're able to innovate 20% faster, and so those innovations pile up faster.
Dan Shapiro:We're able to operate 20% more efficiently, operate like a company that's bigger, with fewer resources, and be more effective in that way.
Dan Shapiro:So I think we're in that middle category of a company that gets meaningfully better because of AI, not a company that has a completely different product and product delivery mechanism.
Dan Shapiro:That said, if you Told me a year ago when we launched Magic Canvas, the percentage of our revenue that I could attribute directly to it, I would not have believed it, not in a heartbeat.
Dan Shapiro:It was a neat add on feature, not something I thought was going to be driving our core profits.
Dan Shapiro:But we really looked at AI through both lenses.
Dan Shapiro:What could it do on the product side and what could it do through our internal operations?
Dan Shapiro:And then with internal operations we split it into two pieces.
Dan Shapiro:One is what are the things that we do that we can replace or augment with AI?
Dan Shapiro:So this is the conversation about customer support, marketing, execution.
Dan Shapiro:Do we generate marketing images with AI?
Dan Shapiro:We've decided not to do that for the time being.
Dan Shapiro:But that's something we're constantly reevaluating.
Dan Shapiro:Do we have AI answer the phones or answer chat?
Dan Shapiro:And again, we're close to it.
Dan Shapiro:We have not pulled the trigger, but we have AI tools that assist our support team can answer, looking at a ticket, that can propose answers and so on.
Dan Shapiro:That's one half.
Dan Shapiro:The other half is giving every single employee the ability to leverage AI to do their job better.
Dan Shapiro:And that's not enough.
Dan Shapiro:Encouraging them and training them and motivating them to use it.
Dan Shapiro:So very early on I said it is important to me that we give every employee in the company access to modern, cutting edge LLMs.
Dan Shapiro:And that was tricky to do at the time.
Dan Shapiro:ChatGPT didn't have an enterprise plan, it was quite early on.
Dan Shapiro:So we stood up something ourselves.
Dan Shapiro:There's an open source project that you can host and run for everybody, it's called Libre Chat.
Dan Shapiro:And our software team put up an instance of that for the company.
Dan Shapiro:Super easy, took about a week and everybody in the company had private access to this.
Dan Shapiro:And it uses ChatGPT under the hood.
Dan Shapiro:And then we added Claude like API.
Adam Davidson:Calls to the LLMs underneath.
Dan Shapiro:That's what's going on.
Dan Shapiro:But from a practical standpoint, it's like installing any software tool.
Dan Shapiro:Software team sets it up, everybody gets an account and everybody logs in with their Google account.
Dan Shapiro:Because we use Google for authentication, it's secure and we get a single bill for everybody's usage of it.
Dan Shapiro:And it's very inexpensive.
Dan Shapiro:We keep looking at Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude for teams and keep coming back to this because it's much more affordable.
Dan Shapiro:It's something that integrates closely with all of our internal systems out of the box.
Dan Shapiro:It's really easy to set up with that.
Dan Shapiro:And because it's affordable, we just give it to everybody.
Dan Shapiro:So the junior guy who is working in the warehouse or our intern helping out with the marketing team, Corey, give them all access to this tool.
Dan Shapiro:So everybody has these capabilities to get.
Adam Davidson:A little micro on the affordability.
Adam Davidson:Are you paying by million tokens?
Adam Davidson:Are you paying a monthly fee?
Dan Shapiro:We just get a bill from OpenAI.
Dan Shapiro:We get a bill from Anthropic for whatever we've used.
Adam Davidson:But that can add up.
Adam Davidson:Like when I've messed around with Cloud or OpenAI to create software, I use a tool, Claude Dev, that counts the money.
Adam Davidson:And if I spend an afternoon messing around, it can add up.
Adam Davidson:Not a ton, but 10, 15 bucks is not unreasonable.
Adam Davidson:But I could imagine if 80 people are using it every day.
