6 ms·

I'm surprised by the dearth of companies with manufactured products, especially since this is an international list. All I see are the 6 listed as "hardware" +

by artnep 11y ago

I'm surprised by the dearth of companies with manufactured products, especially since this is an international list. All I see are the 6 listed as "hardware" + SpaceX. Edit: plus Trendy and Theranos and probably a few more from the other categories.

nl 11y ago
Why? It's pretty hard to build defensible margins on hardware. GoPro is the last company I can think of that did it and they have plenty of challengers.
- artnep 11y ago
  Certainly that's the case in crowded industries like personal electronics manufacturing, but there's plenty of room for companies with new technologies or new markets (e.g. DJI with drones or Magic Leap with VR Tech)
nbadg 11y ago
After working on hardware teams in various capacities for 6 or 7 years, I'm not surprised. Startups need momentum - especially massively successful startups. And hardware, at this point in time, isn't something that you can easily build momentum with. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is because of any inherent difference between hardware and software. Sure, the requirement to physically build something adds a bit of a delay, but computer simulation is so good these days that the actual building bit is pretty infrequent. Plus, turnaround time is usually pretty short - two weeks lead was pretty standard for the shops I've worked with and at. No, the problem IMO is that frankly, our software is shit. The end users of, for example, Solidworks, aren't the people paying for the software, so there's no direct market feedback. Mechanical design software was some of the earliest software ever written, and it's been some of the slowest to change. The hiccups are negotiable if you're working serially and alone, but the second you want to do parallel development on something, or to collaborate with anyone else, you're stuck throwing workaround after workaround on an already slow process. And then there's the catastrophic state of CAM software, BOM integration, inventory management, keeping the books on all that... everything is its own walled system, nothing talks to anything else, and everything sucks. I've spent literally days before duplicating information between Arena and Solidworks drawings -- and they even actually have an integration. I'm wholly convinced hardware unicorns are so rare because the toolchain we use to build hardware is so bad. It stays bad for historical and short-sighted economic reasons. That is to say, the whole situation is ripe for change. And it's not hard to do, either: I coded up 85% of an MVP for a solid model merge tool that would make solidworks files more or less git compatible in just a month or two. If you want to play with that, it's a hacked-up VBA macro called smgimport/smgexport available here: https://github.com/Badg/SolidworksUtils https://github.com/Badg/SolidworksUtils. I have a lot of thoughts on how to do this right. If you're working in this space and want advice, I'm happy to help.
- nl 11y ago
  I think your point regarding how bad hardware-design software is correct. But I think that understates the many other problems with hardware. Just off the top of my head, the following are problems that are incredibly hard to solve for any new hardware company: Distribution (how do you get your device into the physical and online stores where people buy) Logistics (how do you bring the parts together, make sure you always have the correct parts, ship them to distributors etc) Fast followers (If you do have a good device, why can't an existing manufacturer copy what you made and use their better distribution to outsell you and their bigger scale to get better prices on parts?) Regulation (Many hardware devices need certification of various kinds before you can even try to sell them. I'm not opposed to this, but it is harder than in the software world) etc, etc
  - nbadg 11y ago
    So I am definitely making a development-centered critique. Partly that's because most of my experience is in development, and I have very little experience in high volume product or DTC. However, I also think that the software problem is a whole lot wider than design, and that the state of software for hardware companies as a whole (including logistics!) is abysmal. Distribution of physical product to stores is something unique to consumer goods, and for physical hardware I think that landscape is currently experiencing a great deal of change. Even ignoring marketplaces like Amazon, we're starting to see the emergence of distribution / fulfillment as a service, and the burden of entry into the online retail market is much lower. Many very successful hardware startups have gone in this direction first, only arriving at brick-and-mortar retail stores once the company is large enough and established enough to spare the resources to keep that up. Logistics and supply chain management are basically managed by software at this point, but because there's no effective integration between software (even packages that have the integration botch it) means that it's actually in some ways made into a harder problem because the data is stored in 10 "convenient" places rather than a single unconvenient place. The fast followers / competitors problem is, I think, actually a bigger problem for the software industry than the hardware industry, with the exception of offshoring. If you offshore, particularly to China, and don't have a very good relationship with the factor(ies) you're working with, this is a very real risk, if the entirety of the widget is being produced by that one factory. With more complex widgets, this risk is substantially mitigated. In general I'd say this is more a function of the quality and uniqueness of the product coupled with your execution on it than something inherent to hardware. This is not, however, a problem that good hardware software will solve. The ability to rapidly develop things will actually make this worse. I don't have a problem with that! Execution is everything, even in entrenched industries, and Davids have always managed to topple Goliaths. Regulation is also, in my mind, being held up by software. There's certainly a component that's out of your control - once you fire off the paperwork, you just sit and wait - but there's a lot you can do to smooth the approval process on your own end, and a lot of that has to do with proper design documentation, which is once again suffering from terrible software. I'm not trying to say that having better software for hardware will fix everything. It certainly won't. But, I do think it is the single greatest limiting factor by far in hardware production. I would estimate it consumed 80% of my productivity or more. It's an astounding timesuck.

