I think it may be less about talent, of which they seemed to be busting at the seems, but more about management.
An eye opener is to look at the Glassdoor reviews (you may need to be a registered user to see most of them).
A sampling:
Pros
The product is amazing. The people you work with are brilliant, talented, and friendly. Pay is OK, and health insurance is great. Free lunch every day.Cons
Top down micromanagement culture. Lack of transparency to real metrics across the company. Lack of clear objectives or growth opportunities for individual contributor.Advice to Management
Stop, and listen to the people who are departing. If they are willing to leave despite a great product, team, perks, etc. there is a good reason.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Glowforge-RVW20504003.htm
Pros
The people are great. Everyone is really smart, nice to work with, and they care about the customer and the product. People don’t lose their temper and they all handle stress well. The pay and perks are good. For a while they were pushing pretty long work hours, but it seems to have mellowed out some. The product is great and the customers love it. I think the company is going to be a huge success.Cons
I’ve worked at big companies and small companies, and I’ve never experienced such a top down management style. People are constantly waiting for orders, permission, or approval from higher up. Managers and even execs don’t have the authority to approve most things, so it often has to go to the CEO. It feels slow and feels like the people making the decisions don’t take time to make them well. Some people try to sneak work through without permission (do first, ask forgiveness later), but usually they get caught. Some people just check out. A couple of engineers who used to work really hard are 9 to 5ing it now. It’s hard to quit because the people and product are so great and I think the stock options are going to be worth something someday. A lot of other software people are job hunting.Advice to Management
You should be proud for hiring great people and creating a warm and diverse culture. You should trust and respect your people a lot more, both managers and non managers. You should also go talk to your team to learn how many of them are frustrated or maybe what they’d say are the pros/cons to a friend who was considering applying. This is a widespread problem that is hurting morale, slowing things down, and even hurting our ability to hire. Getting feedback might be hard, because a lot of people worry about getting fired or shut out if they are critical.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Glowforge-RVW19165030.htm
Pros
-Best people I have ever worked with. Seriously, we hire top talent
-You get to work with lasers. Amazing.
-We have the best customers
-Glowforge will succeed as a company. It’s an amazing idea and Dan is very smart at marketing it
-Culture and values are pretty coolCons
Although we hire top talent, a lot of decisions are micromanaged. The entire org is very smart, including Dan and the senior executives, but they also tend to want to be involved in everything. This makes getting features out extremely slow and frustrating, and causes us engineers to redo a lot of work as well as ship incomplete features. After we ship, we never iterate.
Been here two years, and after shipping units, I expected us to have a roadmap and direction. Instead it feels like we’re just grabbing the next hottest and loudest thing. When we had a “Product overview” meeting, the first 30 minutes was filled with marketing and strategy, and we ran out of time to answer questions. We were promised a follow up, and it never happened.Advice to Management
Honestly, just listen. We’ve been begging for a followup to talk about our roadmap, we’ve been begging for anonymous questions during all hands, and we’ve been begging for a company survey. You’ve been telling us that if we tell our supervisor how we feel, that we’ll get questions answered. However, many people in the company don’t feel comfortable doing that. You will get a wealth of knowledge about the true feelings of the company if you did any of the above things. At least have an anonymous direct line to the executive team.
Another piece of advice: Allow people to grow into their space. As soon as I’m close to getting done with one feature or bug, I’m pulled off to do something else. The engineering org is great, but I don’t feel like I’m working with others much (other than PR’s), and wish that I knew what we are doing. I also feel like our leaders are capable, but get hindered by micromanagement or a change in direction sporadically. Having stakeholders and a defined goal from the start would be a huge benefit.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Glowforge-RVW19096887.htm
Notice a theme?