Dan Shapiro:That particular tool run things up fast because it'll automatically grab everything you're doing and put it into every prompt so it builds up quickly.
Dan Shapiro:What we found is that with a text interface, with the chat interface, and the ability to upload images and sound, because it does all that too, we're spending, I think it's less than $500 a month for 80 people.
Adam Davidson:Wow.
Dan Shapiro:Crazy affordable, right?
Dan Shapiro:I don't even have to think about it.
Dan Shapiro:And they all have access to it and increasingly are using it.
Dan Shapiro:By the way, it was much less than that early on because nobody was using it.
Dan Shapiro:Or a half dozen people were all excited and in love and using it a lot and everybody else was not.
Adam Davidson:I assume you have patents, you have proprietary knowledge that you don't want out there.
Adam Davidson:So how did you address both the legal and business worries that could have prevented a similar company from adopting this?
Dan Shapiro:We definitely took some time and looked at it thoughtfully.
Dan Shapiro:We have more than 60 patents, we have numerous trade secrets.
Dan Shapiro:And so that was a meaningful concern from the start.
Adam Davidson:Tell us like five trade secrets.
Dan Shapiro:Just the first one is keep your mouth shut a trade secret.
Dan Shapiro:It's not our trade secret.
Adam Davidson:Okay, gotcha.
Dan Shapiro:Wilsoni is our corporate counsel.
Dan Shapiro:She worked with them.
Dan Shapiro:And we're like, look, we know everybody's thinking through this stuff at the same time.
Dan Shapiro:We don't need a bunch of what's special about glowforge analysis.
Dan Shapiro:We need you to go pull together all the analysis that you're doing generally and be like, here's the best and worst practices and here's what to avoid and so on.
Dan Shapiro:So we got their punch list.
Dan Shapiro:Then we looked very specifically at the APIs that we were using because again, LibreChat, the tool that we're using, calls these programming interfaces directly.
Dan Shapiro:So you sign a contract with OpenAI or with Anthropic to use their API.
Dan Shapiro:Very well defined legal Constraints and very different from what happens if you're using the free chat client.
Dan Shapiro:This is another reason to do it.
Dan Shapiro:We didn't want people using the free chat client because that is like corporate secrets out the window.
Dan Shapiro:So we banned that immediately.
Adam Davidson:By the way, if you didn't make this available, we know from data some number of your employees would have just been using the open chat clients.
Adam Davidson:That's just what people do.
Adam Davidson:They use them and don't tell their boss.
Dan Shapiro:Yes.
Dan Shapiro:So we immediately banned using any AI and then we started looking at which tools could we use.
Dan Shapiro:And because our tool lets you pull together multiple other companies tools, we could very much gate that on an approval basis.
Dan Shapiro:But the truth is it doesn't really matter which provider you use.
Dan Shapiro:If you're using ChatGPT Enterprise or Claude for teams or if you're using Copilot or whatever else, it's fine.
Dan Shapiro:If you're small like us, then LibreChat is a great way to operate with a lot of control and low cost.
Dan Shapiro:If you're a larger organization, I would not even bother.
Dan Shapiro:I would go straight to one of the big providers.
Dan Shapiro:But the important thing is that you have that ability.
Dan Shapiro:And now you can get HEPA compliance.
Dan Shapiro:You can get private on prem hosting if you're big enough and want to pay enough money.
Dan Shapiro:You just have to figure out how to get that for your employees.
Dan Shapiro:Because it is like turning on corporate email.
Dan Shapiro:It's like giving everybody a word processor and upgrading their typewriters.
Dan Shapiro:There's a lot of resistance.
Dan Shapiro:There's a lot of work to get people over that hump.
Dan Shapiro:And then productivity is just dramatic.
Adam Davidson:So you make this available.
Adam Davidson:About half dozen people were like, awesome, I'm in.
Adam Davidson:And then 74 people were like, I'm not interested.
Dan Shapiro:They just didn't use it.