by artnep 11y ago

nl 11y ago

Why? It's pretty hard to build defensible margins on hardware. GoPro is the last company I can think of that did it and they have plenty of challengers.

artnep 11y ago
Certainly that's the case in crowded industries like personal electronics manufacturing, but there's plenty of room for companies with new technologies or new markets (e.g. DJI with drones or Magic Leap with VR Tech)

nbadg 11y ago

After working on hardware teams in various capacities for 6 or 7 years, I'm not surprised. Startups need momentum - especially massively successful startups. And hardware, at this point in time, isn't something that you can easily build momentum with. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is because of any inherent difference between hardware and software. Sure, the requirement to physically build something adds a bit of a delay, but computer simulation is so good these days that the actual building bit is pretty infrequent. Plus, turnaround time is usually pretty short - two weeks lead was pretty standard for the shops I've worked with and at. No, the problem IMO is that frankly, our software is shit. The end users of, for example, Solidworks, aren't the people paying for the software, so there's no direct market feedback. Mechanical design software was some of the earliest software ever written, and it's been some of the slowest to change. The hiccups are negotiable if you're working serially and alone, but the second you want to do parallel development on something, or to collaborate with anyone else, you're stuck throwing workaround after workaround on an already slow process. And then there's the catastrophic state of CAM software, BOM integration, inventory management, keeping the books on all that... everything is its own walled system, nothing talks to anything else, and everything sucks. I've spent literally days before duplicating information between Arena and Solidworks drawings -- and they even actually have an integration. I'm wholly convinced hardware unicorns are so rare because the toolchain we use to build hardware is so bad. It stays bad for historical and short-sighted economic reasons. That is to say, the whole situation is ripe for change. And it's not hard to do, either: I coded up 85% of an MVP for a solid model merge tool that would make solidworks files more or less git compatible in just a month or two. If you want to play with that, it's a hacked-up VBA macro called smgimport/smgexport available here: https://github.com/Badg/SolidworksUtils https://github.com/Badg/SolidworksUtils. I have a lot of thoughts on how to do this right. If you're working in this space and want advice, I'm happy to help.

nl 11y ago
I think your point regarding how bad hardware-design software is correct. But I think that understates the many other problems with hardware. Just off the top of my head, the following are problems that are incredibly hard to solve for any new hardware company: Distribution (how do you get your device into the physical and online stores where people buy) Logistics (how do you bring the parts together, make sure you always have the correct parts, ship them to distributors etc) Fast followers (If you do have a good device, why can't an existing manufacturer copy what you made and use their better distribution to outsell you and their bigger scale to get better prices on parts?) Regulation (Many hardware devices need certification of various kinds before you can even try to sell them. I'm not opposed to this, but it is harder than in the software world) etc, etc
- nbadg 11y ago
  So I am definitely making a development-centered critique. Partly that's because most of my experience is in development, and I have very little experience in high volume product or DTC. However, I also think that the software problem is a whole lot wider than design, and that the state of software for hardware companies as a whole (including logistics!) is abysmal. Distribution of physical product to stores is something unique to consumer goods, and for physical hardware I think that landscape is currently experiencing a great deal of change. Even ignoring marketplaces like Amazon, we're starting to see the emergence of distribution / fulfillment as a service, and the burden of entry into the online retail market is much lower. Many very successful hardware startups have gone in this direction first, only arriving at brick-and-mortar retail stores once the company is large enough and established enough to spare the resources to keep that up. Logistics and supply chain management are basically managed by software at this point, but because there's no effective integration between software (even packages that have the integration botch it) means that it's actually in some ways made into a harder problem because the data is stored in 10 "convenient" places rather than a single unconvenient place. The fast followers / competitors problem is, I think, actually a bigger problem for the software industry than the hardware industry, with the exception of offshoring. If you offshore, particularly to China, and don't have a very good relationship with the factor(ies) you're working with, this is a very real risk, if the entirety of the widget is being produced by that one factory. With more complex widgets, this risk is substantially mitigated. In general I'd say this is more a function of the quality and uniqueness of the product coupled with your execution on it than something inherent to hardware. This is not, however, a problem that good hardware software will solve. The ability to rapidly develop things will actually make this worse. I don't have a problem with that! Execution is everything, even in entrenched industries, and Davids have always managed to topple Goliaths. Regulation is also, in my mind, being held up by software. There's certainly a component that's out of your control - once you fire off the paperwork, you just sit and wait - but there's a lot you can do to smooth the approval process on your own end, and a lot of that has to do with proper design documentation, which is once again suffering from terrible software. I'm not trying to say that having better software for hardware will fix everything. It certainly won't. But, I do think it is the single greatest limiting factor by far in hardware production. I would estimate it consumed 80% of my productivity or more. It's an astounding timesuck.