Hey there, I'm the writer and I'm definitely guilty of exaggeration on the title. My goal was to push back against this popular narrative that it's something in

Hey there, I'm the writer and I'm definitely guilty of exaggeration on the title. My goal was to push back against this popular narrative that it's something intrinsic about hardware that kills these startups, not strategic errors or poor execution. Hardware is less forgiving, but I'm not sure it's meaningfully harder to build a new gadget than take on Facebook or Google in social or search. My first job was at an HW startup and I launched a dozen hardware products. It's tough. A screw-up at a single soldering station in Shenzen can screw-up a deal years in the making with Walmart. Overordering materials means you have to lay off friends. But saying "Hardware is Hard" is an oversimplification. When we say that to explain the failure of HW startups, we miss a lot of important nuances. Hardware is hard, but that's not the primary reason most HW startups fail. Almost all of the high-profile failures we see in hardware are companies that are trying to be the "Apple of X." In this post, there are two hardware startups, valued at nine-figures, that are essentially bootstrapped. Hardware was hard for them too, but they managed to win with very little in the way of resources.