Dan Shapiro:A few people were using it, A lot of people weren't using it.
Adam Davidson:You weren't monitoring their use.
Adam Davidson:Oh, Frank is doing this and Alice is doing that.
Dan Shapiro:It is possible to set it up that way.
Dan Shapiro:And we didn't.
Dan Shapiro:And we talked about it and we're like, no, in the same way that we don't want to monitor people's individual web surfing.
Dan Shapiro:And again, different companies could take a different approach to this.
Dan Shapiro:We didn't want the liability, we didn't want the Big Brother feel of.
Dan Shapiro:We're looking at your search history, we're looking at your chat.
Dan Shapiro:That's just a business decision for our culture and resources.
Adam Davidson:Gotcha.
Adam Davidson:So you could see, all right, there's not a lot of use here.
Adam Davidson:Walk me through how you start getting more people to use it.
Dan Shapiro:A number of things, some of them concrete, some of them sort of fuzzy.
Dan Shapiro:The fuzzy stuff was we use Slack for communication.
Dan Shapiro:So we set up a slack channel with like, here's how I'm using AI.
Dan Shapiro:And we just subscribed everybody to it.
Dan Shapiro:They could unsubscribe if they wanted.
Dan Shapiro:And then I asked my leadership to start regularly posting what they were doing there so that we would have some proof.
Dan Shapiro:By example, people could see that their boss or their boss's boss or their grand boss was using this and show that was a cultural norm.
Dan Shapiro:And maybe a like, oh, I want to do what they're doing.
Dan Shapiro:We started at our monthly all company meeting talking about interesting uses.
Dan Shapiro:So we'd highlight one department saying, here's something we're doing.
Dan Shapiro:I asked my leadership to start explicitly asking, oh, have you tried AI for this?
Dan Shapiro:We call it GlowChat.
Dan Shapiro:Have you tried using GlowChat for this?
Dan Shapiro:That increased usage by one big jump forward.
Dan Shapiro:One of the more successful things, we're incredibly finicky about how we do job posts.
Dan Shapiro:So after a lot of research on diversity and inclusion and thinking through what does a candidate want to see versus what usually goes into the job post.
Dan Shapiro:A very prescriptive way to write a job post and it's really candidate centric.
Dan Shapiro:What are you going to be doing?
Dan Shapiro:What will you get from this?
Dan Shapiro:What is your experience going to be like and why do we need you?
Dan Shapiro:Instead of the normal, here are requirements, punch list bullet points, see if you can make it through the filter.
Dan Shapiro:And writing those things takes a long time.
Dan Shapiro:It take me easily an hour.
Dan Shapiro:And I was constantly having people like have to go back for multiple turns.
Dan Shapiro:And anyway, big mess.
Dan Shapiro:I wound up with a 20 page prompt and you put the giant prompt in and then you could put whatever information you had about the job afterwards and it would turn out a great job description consistently.
Dan Shapiro:I actually shared that with Ethan and he did a blog post about it.
Dan Shapiro:You can find the prompt, I've shared it and you can try it yourself.
Dan Shapiro:In fact, it works well enough that you could just give it like Baskin Robbins ice cream cone scooper and it'll give you a really great job description for Baskin Robbins ice cream cone scooper.
Dan Shapiro:Putting that in manager's hands are like, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Dan Shapiro:Yes, I will use this.
Dan Shapiro:And also, whoa, okay.
Dan Shapiro:Would not have thought that this sort of thing was possible with this.
Adam Davidson:We're used to certainly new users of AI thinking it's just generic.
Adam Davidson:I wrote a job Posting it was the most generic job posting I've ever seen.
Adam Davidson:But of course, when you under prompt, it's going to literally be the weighted average of every job post ever.
Adam Davidson:And so it'll be lifeless.
Adam Davidson:But I've never done a 20 page prompt.
Adam Davidson:That's pretty impressive.
Dan Shapiro:I think it wound up about that because it incorporated multiple other job descriptions and it included our entire four page how to write job descriptions.
Dan Shapiro:And then it had multiple other job descriptions before and after.
Adam Davidson:Yeah, gotcha.
Dan Shapiro:The other one, very similar was we acknowledge people's anniversaries and we're a 90% remote company.
Dan Shapiro:Our hardware engineers work in person and a few of our marketers, but everybody else is remote.
Dan Shapiro:We used to give people an engraved plaque.
Dan Shapiro:Now we have a digital plaque.
Dan Shapiro:And the plaque always has a saying for, you know, two years of this, that, and it usually has word play and alliteration and punchy and short and meaningful.
Dan Shapiro:And that's hard and it would take a long time.
Dan Shapiro:It was really difficult.
Dan Shapiro:And it's something people really valued.
Dan Shapiro:So for page prompt, I took all the last couple of years plaques, dumped them all in there along with a bunch of guidelines for good plaques.
Dan Shapiro:And then you just describe the person and what they're known for and what they're appreciated for, and it'll turn out rhyming or alliteration.
Dan Shapiro:It'll give you a bunch of different options.
Dan Shapiro:And it makes the plaque easy and fun.
Dan Shapiro:And then you go in and kind of fine tune it to get it right.
Dan Shapiro:If there's one thing I would recommend to drive adoption, it's giving people tools to make something that they don't like into something easier because it really does help to drive things forward.
Adam Davidson:A very basic one is I used to have to transcribe hours and hours of audio.
Adam Davidson:I'm very happy to never transcribe audio ever again.
Adam Davidson:That's all AI ever did.
Adam Davidson:I'd think AI is one of the greatest inventions of all time.
Dan Shapiro:That's a win.
Adam Davidson:Yeah.
Dan Shapiro:Yeah.
Dan Shapiro:We don't have it taking notes for meetings right now because when we last looked at it, which a while ago, from a legal standpoint, just the liability of having a verbatim recording of every meeting ever had.
Dan Shapiro:Our legal advisors say, yeah, maybe that's a little worrisome.
Dan Shapiro:Never want to create that headache for ourselves.
Dan Shapiro:But there are some modern ones that don't record permanently.
Dan Shapiro:They just have the notes afterwards.
Dan Shapiro:That seems promising.
Dan Shapiro:And if candidates agree and we ask them in advance, we do record and transcribe interviews.
Dan Shapiro:It's fantastic because we used to have to take live notes and that lets you instead focus on the results, which has been a big boon.
Dan Shapiro:And another thing that people have really appreciated, I mentioned the carrot.
Dan Shapiro:There's also a little bit of a stick.
Dan Shapiro:It's a very gentle stick, which is there's just no excuse anymore for turning in text that's anything less than grammatically perfect.
Dan Shapiro:AI is the ultimate spell checker.
Dan Shapiro:And so if somebody sends something to me, I'm like, please run it through glowchat before you ask me to take a look at it.
Dan Shapiro:Because there's just no reason not to do want Glow Chat to write the whole thing.
Dan Shapiro:No, you don't do that.
Dan Shapiro:You say, please highlight any errors or please fix only this or that, and you get some prompting on how to do it.
Dan Shapiro:Well, it raises the bar a little bit for what you expect from everybody.
Dan Shapiro:Managers are always suggesting ways to use GlowChat to make things better.
Dan Shapiro:For example, we had an election themed marketing email and I got a draft of this because it was like, oh, maybe we're playing with fire a little bit.
Dan Shapiro:Let's have Dan sign off on this.
Dan Shapiro:And I said, glowchat, I want you to highlight any language that looks right or left leaning or that could be interpreted as being biased.
Dan Shapiro:And sure enough, it came back and was like, here are five things that are all biased in the same political direction.
Dan Shapiro:Unsurprisingly, the direction of the person who wrote it wasn't obvious and certainly wasn't obvious to the person who wrote it, but it was real.
Dan Shapiro:And then went back and edited and got rid of all that and came out with something that was much closer to what we wanted.
Dan Shapiro:And that's all just talking about the basic chat interface that you can get from any of these providers.
Dan Shapiro:But just having chat and having people know that it's not just allowed, not just encouraged, but expected, that they're making use of these tools brings up the level of performance dramatically.
Dan Shapiro:And I can say with no doubt that the copy that we turn out is better.
Dan Shapiro:People are working more quickly.
Dan Shapiro:Except there's one thing.
Dan Shapiro:There's one rule that we put in at the very start that I've had to call people out on.
Dan Shapiro:Our only rule is we can use AI for generating text for anything, except not for talking to each other.
Dan Shapiro:I never want anybody here sending somebody else an AI generated email because it is really easy to turn five bullet points into five paragraphs and waste everybody's time, right?
Dan Shapiro:And it's not hard to tell when somebody throws that in.
Dan Shapiro:That doesn't Mean, I have absolutely had AI's comment on sensitive emails.
Dan Shapiro:I'll be like, if you were reading this, would you take offense?
Dan Shapiro:And I find that as useful feedback, but I'm always holding the pen.
Adam Davidson:Yeah, I did that very thing with an email I thought was perfect and it said this is likely to cause defensiveness and is a passive aggressive email, which I did not think it was.
Adam Davidson:And it turned out it was true because I checked after I sent it instead of before.
Adam Davidson:You've mentioned carrots and sticks.
Adam Davidson:I would guess a major carrot is you, the CEO are one of the most giddy tinkerers in AI.
Adam Davidson:You just love this stuff.
Adam Davidson:And when I've done some consulting with companies, I've noticed that because CEOs typically are older than the average head of workforce, they're sometimes slower to get its broader use case or might think of it more the way they think about changing CRMs or some other enterprise tools.
Adam Davidson:Your giddy tinkering enthusiasm has got to influence the company.
Dan Shapiro:I'm 49.
Dan Shapiro:I'm part of the old farts club.
Dan Shapiro:Interestingly, I've not seen the correlation with age that I thought just myself.
Dan Shapiro:I've seen a lot of younger folks who are pushing off AI and really scared of it.
Dan Shapiro:And I think with good reason, because the jobs that I'm most worried about in the AI world are my kids entering the workforce.
Dan Shapiro:And AI doesn't replace an experienced person, but man, it's a pretty good intern.
Dan Shapiro:But if I just look at this from the perspective of the leader of a giant organization, there's people who come in every month or every week saying, this thing that I'm an expert in is the most important thing in the world right now.
Dan Shapiro:Somebody comes in and says, skill at writing is the most important thing.
Dan Shapiro:We should uplevel the writing skill of everybody in the organization.
Dan Shapiro:And it's not wrong.
Dan Shapiro:If everybody in the organization was a better writer, if everybody took a training in whatever it is that they're excited about, everybody would get better at everything.
Dan Shapiro:Those things do help.
Dan Shapiro:So there's all these advocates of this thing that the whole organization should be paying attention to.
Dan Shapiro:And as a leader, you gotta have really thick filters or else you're just gonna be whipsawing your organization all the time.
Dan Shapiro:Now we're doing this new sales methodology.
Dan Shapiro:Guess what?
Dan Shapiro:Now the whole company's gonna be trained.
Adam Davidson:In this new communication that's all five dysfunctions.
Adam Davidson:It's all whatever.
Dan Shapiro:Yeah.
Adam Davidson:Which by the way, I love five dysfunctions, but still love five dysfunctions.
Dan Shapiro:Yes, but you're never gonna need any work done.
Dan Shapiro:You're just gonna be constantly training everybody on everything and shoving new tools in their face.
Dan Shapiro:It is a crucial defense mechanism to say, slow down there, tiger.
Dan Shapiro:I'm sure what you're doing is important.
Dan Shapiro:And also, as a CEO with limited attention and necessity to dictate our entire company's resources to what matters most.
Dan Shapiro:I am not going to turn the company upside down because you got excited about this thing this morning.
Dan Shapiro:That is the right answer for a CEO.
Dan Shapiro:And then now that we've made a little space to think, how do we quickly assess where this impacts us on the scale of this completely rocks our world to maybe, like, we'll wait half a decade, see if anything happens, and if it does, we'll have half a decade to react.
Dan Shapiro:So anybody who turned their retail company upside down for Bitcoin is probably regretting that decision.
Dan Shapiro:Probably feeling a little like they got snowed.
Adam Davidson:What is Gloin trading at now?
Dan Shapiro:I mean, like, it's a.
Dan Shapiro:It's a legit example.
Dan Shapiro:I sat down and spent some real time with the team.
Dan Shapiro:Does crypto impact us and should it impact us in any way?
Dan Shapiro:And thought hard about that and ultimately decided, no, it doesn't.
Dan Shapiro:Then we did the same thing with NFTs when that came up, and we said, ooh, this actually does a little bit, because this all deals with the ownership of creative tools.
Dan Shapiro:So we spun up a very small effort to go explore NFTs and then said, nope, this is dumb and it's not providing any value.
Dan Shapiro:Shut it down.
Dan Shapiro:But from the CEO, when the first person shows up and says, ah, it's rocking our world.
Dan Shapiro:The right first answer is cool, not now.
Dan Shapiro:And then the right second answer is to go, okay, now how do I figure out if this is real, if Dan and Adam are just on the latest hype train, or if this is actually something that's going to impact us, that's going to harm us if we don't get on the wagon?
Dan Shapiro:I do think this is one that you can't squarely delegate.
Dan Shapiro:This is one where senior leadership has to get their hands dirty.
Dan Shapiro:Doesn't mean you have to geek out like I do.
Dan Shapiro:I love spending time on this and find it joyful to experiment with these newfound superpowers because I've never been a developer, but now I can write code and I can stand things up and create ideas.
Dan Shapiro:I can do artwork, which is very relevant to my day job.
Dan Shapiro:You don't need to do that.
Dan Shapiro:But absolutely, spending a month taking everything that you put into Google and putting it into an LLM instead.
Dan Shapiro:That's something every leader should be doing.
Adam Davidson:It took people a long time to understand mobile, why mobile is not just small websites.
Adam Davidson:It's a whole different thing.
Adam Davidson:It just takes a while to get your head around AI.
Dan Shapiro:By the way, when I was at Google, I was working for the head of ad products.
Dan Shapiro:So we are right in the belly of the beast creating advertisements.
Dan Shapiro:And I distinctly remember senior executives showing up and saying, well, it just happened.
Dan Shapiro:50.1% of our search queries came from phones.
Dan Shapiro:And the whole team in there was like, no.
Dan Shapiro:And somebody was like, yeah, I told you this was going to happen.
Dan Shapiro:But it wasn't supposed to happen for another year.
Dan Shapiro:Oh my gosh, what do you mean?
Dan Shapiro:A majority of people are searching from their phone and now it's like 90%, right?
Dan Shapiro:But like everybody inside Google who had access to the best analytics, the best data could watch the trend line.
Dan Shapiro:That was surprising.
Dan Shapiro:So we can all be forgiven for saying, oh, is this really a thing?
Dan Shapiro:And truthfully, it's the easiest technology initiative to get your head around because you can start playing with it right away.
Dan Shapiro:You'll start using it in place of Google and be like, this is terrible, Google's better.
Dan Shapiro:Then as you start just trying and failing, you'll start to see, oh, but I can do this thing, but I can do that thing.
Dan Shapiro:And it very quickly becomes a useful add on that just makes your day go faster, reduces work and increases quality output.
Dan Shapiro:You can start to understand the possibility.
Adam Davidson:What are some of the things your teams are doing now that make glowforge a more productive company?
Dan Shapiro:We built an internal tool called Ringmaster.
Dan Shapiro:It was something I spun up in a weekend.
Dan Shapiro:I was just looking at this going, huh, I wonder if AI could be a good sales coach.
Dan Shapiro:So every week, one of our sales calls, transcripts, is chosen.
Dan Shapiro:Not quite random, but like a long one that is analyzed by the AI.
Dan Shapiro:And an email goes out to every sales rep, CCing their manager, the head of sales, and me.
Dan Shapiro:That's a big sign that this is serious, right?
Dan Shapiro:It goes to everybody and it gives them feedback on the call.
Dan Shapiro:Their sales manager owns the block of text that defines how this works.
Dan Shapiro:Because there's a prompt in there, just like any prompt.
Dan Shapiro:Did they speak for more than half the time?
Dan Shapiro:Did they offer a demo, did they interrupt the person, did they listen, whatever.
Dan Shapiro:Just the list of things that they train on.
Dan Shapiro:And then they get back a very humble, friendly email from Ringmaster saying, hey, I listened to this.
Dan Shapiro:I'm not perfect, but I just Want to give you some notes from looking at this.
Dan Shapiro:Here's some things you did well.
Dan Shapiro:Here's some things you could have improved.
Dan Shapiro:And we rolled this out about three months ago, four months ago.
Dan Shapiro:And I was expecting a lot of pushback, like, why is an AI rating me?
Dan Shapiro:And so on.
Dan Shapiro:But what wound up happening was first everybody wanted to meet with their manager, talk about the feedback, either good or bad, or let me explain why this is wrong.
Dan Shapiro:Which is terrific because now they're talking about this.
Dan Shapiro:The manager said, oh, thank goodness, this is catching all the details that I forget to go into.
Dan Shapiro:Or like, this is the fifth time I said, you talk too much.
Dan Shapiro:So I just stopped saying it.
Dan Shapiro:But this just always reminds the person.
Dan Shapiro:And they started asking for more.
Dan Shapiro:They started saying, could I get this call reviewed?
Dan Shapiro:Could I get that call reviewed?
Dan Shapiro:Because this is a really powerful tool.
Dan Shapiro:So it's become a part of the continuous improvement cycle of the sales team.
Dan Shapiro:We're constantly tweaking it with whatever they're working on, with whatever the focus is on, with whatever changes so they get that feedback.
Adam Davidson:And have you seen any impact on sales?
Dan Shapiro:Oh, yeah, about a 20% improvement in productivity as best we can attribute to that.
Adam Davidson:Wow.
Dan Shapiro:Real money.
Adam Davidson:Yes, real money.
Adam Davidson:That's awesome, Dan.
Adam Davidson:Thank you so much.
Adam Davidson:This has been lessons both for smaller firms like yours, but for a large enterprise.
Adam Davidson:It's folks like you who are on the cutting edge of the things they have to be thinking about not 10 years from now, but thinking about right now.
Adam Davidson:So thank you, Dan.
Dan Shapiro:If I have one thought, it is.
Dan Shapiro:There's a bunch of technology that's AI powered that's going to make its way into the organizations naturally.
Dan Shapiro:So when they're thinking about which tool to buy for customer support or whatever else that will come.
Dan Shapiro:In the culture of using chat to superpower each and every employee, that's where leadership plays a role.
Dan Shapiro:That's where leadership has an opportunity to sculpt, to show, and to gain an outsized and continuous advantage or by not doing it, be disadvantaged relative to competitors.
Dan Shapiro:And that's the part that, to me, is most exciting.
Dan Shapiro:How we can lead our companies and our employees from the most senior to the most junior into this world that makes them as effective as possible and makes our organizations as effective as possible.
Adam Davidson:That is a perfect ending.
Adam Davidson:Thank you.
Adam Davidson:Dan Shapiro.
Adam Davidson:Folks can find you on the Discord.
Dan Shapiro:Oh, yes, yes.
